Linker Replies Again

Okay, here's another reply from Damon Linker on Rorty and Rawls below the fold. I think I'll let it drop after this since Linker and I don't really disagree on the core point; we're reduced to an exegetical argument about Rorty and since I don't have any copies of Rorty's books in DC that seems like a bad kind of argument to have. I thought, however, that I might also link to Ross's post on the subject.

I appreciate your response. I actually think we're not that far apart. I would merely add that anti-foundationalism was crucial to Rorty's liberalism. It wasn't simply an unconnected interest that he pursued when he wasn't being political or doing political theory, which is how you make it sound when you compare his secular humanism to orthodox Christianity or Islam. The parallel would be valid if these orthodox religious believers insisted that decent politics in the United States depended upon their fellow citizens becoming orthodox religious believers. That's was Rorty's position vis-a-vis anti-foundationalist secular humanism, which he hoped would one day transform the political culture of the nation.

Actually, I think your reference to "background culture" and Rorty's lack of indifference to it (not just as a personal issue, but as a part of his political theory) makes my point. What is the background culture of a pluralistic society of 300 or so million people of differing classes, beliefs, educations, etc.? Liberal politics is designed to allow those differing people to live together in relative peace and prosperity, despite their deep differences about God, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. In other words, it treats diversity and pluralism in the background culture as a given and tries to work with it. Rorty, on the other hand, thinks that this diversity and pluralism needs to be flattened out as a precondition of the achievement of genuine liberal democracy. And that, paradoxically, is illiberal.

The same thing is true, I think, about the recent spake of anti-religious polemics by such authors as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. They don't simply want religion to stay out of politics. They loathe religion per se and would clearly prefer religious believers to simply go away -- a development they would consider to be an enormous benefit for American politics (and politics everywhere).

Political liberalism, by contrast, has, historically speaking, accepted that lots of people are (and are likely to remain) religious -- and it has tried to come up with a way for different kinds of believers (and more recently non-believers) to live together politically, and in freedom. Once again, liberalism treats pluralism about the largest human questions as the default condition of modern life and tries to devise a way for people to live decently with that pluralism. Rortyean liberalism, by contrast, sees much of that pluralism as an obstacle to establishing decent politics. After all, how can the United States develop decent politics (as he describes it, for example, in Achieving Our Country) with all of those ridiculous foundationalists running around, casting ballots?

Anyway, enough for now.

Damon

Comments

It's been a while since I read Rorty, but I think Linker may be making a mistake when he conflates "metaphysical" with "religion." Anti-foundationalism is a threat to neo-Platonic or Thomist theorizing than the Exodus or Easter narrative. In other words, it's against the God of the philosophers, not of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I imagine Rorty didn't believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob either, but there's no reason why other people in a post-metaphysical culture wouldn't.

Posted by Pithlord | June 13, 2007 2:11 PM

Well, here's the problem Mr. Linker might consider: Once you stipulate a liberal, pluralist, tolerant political order, it's hard not to see that people who have a liberal, pluralist, and tolerant worldview, or metaphysics, or lack thereof, or whatever, are kind of its ideal citizens. Not that I or any truly liberal, pluralist, or tolerant person would argue that other kinds of people cannot or do not have the right to be our fellow citizens. (Come on in, James Dobson, the water's fine--just don't pee in the pool, please!)

If Enlightenment liberal pluralism was a solution arrived at by tragic means--generations of religious wars, e.g.--by which people with incommensurable religious beliefs and worldviews could coexist together, it nonetheless remains true that a person who has to bracket or reconcile his privately-held foundational, doctrinaire, absolute beliefs about important things in relating to a larger political order that holds these beliefs in abeyance to some lagre degree--that person has a big, sweaty amount of work to do in terms of remaining a good citizen in a liberal, pluralist, tolerant order than I do. And the evidence is all around us that it is not easy to do.

