Dewey defeats "True Man"?
Just before the movie started, Ernie was reading Philosophy and Social Hope by Richard Rorty; I borrowed it for a few minutes, and that convinced me that I'd have to read it. I bought a copy at Cody's on Sunday afternoon, and I'd finished it by Monday night.
I usually think of myself of someone who's familiar with the contrasting positions of various philosophers, and who wouldn't hesitate to allude to them in speaking or writing. But sometimes Rorty almost seems to be engaging in name-dropping. On the other hand, if you've actually read all those people, I suppose mentioning them every now and then is only natural. But it's funny to look through a paragraph and see all the capital letters.
Rorty is probably the philosopher with whom I would most have disagreed in the past. One of his many clever observations is that "Platonism" isn't about agreeing with Plato's specific conclusions so much as having an obsession or preoccupation with the questions Plato asked and the distinctions he drew. (So, for example, you can easily be a Platonic Realist without specifically endorsing the Theory of Forms or the Divided Line or the theory that our perception of Forms arises from the immortality and persistence of our souls. Platonism is mostly a way of looking at the world which gives a pre-eminence and an independence to mind and to mental conceptions -- Rorty alludes to "logocentrism" and that seems like a fair description too. "In the Beginning was the Word" is said to be Christian outreach to Platonists, or, if you prefer, Platonist outreach to Christians.)
His view of moral evolution (that it's based on expanding human consciousness rather than in conforming to a non-human rule or standard of knowledge) reminded me in a certain way of the story about Eris from the Principia Discordia:
[...] an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
(Principia Discordia, "A Sermon on Ethics and Love")
Rorty is really smart and interesting, but I doubt I would have been interested in reading him before last year. So now I can read Searle where he argues with Rorty over realism. How strange to encounter an actual antirealist philosopher!
It's not necessarily that Rorty is confident that there is no such thing as the "real world"; it's more a matter of his applying Laplace's skepticism about God to the world itself -- "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis".
I think Rorty gave me enough in that book to talk about for a few years, if I happened to find people who were interested in discussing it.
It's interesting to see someone far outside an entire conceptual world, so that the bitter debaters within that world will consider the outsider totally ridiculous, if they happen to notice him at all. For example, Rorty, like Hume, considers scientific, naturalistic realism on par with theistic religious faith (for many of the same reasons Hume does). So where proponents and opponents of spiritualism, mechanism, Christianity, and so on will go around and around in a debate allowing only a few alternatives (e.g. knowledge is revealed by a divinely-given scripture, or knowledge is obtained from the physical world by empirical observation), Rorty comes along and makes fun of all sides, by insisting that there's no such thing as knowledge, or a place knowledge is obtained from!
In fact, both religious fundamentalists and working scientists are extremely keen to criticize "postmodernists" like Rorty, perhaps because they've both been subjects of his criticism. It's interesting that the reality of the world and knowledge of it is agreed upon between such bitter adversaries: tertium non datur, they say, shaking hands.
But for Rorty,
[s]cientific realism and religious fundamentalism are products of the same urge. [...] Both scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are private projects which have got out of hand. They are attempts to make one's own private way of giving meaning to one's own life -- a way which romanticizes one's relation to something starkly and magnificently nonhuman, something Ultimately True and Real -- obligatory for the general public.("Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance")
Huh. How interesting, but unsurprising, to end up on the same side with the traditionalist religious folks, defending the existence of the real world, human knowledge, right and wrong... it's really not such an unusual situation for me to find myself in. Just ask my ex-girlfriend.
You get a hint of Rorty's orientation here at the very beginning of his book, in the introduction:
If the Platonist is going to insist on that distinction, he has got to have an epistemology which does not link up in any interesting way with other disciplines. He will end up with an account of knowledge which turns its back on the rest of science. This amounts to making knowledge into something supernatural, a kind of miracle.(p. xxvii)
Gee, do you anyone who's ever conceived of people as having a facility like that?
