[MD] Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

dmb said to Steve:
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.


Steve replied:
If such nonsense is off the table then it's hard for me to see what difference you see in Rorty's relativism and your view.


dmb says:
If memory serves, terms like "essentalism", "foundationalism" and the "eternal" do not appear in either of Pirsig's books. And when our pal Matt starting railing against them years ago I really had no idea what he was talking about. After some time, when it became a little clearer what he meant, I wondered what the point was because he seemed quite determined to dispute claims that nobody in their right mind could ever assert, let alone something a Pirsig fan would assert. In fact, the word he uses to describe this notion is "asinine", which means "extremely stupid or foolish". I mean, this is definitely NOT where we disagree. Like I said, such notions have seemed like ridiculous nonsense to me since I was a kid. That's why I think it shouldn't even be on the table.
It came up in a philosophy class once and I was quite baffled there too. I recall asking the professor something like, "Eternally true? You don't mean that literally, do you?" "Yes", she said, "literally". Asked for an example, she referred to math. She said there were mathematicians who believed that mathematical truths were eternal truths. "But that's ridiculous", I said. "Isn't just a fact that there are books about the emergence and development of math, that there could not be math at all until some time after humans evolved?" That's what Pirsig says about "dialectic" coming first, before everything else, as if it were out there in eternity all by itself just waiting to be discovered. It's just asinine, he says and I agree entirely.

I guess I'm saying that one doesn't have to be a relativist to think "eternal truth" is a really dumb idea. If the history of philosophy is full of that sort of stuff, then (sadly) the history of philosophy is full of asinine claims. Let's not waste any time on that.

Sorry to short change you here but that's about all I have time for today. I'll try to catch up with you later.

dmb






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