Ep. 349: Rorty’s Pluralistic Pragmatism (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, episode 349, part 2. We've been discussing Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as anti authoritarianism. Specifically, specifically the first two essays, Pragmatism and Religion and Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism. We are going to stop talking about the controversial things that he says about knowledge and get to the things that we probably mostly agree about where he is analyzing what the various pragmatists, mostly Dewey and James had to say about religion and how, which ones he likes the best.

0:45 Wes: Yeah, so we're looking at section two on classical pragmatism. So he goes briefly into some of the commonalities between the pragmatists, including this naturalistic Darwinian view of things and the desire to save moral and religious ideals from the trends of the time, empiricism and positivism. But they have different philosophical concerns. So Peirce, for instance, Rorty sees as a Kantian interested in improving on Kant and more focused on math and science than the others. James is more, I think, the most interested in religion and is not a fan of Kant or Hegel. Dewey influenced by Hegel, quite anti Kantian. And then that's sort of the initial summary he gives of the three. And then he'll go into the three in detail and ultimately he's going to tell us why he thinks Dewey, when it comes to religion is the most interesting of the three.

1:48 Dylan: Dewey does the job.

1:50 Wes: Dewey does it.

1:51 Mark: He also briefly refers to Nietzsche being described as a German pragmatist. But that interestingly, you know, when you get rid of for Nietzsche monotheism or you get rid of this focusing on transcendental truth, then you turn away from right. It becomes some sort of emphasis on what was good about religion according to some of this, is that it points you at something lofty, it points you at something right. For even for James, a fundamental religious belief is going to be something like the eternal things are the best things so that the otherworldly things that shooting for the heights. This is why Rorty describes his own position and that he sees in some of these other folks as a romantic pragmatism because it is an optimistic pragmatism that goes with this enlightenment idea of democracy as being the full flowering.

2:48 Seth: Right.

2:48 Mark: And he says, I hadn't really realized that this is in Mill, of course, but not so much in Bentham. So Nietzsche didn't see the differences between those and he just thought that all the British moralists, and hence you know, their followers in James and if he had been around to judge those folks, he would have seen them as all as sort of narrow minded, as ignoring Greatness and you know, one of the things Rorty wants to push on as far as this getting rid of a transcendental thing that we all bow down before is, you know, greatness is sort of a individual thing.

Like it really, if you're pursuing, I mean it makes people make great works of art because they think they can make great works of art. And that's all great. But if you think that, you know, what society should be about is about only those great individuals. For instance, as Nietzsche's political philosophy came down, then you're really missing the point of what should happen when God dies is the fraternity takes over. Not, you know, the fraternity of a couple brilliant minds and then a bunch of sheep.

3:48 Dylan: In the second essay he has an extended critique of Nietzsche, basically saying he simply didn't read these things correctly. Both showing how Nietzsche was more in line with the pragmatists, but also that, you know, his anti democratic tendencies were a result of his own sort of unfortunate misunderstanding.

4:09 Wes: I think in this particular section that we're looking at. So Peirce, he doesn't see Peirce as taking religion very seriously. Peirce wants there to be a Christian ethics without the theology, without that baggage. But it's very vague. And James and Dewey and Nietzsche look at that type of thing as too easy. They take religion more seriously. James is a pluralist, doesn't want to see science and religion as competing ways of representing reality, but just, you know, non competing ways of producing happiness. But it's Dewey in particular that is the anti authoritarian.

4:47 Dylan: Yes.

4:47 Wes: Which is what interests Rorty here and that it's Dewey in particular who emphasizes this idea of not measuring ourselves against something quote unquote non human.

4:59 Dylan: He links James up with tolerance and Dewey up with anti authoritarianism.

5:05 Mark: And we didn't, you know, we just read James, but we did not compare so explicitly what he had to say. In the Will to Believe, which is an essay we covered many, many years ago with Varieties of Religious Experience, which you read recently. But he brought something to mind. You know, we in reading Varieties of Religious Experience we sort of where I think going along with Rorty and like, okay, there's a lot of interesting ways of expressing yourself and being awesome and getting in touch with something that you find really valuable. And maybe that makes you a more interesting, a more well behaved.

