The Richard Rorty Exchange Part V

The Social Worker asserts:


I don't know if I'm responding a la Rorty, but it was Rorty who more or less convinced me that yes, the way reality functions is that the true and the good does amount to our ability to convince another. We can believe our position has some independent status, but there's nowhere to find it. You can do a study, for example a recent one that showed that more competitive societies with higher income disparities are less dynamic, show less creativity, and have lower scores of overall well being, and I can marshal that as evidence, but a committed free marketer will tear apart the study and so it goes. 1984 is what happens when the forces of justice and right (my side) don't fight hard enough against fascism, McCarthyism or whateverism. You can appeal to tradition, but traditons change. As we discussed, there's no standard meter anywhere to point to (and even a standard meter is an agreement). We're not so much inviting a person to sign onto a truth that transcends them, but one that they can agree with.

I guess I also have trouble with you using "only" in front of "individual" or "socially/cultural." Why do those standards have to be demeaned or demoted. I want to live and work in a place that shows toleration, that's free of sexism and homophobia. To me those are truly durable principles to live by, that are worth fighting for (but not fighting with violence, yet force may have to be used, like the force of law, federal marshals etc.). My reason tells me that. I don't value any social or cultural practices that go against those principles and I do think those principles transcend cultures who don't embrace such, yet I'm aware that my principles are a culture, too. Yet, no one could convince me that these principles are only true in certain cultures. So I could say, yes I value your culture in where ever, but I think practices or laws that don't allow everyone to be fully enfranchised are wrong. I love the principle of the rule of law, but I hate unjust laws.

I do think it's worth giving our reasons, because I do think there's something worthwhile in being reasonable, but I'd have a hard time convincing a romantic of that who values passion over thought. I wouldn't devote my time giving my reasons for my ice cream preference (though I might wax poetical about them) nor would I try to convince or even discuss with someone I felt just loved to argue (unless I was in the mood) or didn't really listen to my point of view.

I know that this position can devolve into might makes right, but that's a principle I don't agree with (unless of course when the MA Supreme Court say the state has to recognize gay marriage-- that's a might I like). But then again, I agree to abide by the country's choice in a president, even if I fight against his/her policies.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part IV

The Philosopher replies:

Sorry it has been so long since I've replied. I've been mulling over what you wrote. I guess one thing I question is why you think that what is good or true is determined only by whether one can convince someone else of what you think. Is true or good determined only by whether we can persuade another that it is so? You may say that that's the pragmatic upshot of it. I guess I would have to agree that convincing another of what is true or good is important but should those things be reduced to solely my ability or inability to convince you of it? Surely the true and the good (however they are defined) shouldn't amount to simply my ability to convince you of whatever position I happen to hold? Surely those things have some sort of existence, meaning and status independent of whatever individuals happen to believe? Again, I want to say that if you claim that there is no such independent standard then I think that is dangerous in terms of opposing those who wish to ignore such (what I take to be) standards in the interests of defining them for their own political or social purposes. I've just finished listening to 1984 and what Rorty believes is just the sort of philosophy that Oceania and O'Brien thrives on.


The other thing is that you think that we can or should give reasons for what we believe is true or good. But why bother? If the good and the true is just a matter of contingency and is made up why should we bother giving reasons for what we believe? Isn't that like arguing that vanilla is superior to pistachio? Aren't we doing something more than expressing private or cultural preferences by giving reasons? I think so. We're appealing to another person's reason and inviting them to open themselves to a truth that transcends them. Anyway, I don't see any point to argue for my position if what I'm expressing is only my individual or socially/ culturally situated perspective.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part III

The philosopher writes:

I may be thinking of this whole thing in more Kantian terms than Aristotelian, which I'm not too happy about. But, maybe not.

I think, for starters, we have to define that Protean term, "useful." It's so easy for that term to be used in a myriad number of ways. Useful for what? Useful to whom--and for what purposes? It was, useful, for whites to regard blacks as property for centuries. It was useful for males to regard females as inferior. The list goes on. Once you ask these sorts of questions, it seems to me that the question of some sort of supra-cultural norm becomes inevitable.

If one denies the existence of such a norm, then culture becomes the default court of appeal--and, as the old sociologist (whose name I have forgotten!) once said, "In the folkways, whatever is, is right." The "folkways" then call the moral shots and slavery and male superiority are "true" because they have been deemed "useful" to those in power.

In the absence of any supra-cultural, transcultural norm(s) for deciding what is "useful" Rorty's philosophy sanctifies the status quo, however that is defined by the majority or the dominant cultural voice. This is what I find so dangerous about Rorty. In his own way, he's not so radical or liberal but really rather depressingly conservative.

How are we to critique unjust social or political or moral practices in the absence of any normative notion of truth or the good? If he does offer such a critique, from where can he possibly stand?

Rorty may reply that it's just his claim that this or that is wrong or unjust, but why should we take his perspective seriously since he's just articulating his individual or cultural preference?

