A few days ago John told of his disillusionment with the hypocrisy of his elders who listened to the Sermon on the Mount, on Sundays and seemed to forget it during the week. He described his father as one who believed he knew the truth (or the Truth) and was intolerant of those who did not—those who disagreed with him.
John's disillusionment and disappointment with the provincial and uncritical certainty of these central figures in his life led him to seek truth in the study of philosophy. But philosophy too was a disappointment. It taught him to parse philosophical sentences in an approved manner and to take certain passages in Aristotle, and the British Empiricists as paradigms of thought. It did not teach him the Truth (or how to find it).
John's account is honest and moving. It is also, I think, fairly typical; that is intelligent, questioning children's becoming disillusioned with the limitations and prejudices of small town beliefs and values is the stuff of more than one first novel.
Where John's story perhaps differs from the typical is that he sought intellectual (one almost wants to say spiritual) refuge in academic philosophy. Where many protagonists might have sought the meaning of life he sought the Truth, in its Platonic home.
My own story, which I won't rehearse in detail, is so to speak a variation on John's. Satisfied with small town expectations, but quickly dissatisfied with attempts to fulfill them by majoring in various things, I eventually found what I was looking for in philosophy. Here was something that struck me as honest and clean, an enterprise in which one had to explain what one meant and to give reasons for what one said. I did not expect to find the Truth. I hadn't realized there was such a thing. As I went along into philosophy I'm sure I reached a point at which the very idea of great capitalized abstractions like Truth, Beauty, and Knowledge, seemed fundamentally mistaken. That is another story of course.
John's story offers an explanation of why he finds comfort in some things Rorty has written. What it does not do is offer a defense of Rorty's rejection of human knowledge as representational, that is, it does not by itself support the Rortian view that we cannot see the world straight and that insofar as this is impossible, the idea of truths about the world is vacuous. (I'm sure these aren't Rorty's words.) If we cannot see the world as it is what we say about it cannot be grounded in our judgments of it.
This is the aspect of Rorty that I question, and for the time being, reject. It does not seem to me to be a solution to the disagreements which inevitably arise when humans try to investigate the world. In fact, it appears to make nonsense of the very idea of reasoned disagreement (as opposed to cultural sloganeering).
I wanted to comment on Eric Dean's story but I have run out of space and time for now.
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