There's lots of positive ways that that could influence you. But then James has a part toward the end of like well, but are these theory is actually true in themselves. And Rorty just says you're cheating James. That's not your theory of truth, like there should be. No, you know, it only is true insofar as it helps you live a good life. And otherwise there's just no sense in talking about the word true. And so James says, you know, as if he has empirical evidence from looking at all these different figures that yeah, we, we've found psychologically that we are connected to something, some world beyond the individuals and the material things that we can sort of is at least psychologically real.

Right. People connect up with that. And then he had some. Some other specific stuff.

6:33 Wes: Right.

6:33 Mark: That he seemed to think that it boils down. Well, we can all agree that in general theism is right. Even if we might disagree of what kind of theism you want to be. I might be misrepresenting James here, but Rorty is calling all that a mistake.

6:47 Wes: Yeah.

6:47 Mark: Do you guys remember any more of the details of what he's arguing, what James is?

6:51 Wes: Yeah, I just, you know, if we want to look at the. The very end of this section, page 9 to 10, I think this is a good statement of where the authority actually lies. Right. So we're not measuring. We're not putting the authority in the non human. A God or a reality with a capital R. This is at the bottom of page nine. Dewey used the term democracy to mean something like what Habermas means by the term communicative reason. For him, this word sums up the idea that human beings should regulate their actions and beliefs by the need to join with other human beings in cooperative projects rather than the need to stand in correct relation to something non human.

This is why he grabbed hold of James's pragmatic theory of truth. So there is still an authority, right? In a sense, there's still something regulative, but it involves whatever it is, you know, whatever norms are involved in human cooperation, group cooperation.

7:54 Mark: I remember the point. I know this is a little bit still out of sequence, but that this is page 37. The way that Rorty characterizes James take on human nature with regard to religion is that we are in something like original sin. That there is something wrong with us as we naturally stand. And by making proper connection with higher powers, we address this. Right. And Dewey didn't believe that Dewey is. But having just read Varieties of Religious Experience, I don't feel like this is the good.

8:27 Dylan: Right.

8:27 Mark: Do remember Dewey talked about religions of healthy mindedness. So that just optimism. So that would be.

8:33 Seth: This is.

8:33 Mark: James is saying that would cover Dewey. You know, if according to Rorty's analysis, Dewey is one of these people that just does not think that there's anything wrong with us. We, we just need to cooperate more. You know, if there's anything, if we've committed a sin, it's that we've not gotten to the point where we're cooperating, we're engaged in war and things like that. But that's a very forward looking kind of thing. Progress, you know, this romantic ideal of the city on the hill that will arise when we all get together, you know, that's all there.

But I think James, you know, as we were talking about it was referring to the thing that needs to be corrected is not sort of an original sin on this part. It's the fact that there is some suffering, right? We describe this as a problem of evil thing. And that unless somebody takes seriously that there is suffering, you know, in the Dostoevsky brothers, k sense of, you know, no future state could make it worth this kind of suffering. That you are not a serious person unless you're actually engaged with that. So I don't see that necessarily as equivalent to original sin or something that needs to be corrected by relation to a God.

9:38 Wes: Well, this is the way he starts section three. He will talk about. He'll use this word hope, right? So that he's contrasting the two types of people. The first who would. Who need some needs. This union of something that's beyond the human in order to ameliorate the guilty feeling, right, Produced by the superego. This need to ally oneself with an. With an authority figure in order to alleviate guilt. This is something Freud talks about in various places, including civilization and its discontents. So it's really interesting he assimilates the representationalist tradition to this and the need for something non perspectival to.

To this need to solve the problem of human guilt. By the way, this is, you know, something that Nietzsche goes on about at length and Genealogy of Morals. But the alternative, the second type of person looks not to the authority figure but to the future. So hope really becomes the operative word and we de ternalize it in the sense of we don't make it about God and you know, the eternal values set up by God, but we make it about fraternal cooperation. So we look to our brothers, we look to our fellow human beings, not to the father figure above us in order to figure out what to do.

And in particular we're thinking, I think as Mark is pointing us to, we're thinking about suffering and the alleviation of suffering which implicates this concept of Hope, I think so. Do you want me to summarize the Freud.

11:21 Mark: Go for it.

11:22 Wes: This is really interesting. So he gets it. You know, he. I mean, I think this is really psychologically acute. He appeals to Freud's Moses and monotheism, which he calls wacky, but apparently it's worthy of summary anyway. In which society. This is sort of Freud's version of emergence from a state of nature. He conceives of a situation in which there's a tyrannical father figure and a primal band of brothers commits parricide, kills that father figure. What survives in religion is a totem as a representation of a powerful animal who sort of stands in for the father figure.