Well, I wrote more than I thought I would! Anway, I'm not sure I'm thinking about this correctly or adequately. I may have to come back at this from a more Aristotelian perspective, arguing more for the adequacy or inclusiveness of a moral tradition than the search for a transcultural moral norm, but for now I do think that if there is no transcultural good there can be no theoretical grounds for critiquing injustice--other than, of course, individual assertion--which I take to be inadequate because there are no rational grounds for distinguishing justice from injustice. Rorty may think he needs no rational grounds for his assertion, but then there is no ground for me to take what he is saying seriously.

And I reply:

I hope I have some good replies. Otherwise I'd have to change my mind and I'm very attached to my beliefs. Interestingly, we use rational argumentation to decide what is right in the secular, rational, Enlightenment tradition and so we shouldn't really care if we have to change our minds as long as the view we adopt is the better argued. Yet we are attached to our views for extra-rational reasons and these, I think, are the foundations of our moral views and it is why we cannot make a rational argument to convince all inquirers that one view is most correct, or is the objectively best moral view. Beyond the reasons that we give for believing as we do are also the other reasons we believe: because it feels right, our heart tells us it's true, it would violate our being to believe the opposite, it just seems right, we get choked up when we see certain norms enacted, etc.

Yes, "useful" is only useful if we have some goal in mind. If one of my goals is the flourishing of human beings and one norm is that they must be treated equally when it comes to certain basics such as justice and having the material necessities and if I apply this norm to all human beings then I am applying my norm to all. It's being held, by me, supra-culturally, but can I ground or prove it with rational argumentation to convince those who differ - white supremacists, religious fundamentalists, American-firsters, libertarians - that mine is the objective right, supra-cultural norm? I think not, because our norms, ultimately, are not held for rational reasons. So I tend to use my norms as if they are supra-cultural (even though I can't prove that they are).

What is the difference between the person who believes there are supra-cultural norms or objectively right norms and the one who may apply their norms supra-culturally but doesn't think they can be convincingly demonstrated using reason to be the objectively superior supra-cultural norm? That is, between you and me. You can't, and no moral philosopher can, demonstrate to the satisfaction of his colleagues that he has the best norms and yet believes such an objectively best norm exists. I hold norms that I apply supra-culturally, but don't think that ultimate rational demonstration of them will occur and see no need to cling to the belief in their objective rightness. We all still have our array of moral beliefs of varying degrees of coherence and incoherence which we apply in consert and conflict with others using reason, action and force.

Perhaps the difference here is between the belief that norms are wholly human made and the belief that there is some other origin for norms. Or, perhaps that is how I've interpreted the issue when you had something more like universal norms vs. ethnocentrism in mind.

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part II

Here are my responses to the philosopher's comments about Rorty's views. My responses follow the **** (four asterisks):



Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:
"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'

**** For Rorty these are fine distinctions if they serve a pragmatic purpose. But if they become reified into eternal objects or essences that limn the nature of reality then they are going to lead to abstruse arguments and philosophical nitpicking that have been exhausted by Western philosophy.

His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity.

**** These distinctions may be essential to capital "p" Philosophy because that's how it has defined itself. But there are many everyday uses of these distinctions that Rorty would endorse. But we don't need get a "theory of truth" or to finally define the self. This isn't going to happen and it's more productive to talk about other things or to create new conceptions of the self. Novelists do this and Nietzsche and Heidegger were creative self creators.

The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.

**** Or, philosophers could articulate, mediate, integrate, distinguish differing cultural traditions with the goal of creating greater understanding. Rorty would probably like philosophy to become part of the "general cultural stream" instead of falsely assuming a position above the cultural stream. We still have norms of belief, we just don't make believe they are grounded in The Objecitve Norms or God's Norms.

Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.

**** Rorty embraces an ethnocentrism but that doesn't mean that different vocabularies or cultures are incommensurable. We make sense with others all the time, there's just no supra-sense that we can prove to all others is The Supra-Sense to end all questions of Supra-Sense.

Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)

**** Yes, the appearance/reality distinction is not useful if it is absolutized. But it can be useful as what we thought was the case (appearance) but now see was not the case (colloquially, reality), perhaps because we now have more evidence. And the thing we are so sure of because it is so justified in the present we may say may not be the truth, using "truth" as a marker for "finding out in the future that what seemed so justified turned out not to be the case." So we have a use for the expression, and so the concept, "Yes, it's justified, but is it the truth?" This is the "cautionary" use of "truth." It makes us hold open the possibility that what presently seems justified may not be.

