[MD] Rorty on the University of Chicago

Mon Nov 21 06:39:12 PST 2016

Howdy, MOQers:

The following is quoted from Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) by Richard Rorty:

Please notice that he paints a stark contrast between Dewey's Pragmatism and Plato's absolutism and the cozy relationship between absolutism and theism. Aristotle looms large but there is no mention of Whitehead, which was, I learned elsewhere, apparently relegated to the theology department. Make of it what you will but I see a young man struggling to find a really true Truth that can never be found and then realizing that he had to give up his quest for Platonic certainty before he could become a Pragmatist.

When I got to Chicago (in 1946), I found that Hutchins, together with his friends Mortimer Adler and Richard McKeon (the villain of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), had enveloped much of the University of Chicago in a neo-Aristotelian mystique. The most frequent target of their sneers was John Dewey's pragmatism. That pragmatism was the philosophy of my parents' friend Sidney Hook, as well as the unofficial philosophy of most of the other New York intellectuals who had given up on dialectical materialism. But according to Hutchins and Adier, pragmatism was vulgar, 'relativistic', and self-refuting. As they pointed out over and over again, Dewey had absolutes. To say, as Dewey did, that 'growth itself is the only moral end', left one without a criterion for growth, and thus with no way refute Hitler's suggestion that Germany had 'grown' under his rule.  To say that truth is what works is to reduce the quest for truth to the quest for power. Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good – like the God of St Thomas, or the 'nature of human beings' described by Aristotle – would permit one to answer the Nazis, to justify one's choice of social democracy over fascism.

This quest for stable absolutes was common to the neo-Thomist and to Leo Strauss, the teacher who attracted the best of the Chicago students (including my classmate Allan Bloom). The Chicago faculty was dotted with awesomely learned refugees from Hitler, of which Strauss was the most revered. All of them seemed to agree that something deeper and weightier than Dewey was needed if one was to explain why it would be better to be dead than to be a Nazi.  This sounded pretty good to my 15-year-old ears. For moral and philosophical absolutes sounded a bit like my beloved orchids – numinous, hard to find, known only to a chosen few. Further, since Dewey was a hero to all the people among whom I had grown up, scorning [9] Dewey was a convenient form of adolescent revolt.  The only question was whether this scorn should take a religious or a philosophical form, and how it might be combined with striving for social justice.

Like many of my classmates at Chicago , I knew lots of T. S. Eliot by heart. I was attracted by Eliot's suggestions that only committed Christians (and perhaps only Anglo-Catholics) could overcome their unhealthy preoccupation with their private obsessions, and so serve their fellow humans with proper humility. But a prideful inability to believe what I was saying when I recited the General Confession gradually led me to give up on my awkward attempts to get religion.  So I fell back on absolutist philosophy.

I read through Plato during my fifteenth summer, and convinced myself that Socrates was right – virtue was knowledge. That claim was music to my ears, for I had doubts about my own moral character and a suspicion that my only gifts were intellectual ones. Besides, Socrates had to be right, for only then could one hold reality and justice in a single vision. Only if he were right could one hope to be both as good as the best Christians (such as Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, whom I could not – and still cannot – decide whether to envy or despise) and as learned and clever as Strauss and his students.  So I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' – the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted. It also seemed clear that Platonism had all the advantages of religion, without requiring the humility which Christianity demanded, and of which I was apparently incapable.

For all these reasons, I wanted very much to be some kind of Platonist, and from 15 to 20 I did my best. But it didn't pan out. I could never figure out whether the Platonic philosopher was aiming at the ability to offer irrefutable argument - argument which rendered him able to convince anyone he encountered of what he believed (the sort of thing Ivan Karamazov was good at) – or instead was aiming [10] at a sort of incommunicable, private bliss (the sort of thing his brother Alyosha seemed to possess). The first goal is to achieve argumentative power over others – e.g., to become able to convince bullies that they should not beat one up, or to convince rich capitalists that they must cede their power to a cooperative, egalitarian commonwealth. The second goal is to enter a state in which all your own doubts are stilled, but in which you no longer wish to argue. Both goals seemed desirable, but I could not see how they could be fitted together.

At the same time as I was worrying about this tension within Platonism – and within any form of what Dewey had called 'the quest for certainty' – I was also worrying about the familiar problem of how one could possibly get a noncircular justification of any debatable stand on any important issue. The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'. There seemed to be nothing like a neutral standpoint from which these alternative first principles could be evaluated. But if there were no such standpoint, then the whole idea of 'rational certainty', and the whole Socratic-Platonic idea of replacing passion by reason, seemed not to make much sense.

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Here is the entire essay for those who are interested: http://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html

Rorty-Wild Orchids - University of Nevada, Las Vegas<http://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html>
cdclv.unlv.edu
Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) Richard Rorty (Reprinted from Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin Books, 1999). [3] If there is anything to the idea that the best ...

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Robert M. Pirsig's MoQ deals with the fundamentals of existence and provides a more coherent system for understanding reality than our current paradigms allow

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Robert M. Pirsig's MoQ deals with the fundamentals of existence and provides a more coherent system for understanding reality than our current paradigms allow

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Robert M. Pirsig's MoQ deals with the fundamentals of existence and provides a more coherent system for understanding reality than our current paradigms allow

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Robert M. Pirsig's MoQ deals with the fundamentals of existence and provides a more coherent system for understanding reality than our current paradigms allow

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