For another take on Nietzsche's theory of truth, here's a lecture from Prof. Robert Solomon, one of the stars of The Great Courses series. Solomon describes Nietzsche's concept of truth as perspectivist rather than relativist. (Though, unlike Rick Roderick, Solomon is willing to concede that other Nietzsche interpreters have -- rightly or wrongly -- gone farther.) Solomon's argument sources the origin of Nietzsche's critique to his rejection of the "thing-in-itself," which so consumed Kant and Schopenhauer. Once one is cured of the concept of a "thing-in-itself," then we are all left to determine truth based on upon the world of appearances. But of course, once we are left to determine truth based upon experience -- there is no "God's eye view" by which ultimate truth can be established. In fact, even God could not have a "God's eye view" of the world, in the sense of pure omniscience: there is always context; there is always aspect. Solomon wants to make clear that this is not the same thing as saying that all truths are "relative," if one means by "relative" there are no criteria by which we can judge the relative merits of fact or value statements. But it does mean that truth is complex, not simple, and requires an ability to interpret answers, rather than merely "discovering" them. For more on this subject, perhaps review this thesis submitted by one of Jessica Berry's students.
-Daniel Horne
Am I the only one who can follow all the arguments concerning Nietzsche right up until the point where they so often come back around to this claim that he is not talking about “truth with a capital T”, but rather some other gibberish? Once again, I will ask how we can have a theory about this world of surface appearances from outside of our being embodied within them. This notion that appearances some how represent the truth in a purely democratic way is entirely pre-philosophical, if it is true then Nieztsche has absolutely nothing to contribute to the situation so far as it always already exists in this way without his recognition.
But if these truly are appearances we are speaking about, then what are they appearances of? How is this glaring point so often missed? Moreover, if what he is offering is merely acting as an identity function for truth where we will recognize some other concept as being able to stand in exactly for what truth once did, are we really doing away with the old theories of truth in a meaningful way, or are we just making reference to the same thing by way of a different symbol? I’m starting to think the common take away from all of this is just that Nietzsche doesn’t mean the Truth is relative, he means that the truth is Relative, and I don’t believe he would be proud about some regression to a time before all of the science and philosophy and history that allows him to have done the work he did.
Yes, I think Nietzsche really is “doing away with the old theories of truth in a meaningful way”. The old theories of Truth were predicated upon some version of the ancient distinction between appearance and reality. (Plato’s allegory of the cave, for example.) Nietzsche says this distinction is bogus and the result is so dramatic that truth is redefined, so dramatic that “truth” is literally a different concept. The attack on the appearance/reality distinction entails an argument which says we can never have access to reality itself, i.e. Kant’s things-in-themselves. The correspondence theory of truth, wherein our subjective ideas are true if they represent or correspond to objective reality, is a more modern version but it’s predicated on the same basic distinction between appearance and reality.
As I understand Nietzsche’s perspectivism, we wouldn’t even want to use the word “appearances” any longer because it implies that empirical and phenomenal reality is somehow less real than an imagined trans-experiential realm of Platonic forms, things-in-themselves, where the Truth is true regardless of the fact that it can never be known by anyone – except thru “appearances”. Thus the old concept of Truth is an incoherent abstraction that produces an impossible trap, that produces a permanent epistemic gap between us and reality. If Truth is what corresponds to something we can never have, then Truth is a completely useless concept that needs to be replaced with something we can have, something that’s actually useful. This is where a pragmatic theory of truth step in to redefine the concept in terms or what is true in actual experience and in actual practices. James and Dewey were far more explicit is putting forth a working theory of truth but, as Solomon points out, they and Nietzsche were all working from a Darwinian model wherein truths were invented because they had some kind of survival value, because they served some kind of purpose. While I don’t think this is a regressive step back into the pre-philosophical, by insisting that truth can only have meaning within the concrete particulars of experience, it certainly does bring truth back down to the earth of things.
You have proposed that there either is no truth, or that truth is a pragmatic decision, and neither of these claims are necessarily contradictory with the fact of appearances or correspondence (not to suggest that this is the only important theory of truth, I would not attest to it as truths are contingent facts in and of themselves and so do not involve correspondence between separate things). The same “ancient” distinction you allude to still remains prevalent today as most intellectuals are ready to recognize an absurd difference between the world in-itself and the world as it stands for-us. Nietzsche unfortunately remained complicit to this same distinction in so far as he seems to suggest that the nihilist results of empiricism should lead us to make a radical reaffirmation of embodied life.