I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"

The Richard Rorty Exchange Part I

Here's the first in an exchange with a couple of friends on Richard Rorty's philosophy and other issues. The philosopher writes:


Here is a quote from a guy I rather like on the topic of relativism, which I take Rorty to be, me and lots of others. HIs name is Roger Trigg and he's emeritus Prof. of Philosophy, U. of Warwick. He was (and still may be, not sure, Chairman of the United Kingdom National Committee for Philosophy, representing all British philosophy departments--so says the back jacket of this book). This is from his book, Philosophy Matters:

"Richard Rorty is quite happy to demolish the distinctions which he sees built into the vocabulary we inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He says (speaking as an 'anti-Platonist' accused of relativism: 'Our opponents like to suggest that to abandon their vocabulary is to abandon rationality--that to be rational consists precisely in respecting the distinctions between the absolute and the relative, the found and the made, object and subject, nature and convention, reality and appearance.'

His (philosophical) argument is that these distinctions are not essential to philosophy, any more presumably than are such binary opponents as the self and the other, or even truth and falsity. The danger in all this is that of losing grip altogether on the idea of rationality, the idea that there are norms for belief, so that we ought to believe some things and reject others. It is all too easy to settle for what people do believe, and, if they disagree, to resort to a relativism that suggests that differences in belief do not matter. Indeed, 'pluralism' becomes something to be welcomed. Philosophy never ceases to be a matter of rational criticism. It is hard to see how it can then have any function at all. It must become absorbed into the general cultural stream. Philosophers can then articulate the assumptions of one cultural tradition in a way that is irrelevant to the members of another.

Rorty explicitly allies himself with American pragmatism, an important philosophical tradition, but one which has clearly come from a specific cultural background. Genuine philosophy must aspire to universality. American pragmatism must stand on its merits, and not on the fact that it is American. Relativism cannot allow this, and there is nowhere for Rorty to stand to allow him to recommend his views to those beyond his own tradition. It is not enough to be an American speaking to Americans or, in an even more restricted way, an American East Coast liberal speaking to American East Coast liberals.

Philosophical justification has to demonstrate why the views of such people are relevant to those with different backgrounds. By attacking traditional conceptions of rationality, Rorty can narrow the scope and impact of philosophy, so that any distinction from the rest of culture is removed. Just as an unremitting, literally mindless, materialism can dissolve reason into a series of physical events, so relativism dissolves philosophy into a series of cultural stances. The one makes philosophy cede its position to science, and the other to sociology or cultural studies. Philosophy becomes impotent, without any distinction between what seems to us to be so and what is so, or might be. What is the point of criticisms or questions if we cannot be wrong? There is no point in examining the basis of our beliefs if the most important fact is merely that we have them, and not whether they are true." (137-138)

I think Trigg gets to the heart of the matter with Rorty, here. His relativism undercuts, undermines the very possibility of rationality and philosophy itself--and with that gone, what can philosophy be but "a series of cultural stances?"

Life Experience Affects Criterion Affects Belief

In a reading group I attend a discussion broke out over whether there is a pre- or sub- linguistic connection to the world where we contact pure experience, a “felt sense” outside of language, or whether language infuses everything so that we cannot say when we are contacting something sub- or supra- or extra- linguistic such as “the way the world is,” reality, raw or felt experience, and when we’re not. So I was defending the Rortyan view that we can’t know when we’re in touch with that which is beyond language because language can always be argued to be already there. Whereas the other guy was saying that no, in his experience, he can mindfully or self-consciously feel into or gain awareness of what’s there which of course includes language but can go beyond it.

I said you can’t know which view – language infuses all access or we have access to experience - to choose because there are compelling arguments on both sides. He appealed to his phenomenological experience: he looks into his experience and experiences things like sensations, urges, emotions, etc. I was thinking that the criterion you choose to decide the question will be a determining factor in whether you see it one way or the other. I have chosen rational argumentation as the ultimate determiner. I know this issue, and lots of other philosophical issues, have not been decided and probably never will. So I lean towards the pervasiveness of language since language, in the form of rational inquiry, seems to generate more debate, as the alleged eternal problems of philosophy indicate. He uses experience as his primary criterion and finds by using that criterion and method that experience is experienced as having both linguistic and extralinguistic contact.

So which criterion to choose? I realized that my choice of primary criterion was influenced by my life experience. I was in graduate school studying for a Ph.D. and doing abstract intellectual work. I discovered Buddhist practice which can be radically experiential and left school and did that. I later became frustrated with and doubtful of it and stopped doing it formally and went back to intellectual work. Experience, in a sense, betrayed me and I adopted argumentation as the way to go. Now there are those who use argumentation and have the view that you can contact reality. So it can’t only be that choice that makes me defend the undecidability of the issue. But this life experience moved me to adopt one view over another and be a person who argues this way rather than that.

