[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Steve said to dmb:
...I'm sure you are also interested in looking at how Pirsig fits in with the tradition of pragmatism and where he doesn't fit. You then raised the issue of relativism, and I've enjoyed discussing it with you. 
dmb says:
Yea, it's been fun for me too. As I understand it, raising the issue of relativism and trying to locate Pirsig's work within the world of Pragmatism are not two different things. Relativism is one of the central issues at play between the two schools of pragmatism and I think that's one of the issues that distinguishes Pirsig from Rorty. I suppose you already knew that but I just wanted to be extra clear.

Steve said:
...Cindy Sherman believes that the role of the artist in society is to expose its myths. Later I read Joseph Campbell who wrote that the role of the artist is to create myths. I realize that these two people have a very different idea of myth. Sherman meant that the artist reveals the lies that society tells about itself while Campbell meant that the artist creates the context in which experience will be interpreted. Though they meant different things, I still think there is something interesting about the mythologist seeing the artist as creating myths while this artist sees herself as a debunker of myths. There may be something here that relates to the philosophology issue, but I was thinking that the it also relates to the role of the philosopher. If motorcycle maintenance is art, then so is philosophy. The point is that Rorty may be best viewed as a debunker of myths. He wasn't out to create a philosophical system. Instead he tried to cure us of our addiction to such systems. That was his art, and the philosophy that is created in his wake will have to address the strong critiques he made against SOM and systems in general. Perhaps you can at least give him credit for being a strong voice objecting to SOM. But you seem to think that the cure may be worse than the disease, so probably not.

dmb says:
That's an interesting way to frame things. You're right to notice that Sherman and Campbell are using the terms "myth" in two completely different ways. In fact, they're approximately opposite ways of using the word. But if I were to play along with this framing, I'd want to remind you what Campbell says about theists and atheists. Both of them take religious myths as facts. The former accepts this facts as true and the latter rejects this facts as untrue. Campbell says they are both wrong because myths can't be rightly understood when they're taken literally. Myths are written in a symbolic language and their truthfulness can only be approached by reading them as symbols, as a picture language that refers to psychological truths or spiritual experiences. If we extend this notion to Rorty, by analogy anyway, he's an atheists. He takes metaphysics literally, as a set of factual claims, and says that they're not true. He opposes those who also take it as fact but think it is true. And I would draw an analogy between Pirsig (who recommends Campbell in Lila) and Campbell. He thinks its worthy and valuable only when you don't take it literally at all. 

I mean, its interesting that Pirsig and Rorty use the word "metaphysics" so differently. The former thinks it's something everybody does, that it's unavoidable for anyone who is capable of making sense of the world. This is just a way of saying that its impossible to NOT have a world view, however deliberate and articulate that may or may not be. People just can't function without some way to make sense of things. By that definition, it would be absurd to say that we ought to abandon metaphysics. On the other hand, if we adopt Rorty's use of the term, where metaphysics is supposed to be about eternal truths and ultimate foundations, Pirsig isn't going to touch that with a ten foot pole. ( I once got into a fist fight with a ten foot Pole (he was from Warsaw) but that's an entirely different story.)

But more to the point, the thing that bothers me about Rorty is that his project is almost entirely negative. He and Pirsig are not all that different right up to the point where the tearing down ends and the new construction begins. Pirsig doesn't just reject SOM or foundational metaphysics, he also says something positive. He replaces SOM with the MOQ, as we all know, whereas Rorty more or less leaves things hanging. He has strategies for dealing with the emptiness that exists where SOM once stood but, like you say, he wasn't out to create a new system. He didn't even think such a thing was needed or possible or desirable. I suppose that has a lot to do with his particular way of diagnosing the problem, that he thought there were good reasons to avoid this positive second half. But as I see it, this just means Rorty's pragmatism is sort of half-baked. He tore down a house that needed tearing down but then left us an empty lot.