“Thus the old concept of Truth is an incoherent abstraction that produces an impossible trap, that produces a permanent epistemic gap between us and reality.”
There are infinite numbers of potential absurd notions that do no nothing at all, what it is about the absurdity of truth that has produced such a convincing facade? I disagree with your understanding of Nieztsche’s theory of knowledge, he has not done away with truth or replaced it (I’m still curious how if he had even achieved this it would make for a notable accomplishment as far as a replacement would seem to indicate an identity function, merely a new name which represents the same old thing), what he has done was produce the first elaborate modern account of the truth being nothingness.
This again very much speaks to why Nietzsche is at a theoretical level a sort of proto-anthropologist (a neo-Kantian realisation that categories of understanding are bound up in certain ways of life and not universal). Truths are products of interested human projects, and the grounds on which we make truth claims become apparent only through relativization that is made possible by the comparison of perspectives. “By virtue of comparison ethnographic description becomes objective. Not in the naive positivist sense of an unmediated perception— just the opposite: it becomes a universal understanding to the extent it brings to bear on the perception of any society the conceptions of all the others.” In essence anthropology is a certain kind of contextualization of perspectives. (“Personal status, the search for freedom, and need for power” are examples generated by a very limited knowledge of the full range of possible perspectives, which itself proves how limited our philosophical imagination is, or how bound to certain perspectives.)
this seems to limit Nietzsche to an aspect of his genealogical work and miss the forward looking radical thrust (and shock-value) of his sense of how one might become someone who by moving beyond good and evil over-comes his herdish place among the common-man, to make his own myths.
As your comment demonstrates he may well be wrong about this, by and large we may be led by our cognitive-biases to always see new things in terms of them being just more of the same old things, but there are some gestalt-shifts that made, some new aspects that dawn, so more work to be done and maybe more reason to move Kuhn up on the PEL reading list…
I think I mentioned Nietzsche’s “heroic individualism” in another post. The inability to reconcile individual and society is one of the great themes of Western social thought. “Shackles of tradition” is still a common way to view culture.
If I implied that cognition is recognition, I’m also talking about gestalt-shifts. This is exactly what I think a comparative project is good for. Even without it we keep transforming our categories in everyday use all the time. You could argue that the difference between Geertz and Rorty was that Rorty seems to be happy with the world he is committed to, while Geertz wants to keep our system open for radical transformation in a dialogue of cultures. Anthropology then is a self-aware tool for cultural critique. At the very least it opens our eyes to a wider horizon of possible meanings.
“Rorty seems to be happy with the world he is committed to”
wow, have you read Rorty’s books? if you’re going to make these kinds of statements you really need to supply some textual basis.
Rorty is hardly above critique ( http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/dcrawford/rabinow.pdf ) but here is Rorty speaking for himself:
“This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us”
rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar
people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are
like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the
journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the
novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright
gives us the details about kinds of suffering being endured by people to
whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de
Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of
cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.
That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have,
gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal
vehicles of moral change and progress.
In my liberal utopia, this replacement would receive a kind of recognition
which it still lacks. That recognition would be part of a general turn
against theory and toward narrative. Such a turn would be emblematic of
our having given up the attempt to hold all the sides of our life in a single
vision, to describe them with a single vocabulary. It would amount to a
recognition of what, in Chapter I, 1 call the “contingency of language” –
the fact that there is no way to step outside the various vocabularies we
have employed and find a m-eta v-o cabulary which somehow takes account
of aN possihle vocabularies’~ all possible ways of judging and feeling. A
historicist and nominalist culture of the sort I envisage would settle
instead for narratives which connect the present with the past, on the one
hand, and with utopian futures, on the other. More important, it would
regard the realization of utopias, and the envisaging of still further utopias,
as an endless process – an endless, proliferating realization of Freedom,
rather than a convergence toward an already existing Truth.”
also provides an interesting tie in with the upcoming podcast on novel-ty
“This is exactly what I think a comparative project is good for.”
How could you know? You are deadlocked within your own cultural system, maybe the culture that proposes to be entirely racist and xenophobic or whatever else you might have a problem with is actually the “open and inclusive” culture, while you yourself are the antagonistic one no matter what noises you might choose to formulate with your mouth. And above all that you will never know the truth about which culture should be more attentive to the other as there apparently is no truth to settle the matter except that you can know with absolute certainty thanks to your omniscient anthropologist’s lens that you have adopted the next best thing there is to truth.
Also as a Marxist it should be very apparent to you that despite whatever drastic differences may have held between cultures historically, they have all decided to make themselves conform to the values of modern neoliberal democratic capitalism, they have chosen to allow themselves to be judged by this universal metric. If there is some culture out there where this is radically not the case they hide themselves very well and I also don’t imagine they have access to modern medicine or any of the other unarguable comforts which allow us to sit here speaking about generalized problems all the while taking them for granted as some kind of nonsensical personal cultural decision that the few remaining remote tribes have opted out of.
I would deny being “deadlocked” in my own culture because I do not ascribe to such a totalizing “iron cage” concepts of a culture that it would rule out engagement with other points of view. That said I am never going to get some kind of disinterested unmediated access to these alternatives (so there is no absolute certainty or omniscient anthropological lens). I can only to the best of my ability engage in a kind of cultural dialogue and translation that broadens my horizon of possible modes of life and informs my ethical thinking.
“As a Marxist.” Are you saying I’m a Marxist (that would certainly solve many tough epistemological issues for me)? I certainly recognize the existence of a capitalist world system, and the uneasy way in which it fits with a diversity of cultural responses to it. I wouldn’t say people all over have voluntarily chosen to be judged by these standards, many cultures have been bulldozed by colonialism, capitalism, and cultural imperialism. To think that it is an unambiguous boon that all people welcome with open arms, or indeed that it takes the same form everywhere, would be naive. There are places where modern procedural justice system sits alongside modern versions of pre-modern social order in problematic combinations. It is not always clear which ensure “freedom” of the people and which hinders it.
“There are places where modern procedural justice system sits alongside modern versions of pre-modern social order in problematic combinations.”
Bad sentence. What I meant is that “modern procedural justice system sits alongside contemporary versions of pre-modern social order.”
For example, modern liberal democracy and neoliberalism has not wiped social hierarchies off the world map (I am not talking about a class stratification). Indeed the idea that globalization would lead to cultural homogenization has not come to pass, at least as radically as some once feared (and some perhaps hoped).
You misunderstand I don’t propose this historical fact of a standing world system as being the solution to the problem of having met all social or cultural needs, I agree with all of your critiques of modern homogenizing culture, I just don’t see what right personal perspective you have attempted to set aside for yourself that you could be making them from. The complete homogenization of world cultures has not yet come to pass, but it certainly seems to be an as yet accelerating phenomenon. Cultures that stand in its way as you say get “bulldozed”. Are these not global problems that one person suffering from the kind of absolute subjectivity that you allude to could not have access to? How can we suggest that the way capitalism seems to be able to pervade the value systems of all other cultures might seem to be “uneasy” if it is just so happens to be one living culture among many? What allows you to make engagements with other points of view other than some shared if imbalanced access to the real?
The disinterested unmediated access belongs to scientific communities, not individuals. Is it not very convenient that the epistemological problems you propose end exactly before any ontology is possible, but still allow for an ethics to slip through? What is it that allows you to know any contingent engagement and translation of a cultural dialogue will broaden your possible modes of life and ethical thinking, rather than reduce them?
“I wouldn’t say people all over have voluntarily chosen to be judged by these standards, many cultures have been bulldozed by colonialism, capitalism, and cultural imperialism.”
Yes, but just how much political agency are we going to take away from them with this idea? Anybody could stop remaining complicit any time it would stop appearing to be more convenient no matter how also horrific.
I think you are attributing to me a kind of solipsism I do not hold:
“Are these not global problems that one person suffering from the kind of absolute subjectivity that you allude to could not have access to?”
What absolute subjectivity? Where did I say that I do not have access to such problems? On the contrary, we must have awareness of how local systems respond to global pressures. The fact that we don’t have an immaculate god’s eye view of the world, does not mean we cannot see problems. If capitalism impacts different cultures differently, the problems will likewise be different. The fact that people get screwed in different ways doesn’t mean they don’t get screwed or that we can’t recognize it. Often our own belief in our value systems is so great that we ignore local responses to their ramifications, but I truly think an understanding of a “natives point of view” helps here. Then we can have an understanding of the contradictions between values and whatever the “uneasy” fit is.
