From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Apr 20 2005 - 18:49:07 BST
David, Anthony,
DMB said:
Frankly, I think a person has to be fairly oblivious to deny the connection
between philosophy and politics. I think that anyone who keeps up with
current events could hardly fail to notice that contemporary philosophy is
overwhelmingly political. This is the point I was trying to make in
reminding you that conservatives feel they are under seige by the very
philosophy you are defending here. Just yesterday I recieve a request for
money from a WW2 veterans organization. They claimed an urgent neeed for
cash because of "pluralism", "political correctness" and
"multi-culturalism". I mean, being against the postmodern movement that
presently dominates our institutions of higher learning has real cash value
in our society. Its central to the culture wars so that the Republican Party
more or less defines itself by being against everything you're pushing.
Anthony said:
Again, this is another reason why Rorty needs to be rejected out-of-hand.
As I mention in my PhD thesis this Ostrich approach to politics by
philosophers is naive and dangerous and I particularly dislike Rorty for
putting such ideas in young people when they should be at the most outspoken
and radical stage in their lives.
Matt:
This is why it is hard for me to respond without being laughed off by the
two of you because I don’t think it is at all obvious that the political
plight of the world is because of intellectual movements like
post-modernism. Its handy for conservative pundits, essentially
philosophical know-nothings, to say so, but it’s a smokescreen to move the
debate to a less important level than the one where they keep stealing
everybody’s money, solidifying their own power, i.e. the machinations of
world governments. To my mind, it’s a smokescreen analogous to the current
“right to life” slogan the conservatives are behind, which is nothing more
than a barely obfuscated continuation of the abortion debate. (I’m not sure
how much you know about the current American political scene, Anthony, but
I’m referring to the Schiavo case that was being talked about on the MD
recently, for which I think David is right on the money in his response.
Like I’ve said before, I don’t normally read much of those political posts,
but I read one of DMB’s just to remind myself how much we do agree on what I
consider a more fundamental level: politics.)
The reason I’ve argued that philosophy doesn’t directly affect politics is
not because people don’t see philosophy as directly bearing on their
political decisions. Clearly the two of you do. But I wonder what that is?
I think blaming Rorty and Stanley Fish for the Gulf War(s) is analogous to
blaming Nietzsche for Hitler and I don’t think either have much of a leg to
stand on. It seems much more obvious that the first Gulf War had more to do
with oil and Hitler with power obsession and anti-Semitism.
You blame post-modernism for throwing the philosophical landscape into the
opposite extreme of the subject/object problematic, but that doesn’t fit for
Rorty and Fish. They’ve been very careful to distance themselves from the
“movement” when it says stupid things like “all views are unequivocally
equal.” (I can’t even think of anybody who says that.) Their negative point
about the history of philosophy is the same as Pirsig’s: there is no
objective fact of the matter about values or ethics. Everything is values.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t better or worse views. That means that our
practice in these matters is just what it always been: a hashing out of our
disagreements which is housed in our discourse on these matters. Rorty and
Fish are making a point about our philosophical discourse, a point that is
very hard to discern as having a direct impact on what we think about
Universal Health Care. They aren’t telling our children that they shouldn’t
be politically active. Quite the opposite: they’re telling them that they
need to be more politically active if they want to have an effect on
politics, rather than hiding their head in philosophy.
Philosophical nihilism and relativism is mentioned all the time as the
problem extremists like Rorty represent, but I don’t understand what you
could mean. Nobody could be a nihilist or a relativist in practice. If you
valued nothing or everything equally, you wouldn’t be able to act. Simply
acting refutes it. This is part of the pragmatist point towards the
philosophical tradition. These are scarecrows that the Platonists have been
using against us for years to hold up their distinction between theory and
practice. Good pragmatists, like yourselves, collapse that distinction.
But still, what does that philosophical point have directly to do with
opening up Alaska for oil drilling?
It seems to me that your disagreement isn’t with Rorty or Fish’s politics,
but with their political philosophy. You think they’re telling people not
to bother them. Their entire point, though, is that after post-modernism
finishes with their destructive point about philosophy is that politics is
still there unaffected. All our values are still there, unaffected. Once
we take the foundation out from under them doesn’t mean that everything is
floating in a sea of existential anguish. Values hold themselves up all by
themselves, which I would think is a point that Pirsig would agree on. So,
what do we do now is the question we disagree on. Both of you think we need
to erect a new philosophical foundation or metaphysics or something in the
old one’s place. But why? What would happen if we didn’t have it? You
think the right-wingers wouldn’t attack whatever else you dreamt up?