So you can call the Rortian view superficial, antitragic, smug, condescending, godless, and therefore meaningless, if you believe that--but it's still a new, improved model of the liberal pluralist tolerant political monad compared to any of the extant alternatives, is it not? And anyway, Rorty has just as much (well, in my view, probably more) right to theorize and conceptualize and even emotionally vent about what he believes is a superior worldview and belief system as do any of the self-appointed guardians of Religious and/or Metaphysical Truth out there in the public marketplace. Why you be harshing on that, Mr. Linker? You just like Rawls because he strikes you as the unprepossessing type who won't waste anyone's time arguing with others about what he sees as their irrationally-held beliefs--isn't that it?

Posted by elle loco | June 13, 2007 2:20 PM

Frequent blog posts on philosophical matters is probably not a good way to go if one aspires to a large readership. I would have personally preferred a discussion of Rorty vis-a-vis the prospect of Habermas's "constitutional nationalism" (bring in Gellner as a starting point, discuss the possibility of U.S. exceptionalism and the virtues of procedural vs. equity-based democracy). I do find it more than mildly ironic though that the argument got bogged down, at least partially, in exegetics and the epistemic uncertainty over just what the hell any of the essays Rorty wrote over a lifetime meant. Matt, I don't think that defending Rorty over the charge of being illiberal--where precisely, for instance, does he claim that "...diversity and pluralism need to be flattened out as a precondition of the achievement of genuine liberal democracy"--requires access to volumes of primary and secondary scholarship, though I appreciate your disinterest in confrontation.

Posted by VasyaDC | June 13, 2007 2:49 PM

Since Mr. Linker continues to make assertions about what Rorty thought without actually citing any texts, I thought I would post the following from an interview published in 2002:

Q: Rogers and Cohen, among others, have suggested that you have a dismissive attitude toward the sort of absolutist beliefs with which a lot of leftist movements have generated strength: the use of Christianity in the civil rights movement, and so on. How would you respond?

RR: The next book I wrote after Contingency came out in German and French. It was called Hope Instead of Knowledge. It was supposed to be a reply to that kind of criticism. I argued that if you have hope, it didn't really matter whether you believe that Christ was the son of God, or that there are universal human rights. The essential thing is to dream of a better world. Hope doesn't require justification, cognitive status, foundations, or anything else.

Q: I wonder in that case how one would practice pragmatism politically, especially considering the number of Americans still influenced by religion. I heard Cornel West once talk about how something like 95% of Americans believe in God, and 85% believe that God loves them. That being the case: does the pragmatist try to moblize these kinds of beliefs in, I guess, a Leninist way?

RR: Whatever works: Cornel talks Christian; other people talk Marxist; I talk pragmatist. I don't think it much matters as long as we have the same hopes. I don't think it's inauthentic to talk Christian, or to talk Marxist. You use whatever phrases the audience leanred when growing up, and you apply them to the objects at hand.

Q: Some people would say, though, that without something like the belief in the Chruch, the civil rights movement couldn't have happened.

RR: Maybe so. I don't know. Religion is less important now than 100 years ago. The tide of faith has ebbed. Lots of people are commonsensically secular in a way that their ancestors couldnt't have been commonsensically secular. I certainly don't think we have to get back to Christianity, or Marxism, or any other absolutist view in order to get anything political done.

***

Q: I wonder again about when Cornel West "talks Christian": when you mobilize that kind of language for political purposes, are you maintaining a kind of anti-foundationalist position while encouraging a foundationalism in others.

RR: Well, this is where the private/public distinction comes in. I think that the shared hope is public and the Weltanshauung justification in the background can stay private. John Rawls says that in a pluralistic society everyone has their own notion of the meaning of life, but it doesn't get in the way of politics because they agree to keep it out of the public sphere. That seems a good idea.

***

Q: And what would you say to criticisms that your ironism means a kind of sneering at earnest liberals who don't want to acknowledge the contingency of their own values?

RR: That was certainly the way it came across. But what I wanted to say was: take yourself with some lightness. Be aware of yourself as at the mercy of the contingencies of your upbringing and your culture and your environment. I thought of myself as offering advice rather than insults. My liberal ironist doesn't go around being ironic to everybody she meets. She saves the irony for herself. The liberal part is public and the irony part is private.

Posted by blah | June 13, 2007 2:50 PM

Pithlord:

I think a lot of all this stuff about Rorty is a bit wrongheaded in that some people think that Rorty's thought is in anyway original. Rorty isn't original at all, in the Middle Ages people who though as Rorty did were called nominalists.

To elucidate your point about religion, per Aquinas reason and revelation were both valid paths to the capital T Truth, God. The usual metaphor for this is they're a Thomist's 'two wings', or I'd say two legs.

A God of the Philosophers type guy, like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or probably George Washington, could get to God through reason (metaphysics) and also get to a very Christian like moral code through reason (not unintelligently imitating ancients like Plato, Plutarch or some ancient Stoics, and ... Thomas Aquinas), but did think Christianity was a good shortcut for those who weren't mentally equipped for such a journey, i.e. reason is one's leg and faith makes an excellent crutch. Jefferson especially looked forward to the day where men, through education, could throw the crutch away.

Martin Luther and Calvin, justification by faith guys, thought just the opposite, Thomism might not be totally the work of the devil given his conclusions, but faith is one's leg and reason could at best be a crutch that a good man does better without and should throw away. Methodists were the same sort. Protestantism is what one kind of post metaphysical society looks like.

Luther and Calvin believed there was an 'ideal' society or and 'ideal' or sinless man but that men were so depraved that they it was beyond their ability to ascertain what such things looked like beyond what scripture says so the only way out was to believe real hard and pray for forgiveness for sins one wasn't and couldn't even be aware of committing. No point in going to confession.

I'm not an expert on Rorty, but an anti metaphysical guy without a revelation really can't say anything about anything. The medievals were far better nominalists this way.

Posted by j mct | June 13, 2007 2:57 PM

I'll assume what Linker says about Rorty is correct. I've only read the Contingency book, and a long time ago. But what he seems to say about Dawkins, Hitchens and so forth seems incorrect:

"The same thing is true, I think, about the recent spake of anti-religious polemics by such authors as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. They don't simply want religion to stay out of politics. They loathe religion per se and would clearly prefer religious believers to simply go away -- a development they would consider to be an enormous benefit for American politics (and politics everywhere)."

I don't take Dawkins or Hitchens to say that religious people should be re-educated. In other words, there's nothing per se illiberal about what they say. They do point out quite correctly the enormous damage that religious belief does, the idiocy of a belief in a god, and so forth.

Their points are true and valuable, and not illiberal or, for that matter, liberal to my mind. Liberalism's basic point is that one can live with absurd beliefs and practice absurd rituals and do all sorts of absurd things, and that's all permissible up to a point (the point at which it poses some harm or danger to other individuals), even if those aren't the best choices one ought to make.

Posted by Joe Strummer | June 13, 2007 3:23 PM

I don't think Rawls was all that different on this score. Rawls certainly thought that you could have reasonable religious comprehensive doctrines, but that didn't have much to do with his own personal views that they were untenable.

Rawls clearly favored some flavor of Kantian constructivism as a comprehensive doctrine and, if we are careful in our cropping of Section III of TOJ, then I think we can conclude that such a conception would flourish in a just state.

Rawls was simply arguing that one couldn't use force to maintain a consensus around Kantian constructivism, and that in a free society, we would have to. That motivated the move to his political conception of justice. I doubt Rorty disagreed about this.

Now, there might be a real difference between Rawls and Rorty if Rorty said that ONLY Rortyian pragmatists could be political liberals. That would be a clear disagreement. But that claim seems quite obviously false, both on a pragmatic and my delightfully retrograde realist reading.

