[lit-ideas] Transcendental and otherwise
- From: Eric Dean <ecdean99@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2008 05:03:08 +0000
Walter characterizes a passage John McCreery quoted from Rorty thus:
"...Rorty's claim...is a transcendental claim: it attempts to identity the
limits and possibilities of a specific kind of discourse."
I'm not sure that Walter's characterization, on which he bases a dismissal of
Rorty, is accurate. The quote from Rorty was:
"...The controversy between those who see both our species and our society as a
lucky accident, and those who find an immanent teleology in both, is too
radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint."
That need not be a transcendental claim at all. Instead, it could just be a
description of the disputes which arise between two roughly identifiable groups
of people. My wife was a divorce mediator in Rockford, Illinois, where there
is a large population of Swedes and another large population of Italians. She
says that the most bitter divorces she saw were those in which a Swede had been
married to an Italian. The Swede in his or her bitterly cold rage would
contemptuously characterize the Italian as crazy, and the Italian, in his or
her voluble rage, would contemptuously characterize the Swede as a soulless
lump of ice. If one takes Rorty's "permit of being judged from some neutral
standpoint" as meaning "being judged in a way the disputants might both
accept", then the Swede and Italian divorces can be understood as controversies
that are "too radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint."
My wife wasn't trying to say that no Italian/Swede divorce could ever work out.
She wasn't setting limits or defining possibilities for such divorces, but
rather trying to describe a rough class of human situations in a way that could
be useful. Trying to help a divorcing Italian/Swede couple to understand one
another might be largely futile; better, perhaps, to help them figure out the
minimum they had to do together to get through their divorce.
Similarly, I read Rorty, in this passage, as saying that as a practical matter,
trying to find a neutral ground on which the Darwinists and fundamentalists
might some day come to an understanding is probably a waste of time. Life's
too short, I hear him saying; we should move on.
Lots of problems with that sketch come to mind as I write it. For one, there's
a formally established neutral position from which a divorce mediator observes
people in conflict. Rorty, however, is one of those involved in the conflict.
It's one thing for a third party, whom both combatants have accepted as
neutral, to say "you guys aren't going to resolve this"; it's another thing
altogether for one of the combatants to say "we're not going to resolve this,"
especially if it's followed with a "because" that's based on the combatant's
position, like, say "because you're too narrow minded to accept the evidence of
your senses" or "your soul is too corrupted to hear the word of God".
Walter's complaint that Rorty's guilty of a performative contradiction sounds
to me more like the retort of the other combatant than it does a serious
consideration of the question of whether the conflict could ever be resolved.
Rorty may not be able to occupy the neutral ground, but he seems to me just to
be saying no one can occupy the neutral ground anyway, so where's the
contradiction?
Walter goes on to say:
"...biography has no epistemic relevance to philosophical argument, as far as I
can see. It may help to explain how one comes to hold a set of beliefs, but no
justification of judgment or action is possible via such
description/recitation."
This is more about the definition of the boundaries of philosophy as Walter
believes they should be set than it is about truth per se. Biography may have
no epistemic relevance to that which Walter sees as philosophical argument, but
surely there are judgments and actions which are entirely justified based on
biographies -- judgments about whether such and so happened to someone can only
be justified by knowing that someone's biography; and certainly there are
biographical questions that go into deciding whether or not scarce resources
should be given to someone who appears needy but may be scamming the giver, if
only because it may limit the giver's ability to help the truly needy.
It seems to me that Walter wants to assert that philosophy bears a similar
relationship to life that mathematics bears to the construction of bridges.
I'm willing to acknowledge that there are worthy questions about things one
might call philosophical that bear something like that relationship to life --
call them 'transcendental' if you will. I'm uncomfortable, however, with the
idea that the word 'philosophy' clearly and unequivocally refers only to such
things.
Etymologically philosophy is about loving wisdom. Isn't wisdom, in the end,
about how to live? How can one be wise about how to live without understanding
a lot about living, i.e. about the material of biographies?
I can accept that a mathematical theorem is true or false irrespective of the
biographical details of its propounder; whether an assertion about how one
should judge a practical matter in life is true or false may, however, be much
more closely tied to the biographical details of its propounder. The real
challenge is in recognizing which things are of the former sort and which of
the latter.
Regards to one and all.
Eric Dean
Washington, DC
Other related posts:
