From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 28 2003 - 02:15:44 GMT
David,
David said:
I take the Rorty-reader to say that the two cultures have different values and that you cannot say one is superior to the other. They have different language games and live in different worlds. I have heard Rorty take a position of 'no way to judge' in respect of so-called primitive cultures.
Matt:
This isn't quite right, though many have interpreted Rorty as saying this. Rorty says that we cannot judge either culture to be _transcendentally_ superior, or objectively superior. This is because we cannot "leap out of our skins" or take Putnam's "God's eye view" or take the view from nowhere. As you say, we are always in a contingent time and place. However, this does not still our judging heart, nor should it, nor could it. As ironists, we enjoy meeting new people and exchanging views. But I think Rorty's point is that some views are simply beyond the pale, things we simply cannot put up with and still get a decent night's sleep without being awoken by nightmares of people eating babies.
The Rortyan position is not about silence at all. Its about continuing the conversation. Rorty doesn't know what it would be like to give up binary thinking. We can make anything and everything into a binary. The trick is to not think that a pair of poles gets at the way reality really is. This is why I think Pirsig is right to say that reality is a pile of sand that we can split into two in any infinite number of ways. This is Pirsig agreeing with Rorty's point about the game of redescription and recontextualization. I think Pirsig is wrong, however, to think of this as still playing metaphysics (taken in the Platonic tradition). Pragmatists agree with Pirsig that there is no perfect opening in metaphysics. We take this as the suggestion that we should stop doing metaphysics. Metaphysics is the game of constructing the perfect game, a transcendental game in which you'll always win, thereby precluding the need to continue playing the game. Pragmatists take Pirsig'
s suggestions as breaking the spell, as suggesting that there can be no winner. Whatever game we play after that, though, one thing is for sure, it is not metaphysics. It is a de-transcendentalized game of redescription, each person trying to make the other's position look bad. The trick of pragmatist philosophy is to keep cutting the sand until you come up with a cut that is more useful, looks better. This is, essentially, the same game that philosophers have been playing, except that pragmatists drop the pretention that the object of the game is to stop playing. Pragmatists don't think the game will ever stop.
Matt
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