“What is it that allows you to know any contingent engagement and translation of a cultural dialogue will broaden your possible modes of life and ethical thinking, rather than reduce them?”
My interested culturally ordered practical engagement with the world.
The question of cultural agency and world system is interesting and Marshall Sahlins has written about it extensively. Some people have critiqued him by claiming that he has diminished the fact that people are victims of an oppressive world system by emphasizing the varied cultural responses to such a system.
“The disinterested unmediated access belongs to scientific communities, not individuals.”
Again, I’m totally against individual relativism, the notion that there are as many incommensurable truths as there are individuals.
And I am not denying the great cumulative success of natural sciences engaging the world in a particular ever evolving way.
But I do reject simple representational theories of knowledge, as do many anthropologists, as does Nietzsche and as, to the best of my knowledge, does Rorty.
The problem arises from the idea that if we argue that scientific knowledge is culturally/socially constructed we imply that it is an illusion, that it is not objective in relation to some mysterious das Ding an Sich. This is why I think Nietzsche is generally right in that we need to reconfigure our notion or truth. This does not mean abandoning truth for some kind of airy fairy relativism, though it should make us concerned for the conditions which produce knowledge (as Foucault saw).
Let’s take spirits for example. I may be a scientist and say that there are no such thing as far as science is concerned (for now). This might not persuade someone who believes in spirits. Is this because they irrationally refuse to acknowledge a scientific truth? Could be. Or it could be because the truth conditions that science sets for spirits don’t come into consideration when people go about their lives which involve cultural practices which define spirits for them.
Let’s take beauty as another example. Perhaps I am a great aesthete. I like arts. Then I read books about anthropology of art that persuasively argue that aesthetic standards are culturally relative and that there is no universal ground or essence to beauty. That beauty is a figment of my cultural imagination. Do I then abandon beauty as an illusion or a lie? Do I stick to my ethnocentric perspective? In some cases it might be prudent to acknowledge the limits of this perspective, as Sally Price has argued in her great critique of Western connoisseurship of so called “primitive arts.” This is also true when we extend political ideologies beyond their cultural contexts, or when we condemn irrational people that do not define the meaning of some part of their engagement with the world in scientific terms.
“Anybody could stop remaining complicit any time it would stop appearing to be more convenient no matter how also horrific.”
This is highly problematic statement.
I may very well be wrong here since I’m not very familiar with Rorty at all, besides bits and pieces. What I was referring to is a specific dialogue between Geertz and Rorty on ethnocentrism, which had been a topic before. I’m basing my sweeping characterization (difference between Rorty and Geertz) rather unfairly on that very minor juxtaposition of opinions that was referenced before, so please do not take it to be anything else.
Here’s Michael Krausz on the matter:
“Rorty’s attitude Toward the ineliminability of ethnocentrism is to embrace it unapologetically and to identify himself as a white male western bourgeois liberal intellectual. Liberalism of the procedural justice sort, on Rorty’s view, is the best political system so far deviced. Why apologize?”
“On Geertz view, no culture with properties determinately fixed independently of interpretative practices is accessible. It is for this reason, in addition to the ineliminability of ethnocentrism, that we cannot presume to get cultural interpretations singularly right. The best we can do, with the help of numerous lights and lenses, is to “tack in”[…]on the culture in an approximate way. At the same time, and here his attitude opposes Rorty’s, Geertz takes cultural interpretation to be a vehicle for his own (and our) self-transformation or self-development. To expand one’s horizon is to expand oneself[…]Geertz’s self-characterization as white, male, bourgeois, liberal, intellectual, and so on, resembles Rorty’s self-characterization. But such a self-characterization for Geertz is initial, while for Rorty it is final in the sense that Rorty seems to see no need for self-development through confrontation with alternative cultures. Put otherwise, Geert’s ethnocentrism encourages a development in inquirers, while Rorty’s does not.”
http://books.google.fi/books?id=0DLVVlE6bksC&pg=PA113&lpg=PA113&dq=rorty+geertz&source=bl&ots=jfDPAts_Tm&sig=jSNpyh47mGQok-Qw1PPa4waQj2A&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
Or you can look up my post:
http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/07/24/truth-and-lie-in-gullivers-travels/comment-page-1/#comment-111872
Again, I’m no expert on Rorty, so I may be completely off base. It is only an impression I got from reading the two articles, and which Krausz seems to echo.