Steve said:
You are concerned that students will read Rorty and turn into relativists, but I don't think students become relativists from reading too much Rorty.


dmb says:
I disagree. I think that's exactly what happened to our friend Matt. And it's not just a problem about students. It's also a problem for grandmothers like Marsha, who thinks Pirsig is a relativist. They both tend to use pragmatism to assert a position that I'd characterize as philosophical narcissism. Neither seems particularly interested in discovering what the MOQ means per se. They just take the parts that please them and ignore the rest. Rorty reads things this way too and I just don't see how that sort of thing can be intellectually responsible or fair or accurate. In short, I think that sort of whimsy is bogus and extremely objectionable.

Steve said:
Students who only read one philosopher tend to be swayed by the arguments. ...The students see that all these philosophers or religions have promised a deep foundation for their ethical systems and claimed to have such a universal grounding which was later shown to be empty and that all these philosophers and religions discovered different and contradictory things about the good life. They decide that the best we can hope for are systems that are self-consistent and are getting the idea that being self-consistent isn't even that hard to do. Now what went wrong here? How were these students turned into nihilists or skeptics or relativists? The problem isn't that they were never taught the one system that really does have the sort of universal grounding that was promised. The problem was that they learned to expect that any legitimate moral claim needs to have the sort of foundation that was promised, some transcultural or natural law, the sort of foundation for justifying our moral beliefs that we are just never going to get.

dmb says:
That's not how I experienced it at all. In fact, I had to be convinced that any philosopher had ever been willing to claim eternal truths. I had thought that only religious fanatics made such claims. Then I saw that philosophers had made such claims. But then I realized that most of those philosophers were religious fanatics of one kind or another. Plato and Hegel spring to mind, for example. As I see it, their absolutism was thinly disguised theology. I mean, the idea that our morals are underpinned by the founder of the universe was something I saw as quite ridiculous when I was in 7th or 8th grade. That's exactly what turned me off to religion and turned me on to philosophy and history. I was very interested to find out how people ever came to believe such unbelievable nonsense. These days I do not think this is a philosophical problem so much as it is a psychological phenomenon, a form of mental illness. It's interesting, I think, that I heard the same story from two different professors in two different departments. A Jungian in the religious studies department and a Plato scholar in the philosophy department both described what it was like for entering students who had come from a very religious background. They both explained how such student arrived on campus, after a lifetime of indoctrination, with extremely uncritical minds. In effect, they had no intellectual immune system and as a result they would believe just about anything they heard or read. We all do this to a certain extent when we're young but these people had a particularly hard time discerning which way was up. And of course, they'd encounter ideas that seriously challenged the faith in which they were raised and would get extremely upset about. Mere exposure to alternative views would make their little worlds fall apart. This can be quite devastating, emotionally. Some of these types just flunk out. Similarly, when the Jungian was explaining that fanatics tend to get upset and hostile when presented with challenges to their belief system (as opposed to having a reasonable debate about it), one student got all red in the face and shouted "Bullshit!" at the professor right there in front of everybody. I felt a little sorry for the student and yet her response more or less proved the Jungian's point. That particular student didn't drop the class but she was silent for the rest of the semester. It was a psychology of religion class and I'd guess about half of the students were pretty religious because I watched them squirm all semester long. They didn't have to say much because the body language was very telling. In fact, the professor begins her classes with a verbal and written warning. It's standard procedure to warn everyone that ideas and beliefs are discussed and challenged in academic situations and anyone who is not comfortable with that is invited to choose some other class instead.

Steve said:
One of the things he tried to get us not interested in asking was "is it absolute or relative?" For that (and, admittedly, for being too careless in the unfortunate pragmatist tradition of making pithy slogans that were right in what they rejected but too easily construed as wrong or misleading in what they asserted) he was often labeled a relativist. But I think it is wrong to do so unless all you mean by the term is that he had given up on the sort of grounding for ethical and factual claims than was promised by philosophers of the past. Instead of trying to "lend our current practices the prestige of the eternal," he gave us ideas about how to create a future that will be "unimaginably better than the present."

dmb says:
Okay, let's agree that Rorty is right about the impossibility of lending "our current practices the prestige of the eternal". Let's agree that such nonsense is completely off the table. What I don't see are any ideas about creating an "unimaginably better" future. If Rorty had anything like that, he'd be a lot easier to like. It could be that he has some good ideas along those lines, but I'm unaware of any. Go ahead. I'm listening.



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