Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty gave one of his last public presentations in a 2005 lecture
in Italy called “An ethics for today: finding common ground for philosophy and religion.”
In his lecture Rorty contrasts his own view with that of the Catholic Church
and clarifies his own understanding of relativism.
Rorty describes the Church as affirming the reality of a “structure
of human existence, which can serve as a moral reference point.” For his part, Rorty
sides with John Stuart Mill in holding that the only moral obligation humans have
is that of “helping one another satisfy our desires, thus achieving the greatest
possible amount of happiness.”[1]
This clearly utilitarian ethic is one for which Rorty makes no apology. In the face
of the Church’s view that utilitarianism makes animals of human beings, Rorty claims,
in revealing phraseology, that on the contrary, “utilitarianism exalts us by offering
us a challenging moral ideal. Utilitarianism leads to heroic and self-sacrificing
efforts on behalf of social justice.”[2]
One must assume that the irony of his positive moral appraisal
of heroism, self-sacrifice and social justice is not lost on Rorty who describes
himself as a liberal ironist. But irrespective of whether Rorty acknowledges the
strange juxtaposition of utilitarianism and moral virtues such as heroism, there
is a clear appeal to moral values above and beyond, or at least additional to, that
of increasing the net amount of happiness on the planet. While social justice might
conceivably be defined in utilitarian terms as maximising human happiness or desire
satisfaction, that is not the case with heroism and self-sacrifice. As normally
understood, and when not distorted to fit a utilitarian scheme, one can imagine
classic situations of heroism or self-sacrifice that neither increase net happiness
nor were even intended to do so.
Although an appeal to the exaltation, heroism and self-sacrifice
of human beings is to use non-utilitarian, morally loaded terms, Rorty assures us
that “such [heroic and self-sacrificing] efforts are entirely compatible with the
claim that there is no such thing as the structure of human existence.”[3]
With George Santayana, Rorty believes that the only source of moral ideals is the
human imagination and he rejects the superstitious view that moral ideals are grounded
in any structure of human existence.[4]
He says:
To give oneself over to a moral ideal is like giving oneself over to
another human being. When we fall in love with another person, we do not ask about
the source or the nature of our obligation to cherish that person’s welfare. It
is equally pointless to do so when we have fallen in love with an ideal. Most of
Western philosophy is, like Christian theology, an attempt to get in touch with
something larger than ourselves. So to accept Santayana’s view, as I do, is to repudiate
the tradition that Heidegger called onto-theology. That repudiation means ceasing
to ask both metaphysical questions about the ground or the source of our ideals
and epistemological questions about how one can be certain that one has chosen the
correct ideal. 9
This passage, which unnecessarily forces a wedge between the
repudiation of onto-theology and the possibility of any sort of metaphysical
questioning, is one I will return to after finishing this exposition of Rorty’s
paper. Suffice to say that with respect to epistemology, of course one cannot “be
certain that one has chosen the correct ideal,” but the question is whether
Rorty’s repudiation of such questions is because of that epistemic uncertainty
or because he wants to make an ontological claim about the non-existence of
such ideals as part of the structure of human existence. If it is the second,
as seems clear in this paper, then it also involves an implicit epistemic claim
to know that there is no source of such ideals beyond the human imagination. One
need not abandon the quest for truth because one recognises that certainty is a
chimera, let alone, as Rorty does, to make a truth claim about such ideals not
existing while at the same time repudiating the asking of such questions. The
situation sounds suspiciously like the sort of family argument stopper that goes,
“I’m just going to say this and then I’m leaving the room and not going to
argue any more,” which leaves the interlocutor frustrated at having been
presented with a poor argument without recourse to further discussion.
Rorty elaborates on his metaphor of falling in love by saying
that there is no possibility of an appeal to neutral criteria to choose between
two people or between two ideals such as atheistic and religious forms of spirituality.
So in the face of the demands of the onto-theological tradition which insists on
raising metaphysical and epistemological questions, Rorty says that conversion cannot
be rationally justified: “It is futile to look for a demonstration that one has
turned in the right direction.”[5]
Rorty makes it clear where the differences lie between himself
and the onto-theological tradition—and more generally, speculative
philosophy—as he advocates a sort of atheistic but spiritual relativism.
Responding to a homily by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, which speaks of “a dictatorship
of relativism that does not recognise anything as definitive,” Rorty dons the relativist
mantle willingly—something he has resisted vehemently in past writings—and in the
process, he clarifies the nature of his relativism. But it is founded on a
non-relativist dogma that there is no structure of human existence in which
ideals are founded and which therefore leaves ideals as relative because they
serve the purpose of increasing human happiness. Aligning himself with philosophers
such as Santayana and John Stuart Mill, he says,
[They] do indeed refuse to recognize anything as definitive. This is
because they think that every reported object of philosophical speculation or of
religious worship is a product of the human imagination. Someday it may be replaced
by a better object. There is no destined end to this process of replacement, no
point at which we can claim to have found the correct ideal once and for all. There
is nothing already in existence to which our moral convictions should try to correspond.[6]
So rather than being “carried about by every wind of doctrine”
as the now-current Pope describes relativists, Rorty takes the moral high ground
describing philosophers like himself as open to new ideas, willing to “consider
all suggestions about what might increase human happiness” and claiming that this
doctrinal openness “is the only way to avoid the evils of the past.”[7]
Rorty clarifies his atypical use of the terms
‘fundamentalism’ and ‘relativism’ that allows him to refer to the Pope as
fundamentalist and himself as relativist; fundamentalism is the view that
“ideals are valid only when grounded in reality” as opposed to the more typical
understanding that sees fundamentalism as a naive invocation of scripture.
Adopting this meaning allows Rorty to define relativism as the denial of
fundamentalism; at a minimum presumably, ideals can be valid even if not
grounded in reality. However Rorty goes further: “Relativists on this
definition are those who believe that we would be better off without such
notions as unconditional moral obligations grounded in the structure of human
existence.”[8]
But this explicit definition of relativism introduces a value judgment not
found in the denial of fundamentalism as a belief that ideals are grounded in
reality. Does this matter? Only that Rorty’s explicit definition doesn’t
actually tackle the question of whether ideals are or are not grounded in
reality; it only says we would be better off without that notion. Is this
because the notion is wrong or simply unpragmatic? This brings us again to the
heart of the question of Rorty’s view on truth. Does he think his liberal
ironic pragmatism is the way forward because he really does regard truth (with
respect to ideals in the current discussion) as nonsensical, or is truth for
Rorty simply unattainable? Or perhaps he believes that because the latter is
true (!) then so is the first?
Rorty quotes Ratzinger and says that Mill, Dewey, Habermas
(and by implication Rorty himself) share the cardinal’s view of relativism:
The cardinal summarized the relativists’ line of argument as
follows: “Democracy is said to be founded on no one’s being able to claim to
know the right way forward. It draws life from all the ways acknowledging each
other as fragmentary attempts at improvement and trying to agree in common
through dialogue. A free society is said to be a relativistic society. Only on
this condition can it remain free and open-ended.”[9]
Further expounding his own view, Rorty says that the three
philosophers he mentions share in a view of truth as “what wins out in the
marketplace of ideas rather than correspondence to an antecedent reality” and
that they see democracy as essentially relativist in Rorty’s sense because it
is based on the “idea that nothing is sacred because everything is up for
discussion.”[10]
While Ratzinger acknowledges the validity of some relativity
in the realms of politics and society, such relativity is not unlimited and
when politics tries to be redemptive, he says, it has usurped the work of God.
Rorty agrees that politics should not try to be redemptive, but not because
redemption is God’s business; rather because “redemption was a bad idea in the
first place. Human beings need to be made happier, but they do not need to be
redeemed.”[11]
Humans according to Rorty are not “degraded beings, not immaterial souls
imprisoned in material bodies, not innocent souls corrupted by original sin.”
