An Ethics for Today

Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion

Richard Rorty

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780231525435
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

One of the most widely discussed philosophers of the 21stcentury finds common ground between spiritual and secular ethics in this provocative book.

As controversial and he was influential, Richard Rorty developed a brand of philosophical pragmatism that rejects all theories of truth. His groundbreaking work also dismisses modern epistemology and its preoccupation with knowledge and representation. Though he was a strict secularist, Rorty believed there could be no universally valid answers to moral questions. This led him to a surprisingly complex view of religion rarely expressed in his writings. In this posthumous publication, Rorty finds in the pragmatic thought of John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, William James, and George Santayana, among others, a political imagination shared by religious traditions. Rather than promote belief or nonbelief, Rorty seeks to locate patterns of similarity and difference so an ethics of decency and a politics of solidarity can rise. He particularly responds to Pope Benedict XVI and his campaign against the relativist vision. Whether holding theologians, metaphysicians, or political ideologues to account, Rorty remains steadfast in his opposition to absolute uniformity and its exploitation of political strength.

CONCLUSION

PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION, AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF AFTER RORTY

G. ELIJAH DANN

A few years ago, I wrote After Rorty: The Possibilities for Ethics and Religious Belief in which I tried to outline, among other things, what ethics, the philosophy of religion, and religious belief might look like in light of Richard Rorty’s metaphilosophical views.¹ The timing of this exploration was fortunate, as a couple months before my manuscript was due the very capable Santiago Zabala published a book based on a discussion of these topics that Rorty had with Gianni Vattimo.² Their conversation provided me with more theoretical fodder for my own study. Now, a few years later, I’d like to try to stoke the small flame a bit more to see if a little more light can be generated, especially in relation to this presentation and exchange by Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo.

Jeffrey Robbins’s introduction has already explained Rorty’s philosophical transition, but I’d like to add to it. In After Rorty, I offered what I thought was an apt, albeit hypothetical, analogy between Rorty having doubts about the philosophical tradition and a story (the hypothetical part) about Pope Benedict XVI. Imagine, I wrote, if the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, while in the Papal Conclave after the death of Pope John Paul II, had awoken after the first day of the Conclave’s meeting and, for a reason not particularly determinable, thought that he could no longer believe in God.

It’s one thing, say, for the new atheists, like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, to castigate and criticize religious belief. None had much involvement in organized religion. (And, dare I say, none has profound understanding of Christian theology, or, even in general, the phenomenon of religion.)³ In any case, it’s quite another thing for those who are steeped and trained in a given tradition, and who are its highly articulate advocates, to have a change of mind on the value of a tradition, then upping the ante by becoming vocal detractors of the very tradition they once embraced. In the case of the Church, it can ignore, even tolerate a Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, or Dennett. Yet the Church will feel a sharp chill down its spine when those who have been its greatest defenders turn their backs on it. This reaction isn’t unique to established religious groups. It also holds for other established organizations and institutions, even one—like the philosophical community—that extols the virtue of critical, unbiased, and clearheaded thinking.

Of course, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, had no change of heart. But in midcareer, Richard Rorty did have one about the various tasks of traditional philosophy. His eventual abdication generated a particular sort of resentment from the philosophical community—a typical reaction to the renunciation of one of its leading advocates. It would’ve been no different in the halls of seminaries if Cardinal Ratzinger had thought the gig was up for religious belief and Catholicism. Ordinarily, this sort of doubt would go unnoticed by the wider philosophical community. In Rorty’s case however, trained at Chicago and then Yale by some of the most notable philosophers of the twentieth century—Rudolph Carnap, Charles Hartshorne, Richard McKeon, and Paul Weiss—he showed himself to be a sharply skilled philosopher who delved deeply into the traditional inquiries with impressive acumen. Then, while teaching at Princeton in the 1960s, because of his colleagues’ predilections toward analytic philosophy, he took time to understand this prominent philosophical school of thought.⁴ By then, it could’ve easily have been assumed that Rorty would one day command the attention of the philosophical community by doing cutting-edge philosophical analysis.

The analysis indeed came about, but not in the way it was expected. ⁵ Rorty began to chart his doubts about the philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. When it appeared, it was interpreted by some as an attempt to pull apart the very tradition that Rorty had so diligently studied. In relatively quick succession his other volumes appeared, expanding his metaphilosophical critique: Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991), and Truth and Progress (1998).

Throughout these volumes Rorty challenges squarely the core inquiries of “first philosophy”—or, Philosophy.⁶ One of his key targets throughout these volumes is realism, with its representational theory of knowledge. “Realist philosophers say the only true source of evidence is the world as it is in itself.”⁷ So the mind’s task is to take the empirical input—“the given”—and for the generated thoughts to then represent, or “mirror the reality,” of the exterior world. In turn, this exercise of the mind’s mirroring the world by representation becomes a “‘rational reconstruction’ of our knowledge.”⁸ By means of this representation, if done rightly, we will have then established a correspondence with the world, deriving truth.⁹

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The other feature of traditional philosophy that Rorty takes to task is foundationalism—the notion that there is an ultimate resting place that is the ground, or “foundation” for our most basic beliefs:

[It is] an epistemological view which can be adopted by those who suspend judgment on the realist’s claim that reality has an intrinsic nature. A foundationalist need only claim that every belief occupies a place in a natural, transcultural, transhistorical order of reasons—an order which eventually leads the inquirer back to one or another “ultimate source of evidence”.¹⁰

Accompanying a very close examination of the central projects of first philosophy throughout these volumes, he also works through and presents concomitant redefinitions of the nomenclature held to be of greatest interest to the traditional philosopher. Rorty’s criticism traverses the spectrum of philosophy, from the efforts of analytic philosophy (such as studies in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics) clear over to the so-called Continental side. Although the process of philosophizing is different for Continental philosophers, whether powered by phenomenology, existentialism, or deconstructionism, there is also a conviction for them, just like many of the philosophers working in analytic philosophy, that there is the “really real” to be uncovered.¹¹ This is what philosophy has become, holding the age-old conviction that once the technique of its algorithm is applied, then Knowledge, Reality, and Truth will be obtained.

The perennial problems of philosophy had their beginnings with Plato, who expounded on the notion that there is something beyond the natural, corporeal, and temporal world (the realm of “shadows”) that must be contemplated in order for us to achieve enlightenment and, as a result, upon death, emancipation from this fleshly existence. The philosopher’s task, Plato believed, was to recollect the eternal realm of the Forms, the realm where Truth, Beauty, and Goodness reside in their perfection. This realm is where the Forms of all earthly representations exist in perfect harmony, from the muck and sludge of the earthworm to the magnificent scenes of nature like a mountaintop and, more abstractly, the deeply complex algorithm lurking in the mind of the mathematician. Only by contemplating these Forms will we be able to know the True Nature of Reality, including Moral Reality, and armed with such knowledge we will be able to intelligibly understand our corporeal world, and, by consequence, ultimately escape it upon death.

As Rorty saw it, two thousand years later, the philosophical tradition with its assorted investigations and tasks put into gear by Plato hasn’t paid off. Philosophers, taking up the challenge by Plato to define and distinguish the inevitable dualisms of Knowledge vs. Opinion, Reality vs. Shadows, Truth vs. Error, produced a multitude of distinctions, wandered down innumerable labyrinths, carried through various investigations, but always bringing more questions and more problems, all seemingly without end. Today, few philosophers hold to Plato’s more ephemeral views, like the contemplation of the Forms. There is, however, a remaining allegiance to his original ambitions:

[They] think of their discipline as one which discusses perennial, eternal problems—problems which arise as soon as one reflects. Some of these concern the difference between human beings and other beings, and are crystallized in questions concerning the relation between the mind and the body. Other problems concern the legitimization of claims to know, and are crystallized in questions concerning the “foundations of knowledge.”¹²

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Taken further:

[This is] the original Platonic strategy of postulating novel objects for treasured propositions to correspond to, and the Kantian strategy of finding principles which are definatory of the essence of knowledge, or representation, or morality, or rationality. But this difference is unimportant compared to the common urge to escape the vocabulary and practices of one’s own time and find something ahistorical and necessary to cling to.¹³

This “urge to escape” is what Rorty and a long succession of intellectuals have pointed out (to borrow from Nietzsche), as the rather human, all too human, political, mundane, emotional, psychological elements—but altogether powerful ones—that go into the promoting of a given belief, tradition, or school of thought.

Alongside Rorty’s more critical volumes on traditional philosophy, where he worked through the reasons he thought professional philosophy and its vocabulary had to change direction, he also published works such as Truth, Politics, and ‘Post-Modernism’ (1997), Achieving Our Country (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (1999) where he tried to show what this overall transformation might look like. By the time Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007) appeared, instead of the further pulling apart the obsession “with the primal world of some final vocabulary, with truth or objectivity,”¹⁴ Rorty’s attention had turned clearly to the pressing issues of contemporary society: gender, race, and class discrimination, to name a few. His admitted dependence was on John Dewey, who emphasized that we should turn our intellectual energy to addressing the “problems of society,” envisioned as “clarifying the ideas men and women have on those issues that divide them.”¹⁵

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Jeffrey Robbins and Gianni Vattimo have already reviewed the manner in which Rorty criticized the philosophical tradition and its key terms. In the remaining pages, I want to describe and expand Rorty’s view of religious belief. But to make the description as clear as possible, without being too repetitive, some of his key redefinitions of traditional philosophical terminology should be kept in mind.

Rationality, a fundamental term in first philosophy, is not some quality of thinking unique to the philosophical mind, one based on a reflection and concise understanding of the terminology, distinctions, and qualifications in the philosophical tradition, honed as a graduate student and then fully bestowed after successfully defending the Ph.D. thesis. Instead, as Rorty sees it, to be rational names a set of moral virtues:

Tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force. These are the virtues which members of a civilized society must possess if the society is to endure. In this sense of “rational,” the word means something more like “civilized” than like “methodological.” When so construed, the distinction between the rational and the irrational has nothing in particular to do with the difference between the arts and the sciences. On this construction, to be rational is simply to discuss any topic—religious, literary, or scientific—in a way which eschews dogmatism, defensiveness, and righteous indignation.¹⁶

This isn’t to say that philosophy hasn’t been productive over the centuries in charting out some of the terminologies, distinctions, and qualifications that have contributed to the avoidance of dogmatism and the cultivating of this “tolerance.” Consider Socratic dialogue, where we carefull...