To quote Rorty directly:
Page 530:
“I am inclined to set aside the question Geertz poses about the resolution of social issues created by cultural diversity by saying that we should simply keep doing what our liberal society is already in the habit of doing: lending an ear to the specialists of particularity, permitting them to fulfil their functions as agents of love, and hoping that they will continue to expand our moral imagination.”
Page 532:
“[Anti-anti-ethnocentrists] urges liberals to take with full seriousness the fact that the ideals of procedural justice and human equality are parochial, recent, eccentric, cultural developments, and then to recognize that this does not mean they are any the less worth fighting for.”
“I do not see why Geertz think that we bourgeois liberals need to change our thinking about cultural diversity in order to deal with this situation [globalized interconnected world]. For this is just the sort of situation that the Western liberal ideal of procedural justice was DESIGNED to deal with. John Rawls remarked that ‘the historical circumstances of the emergence of the Western liberal notion of Justice’ include ‘the development of the principle of religious toleration and the institutions of large market economies.’ Both sources, he says, ‘spring from and encourage the diversity of doctrines and the plurality of conflicting and indeed incommensurable conceptions of the good affirmed by the members of existing democratic societies.’”
Page 533:
“We can suggest that UNESCO think about cultural diversity on a world scale in the way our ancstors in the seventeeth and eighteenth century thought about religious diversity on an Atlantic scale: as something to be simply IGNORED for purposes of designing political institutions.”
I take it I supplied enough “textual basis” for my argument.
no you just showed how Rorty thinks that our basic democratic institutions (which are always being modified) can provide the kinds of space for:
“lending an ear to the specialists of particularity, permitting them to fulfil their functions as agents of love, and hoping that they will continue to expand our moral imagination” and that theory(philosophical or otherwise) is no replacement for democratic governance, Rorty defines his hope for the future in terms of later generations looking back at our current intolerances/cruelties/prejudices with the kind of understanding disdain that we look at say slavery or early psychiatric efforts, so your earlier overstatement is quite wrong and even slanderous. If you had raised the little bit of reading you have done in terms of a question of how representative (and representative of what) this work was of Rorty that would have been fine but this kind of lack of respect for context undercuts your whole efforts to speak up for the values of contextual understanding.
All right, you are clearly protective of Rorty.
As for context, I fully admitted that I may be wrong, that I know little of Rorty’s overall corpus, but that this was the impression that I had (not God’s truth). If that constitutes slander, the Gods of philosophy must be sensitive indeed. Furthermore I tried to carefully point out what the context for my interpretation and throwaway line comparing Rorty and Geertz was (the two articles that had been a topic of discussion before).
I did not say “Rorty is happy with the world as it is” I said “Rorty seems to be happy with the world he is committed to.” I am not at all implying he is blind to injustices or thinks we have no need to strive towards a better future etc. He appears, however, to have a little more faith than Geertz in modern liberal democracy’s ability to solve problems arising from cultural differences. Maybe he has changed his mind since, maybe I’ve read him wrong, but that was the impression I had contrasting the two views. This also seems to be the view of Krausz. If you think we are wrong, please explain why in such detail that I, who may be of lesser intellect and certainly knows less of Rorty, can be enlightened.
Now that quote that you cited about “specialists of particularity” being “agents of love.” I took it to be an argument that anthropologists, journalists etc. are (or can be) agents of tolerance and inclusion, enabling us to realize how marginalized and oppressed should also be considered equal subjects in front of the guardians of justice. This is what “liberal society is already in the habit of doing” so keep up the good work and we may see a better tomorrow yet! This kind of progressive notion contradicts nothing I’ve said.
I am not a professional philosopher. If I had to be fully familiar with the context of the philosophical texts I comment on I would not be able to do so at all. I’m also not a native English speaker so I may be imprecise in my expressions. But to be scolded so for an offhand remark, especially since you have provided scant evidence for why I’m wrong, seems a little thick (especially coming from someone who seemed to make the sweeping statement that to find pseudo-science one only needs to turn to the index of any introduction to cultural anthropology).
I’ll try another tack since my lack of familiarity with Rorty disqualifies me from commenting.