Rather they are Nietzsche’s ‘clever animals’ that have grown through history to
be cooperative, to be “brave, imaginative, idealistic, self-improving.”[12]
So, rejecting Ratzinger’s Platonic spirituality, which is
rooted in the infinite and the possibility of immortality, Rorty affirms a
secular spirituality consisting of “an exalted sense of new possibilities
opening up for finite beings.” The difference between these two views is that
between “the hope to transcend the finite and the hope for a world in which
human beings live far happier lives than they live at the present time.”[13]
And, he says, “though largely Christian in its original inspiration, the
political idealism of modern times has no need or use for the idea that there
is something over and above what Cardinal Ratzinger called ‘the ego and its
desires.’”[14]
Rorty’s utilitarianism is clear; for him, no desires are bad
in themselves although some do obstruct the overall satisfaction of desire:
“there is no such thing as intrinsically evil desire.”[15]
Rorty describes Peter Singer’s idea of “enlarging the circle of the ‘we’” as a
case where relativism leads to beneficial change; he cites three examples: when
poverty and wealth are seen as mutable rather than immutable social
institutions then the rich see the poor as fellow citizens rather than ordained
by God to their station in life. Similarly, he says, the success of feminism
and the growing heterosexual understanding of homosexuals are examples where a
Rortian relativism has provoked a change for the better.
However, Rorty does not make his point; there is no reason
to assume that ‘enlarging the circle of the “we”’ cannot occur based on an enlarged
or changed understanding of what norms are immutable. That is, while Rorty
claims that it is the movement in thinking from fundamentalism (as he defines
it) to relativism that leads to the benefits he cites, others—Christians
included—might say that a better understanding of, or a revision of what counts
as immutable norms, lies at the heart of social changes for the better.
Christians would say that despite a belief that slavery or the inequality of
the sexes are rooted in an immutable order, the Church was wrong. And not only
that, but the very reason that those past positions can be criticised is on the
basis of new understandings based on the immutability of the equal dignity of
all human beings. We will return to discuss further Rorty’s relativism and the
question of immutable norms.
Rorty finishes his paper complicating an already unclear
discussion. He raises the question of how to decide between the Jamesian view
that “any desire has a right to be fulfilled if it does not interfere with the
fulfilment of other desires” and the view of those who see “certain desires and
acts as intrinsically evil.”[16]
Such a decision cannot be made, he says, on the basis of philosophical
reflection—which, rather than constraining the imagination, is in fact one of
the products of the human imagination. Nor can a choice be made on any
particular reading of history, which would be simply one among many readings.
The answer is that “our choice between alternative
principles is determined by our preferences between possible futures for
humanity.”[17]
Neither the reasoning of philosophy nor the experience of history offer a
neutral court of appeal and so, for relativists like Rorty, the struggle is
between “two great products of the human imagination;” the pope’s view appeals
to a truth greater than humanity while the relativist’s vision holds that
“there never was, and never will be, a truth that is greater than we are. The
very idea of such a truth is a confusion of ideals with power.”[18]
What are we to make of Rorty’s defence of relativism over
fundamentalism as he has defined them? Rorty’s disarming turn of phrase makes
the lack of rigour less transparent but before criticising him for a lack of
philosophical rigour, his own words against the possibility of resolving such
matters through philosophical reflection need to be remembered. Hasn’t he
closed the possibility of criticism with his appeal to preferences rather than
philosophy? By his own parameters, his writing need not claim to be rigorous
because it is just one product of the human imagination.
This sort of
defence simply won’t work and despite his clear statements, I doubt that Rorty
would explicitly appeal to it. He falls into reflexive incomprehensibility if
he simply sloughs off the tradition of serious argument as long as he is trying
to say something true—in fact, as long as he is trying to say anything at all.
Whatever he says, he comes under critical judgement to see if his communication
points to truth or not; Is this the way things are? is the question we ask as
we read his work which purports in its own self-deprecating way to be telling
us about the way things are.
All references are from Rorty, Richard, Elijah Dann, and Gianni Vattimo. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
[1] 8
[2] 8
[3] 8
[4] 8
[5] 10
[6] 10
[7] 10-11
[8] 11
[9] 11
[10] 12
[11] 13
[12] 13
[13] 14
[14] 15
[15] 15
[16] 16
[17] 16
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