From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Tue Oct 01 2002 - 00:50:38 BST
Platt,
> (Platt previously):
>
>>>First, Rorty completely rejects all universals, absolutes and self-evident
>>>truths. (That his total rejection is itself an absolute doesn't phase
>>>him. Logic in his view is "contingent" like everything else.) By contrast,
>>>Pirsig's explanation of reality is based on an universal absolute he
>>>identifies as "Quality."
>>>
>>Your right about Rorty (though, as usual, you're attempt to catch him in a
>>language-trap fails).
>>
>
> My "trap," if there is one, is based on logic whose form transcends
> native spoken languages, like mathematics.
>
>
You are forcing your contingent vocabulary of absolutes, universals, and
self-evident truths (which didn't exist until Philosophers created it)
on Rorty, and then calling him inconsistent because he declines to adopt
it. That's not logical. In any case, Rorty doesn't say such absolutist
statements as "I completely reject all absolutes, universals, and
self-evident truths". He is more likely to say, "I haven't found the
concepts useful, and have found them harmful. We'll be better off
without them". Nothing inconsistent in that. Unless you assume that the
concept of absolute implies its existence (like the ontological proof of
God;s existence).
You said and quoted:
"Likewise, I don't think any good, edifying narratives or insights can
come from Rorty. Not only do I base my conclusion on his quirky,
murky expository style, but also on these words he wrote:
We must accept the fact "that we have not once seen the Truth, and so
will not, intuitively recognize it when we see it again." This means that
when "the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent
there is nothing to be said to them.""
Here's the complete passage:
"The urge to make philosophy into Philosophy is to make it the search
for some final vocabulary, whcih can somehow be known in advance to be
the common core, the truth of, all the other vocabularies which might be
advanced in its place. This is the urge which the pragmatist thinks
should be repressed, and which a post-Philosophical culture would have
succeeded in repressing.
"The most powerful reason for thinking that no such culture is possible
is that seeing all criteria as no more than temporary resting-places,
constructed by a community to facilitate its inquiries, seems morally
humiliating. Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have *not" once
seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize when we see it
again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers
violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form
"There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you
embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure
forever, there is something beyond you which condemns you".
[skipping related Sartre quote]
"This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and
Nietzsche, together -- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside
us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have
not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of
rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous
argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions."
Now, my point in giving the extended quote is not so much to imply that
you have twisted the meaning by taking it out of context (though I think
you did a bit -- by leaving out "...of the form..."), but to ask how
you respond to it. For one thing, societies that do have state-sponsored
torturers are based on absolutes (e.g, Inquisitional Spain, the USSR),
so it is clearly not the case that belief in absolutes is a way to
prevent torture. Rather the opposite.
But more importantly, how does a belief in Quality as an absolute ward
off torture? Quality is undefinable. It is does not come with a sticker
on it saying "Thou shalt not torture". That sticker is a fairly recent
pattern of sq. Now I happen to have faith that there *is* something
beyond little ol' egoistical me that *does" say that torture is always
wrong, but I sure as hell don't know how to demonstrate it, even if I
presuppose that Quality is an absolute. How does one, without recourse
to an appeal to the beyond (and therefore not something we have any
vocabulary for) respond to the torturer?
And, your characterization of Rorty's writing as murky and quirky is
bizarre. Compared to most philosophers and Philosophers, he is a model
of clarity. Pirsig, perhaps, is clearer, but as a result has left many
philosophical gaps (why should one, for instance, call inorganic
patterns static "quality", and not just inorganic patterns?).
- Scott
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