From: phyllis bergiel (neilfl@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Fri May 02 2003 - 04:18:17 BST
Mea culpa if I offended Matt or Johnny.
> Matt said:
> As someone who gets read as an ethical relativist, like Johnny is here,
I'd
> like to merely point out on our behalves, that reading us as ethical
> relativists buys into an either/or situation that Richard Bernstein calls
> "objectivism or relativism": "_Either_ there is a universal, objective
> moral law, _or_ the concept of morality is groundless and vacuous."
(Beyond
> Objectivism and Relativism, p. 13) The same goes for knowledge, for that
> matter. Bernstein draws out a thread of conversation, ranging from Kuhn
> and Gadamer to Feyerabend and Rorty to MacIntyre and Habermas to Wolin and
> Arendt, that he claims is attempting to get _beyond_ objectivism and
> relativism. The degree to which they are successful or not may be an open
> question, but I think the conversation needs to be paid attention to to
get
> a concrete understanding of what these thinkers are attempting to
> say. Bernstein argues that those that buy into the gigantic Either/Or
> situation of objectivism or relativism suffer from "Cartesian Anxiety":
> that which people suffer from when they continue to use the metaphor of a
> "foundation" to describe morals or knowledge. In this sense, moderns are
> those who suffer from Cartesian Anxiety and post-modern thinkers, like
> those mentioned above, are those who wish to get beyond the foundation
> metaphor. To characterize Johnny and myself as relativists, I think, is
to
> buy into a metaphor that we have dropped. This means that the epithet
> means very little to us because we understand how we are not relativists
> and deny that we are.
>
By any chance is there a summary essay somehwere? I'm a bit short on
reading time, but I am interested in looking into it. Thanks for the
recommendation. I would hesitate to accept the inclusion of Habermas in
this, as he usually sits on the opposite side of the table from Rorty.
I am particularly interested (in mid project now) about your views on the
MoQ's place in this axiological debate. As I said in response to Platt, the
dynamic could be considered the stage where absolutes are contained
independent of human apprehension, the modernist/objectivist view, or the
dynamic is chaos out of which static patterns are chosen (radical
postmodernism - my term) or the event which initially is responded to by
emotion/intuition and then examined and assimilated by the intellect to new
patterns (conservative postmodernism with a dash of neo-feminism).
Johnny's initial comments on this actually sounded very pragmatic, like
Venturi on architecture - is this a hallmark of the self-identity you claim?
How does the "beyond foundations" position avoid the performative
contradiction that so many relativists fall into?
Do we keep this under the same subject thread?
phyllis
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