And the killing of the father is memorialized by ritual sacrifice of that animal at festivals on a regular basis. So. And for Freud's theory is that. So totemism is early religion. And then that animal figure gets humanized at a certain point. So we go from an early. And I think. I'm not sure if Freud says this is Rorty's emendation, but we go from a right early mother God. The earliest gods are maternal mother goddesses. And then you get polytheism with both genders, and then you get patriarchal monotheism. And that is a process of purification on the one hand, but on the other, it.

It's purification in the sense, it becomes less complicated. But it also leads us back to the father. The father is no longer as concealed behind these images, right? You get God the father. So the murdered father is restored to his rightful role. And then the process of purification. And then I'll hand it over to someone else who wants to continue. But the process of purification in Platonism, you get a further depersonalization of. Which is not to say that Christianity came before Plato, but conceptually there's a further depersonalization in the sense of you are.

Instead of looking for obedience to a God, you try to become identical to an ideal or an idea. So you get a godlike, These godlike external standards, but they don't. They're stripped of passions and feeling and the instinctual. Right. So it's no longer this scary father figure animal, or even the God who might punish you. Or the Greek gods with all their vices and passions. It is just something very, very pure and passionate, passionless, but is still an

13:58 Mark: authority which, you know, Rorty is relying on a sort of primal instinct that we would have of bowing before authority humiliates us all. And so we should not want to do that as opposed to a You gotta serve somebody. And it's a matter of if this was a fundamental thing about human nature is wanting to subject ourselves to some objective standard or ruler or something like that. You might think that, well, the way to sublimate that, the way to, to make that not harmful is to do exactly that. Depersonalize it, make it an ethic that we can all be proud of.

Make it. I'm going to serve the Christian brotherhood, not the Pope, not any, you know, somebody that could then send me off to war to kill all the pagans. But some abstract ideal, so that's, you know, we use that in our current political discourse is we're in favor of truth and democracy and justice and things like that. We are not slaves of the cult of whoever happens to be in charge of the country right now. So do we think that this depersonalized is maybe, maybe that's the best we can do as opposed to fully throwing off the shackles as Rorty wants us to do and becoming truly self sufficient?

I mean, I think maybe we've been mentioning a few times here that because he's in favor of Kant in that Kant's ethics is we're all self legislating but still the thing that we self legislate ends up being an objective standard that is not merely interpersonal. It is, it is as objective as if God had handed down the law. So it ends up being something, you know, not really taking the God is dead thing the way that Nietzsche wants to take it, where you get rid of all monotheistic standards. Like maybe we need a monotheistic standard. It's just, let's just get a good one.

16:04 Wes: I think the contrast he's making in the end is between truth and love. So this is on page 50 or slash 14 at the very top. So we get. Let me just quote. Suppose that Freud had turned his eyes on the theory of ideas. Had he done so, I think that he would see worship of the bare idea of father as the origin of the convention. Conviction that it is knowledge rather than love which is the most distinctively human achievement. So this is the contrast, right? So the fraternity that the pragmatists later on he's going to say something great, which is that only pragmatism reach reaps the full advantages of parricide.

We cannot get to this fraternal ideal except as pragmatists. And in that sense we are. And this is where religion is relevant. Love thy neighbor becomes the primary commandment. It becomes something essential to pragmatism. So no God no authority figure to make us feel guilty about that. No cleansing of guilt by worrying about God or truth or anything like that, but only love and cooperative effort out of love.

17:12 Mark: I mean, we probably think as a practical matter that truth and love need to coalesce, that if you're just because I love you, I'm going to lie to you for our whole lives. Like, no, that might be a temporary thing, or you tell your kids myths, or, you know, you are gentle with them until they're old enough to handle the truth. But actually, what real love is is trying to get your kids and everybody else to live in accordance with truth and not to lie to ourselves about things, etc.

17:47 Wes: So you're making a counter argument here?

17:49 Mark: I think so, yes.

17:51 Wes: Okay.

17:51 Mark: I mean, I don't know, because again, he doesn't like truth, big T, but he is okay with truth, little T. And this is something that we've sort of gone back and forth about. Right. I recall Quine's idea that even a physical object is a theoretical entity, but it's a really convenient theoretical entity. And so we're not going to stop talking about physical objects. It's just we might be open to. To the idea that for some other purpose, you know, if you're doing subatomic physics, then actually the glass of water does not exist because it's not there for the purposes of the reactions that you want to.