Do you disagree with Krausz?
v, there are limits to these kinds of blog/commenting mediums/exchanges and from straying too far from the texts at and, and I lack the capacity to do justice to the Rorty vs Geertz debate in such a literally small (on the screen) box, I have suggested that if you are really interested in such lines of work (it’s certainly not a settled/closed issue) that you check out folks like Frankenberry, Nancy K.; Hans H. Penner on their take on Geertz as it may be a bridge between your obviously studied relationship to anthropology and the philosophical issues at hand. I don’t know if you have any training in actually doing ethnography but if you approach philosophical texts as you might any new subject for field study than you should be better equipped to engage/comment than most academically trained philosophy students.
I like the tenor that Rabinow sets here but that’s just me:
http://openwetware.org/images/7/7a/SB1.0_Rabinow.pdf
So reading Language Truth and Religious Belief will show me were I went wrong in my interpretation of these two articles? I was neither trying to valorize Geertz nor critique Rorty. I was implying relatively little about the epistemology of their grand projects. One may use Deleuze, post-social theory, or Davidson to say that Geertz’s hermeneutic project was misguided. Fine. This for me was not the issue.
What was at issue for me was that Geertz saw a problem not solvable by current tools at hand, while Rorty did not. This is why, I think, Krausz claims that “Geert’s ethnocentrism encourages a development in inquirers, while Rorty’s does not.” If you want to argue that the basic democratic institutions are able to evolve and meet challenges without essentially changing their modus operandi, as Rorty does, that’s neither here nor there.
I understand that this gets wrapped up in larger ontological questions about culture, but I think I was completely justified in making my unscandalous statement about the “minor difference” between the two arguments by Geertz and Rorty.
To say that this is too complex an issue to engage here seems little more than evasion.
“What was at issue for me was that Geertz saw a problem not solvable by current tools at hand, while Rorty did not”
the reason that they differ on this issue is b/c of their deeper differences, and if you read the not exhaustive laundry list of things that Rorty recommends above you will note ethnography as one of the many evolving tools that we might employ but not from nothing but within a time-tested framework, one that Rorty had pointed out many problems with but which on an empirical level he saw, with Churchill as the least worst alternative, if you had limited your comment to a disagreement about the modes of governance that would have been fine but you didn’t you made it about Rorty’s being satisfied with a “world” that he was committed to rather than a set of tools/process and or values, a statement which is diametrically opposed to the man’s life work.
Thank you for finally addressing what I said. Mea culpa, it seems that my vague wording was at the heart of our misunderstanding. What I meant was that those tools/processes and values constitute a cultural world (whether Rorty would have put it this way or not), and that Rorty is happy with his ethnocentric perspective (world) since it is best at accommodating, or tolerating, a plurality of perspectives. Modes of governance cannot, however, be easily separated from cultural contexts, whatever Rorty thinks.
If on the other hand you wanted to object to my interpretation of Rorty through a relativist notion of multiple worlds, that’s another matter, but does not by itself indicate I was wrong.
There is a small paradox in the argument if we pretend that Rorty and Geertz are talking of the same issues, and not past each other. Rorty says that what makes his modern solution to cultural diversity work is because it gives voice to ethnographers who problematize our received views and enlarge our moral imagination, yet he dismisses Geertz’s claim that there is a problem.
dmf:
In the spirit of reconciliation, let me say that this particular disagreement stems from my obstinacy and inability to communicate what I mean. Much more productive would have been to try to figure out what the “diametrically opposite” readings of Rorty actually entail and on what grounds the respective arguments are made.
I obviously acknowledge that Rorty has been a sharp critic of Western political ideologies and a forward looking progressive, even utopian, thinker. What I alluded to by stating that “Rorty seems happy with the world he is committed to” was the difference between Geertz’s anti-ethnocentrism and Rorty’s anti-anti-ethnocentrism. As Krausz says, Rorty seems to embrace his particular form of ethnocentrism (liberal postmodern) and seems to have no need to move beyond it. One may say that this intrinsically entails a certain kind of openness to change through encountering the Other (and by recognizing its dignity and being inclusive). The question remains, how does Geertz’s openness and the openness of Rorty’s pragmatism differ, what are the differences they envision for intercultural dialogue, and what kinds of “deeper differences” are in the background?