The Personal is Philosophical

In hearing a friend recount an argument she had with another friend I thought about how ethics and ethical norms play a role even in intimate encounters. We tend to think of the fights we have with intimates (friends, lovers or family) as purely personal or interpersonal and having to do with feelings. But there is that aspect of arguments in which people say things like: “You should’ve called.” “That’s an overreaction.” “How could you do that to me.” Each has a charged emotional component but they also assume and assert a belief in what is right and wrong. Is it right or expected to call in this or that situation? When is an emotional reaction an overreaction; how do we judge the proper level of emotion for a given perceived offense? Was the wrong committed a wrong? Each of these presupposes and asserts a view of how to behave properly and improperly. Part of the understanding of propriety is based on what we think is right and wrong behavior given our society and culture. In some cultures there could be great offense in not accepting an offer of food or drink upon entering a person’s home. Is that an overreaction? It depends on one’s belief in the social norm being violated. One’s position on that norm is part of the argument in an interpersonal conflict.

When is a reaction to another’s actions an over or under or proper reaction? It is whether the reaction is appropriate to the behavior that caused it? How is that determined if the two people disagree about the norm violated?

A: How could you do this to me?
B: What are you talking about? It’s not that big a deal.
A: It’s a big deal to me!
B: You’re overreacting.
A: No I’m not. I’m hurt by what you did.
B: Well, you’re too sensitive.
A: I’m not too sensitive. You’re insensitive if you can’t see that what you did was wrong.

The emotional element is intertwined with a normative or ethical element and both have to be sorted out. The ethical element brings into play one’s philosophy of right and wrong.

I wonder if some philosophers have thought and written about this. A quick search of the philosopher’s index didn’t reveal anything, but it does seem like the kind of thing others have thought of already, maybe feminist philosophers.

Bruno Latour and Rorty

Reading Bruno Latour’s Pandora’s Hope word by word, page by page unlike most books where I jump around and get what I want and then leave it. I see him as doing the practical work not elaborated by Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism. Rorty suggests we stop looking at things as entities with a nature or essence that we are groping to finally represent correctly. That essentialist mentality leads to tough “What is …?” questions like: “What is the nature of mind?” “What is money?,” etc. Rorty suggests there will be many descriptions of things depending on our needs and goals.

Latour who is describing “science studies” is taking that anti-essentialism seriously and showing how to describe and understand changes in science. Instead of the dominant picture of the world as being one particular way and as always having been that way and that we gradually describe more and more correctly, he describes the many associations and connections that occur in order for a scientific object to become what we take it to be. So the development of atomic energy was an interaction between many actors: scientists, colleagues, funding sources, the military, mineral suppliers, opponents, the public, the media. What “atomic energy” is arises through the interactions of that collective and its character is determined by that array of, what he calls, “articulations” that changes over time. Articulations that last and become well-entrenched achieve the social category of “reality” by becoming an “institution.” The “reality” of the things comes later after the struggle for dominance is won, but it can be reversed since it is an historical and social process. Latour, like Rorty, advocates moving away from the standard modern epistemological view of a reality “out there” which is veiled with a variety of appearances and which we gradually mirror better and better. This way of conceptualizing things leads to a gap between the world as it is in itself and our representations of it and to the irresolvable epistemological and other problems of Western philosophy.

Latour’s view sees all actors or participants – humans and nonhumans – as relationally engaged in creating themselves and each other through the particular way they interact through history. And as history itself moves on there is an ongoing reinterpretation of what happened in the past.

What’s nice about Latour is that he keeps coming back to the central philosophical conflict between the standard, modern, philosophical essentialism and his alternative anti-essentialism instead of leaving the questions hovering in the background.

Gordon Wood in the Radical Middle

Watching the historian Gordon Wood on Book TV’s “In Depth” program on C-Span 2 where they spend three hours interviewing a noted author. He’s a popular historian of revolutionary America. What struck me was his complete ignorance of questions regarding the philosophy of history writing and the value-laden character of all history writing. He was asked about Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” and saw it as emphasizing only a “dark” view of American history and implied that it doesn’t tell the whole story, which presumably Wood does. Wood says nothing about Zinn’s book being a counter-history to conventional history and that it chooses a different perspective from which to write history, that of the poorer, disempowered people who are generally overlooked in conventional history writing. Wood shows no awareness that there is even a question regarding the perspectival character of history writing. Even on a show for the general public this could be acknowledged.

Then Wood was asked about how he reacts to histories written that are to the political right and to the political left of him. He used the hoary defense of thinking he’s doing something right (correct) because he’s criticized by both sides. This is a ridiculous defense I’ve heard many times since you could also conclude that you are doubly wrong because you’re being criticized twice. But the point of the defense is to portray the two sides criticizing you as having an agenda so Wood can say that he transcends that partisanship but occupying the neutral middle. This is the myth of the neutral observer which people who hew to the reigning values use to make it appear as if they are disinterested truth tellers. Wood can’t see that he has a perspective like everyone else and everyone has to choose the values that will inform their history-telling. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t agreed upon (and debated) criteria for determining facts and good arguments, it means that any history writer who is telling the story of the past must have a value system in order to organize their narrative. This is the argument of Hayden White. What’s striking about Wood is that he indicates no awareness of this perspective and blithely believes that his position in the center, away from the agenda-biased extremes, allows him to simply get at the truth better.