You know, it's mostly empty space, blah, blah, blah. And so maybe we should. Do you know that that's fundamentally not different than the idea that quarks are constructs and asking, is the quark really a real thing? Is it really in the ontology or not that that's just nonsensical. And we could go then even the idea of truth, you know, if somebody, if two people are arguing about the crowd size at one of Trump's rallies, do we. You know, as a practical matter, we've been saying, you know, you refer to, okay, well, here's a photo. Here are a bunch of eyewitnesses.

Here are a bunch of people that were counting. People, you know, you bring forth. But you want to say the reason that all those things are accurate is because they are aiming at truth, they're aiming at this. But do we have to think of truth as something transcendent that these people can never really fully reach? Or do we just have to think about it as something that, like a physical object on this, or like a quark on this is a theoretical entity that we say, yeah, there was a state of affairs that occurred in terms of a certain number of people that were at the rally or not at the rally.

And I don't know is there just. I know that Rorty is not. Is going to say there actually is nothing to the question as to whether that truth I'm referring to is truth is a small T or truth of large T. But it sure as hell seems like we might as well have say that it's ontological real.

19:56 Wes: You did all that work of trying to get us to not talk about epistemology. Now you're dragging us back down a very perilous path.

20:06 Dylan: Well, I mean, but I don't see what the answer. Why the answer isn't just what in terms of methodologically, as Wes would point out, any different than Rorty has been saying. Right. You do just exactly what you just described, Mark, is you bring evidence to bear on it. Right. And that evidence ends up. It might be that you say, well, what will also be true in the end is that the ability for that evidence to sway has to do with the force of the. That normative part of culture. Right. And, you know, someone can be a whiny crybaby and say, you know, no, my crowds were.

Were bigger or her crowds were smaller. And that will be understood. Understood in general as a whiny crybaby. But it's also true that there will be circumstances in which that whiny crybaby could be in a position where they're just making those judgments and they could just completely hold somebody accountable for saying that. This is why I was thinking about what it's like to be in a member of a mob family or a gangland rule or living in Macedonia with Alexander the Great and his father. Right. In those cases, if they were a wackadoodle and just decided, you know what, the sky is purple and not blue, then that's just.

21:39 Mark: Then it becomes that. What?

21:41 Dylan: No, it's not that. It becomes that. It's just the cash out of that fact. The practical upshot of it is that you're not going to be able to do anything about it.

21:48 Mark: Well, and if you voice it, the sky is blue, then you get executed.

21:52 Dylan: Yeah, but that's always true. That's always been true and will always forever be true. That's the practical upshot of it. That's even true. Even in our consensus. Right. Our consensus situation. Yeah.

22:03 Wes: I mean, I was going to say consensus is the important metric here. And I'm going to read just the very last part of the section 6, page 16, by anti authoritarianism and ethics. I mean the development of an attitude. I just described the attitude that makes our sense of what counts as a moral abomination, not an insight produced by a part of ourselves that is linked a to such something non human and good, but simply a revisable cultural inheritance. By anti authoritarianism and epistemology, I mean the substitution of intersubjectivity in the form of free consensus among the members of those curious enough to inquire for objectivity, where objectivity is understood as a privileged relation to a non human being, such as God or reality or truth.

22:46 Dylan: But isn't that a framing of what the normative standard is to be preferred is you don't just get consensus, but you get characteristics of that consensus. It's free, it's this, it's that. And there is a conceit. You reminded us of Mill's warning about tyranny of the majority. Right? Rorty, you're right, isn't worrying about that problem.

23:08 Wes: Yeah, I mean consensus processes break down or they delimit different groups. In some ways what counts as a group is delimited by where consensus reigns and where it doesn't. So it gets very complicated. But yeah, and by the way, this is what I why I think skepticism is far more warranted than sometimes these philosophers give it credit for. Because I think Plato's primary observation is that we ought to be worried that we are full of shit because everyone is full of shit. The Sophists are full of shit. They're running around being full of shit, saying they have the ethical answers.

And likewise we are always in the position of thinking, look at those crazy people over there with their political point of view. But we have no way of. And we think. And of course we can say, look, here's the photograph, you're a conspiracy theorist. But how do we know that we're not the conspiracy theorists? Because they don't know. They're not in a position to know how crazy they are. So what if we're in that position? So the skeptical worry, I think is fundamentally a political worry. But the larger problem is that where consensus breaks down, you have the potential for violence.

