Hi DMB,
When I raised the question about ironism, I was wondering how well
Pirsig's philosophy stands up to Rorty's critiques of systems, and I
look forward to rereading Lila in light of what I've read from Rorty to
imagine what Rorty might have thought of Pirsig. I think it will be
interesting. I'm sure you are also interested in looking at how Pirsig
fits in with the tradition of pragmatism and where he doesn't fit. You
then raised the issue of relativism, and I've enjoyed discussing it
with you. I've gotten a little too involved in debating, so I want to
try to do a better job exploring the issue without so much ego
involvement. I'll respond to your last post when I have time, but first
just some thoughts...
I'm not sure why it came to mind, but I remember reading a long time
ago that Cindy Sherman (the photographer that is most famous for her
phony film stills) said that she believes that the role of the artist
in society is to expose its myths. Later I read Joseph Campbell who
wrote that the role of the artist is to create myths. I realize that
these two people have a very different idea of myth. Sherman meant that
the artist reveals the lies that society tells about itself while
Campbell meant that the artist creates the context in which experience
will be interpreted. Though they meant different things, I still think
there is something interesting about the mythologist seeing the artist
as creating myths while this artist sees herself as a debunker of
myths. There may be something here that relates to the philosophology
issue, but I was thinking that the it also relates to the role of the
philosopher. If motorcycle maintenance is art, then so is philosophy.
The point is that Rorty may be best viewed as a debunker of myths. He
wasn't out to create a philosophical system. Instead he tried to cure
us of our addiction to such systems. That was his art, and the
philosophy that is created in his wake will have to address the strong
critiques he made against SOM and systems in general. Perhaps you can
at least give him credit for being a strong voice objecting to SOM. But
you seem to think that the cure may be worse than the disease, so
probably not.
You are concerned that students will read Rorty and turn into
relativists, but I don't think students become relativists from reading
too much Rorty. Students who only read one philosopher tend to be
swayed by the arguments. If all a student read was Rorty, they would
share his liberal ethics. What happens instead is that they don't start
with Rorty. They start with the Socratics and are swayed by
Aristotelean ethics. Then they read the next philosopher on the
syllabus and buy into that system instead. They are impressed by
Kantian ethics and later trade up to Mill's utilitarianism. They
eventually recognize how they have found all these philosophers
convincing taken one at a time. They know something about the ethics
taught by religions as well. The students see that all these
philosophers or religions have promised a deep foundation for their
ethical systems and claimed to have such a universal grounding which
was later shown to be empty and that all these philosophers and
religions discovered different and contradictory things about the good
life. They decide that the best we can hope for are systems that are
self-consistent and are getting the idea that being self-consistent
isn't even that hard to do. Now what went wrong here? How were these
students turned into nihilists or skeptics or relativists? The problem
isn't that they were never taught the one system that really does have
the sort of universal grounding that was promised. The problem was they
they learned to expect that any legitimate moral claim needs to have
the sort of foundation that was promised, some transcultural or natural
law, the sort of foundation for justifying our moral beliefs that we
are just never going to get.
Whereas a student who was raised on Rorty and never promised such would
never have to ask "is slavery wrong?...Yeah, but is it REALLY wrong?"
Universal Human Rights? Hell yes, that sounds like a great idea. People
don't look for such a foundation who weren't taught to expect one and
instead are taught other ways of talking about their moral concerns.
Rorty can't be faulted for not providing the sort of foundation that
philosophy never should have promised to begin with. What he tried to
do in order to repair the damage was offer better questions to ask than
philosophers were asking before.
His version of the pragmatic method seemed to me to amount to this sort
of suggestion: "Instead of asking X, try asking Y instead. Isn't that
really a better question? And note that someone who is concerned with Y
never bothers to ask X."
One of the things he tried to get us not interested in asking was "is
it absolute or relative?" For that (and, admittedly, for being too
careless in the unfortunate pragmatist tradition of making pithy
slogans that were right in what they rejected but too easily construed
as wrong or misleading in what they asserted) he was often labeled a
relativist. But I think it is wrong to do so unless all you mean by the
term is that he had given up on the sort of grounding for ethical and
factual claims than was promised by philosophers of the past. Instead
of trying to "lend our current practices the prestige of the eternal,"
he gave us ideas about how to create a future that will be
"unimaginably better than the present."
Best,
Steve
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