DMB said: Dewey, James, Pirsig, and Heidegger ...they're all concerned with the state of our civilization and the quality of our lives. Rorty is no less concerned, I'm sure. But I think he's tone deaf in this area. It just sounds like Platonism to him. Or religion, if there's a difference.
Matt replied: This is, I think, the true, but minor, difference. Rorty, and I, get less excited about the notion of philosophy changing the world. "Cultural illness" is language we both would have a distaste for, but the notion of it being a cultural problem--a cultural _battle_--is right. His view is, basically, that politics is the best route (though certainly not the only) to effect change in this regard. At the end of his life, he liked to refer to philosophy as a kind of cultural politics. DMB then said: I get the impression that we aren't even talking about the same thing here. I mean, its not like economic and political solutions would compete with the solutions offered by mysticism. They don't really address the same problems. Matt: Yeah, I think that's right. They don't exactly address the same problems. But, as monists, particularly mystics, like to point out, the world is all interconnected. In this regard, I used to like to say that clearing up economic/political problems should be the priority, but now I'm coming to think that it might be a precondition to really actually making progress on spiritual problems. Dewey used to like to say that his philosophy was at bottom a philosophy of education, out of which everything else unfolded, metaphysics, epistemology, etc. I think Rorty ended his career in a similar position, except I think he might have formulated it as political philosophy as the root. They both saw that the process of socialization was the key to everything. As I see it, politics comes first because it is the thing that has the ability to destroy all of humanity. Change can occur very quickly on the political level. Now, I don't think you'd disagree with any of this, but you'd repeat that these are two different things. And I can again agree, they are. So what's the trouble? The trouble might be two-fold: 1) I don't think "illness" rhetoric is the best kind of language to use because I think it sounds a little Platonic--health is our natural state, illness a fall that we must recover from (Plato used the "health" metaphor especially in the Republic) and 2) I don't think the thing that helps us spiritually is necessarily radical empiricism or mysticism. In the first case, I know you're not a Platonist, and in fact, like Pirsig, are an anti-Platonist, so you try and be self-conscious of not running afoul of those problems. I think "illness," like some other of Pirsig's choices in enunciating his philosophy, is a bad choice, or rather perhaps, not bad so much as there are better choices available. But whatever: I'm happy we are all anti-Platonists. In the second case, I think radical empiricism and mysticism are far too specific for "solutions" to a spiritual crisis. I'm not even sure the language of "crisis" and "problem" are good ones to use in this respect. The thought laying behind Rorty's philosophy, and something I've been trying to enunciate better than he sometimes did, is that--adverting to the public/private distinction Rorty took up from Mill and Jefferson--public problems, political problems about the functioning of governments, are problems for groups, and need the group to deliberate on, but private problems, e.g. spiritual problems, are problems for individuals that can _only_ be answered by each individual as they see fit. Now, this doesn't mean that "groups," as I'm using such unsophisticated language, aren't involved in private problems, nor individuals in public problems. Of course they are. But individuals get frustrated with politics because they feel like they are just one drop in the bucket (which they are), and us non-cynical types have to keep reminding them that the entire system will break unless they stay involved. I think we both understand that phenomena. I also think there is a converse to that phenomena, which an example of is me getting a little frowny when I'm told that I'll be spiritually destitute lest I take on the philosophical positions of radical empiricism and/or begin to find enlightenment in mysticism. And then I get defensive for others, which leads to me trying to develop a general (philosophical) statement of, say, how and why we should put radical empiricism, mysticism, and philosophy in their place, and not let them boss us around. Which is obviously ironic. I don't take the irony of developing a philosophy about philosophy's lesser status (then it has generally considered itself) all that seriously, but some take it to be a tension of greater magnitude. One thing this philosophy, which Rorty for better or worse called "pragmatism" because he thought it lay at the heart of Dewey, is designed to do is bring about a cultural situation in which everybody sees this irony, but doesn't take it so seriously, a situation in which everybody finds spiritual solace and enlightenment where they can. I think we've learned from history that religion is (or used to be, or rather, will hopefully soon be "used to be") the type of thing that says, "This is _the_ answer to _everybody's_ spiritual problem." This is why so many things, over the course of the 20th century, have been "accused" of being a religion, like Marxism and various "ideologies." If we identify _Platonism_ as that thing that says, "There is one answer for everyone," then we can say religion will survive because it can be de-Platonized. And if we are successful in de-Platonizing our culture, I think the culture we will have is one that says that unhappiness is the sign of an inner problem (which might be caused, of course, by stuff happening on the outside, like your job) and that if you are happy, then Godspeed, but if you are unhappy, 1) you have the freedom to search for a remedy (which includes the _ability_, like time and energy, to do so) and 2) others do not say, "You are unhappy because of _this_ and _this_ is its solution," but rather, "You're unhappy? I'm sorry. You know, I was unhappy for similar reasons to what you just described. You should try this--you might like it and it might help." Some people find happiness in philosophy. Some people in mysticism. Some people are able to bring them together. But I don't think there's a large cultural problem that will be solved by a philosophical position or mysticism. When it comes to stuff aside from economics and public policy, there are problems in our hearts and _that_ is why the epigraph of ZMM is "And what is good, Phædrus,/And what is not good.../Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?" We have little groups that collude together, that have decided to together explore certain avenues of spiritual development, but I'm not going to tell my dad to give up the Cubs and start reading Plato. I've found it very useful to my life and my spiritual happiness to read books, no less books typically shelved in a section now called "Philosophy." But I'm not sure how helpful that will be to other people. Now, we can push this bird's eye view of culture aside and look from the more particular view within the group of colluders we've both chosen (or been called to, depending on point of view) to be apart of. From this point of view, I do have a different attitude to radical empiricism and mysticism. My view of radical empiricism is that it is probably an old way of speaking _in philosophy_ that won't resurge, but that that's okay because the gains from it have already been more or less assimilated within new ways of speaking. Either way, if it does come back or not, it doesn't particularly matter to me, just so long as we stay away from Platonism. My attitude to mysticism is similar, insofar as I think it is a tradition of spiritual enlightenment that is fine, as long as it stays away from Platonism (or rather, because mysticism isn't itself a philosophical position, as long as the tradition stays away from Platonic kinds of ways of enunciating itself, which is the same stricture on religions, Western and Eastern). Am I being patronizing by saying, "Mysticism is fine"? Well, from some points of view, perhaps, but I have the same view of my own searches, for the traditions that I like, and I wish others would have my view, too. Which is why I argue about it, trying to convince others to relax about certain things. I don't think mysticism will save me, I don't think it will help my spiritual life. I'm glad it helps some, but I don't think it is for me, and I take it as a sign that we still live in a Platonic culture when people get upset by that. So I accuse them of being crypto-Platonists. The essay of Rorty's about religion that you read must have been "Anticlericalism and Atheism," but I don't think that gives one a good guide to the perspective on religion you are looking for an answer to from Rorty, the perspective I've been talking about. I think a far better one is his commentary on James' The Will to Believe, "Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance," which is in the Cambridge Companion to William James and collected in Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope. That's my favorite in talking about this kind of question, about the interrelationship of spiritual questions, philosophy, and politics. Another two are "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism" and "Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God," both in his last collection, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (the former is also in The Revival of Pragmatism (ed. Morris Dickstein) which has a lot of _great_ essays about pragmatism and the latter also appears in Radical Interpretation in Religion (ed. Nancy Frakenberry)). Matt _________________________________________________________________ Change the world with e-mail. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ChangeWorld Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