I mean, maybe you have a bear political contest and you vote and then you get one consensus over another, but there's always the potential for it to break down into violence. This is not to say this is an argument against anything he's saying.

24:36 Seth: You know, there is an aspect here in the second chapter where he's talking about romanticism.

24:43 Dylan: You're moving us to the second Essay?

24:46 Seth: Yes. Can we do that or were we.

24:49 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I'm fine to skip over the fourth section and the first essay, unless someone else.

24:54 Mark: I mean, I think we've said in the summary material that James privatizes religion, as Rorty puts it, so right. That you can think any weird thing you want, so long as it doesn't affect your human. Your cooperative projects with other people.

25:09 Seth: Right.

25:10 Mark: Importantly though, maybe we didn't make clear is this includes belief. You might think you can believe whatever you want, but Rorty insists on page 21, believing is inherently public.

25:21 Seth: Right.

25:21 Mark: Your emotions are your own business. Your beliefs are everybody's business. You can't claim a right to believe as a part of right of privacy.

25:30 Seth: Yeah.

25:30 Mark: So Rorty is disagreeing, I think with James here. He's drawing a what James should think. Rorty says we all have a responsibility to each other not to believe anything which cannot be justified to the rest of us. To be rational is to submit one's beliefs, all one's beliefs, to the judgment of one's peers.

25:48 Wes: And he will say we have a duty to argue where there are inferential connections. And this links in. Right. Brandom and inferential role semantics, which I want us to do soon because that's sort of an outgrowth of this point of view. Right. So it's an inferential role semantics being a way of talking about belief that is non representationalist and involves the way beliefs are inferentially related to other beliefs. But the point is here, yeah. Where these connections occur, where these beliefs are linked. It sounds like we have a duty to argue, which is to say we have a duty to work towards some sort of consistency in beliefs which is related to consensus.

Right. It's not just enough that someone says, oh, you say two plus two equals five and I say it's four and let's agree to disagree. That's not what consensus is. Consensus involves some relationship between the beliefs themselves. So this is once again where it gets very thorny when it comes to the epistemology.

26:54 Seth: Part of Rorty's hang up with James is that he feels James compartmentalizes science and religion as having two different spheres of inquiry, if you will. So science is after truth, religion is, let's call it after happiness. Which is another way of saying he, Rorty, doesn't like the idea of a. It's not just the external appeal. It's the idea that going back to the notion that representation is judgment, that you can separate pursuit of happiness or Fulfillment or however we want to characterize human flourishing with truth, a.k.a. in other words, there's knowledge and love are part and parcel, they're intertwined. So that's part of what he thinks James got wrong. And he likes Dewey because he thinks that Dewey neatly solves or neatly brings those two together as part of his systematic approach.

27:56 Wes: All right, should we look at say two.

27:59 Dylan: Yes.

28:00 Mark: Seth, what did you want to get us going with that?

28:02 Seth: The introduction of the notion of irrationality. One of the things that so my Wes, when I said that, you know, Rorty was my hero, I was talking about the way he talks about things, but not necessarily his conclusions because I think he's still caught up in this and he recognizes the critique of the metaphysics of presence and foundationalism and all that, but he's still caught up in rationality. And I think rationality is part of the problem. And so you see here where he's talking about Romanticism and a romantic solution, if you will, to these problems, the problem of transcendence or the problem of knowledge.

28:42 Wes: And the romantic solution just being giving poetry this or something like that, this predominant place when it comes to our correct.

28:52 Seth: So you know, he says essentially the romantic solution in Rorty's characterization is you put poetry in the place of science or perhaps in the place of science and religion. So it's that becomes your non human authority to which you appeal. But the magic of poetry, unlike truth or God, is that it's a plurality. And so you get the transcendence you want, you get the transcendent authority you want, but you get plurality that's non violent, non constricting, non hierarchical, etc.

29:26 Wes: As in many different great poets. That becomes your new pantheon, right?

