[MD] Rorty on the University of Chicago

Mon Nov 21 07:56:20 PST 2016

Thank you , David, i'm going to read it all the coming days.
It contains a lot of promises on first sight, and indeed in the concluding
open-end sentence at closing down.
I have been reading shitloads of Russian litarature when i was young.
Most title's i do not recall.But i clearly remember Kazamarov.Yesterday i
was reading in the unbearable lightness of being.(related to Russian
literature.)
But most of what i read were the novels.And historical works,and of
course Marx, Yep.

Keep up the good work!

2016-11-21 15:39 GMT+01:00 david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>:

>
> 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.
>
>
> --------------------
>
>
> 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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