But if Rorty is making the more plausible claim that most religious conceptions that people now have fail to pass the test, then that I think is a conclusion quite in line with Rawls's views. Rawls's dissatisfaction with contemporary American discourse would be hard to exceed, from what I have read.

Posted by Patrick | June 13, 2007 3:55 PM

I don't know about Hitchens or Harris, but Dawkins' buddy Daniel Dennett does somewhere imagine a nice future where Christians will be in zoos. Dawkins is a bit more humane, his imagined future is one where silly believers' children are taken away from them to be educated by the state in what I suppose would be a Dawkins approved manner, thereby wiping out notions that he considers mental diseases.

I suppose neither of these notions constitute 'reeducation' though, and I guess I have my doubts about anyone ever getting it done, at least if the 2nd Amendment isn't repealed

Posted by j mct | June 13, 2007 3:59 PM

Conflating Rorty with people like Dawkins and Dennett seems very strange to me. Dawkins/Dennett definetely don't think they are just telling another story contingent on their own life history and cultural situation. They think scientific materialism is just how the world is.

Posted by Pithlord | June 13, 2007 4:53 PM

I argued that if you have hope, it didn't really matter whether you believe that Christ was the son of God, or that there are universal human rights. The essential thing is to dream of a better world. Hope doesn't require justification, cognitive status, foundations, or anything else.

No wonder Rorty's so viscerally hated; he's the philosophical equivalent of Bill Clinton.

Interesting interview; I will have to rethink my reading of parts of CIS, or maybe decide that Rorty rethought those parts.

Posted by Anderson | June 13, 2007 4:59 PM

No wonder Rorty's so viscerally hated; he's the philosophical equivalent of Bill Clinton.

Hah, except one almost expects philosophers to wonder what the meaning of is is! I think though that in any fair reading of Rorty, this is precisely the kind of thinking much of his writing identified as irrelevant. As a commited foundationalist, when reading him I was constantly jotting down objections in the margins, but as a political operative I find his skepticism about the link between epistemic/metaphysical and political positions very compelling. Prolongued exposure to DC will disabuse anyone of the notion that the decisions that are made at all levels in this city are made with an eye to philosophical foundations. (In fact, Chait's snobbishness toward Kos's limited philosophical literacy always struck me as both smacking a little of 19th century sensibility and beside the point--even though I do believe that the time I dedicated to the subject was well spent.) I think Rorty comes closer to describing how political change actually occurs than the vast majority of academic philosophers--and his thoughts on the subject do not bar citizens who have not extensively studied the subject from being full political participants.

I also agree that much of his writing feels derivative (not nominalist though--see Pierce's "Pragmatism and Pragmaticism" for the point of disagreement). I do think though that his particular combination, and popularization, of other thinkers' ideas is very interesting and lauditory. There are many public intellectuals of greater fame who have gotten by on a lot less (Judge Posner, for instance).

Posted by VasyaDC | June 13, 2007 5:46 PM

Dawkins' buddy Daniel Dennett does somewhere imagine a nice future where Christians will be in zoos. Dawkins is a bit more humane, his imagined future is one where silly believers' children are taken away from them to be educated by the state in what I suppose would be a Dawkins approved manner, thereby wiping out notions that he considers mental diseases.

Stuff and nonsense.

Posted by Seamus | June 13, 2007 6:00 PM

I was a TA for Rorty in an intro course in the 70's. In lecture, a student asked him what his own religious beliefs were. He said, "Essentially zilch." For whatever that's worth.

On another topic, I think some of this discussion of Rorty's views neglects something to which he attached some importance: the distinction between the public and the private spheres.

Posted by SqueakyRat | June 13, 2007 11:33 PM

When Linker claims that Rorty felt that his "fellow citizens need to embrace these views [on epistemological questions] as a precondition of contributing positively to the nation's public life," he's so far off base that it really makes you wonder if he's read any Rorty. I wish I had the time to comb through all my Rorty books to find the numerous counterexamples to this claim, but two spring immediately to mind.