Philosophy's Perennial Problems

Western philosophy’s perennial problems – mind/body, free will/determinism, objective truth, ethics, etc. - are generally thought to be persisting problems because they capture an essential mystery or conundrum about existence. But here’s a different way of looking at them. The perennial problems of Western philosophy - its recurring problems – can be seen as repetition compulsions. That is, as a pathological repeating on a superficial level of some unresolved issue deeply buried in philosophy’s social-psychology. And if they should be seen as a pathology what is the issue that Western philosophy is trying to work out?

The Meyerhoffian Solution (A personal favorite) - One possibility is that the underlying pathology is a split between the psychology of the thinker and the thinker’s beliefs. Since the major philosophical problems have not been rationally resolved and can be criticized by those opposed to any view, believers in a solution to the problems cannot have their belief in their solution by the reasons of their arguments alone. Their belief in their view and their adoption of their side of the argument has to have some of its origin in their personal psychologies since their reasons do not hold sway. On the foundational level of our beliefs we can’t have our allegiance to the answer to a philosophical problem without our non-rational attachment to a particular way of looking at things. This is fundamental and unresolved, and mostly unrecognized split, in the contemporary rational inquirer, but I’m not sure that resolving the split would lead to a resolution of the philosophical problems. More likely we would know why a given person adopts their side of the philosophical argument.

The Frankfurt School Solution - That perspective would interpret the cause of the persisting dualities of Western philosophy as a result of the persistent socio-economic divisions of contemporary capitalist society. We are socially and economically divided and in conflict with each other through class and power inequalities. There is no inherent betterness in one person rather than another or more reason for one person to have the necessities of life rather than another yet we must live in a society that distributes the means of existence based on a skewed view of achievement rather than human need. This socio-economic condition creates existential, personal and interpersonal divisions and is reproduced on the cultural level in the persisting contradictions and conflicts that philosophers encounter.

The Neo-Wittgensteinian-by-Way-of-Rortyan Solution - A third explanation I take from Richard Rorty. Western philosophy’s enchantment with the assumption or concept that there is “a way in which things are” leads to arguments about what that “way in which things are” is. If we don’t assume there is a way in which things objectively are (or is not knowable) then everyone is presuming and using a representationalist vocabulary, assuming that our words are representations of the world, and an objectivist or realist assumption that cannot be redeemed. There is no way the world is in and of itself which some of us have a superior insight into. There is the way we hash out our differing views of the world and for the differing purposes we have for doing so. The philosophical assumption – here thought to be false or of little use – is that there exists an entity – the actually existing state of affairs – which is what one side of each argument is matching or getting right but which cannot be shown to exist. By ceasing to assume that we are trying to “get reality right” the attempt to solve the perennial problems of philosophy would not have to be repetitiously enacted and inevitably failed at.

The Mystical-Transcending solution – Here the practitioner of a mystical practice is understood to cultivate the ability to have a direct experience of the nature of reality, bypassing or transcending discursive thought in order to dissolve the boundary between self and other or subjective and objective. The perennial problems of philosophy are resolved in practice and in the transformed being of the practitioner. The duality of thinking is resolved through the non-duality of being.

The Nietzscean-Foucauldian-Rortyan Genealogical Solution – Demonstrate through a historical analysis that what are thought to be the perennial problems of philosophy are not perennial problems, but historically contingent problems. Contemporary problematizing tendentiously interprets past dilemmas as the same as present day dilemmas when they aren’t the same dilemmas. The words used and the social contexts in which they were used changes. Rorty cites works like Wallace Matson’s “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?” Foucault describes the practice of genealogy as distinguished from conventional history in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

Bald Ambition in Hardcover

My book Bald Ambition is now out in a non-virtual form. It has a cool cover. And it already has a negative review! Today it ranked 44th in Books>Nonfiction>Philosophy>Criticism.

You can get it at amazon.

The Metaphysical and the Pragmatic

The discussion I participated in on talkingblog.com asked which is more real: dreams or waking life. Presented in this way it sounds like a metaphysical question.

But I suggested that determining what is really real is dependent upon the approach or stance or perspective we adopt in order to determine what is most real. So if you are doing psychoanalysis then you could think that dreams are the gateway to the real because one’s real motivations, the real determiners of one’s life, are found by interpreting the dreams and gaining access to one’s unconscious. One could also adopt a commonsensical, intuitive perspective and say that our waking life seems realer than the dream and maybe argue that we think about the dream in waking life but rarely think about waking life while in the dream. As a third alternative, we can adopt and do a Buddhist practice and eventually see that what we regard as normal, waking life is really a dream or a form of being asleep compared to the superior wakefulness of a Buddhist mindfulness practice and eventually enlightenment.

