[MD] the mass cultivation of authority

John Carl ridgecoyote at gmail.com
Wed Jun 3 16:52:47 PDT 2015


"it is important to remember that some of Rorty’s views are more outrageous
than others—but none are less. The more outrageous view is that the
structure of authority and responsibility that constitutes objectivity is
actually incoherent. When we think from a pragmatist point of view about
what it would require, we see that it is not possible for us to institute
such a structure. For it requires granting authority to something
non-human, something that is merely
there, to intrinsically normatively inert things
  that belong in a box with Wittgenstein’s
 'sign-post considered just as a  piece of wood.'

A fair amount of Rorty’s rhetoric seems to commit him to a view of this
stripe.
What is  intelligible is a cognitive theoretical consensus
 on various points (contingent, partial, and temporary though it may be). But
the idea of something that cannot enter into a conversation with us, cannot
give and ask for reasons, somehow dictating what we ought  to say is not
one we can in the end make sense of.

It is the idea that we are subject (responsible) to an ultimately
 irrational authority—

one whose cognitive contentfulness is, just because of that irrationality,
unintelligible.

Reality as the modern philosophical tradition has construed it (“just as a
piece of wood”) is the wrong
 kind of thing to exercise rational authority.

That is what we do to each other.

That is the lesson we ought to have learned about God from the first
Enlightenment, and it will take a second Enlightenment to teach us how to
apply that lesson to Objective Reality: the successor candidate for
our subjection
forwarded not now by the Church, but by Science.


Robert Brandom, in his, "An Arc of Thought: From Rorty's Eliminative
Materialism to His Pragmatism"



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