29:32 Seth: And he goes on and later on in the essay to say that if you look at Christianity as a poem, think focus on the love and get away from the God of power and get constricted by all the thou shalt, thou shalt not and focus on the love thy neighbor as you love thyself, then it becomes much less pernicious and et cetera, et cetera. But Rorty's solution is he's taking a rationalist approach to the irrational, right? A rationalist approach to Romanticism. He's not going to go for any kind of apophatic or experiential type of relationship that can't be articulated. In other words, he can't reconcile Romanticism with the need for a social interaction, with the need for social consensus. I think that's what I'm trying to

30:28 Mark: say, which is a weird thing to say, if poetry, right? Poetry is essentially something you don't just get into by yourself, right? You go to poetry readings, you go to concert. You know, I'm just extending this to rock and roll, et cetera. It is a social thing, but I guess it is. The important thing is that the way in which it is social is just still emotional and not about, let me tell you the story about the magic Jesus that you all need to believe in or something like that. It's more like, let me tell you the beautiful story about. About the magic Jesus. And you can believe it or not, want not believe it, but you'll be inspired. So I think you said before, Seth, that, you know, poetry becomes the authority.

31:12 Dylan: I think it's.

31:12 Mark: Poetry comes an inspiration, right? Authority seems to imply the monotheism. Unless. Unless you have just a different notion of authority where there can be many conflicting authorities that we can respect in different ways.

31:24 Seth: Well, yeah, he's making the point that he equates Romanticism with polytheism. And he makes the point that gods play their roles in polytheism. You can have multiple gods with multiple actions doing multiple things, and there's nothing wrong with that.

31:42 Dylan: He doesn't equate Romanticism and polytheism. It's Romantic polytheism.

31:47 Seth: Oh, sorry.

31:49 Mark: Right. Because I guess a romantic could be a monotheist, could be, you know, all the ones we read.

31:54 Wes: I will say that the Romantics themselves associated themselves with polytheism and just this very idea. So we read. Is it Herder? Who did we read? Schlegel. There's a whole section right in Schlegel on the. The idea of this. A kind of new polytheism, which is very much in line with this idea of a plurality of norms. Something that was, you know, became very influential, obviously, and Nietzsche was greatly influenced by it, and in a way, was a Romantic. In a way an anti Romantic. But maybe it's worth. Well, Seth, you're bringing up a very interesting objection, which is, how do we reconcile pluralism with this need for consensus?

Right? And then Rorty said himself says something very interesting on page 65, 29, which is that romantic utilitarianism, pragmatism and polytheism are equally compatible with enthusiasm for democracy and with contempt for democracy. The frequent complaint that a philosopher holds the pragmatic theory of truth cannot give you a reason not to be a fascist, is perfectly justified, but neither can she give you a reason to be one.

33:02 Dylan: And this is in the Context of his discussion about Nietzsche's antidemocratic tendencies. And so he's basically making the point that just, you know, me calling Nietzsche a pragmatist and him having anti democratic tendencies. There's nothing contradictory about that because being a pragmatist doesn't make you a Democrat. That's what he's.

33:25 Mark: But all this talk about fraternity sort of sounds prima facie pretty fascist. Right. We're all gonna join together in our crazy ass thing and focus on solidarity over, you know, dedication to some sort of external truth or whatever. I think the idea though, is that it can't just fraternity has to be with everybody. Fraternity of all humanity, not fraternity of the in group, America first.

33:51 Wes: Plus there's got to be a keg party.

33:52 Dylan: Yeah, a keg party, yes.

33:54 Wes: Not a fraternity until there's a keg party.

33:56 Dylan: But you also have to not, you know, cherry pick each individual thing. Remember the importance of individual. The flourishing of individual human beings is key to it. Right. It's not a Borg mentality of, you know, we're going to have the fraternity of the Borg and all of. And that's the new deity. It really is about cultivation of individual human flourishing.

34:20 Mark: Sure.

34:20 Dylan: He comes back to that over and over again.

34:22 Mark: So actual fraternities who sort of used peer pressure to get you to drink too much or whatever, that would not be encouraging human flourishing.

34:30 Dylan: That's authoritarianism.

34:32 Mark: Yeah.

34:32 Wes: He goes on to say Nietzsche mistakenly thought that once you had, with Darwin's help, given up this idea of, you know, contact with God and gotten comfortable with the idea that you are just a clever animal, you could have no reason to wish for the happiness of all human beings. So how do we preserve this idea of Christian fraternity without the Christianity?

34:54 Mark: He criticizes Nietzsche. He could not think of Christianity as the work of strong poets. So I think it's just a matter of that. I think we said early on, Christianity, according to Dewey, who Rorty is approvingly describing here, is it works. But then, Wes, you were pointing out, but if you're the individual psychopath, it doesn't work for you. Right. That you would feel like you're in a member of. They're using peer pressure to try to make me care about other people. But I don't care about other people. My flourishing is very solipsistic.