In "Pragmatism and Law", in Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty imagines a jurist who holds philosophical views diametrically opposed to those that he shares with Richard Posner. He then writes, "Suppose she finds out that she disagrees with Posner on all matters epistemological, metaphysical, metaethical, and metaphilosophical. Once she recovers from the initial shock, I suspect this would matter as little to their collaboration on the bench as her discovery that Posner is an atheist (while she is a cradle Catholic)."

Is good jurisprudence a "positive contribution to the nation's public life"? But Rorty doesn't stop there; in the next paragraph, he generalizes the claim, agreeing with David Grey that his "metaphysical anti-realism (or alternatively Putnam's 'internal realism')" is no help in dealing "with those 'real human problems' which the pragmatists say philosophers should work on."

In the same book is an essay called "On Heidegger's Nazism." The essay begins, "Heidegger's writings -- both early and late -- are full of polemics against the appearance-reality distinction" -- one of the bad epistemological dualisms that Rorty also rails against. Rorty then goes on to imagine an alternate universe in which Heidegger falls in love with a young Jewish woman, flees Germany with her, and becomes an "anti-Nazi polemicist" who also offers encomia to Thoreau and Jefferson. Then Rorty asks, "What books did Heidegger write in this possible world? Almost exactly the same ones as he wrote in the actual one." Heidegger's political commitments, Rorty is saying, were the product of their own contingencies and had nothing to do with his epistemological commitments.

Actually, since I typed up the preceding paragraphs, I came across this site, on which Stanley Fish quotes Rorty as saying,

"One would have to be very odd to change one's politics because one had become convinced, for example, that a coherence theory of truth was preferable to a correspondence theory."

Don't know where it's from, but it's obviously more to the point than any of the excerpts I found.

Posted by Larry Hardesty | June 16, 2007 12:00 PM

More better quotes on this topic that I've come across as I continue my commemorative reading of Rorty:

"Pragmatism is often said to be a distinctively American philosophy. Sometimes this is said in tones of contempt. ... Sometimes, however, it is said in praise, by people who suggest that it would be un-American, and thus immoral, not to be a pragmatist -- for to oppose pragmatism is to oppose the democratic way of life. ...

"I think that ... this sort of praise of pragmatism is misguided. Philosophy and politics are not that tightly linked. There will always be room for a lot of philosophical disagreement between people who share the same politics, and for diametrically opposed political views among philosophers of the same school. In particular, there is no reason why a fascist could not be a pragmatist, in the sense of agreeing with pretty much everything Dewey said about the nature of truth, knowledge, rationality and morality. ...

"It is unfortunate, I think, that many people hope for a tighter link between philosophy and politics than there is or can be. ... [A]ny philosophical view is a tool which can be used by many different hands."

-- "Truth without Correspondence to Reality," in Philosophy and Social Hope

"Among present-day fans of Dewey, there is still plenty of disagreement about what programs of action follow from his pragmatist philosophy. Cheryl Misak and Robert Westbrook, for example, claim that Dewey argued successfully from a pragmatist view of truth and knowledge to the need for deliberative democracy. Misak urges that a pragmatist approach to knowledge provides argumentative ammunition against, for example, fascists and religious fundamentalists. Westbrook says, 'Pragmatist epistemology alone is enough to provide grounds for criticism of those who refuse to open themselves to the widest possible range of experience and argument,' and then claims that deliberative democracy is the only form of government that provides the maximum amount of openness. Judge Posner and I do not think that pragmatist epistemology is up to the jobs that Misak and Westbrook think it can perform. Westbook ruefully notes, 'No pragmatist has worked harder to break the link between pragmatism and deliberative democracy than Richard Posner.' I agree with Posner when he writes, 'The bridge Dewey tried to build between epistemic and political democracy is too flimsy to carry heavy traffic.'"

--Dewey Lecture, "Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress," April 2006

Posted by Larry Hardesty | June 18, 2007 3:51 PM