So it seems the practice adopted trumps or comes before the determination of the real. We tend to think that by asking questions like: What’s real? Or what’s more real? We are neutrally inquiring into the nature of things. But this way of inquiring presupposes that this particular method tells us how things are. There are other methods for determining how things are, such as a Buddhist practice or psychoanalysis or appealing to common sense or intuition or faith rather than reason.

But, in another twist, the practice adopted comes with presuppositions about the way things are: which is a metaphysics. In Buddhism they say meditate and see for yourself the nature of experience as it arises and passes away in each moment. That by doing this you will see things are they are. But this presupposes that that method of looking or inquiring is the superior method as well as presupposing other things, such as that the present moment is the true reality, that past and future only exist as experiences in the present moment, that in examining our subjective experience we learn about all existing things, etc.

Likewise psychoanalysis has metaphysical presuppositions that one assumes or adopts by inquiring in that way.

Rational inquiry is an approach to determining the real which hides its assumption that it is the best method of inquiry. The various practices which shape what will be seen as real presuppose a metaphysics or beliefs about how things are which leads one to see things in a particular way.

In answering the pragmatic question of which inquiring practice to choose we presuppose the metaphysical and in choosing the metaphysical – i.e. unquestioningly inquiring using our chosen way – we presuppose the pragmatic superiority of that mode of inquiring.

Is Life a Dream?

I replied to a post at the Philosopher's Magazine: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=1767

Here's my reply:

The phrase “Life is a dream” can have a deeper meaning if there is another state beyond the two states of existence: waking life and dreaming. In Buddhism and other mysticisms it is claimed that there is another way of living and relating to reality that makes what we call waking life seem like a dream in comparison to it. In Buddhism the story goes that when a man passing the Buddha on the road and noticing something special about him asked if he were a god or magician or demon, he replied, “I’m awake.” A strange reply (since obviously he was awake) unless there is a state of being that makes our normal waking life seem like a dream in comparison to its superior wakefulness. This is what Buddhism asserts but not only as an intellectual assertion; it recommends a practice that must be done so that one sees or experiences that this is the case. You write as if it is a purely intellectual claim to be considered philosophically or in thought. But Buddhism and most mysticisms are about the person’s decision to pursue a daily practice which involves some sort of method of inquiry that either does or does not wake them up by showing them how what we call waking life is actually like a dream in comparison to a superior wakefulness. The Buddhist practice is mindfulness meditation. The moment to moment practice of witnessing the contents of consciousness – thoughts, feelings and sensations - as they arise and pass away. The claim is that you will see that everything is impermanent, changing. You don’t just think it is impermanent, you experience it immediately and that experiencing alters one’s being.

In psychoanalysis of a Freudian or Lacanian kind you do the practice of therapy in such a way (and with the assumptions and practice) that regard the dream as conveying more reality – the really real – in comparison to our illusory waking life.

I think the crucial question is: what method of inquiry do you choose? If you choose a mystical path and do the practice and see what they say you see then do you then believe that that is the way things are? If you choose to use philosophical reflection and see things in a certain way is that the way things are? So, which mystical practice or philosophical tradition should one choose? Phenomenologists “see,” or talk in terms of different things, than do analytic philosophers. If we ask philosophical questions about the way things are we think that we are just neutrally inquiring, but we’ve really unconsciously adopted a method and approach to investigating that comes with certain presuppositions about how we will know what’s real.

Which method of inquiry is the right one to choose to investigate whether “life is a dream”?

The Will to Believe

In again reading Richard Rorty’s magnum opus Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature I find myself absorbing it as if it is a sacred text. As if I’m trying to understand The Truth or how things are by reading it. And as with sacred texts, I experience a mix of getting it and not quite getting it. Of course, this way of being disposed to reading it is a direct contradiction of its point, that being that there is no way in which things are or absolute truth or ultimate guarantor of the true, the good and the beautiful and all the implications that flow from not assuming those absolutes exist or are available to us.

This is not the way I read most texts. I generally read them both to understand them and to be critical of them. Yet my oft-handled copy of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has become as soft and floppy as an evangelist’s Bible. Shouldn’t I be more detached and critical of it? Why aren’t I? Is it saying something that I need to hear? Why would I need to hear that? Why have others chosen some other text as their “Bible?” What is the unique character in which their chosen text speaks to them? What about it and them captured their allegiance?

Yet there is something in the fact that I do keep having to read Rorty’s book. Is it that I don’t believe Rorty’s book is right and, contrary to its thesis, the absolutes exist, or is it the opposite: some part of me clings to an illusory belief in absolutes and reading Rorty is the existential remedying or extraction of this false or impractical belief?

Zizek describes Lacan’s concept of the subject supposed to know. We carry this belief in the subject supposed to know into our psychoanalytic sessions and transfer it onto the analyst. So we imagine the analyst knows the truth of our psychological process. But Zizek, citing Michel de Certeau, describes an even more fundamental concept: the subject supposed to believe. This is the belief we have that there are others, more authoritative than we, who believe completely what we only want to or try to believe.