35:31 Wes: Do you guys just spare one lamb a week from the flock and then we can all be happy?

35:37 Mark: I think I just saw some meme on Facebook or something like that was. If you were a moral relativist, then you're moral statements have no weight. And so that's, I think something that this view has to come to terms with is like, no, it obviously does have weight because it has the wealth of human experience and our passed down heritage. And what we've discovered works like, there's quite a lot behind it. But that's still, it's not pure stupid relativism. It's not everybody's opinion is just as good as everybody else's, but it allows, I guess. So pluralism is a better way of putting it than relativism.

36:15 Dylan: Well, that's why that's all this emphasis on consensus.

36:19 Mark: And so maybe the meme should be subjectivism. If it's just your, if you think that everybody's opinion is just their own business and everybody's opinion is equally right, okay then actually, yeah, your opinion is just yours. And why would you think it would influence anybody? But if you think that the point of morality is to have this conversation by which we try to convince each other of stuff, again, we do not try to convince someone by pointing to the foundational thing, to pointing to God's law or the moral truth with a capital T and saying, you know, you should believe me because I'm on the side of that thing. I have God on my side. Essentially we use, you know, self serving, we use, try it out, you should care about other people because then they'll be nice to you and you'll feel good about yourselves.

37:08 Dylan: I mean that's why it's pragmatism as anti authoritarianism where it's not that there is no authority, it's that the form of authority is not invested as a thing in itself. It's not a thing that we say, oh well, reality told me, or the king told me, or the Pope told me. It is something that is owned by the individuals with the engine of consensus. That's the goal.

37:40 Wes: Yeah. And even at an individual level it can't be completely divorced from our own desire. So he'll say on page 38, he'll say, even if a non human being tells you something, the only way to figure out whether you, what you've been told is true is to see whether it gets you the sort of life you want. So God could come down and tell you that the only way to be a good human being is to torture yourself. And well, it comes from the mouth of God, it must be true. But could that really count as true in our sense if it meant nothing but pain? It seems like it couldn't. So the standard isn't the external authority in that external authority's declaration, our own desire, our own pleasure and pain, they are themselves important standards. And this is where I think pragmatists and. And Rorty are spot on. We can't get away from that sort of internalism.

38:36 Dylan: Yeah. And this quote, this reminded me a lot of even in Plato, the notion that there are no teachers. Right. You can't really teach anybody anything in the sense that, you know. And I think Rorty, in fact, even this paragraph, he says, granted that hearing that such a being, what such a being has to say may change your words wants, nevertheless you test those new wants and that purported truth in the same way by living them, trying them out in everyday life and seeing whether they make you and yours happier. And there's something. This kind of point is made about teaching someone so that they know something. And the same thing would also be true about a doctor healing you. Right. At some level you're.

39:22 Wes: This reminds me of Lakatos a little bit. Right. Because it's not to say that God coming down is going to falsify and telling us something is going to falsify our theory. We might just conclude that they're not God or that we don't want anything to do with God or that God is evil. He's telling me to torture myself.

39:39 Dylan: Yes.

39:40 Wes: So, you know, there's something to be said sometimes for sticking to one's guns, including the guns that involve our own hedonic states, our feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

39:55 Mark: So I don't feel like we've said enough about what the private business is that James was saying was so great about religion, which I think is retained in this mill slash Dewey model of trying to get individual thriving, but in a way that will not actually conflict with others. So I'm looking on page 37 for private issues. Rorty says the problem is to get your own habits of action to cohere with each other sufficiently to have a stable and coherent character. Such a character does not require monotheism or the belief that the truth is one is compatible with the idea that you have many different needs and that the beliefs that help you to fill one set of needs are irrelevant to and need not be made to cohere with those which help you fill another set.

So that's an interesting take that, you know, it seemed like in the previous essay he was saying, well, you don't have the right to believe whatever you want because belief is public, belief is. But here he's saying, even with yourself, you don't actually have to. There's a certain kind of coherence that's required. You know, you want to become who you are, to use Nietzsche's phrase, you know, So I religiously, I think I could sort of go around mostly being an atheist, but then feel free to just pray whenever I just feel like it's. And I shouldn't feel that those are actually in conflict, especially if my plane is crashing and this is a thing that will help calm me down or something.