Are there any particular texts that would shed light on this issue (by Rorty, Frankenberry, etc.)?
“Besides by now already well-worn accusations leveled against Rorty that his thinking was ethnocentric and tied to his understanding of a specific model of person (i.e. a Westerner) called liberal ironist, his negative picture of intercultural philosophy is even more direct proof of his serious skepticism about this field of philosophical research.”
http://www.scielo.unal.edu.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0120-00622008000300004&lng=pt&nrm=
dmf:
In the spirit of reconciliation, let me say that this particular disagreement stems from my obstinacy and inability to communicate what I mean. Much more productive would have been to try to figure out what the “diametrically opposite” readings of Rorty actually entail and on what grounds the respective arguments are made.
I obviously acknowledge that Rorty has been a sharp critic of Western political ideologies and a forward looking progressive, even utopian, thinker. What I alluded to by stating that “Rorty seems happy with the world he is committed to” was the difference between Geertz’s anti-ethnocentrism and Rorty’s anti-anti-ethnocentrism. As Krausz says, Rorty seems to embrace his particular form of ethnocentrism (liberal postmodern) and seems to have no need to move beyond it. One may say that this intrinsically entails a certain kind of openness to change through encountering the Other (and by recognizing its dignity and being inclusive). The question remains, how does Geertz’s openness and the openness of Rorty’s pragmatism differ, what are the differences they envision for intercultural dialogue, and what kinds of “deeper differences” are in the background?
Are there any particular texts that would shed light on this issue (by Rorty, Frankenberry, etc.)?
“Besides by now already well-worn accusations leveled against Rorty that his thinking was ethnocentric and tied to his understanding of a specific model of person (i.e. a Westerner) called liberal ironist, his negative picture of intercultural philosophy is even more direct proof of his serious skepticism about this field of philosophical research.”
http://www.scielo.unal.edu.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0120-00622008000300004&lng=pt&nrm=
v, I appreciate your willingness to engage this in a more ‘philosophical’ manner (which in some basic sense may just be a way of being committed to the idea that what we say, make explicit,and how we say it matters), I certainly didn’t mean to offend you and wasn’t questioning, indeed was trying to speak to, your commitments to particularity/respect.
It’s been a while since the Geertz vs Rorty rap-battle went down so when I get a chance I’ll look again at the documentation and see if I can come up with a handy reference point. If you get a chance see what you can find/make of Donald Davidson’s (and Quine’s) “‘principle of charity”.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/
which reminds me that John McDowell should be on the PEL reading list.
on a lighter note: http://ttbook.org/book/cross-talk
Wow. That was a sensational talk through multiple ideas. Solomon is a fantastic speaker. Direct, clear and simple. This is killer stuff. Is he always like this or is he just on fire in that talk?
Where can we hear more from this series? The link wants me to buy a course?
This is the guy from the movie “Waking Life”, right?
How come there isn’t shows on TV like “Philosophy talk”. Or instead of the “History Channel” the “Philosophy Channel”. The only things I find are on the religious channels. EWTN?
Hi Dave,
I’m glad you liked it! Yes, this clip is representative of Solomon’s style. I’m a fan.
I uploaded this clip in the spirit of fair use, in part because I want to encourage people to buy the whole Solomon lecture series:
Will to Power: The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=415
Passions: Philosophy and the Intelligence of Emotions
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=4123
No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=437
If you’d like to sample some more from Solomon before you decide on purchasing, there are lots of other clips on YouTube to browse.
Any comments on this (rather long) video please? it proposes that the nazis drew their ideology partly from nietzche.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdzmLdKNAik
it posits that both the nazi ideology and nietzche’s were:
strongly collectivistic and anti-individualistic
viewed zero-sum conflict as inescapable and fundamental to the human condition
Irrationalist in their psychogical theories.
downplaying reason and glorifying instinct and feelings
pro-war. War as a necessary and majestic enterprise
anti-democratic
anti-capitalist
anti-liberal
I left out the author of the video above.
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks is professor of philosophy at Rockford College, Illinois
“strongly collectivistic and anti-individualistic”
Nietzsche?
yeah that’s far thru the fun-house looking glass, but I think we should also be careful about framing Nietzsche as a logician, seems to miss the move back to the Greeks (like Foucault and McIntyre after him) in search of philo-sophia as a way/discipline (ars) of life, life as a work of art.