My subjects supposed to believe are Noam Chomsky (in politics) and Richard Rorty. I do believe what they believe, I’ve adopted their beliefs, but there is a way I don’t believe as fully as they appear to believe. And part of my confidence in my beliefs is dependent upon my imagining that, despite my doubts, they believe completely the things I profess to believe that I’ve gotten from them, but that I feel secret uncertainties about. I believe, and need to believe, in their belief.

Oddly, the certainty I apply to Rorty and am trying to achieve for myself, is in contradiction to the uncertainty which is an inevitable result of his philosophy critical of belief in absolutes.

When "My Spade Is Turned"

An interesting difference of view that may be an example of reaching a bedrock assumption is the different arguments that Matthew Bagger, a philosopher of religion, and Graham Priest, a logician, make about the fact that mysticism, and, Priest would say, all philosophical thinking, reach an inevitable point of contradiction. Such contradictions are “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao” or none of our concepts can ever grasp God. These assertions are contradictory because they say with words or concepts that we can’t know these ultimate things with words or concepts. Yet they do tell us something about these things.

Bagger argues that this paradoxical quality of ultimate entities is made into something mysterious by religions when they are just paradoxes. Priest says that the fact that mystics and philosophers keep running into contradictions at the limits of thought suggests that there are true contradictions. That we are finding something out about the nature of existence when that is the result we keep encountering. And as a corollary, the law of non-contradiction which says that something’s wrong with our understanding of things if there is a contradiction is, in this case, wrong. The contradictions at the limits of thought may be information we keep rejecting; that there are true contradictions.

Wittgenstein wrote: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"

Bagger’s book is “The Uses of Paradox” and Priest’s book is “Beyond the Limits of Thought.” Who we think is right is dependent upon the kind of world we want to live in.

Psychoanalyzing Some Philosophizing

The blog “The Joy of Curmudgeonry” has criticisms of Richard Rorty’s philosophy. The blog’s author employs a common technique which is interesting to psychoanalyze. He takes a one or two sentence quote from Rorty and then “refutes” him. This technique is in contrast to the usual critical method of grasping a thinker's overall argument and responding to it. This facile technique is done more with Rorty and, more generally, with people who are strongly antithetical or fundamentally undermining of the critic’s position. Examples I’ve seen of this technique are numerous: several critics’ responses to Noam Chomsky’s radical political critiques; the analytical philosopher Rudolph Carnap’s making the continental philosopher Martin Heidegger look ridiculous by quoting a particularly abstruse passage without any context; Noam Chomsky calling the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan an “amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan.”; several critics of Jacques Derrida.

The critic’s criticism usually has an air of dismissiveness. The opponent is not worthy of consideration because their view is so wrong-headed that it can be disposed of easily. Yet what’s interesting is that the opposite is the case. The opponent’s view is so radical that it challenges the basis of the critic’s worldview and so is profoundly threatening. When the target of the criticism can make a fundamentally opposed worldview plausible and compelling (and I find all the above named thinkers compelling) it relativizes the critic’s worldview. It’s the profundity of the threat and not the foolishness of the thought that causes the threatened critic to act as if their opponent cannot be taken seriously.

If Rorty were as easily dismissable as the curmudgeon of the blog suggests why are twelve of the top philosophers in the world responding to Rorty’s work in the collection Rorty and His Critics? If he is that easily dismissable what is going on in the book? As we might expect from a knowledge of psychoanalysis, the critic’s tone of easy dismissal hides its opposite. In psychology it’s called a reaction formation. We feel and express consciously an emotion opposite to the one we are unconsciously feeling underneath it. A smug confidence in one’s rightness masks the vulnerable fear of a threat.

Rorty and the Need to Tweak

The link between Rorty and non-dual mysticism – the Tao, Buddhist emptiness, Advaita Vedanta, negative theology - is that he’s continually trying to convince us that there is nothing to hold onto. There’s no It. No way in which It really is. No essence. That our words, vocabularies, concepts, or the assumption we have about them, keeps fooling us into thinking we can grasp how things are if we get our words to work, our understandings to cohere.

But, according to him, it’s also not the case that we know for sure that there is no essential nature to things. That would be another metaphysic. He wants us to leave off the search, stop asking the bad philosophical questions. But how to let go?

Rorty is the only philosopher I’ve kept reading over the years and yet he keeps doing the same thing just in different ways. As he said, nowadays he’s just “tweaking” what he’s already written. I keep reading him because I can’t let go of the dream. The dream of finding The Answer, the final resting place, where one doesn’t have to search anymore. Wittgenstein said the goal of philosophizing is to be able to stop philosophizing when you want to. I both believe Rorty that one must let that quest go and, since I keep reading him, obviously don’t believe it. To choose his view and say that’s the way it is is to contradict oneself because you choose to rest and feel sure that there is no surety. To do the opposite and cling to a fundamental understanding and say there is a Way, an Answer, The Truth, is to cling to an ideal that you cannot prove and so believe in that which you cannot show and so, as a rationalist, contradict yourself. The contradiction at the limits of thought.