Afterall, people like Rorty and Fish are attacked by the right and left.
Rorty’s political philosophy is designed to try and sum up our liberal
intuitions. We don’t need a foundation because philosophy isn’t meant to
provide a foundation because that would be the Platonic dream of
objectivity. Rorty sums up his philosophy by saying that democracy has
priority to philosophy, that politics has priority over philosophy because
politics is where we decide who gets what and that would seem to be more
important then summing up our liberal intuitions. Rorty sums up our liberal
intuitions by saying that we have private lives and we have public lives and
we shouldn’t have to try to get them to match up. American freedom says
that we can watch football on the weekends if we want. It says that we can
have sex with whomever we want. It says that we can say what we want
provided we aren’t infringing on somebody else’s rights. And that it says
those things is a matter of political debate sometimes. The public/private
distinction that Rorty inherited from some of our greatest liberal thinkers
like Mill, Jefferson, and Isaiah Berlin doesn’t say that we have the public
and the private, and never the twain shall meet. It says the same thing
that Jefferson wanted, that we shouldn’t be telling our neighbor by
political means who he should worship on Sunday. We have as much a
political side as we need to set up a world in which each person can be a
culture of one if they so choose, just as Pirsig envisions at the end of
Lila.
The scenario I’ve asked over and over is: do you think we should debate
philosophy on the floor of the Senate? That’s pretty much the extent of
Rorty’s public/private distinction. If you agree with Rorty that we
shouldn’t, then I’m not sure what’s left. There’s no nihilism or relativism
to get away from. Nobody’s shunning their moral responsibility. Rorty’s
moral responsibility is tied up to his politics. After he’s voted and read
the proper materials to stay abreast of political events, what’s left?
After he’s given money to charity and raised his kids right and sent them to
college and been a good husband, what’s left? What’s missing from his
philosophy that isn’t filled in by practice? What’s missing that couldn’t
be filled in by more discussion?
Another way to put my point is to go back to Pirsig’s co-optation of
pragmatism and quote Stanley Fish at length. Pirsig quotes James: “The true
is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.”
Fish notes that whenever people co-opt Protagoras, as Pirsig does in ZMM, or
James they usually get leveled with the view that you guys are leveling at
me: anything goes. You learned this from Pirsig who also leveled that
attack at James indirectly by saying that James had no way of stopping the
Nazi from being a pragmatist. Fish says that what James and Protagoras and
pragmatism mean is that:
“_anthing that can be made to go goes_, at once a tautology and
acknowledgment of the difficulties James acknowledges in the second half of
the oft-quoted sentence: ‘The true is the name of whatever proves itself to
be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable
reasons.’ What James tells us when he adds ‘and good, too, for definite,
assignable reasons’ is that we neither believe nor persuade others to
believe by an exercise of the will. Rather, we come to beliefs by virtue of
our situations and our histories in relation to which certain routes of
evidence and persuasion are already part of the structure of our
understandings….
…
“That is the lesson pragmatism teaches, that we live in a rhetorical world
where arguments and evidence are always available, but always challengeable,
and that the resources of that world are sufficient unto most days. It is
neither a despairing nor an inspiring lesson, and it doesn’t tell you
exactly how to do anything (it delivers no method) although it does assure
you that in ordinary circumstances there will usually be something to be
done.” (“Truth and Toilets: Pragmatism and the Practices of Life”)
Pirsig says that he adds to this by uniting James’ pragmatism and his
radical empiricism, by saying that “the primal reality from which subjects
and objects spring is value.” But I’m not sure what this does other than
what neopragmatists like Rorty have been doing by saying with Sellars that
“all awareness is a linguistic affair.” They use different idioms, but both
are reducing everything to a play of values. I’m not sure what foundation
this fulfills in James that was missing, or what moral responsibility this
fulfills. To me, it doesn’t make any political or moral point. It simply
says that, whatever values we back, it’ll be the same fight it always has
been in marshaling evidence and arguments to persuade others that our values
are better than theirs.
Matt
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