Huw Price on Representationalism

This from philosopher Huw Price from a lecture he gave called "Two Readings of Representationalism"

The view I’m challenging can be thought of as a loosely articulated combination of two fundamental assumptions about language and thought. The first assumption (call it the Content Assumption) is that language is a medium for encoding and passing around sentence-sized packets of factual information – the contents of beliefs and assertions. The second assumption (the Correspondence Assumption) is that these packets of information are all ‘about” some aspect of the external world, in much the same way. For each sentence, and each associated packet of information, there’s an appropriately 'shaped’ aspect of the way the world is, or could be – viz., the state of affairs, or fact, that needs to obtain for the sentence to be true. The orthodox view bundles these two assumptions together (not recognising that they are distinct). Once both are in place, it is natural to regard language and thought as a medium for mirroring, or representing, these sentence-sized aspects of the external environment, and passing around the corresponding packets of information from head to head.

My proposal rests on pulling the two assumptions apart, foregrounding the Content Assumption but sidelining the Correspondence Assumption, replacing it with richer, practical and more pluralistic understanding of the role of various kinds of linguistic information in our complex interaction with our environment. The key is inferentialism, which frees the Content Assumption from the Correspondence Assumption. According to an inferentialist, the internal logical machinery of language creates packets of information, or contents, but these may be associated with many different functional relationships, in the complex interaction between language users and their physical environment.

From the inside – as ordinary language users – we don’t notice these differences between one sort of content and another. We talk about ‘facts’ of many different kinds – e.g., about tastes and colours, or right and wrong, as easily as about shape and position. The differences are only visible from a theoretical perspective, by asking about the different roles that commitments about these various matters play, in the lives of creatures like us. (Facts thus become a kind of projection of informational structures made possible by language, echoing Strawson’s famous remark that ‘if you prise the statements off the world you prise the facts off it too’ (Strawson 1950); and there is plurality in the resulting realm of facts, reflecting the underlying plurality of functions of kinds of assertoric commitments.)

More of Part of a Worldview: Politics

The capitalist credo/arrangement of “get what you can acquire through any legal means in the market” is a primitive, animal-kingdom-like approach which humans need to transcend by taking competition out of the equation for gaining the necessities of living. Freedoms in acquiring beyond the necessities can be structured into the workings of the economy with upper limits created through taxation, regulation, etc. This allows the freedom to be entrepreneurial but not at the expense of each person’s right to the necessities of living.

An assumption is that no person deserves the necessities of life more than another person. So what there is must be distributed in such a way that all have the necessities regardless of their capability in acquiring them, assuming the society is capable of producing that level of material abundance. So the society or social group cannot have children or adults in poverty or “going hungry,” or without shelter, proper clothing, medical care or education.

People’s flourishing occurs in a political-economic organization of participatory political and workplace democracy. The laws and policies would be guided by the ideal of each person having maximal control and input in their public places of participation. This would be balanced by the needs of an organization to function through timely decision-making.

These ideals should be applied to the present state of society and see how it measures up in any given case. Unlike the conservative orientation which takes history and tradition as the guides to what can be and so is cautious about social change, my view judges the present according to its ideal and asserts where society does and does not measure up and why.

In the US money generally rules so elites with economic and political power maintain a status quo which favors their interests at the expense of the majority. This state is hidden through propaganda and pervasive mainstream assumptions about what is and is not a serious political or economic issue. The media, being large corporate institutions, have a confluence of interests with economic elites and are part of a taken-for-granted structure which promotes the interests of those on top. There is no conspiracy or cabal maintaining the status quo and the participants are mostly sincere in their ignorance of this situation. A pervasive media and political skepticism must be maintained since what is considered an issue or current event or social fact is an outcome of a system structured around maintaining an unequal and anti-democratic power structure.

Announcing a New Ultimate

I thought of a new concept for the ultimate stuff or what their really is beyond all appearances. People use varying terms for this ultimate stuff: Truth, Reality, The Real, The Absolute, God, the Tao, Nature. But I think there is a paradoxical and almost not-there quality to the ultimate stuff which is not reflected in those concepts. So we need a word that takes up that space - in our minds and on the page - but which doesn't give us much to cling to, since we really can't prove to everyone that we are the ones who've got It (the Truth, the Right way, God). So I propose that we call the ultimate stuff "The Absence". It is a word, a concept, so it is present and yet it refers to what's not there. It's pleasantly or irritatingly paradoxical since it's identifying something that is missing. Maybe the Buddhist notion of emptiness is comparable, but that has to be clarified by saying: "it really means empty/fullness" and "don't think it means nothingness." The term "The Absence" points to something that isn't there.

A drawback to this term could be that it could refer to a previous presence that is now gone because it went away, but that may be ok too.