I should feel. I should not feel like I'm committing an intellectual sin by doing that. That does not actually make my character incoherent. And I guess the same thing like that I could essentially preach the gospel of, you know, you should believe in Jesus, you should believe in that, blah, blah, blah. And as long as I'm doing it, not doing it in a way that would make you turn away from other things that are important, to just be swept up in this one thing, then it's totally fine for me to suggest that here, here's a belief that gives me comfort or helps me focus or has some practical benefit in some way, is just a really fantastic story, is really inspirational.

And yeah, it's part of my individual business to have things like that to help me excel. And actually it's okay socially to see if other people would find that useful as well, not force it on them.

42:12 Dylan: The flip side reminds me of my experience with yoga, which is I really like yoga and I find it spiritually and physically edifying and pleasurable to do. But, you know, when I go to yoga classes and I hear all this, you know, the speeches about my chi or whatever, maybe yogis don't always use chi, but, you know, the flow of my energy, I just kind of let that wash over me. It doesn't enhance anything about my experience. So I don't have to buy into at all some metaphysical or understanding of yoga to completely appreciate it and embrace it, I guess.

42:53 Mark: You don't know though. What if you did believe it? Maybe you would get more out of it.

42:57 Dylan: I don't think so.

42:58 Mark: If you believed it was impossible, a possible description of the world that doesn't have to cohere with your physics. You're so bent on your physics as a monotheist, you just can't accept that chi is equally valuable over, you know, it's just for different purposes. Metaphysics is just. I think I'm.

43:17 Dylan: Well, so you, you're simply making fun of me right now. But what I would. What I would say is that those casual languages about things like flow or energy and the way in which we use that analogically all the time to describe. Let's just stick in the realm of physical activity. Those I use all the time too. And I find them very helpful to work with.

43:45 Mark: We'll get a chance to say more about this, of course, and we could bring in some more individual points about religion as we go. Because of course, if you're talking about knowledge and you're talking about positive assertions about the world, metaphysical assertions, you know, religious ones are right there with them. Any closing thoughts though, to wrap up this part that anybody has?

44:07 Seth: So there's a part where. Do you guys remember our Buddhism Naturalized episode from 150 years ago?

44:15 Mark: Yep. Very much talking about what Dylan was just talking about of you can meditate without thinking that you're going to some other realm or that your self is literally dissolved anyway.

44:25 Seth: Yeah, yeah. So there's a part where Rorty says this. Had they preached such a merely moral and social gospel, the Christians would never have bothered to develop a natural theology. 13th century Christians would not have worried about whether the scriptures could be reconciled with Aristotle. 17th century ones would not have worried about whether they could be reconciled with Newton or nor 19th century ones about whether they could be reconciled with Darwin. Right. Blah, blah, blah. He goes on to say, you know, the idea being, oh, we could have gotten the tame and sweet brother loving version of Christianity that's hidden in there.

Right. The agape. We did that, but we didn't. And there's probably not a possible world where. Where we wouldn't get the one that. Where power is invested. And I think that's the piece he's. There's a need for an analysis about why the foundationalist. Why the foundationalist approach always wins, why it's violent, why it's tyrannical. And it's great to provide an alternative, which he does. But if he was going to be really a good Deweyan, he would give the analysis that I just mentioned first and also put together some kind of a developmental or educational guideline, like a decimal system.

Mm, sorry, it's a different Dewey. Different Dewey, yes, that would help. How. How do we create human beings? I mean, maybe he thinks we just should go back to Dewey and do whatever Dewey was recommending. But how do we create citizens that are prepared to not appeal to a non human, a non human authority and actively, joyfully, lovingly engage in consensus building with their peers?

46:30 Mark: Yes, I will refer back to our Dewey on Education episode, which sort of, as we've described involves not just telling you here's I'm the teacher, I'm telling you the knowledge. But here, try this, try this, try this. Really internalize and see how it relates to your own desires and goals and and you know, the truly participatory education we need.

46:50 Wes: We need to start selling a what Would Dewey Do? T shirt or what would Dewey Try?

46:55 Seth: What Would Dewey Try? Wwdt. I don't like where that could go.

47:04 Mark: All right, See everybody next time. Thanks for checking in. Yeah. So read the next two or three chapters of this book. That's what what we're going to do if you can get a hold of it. And we'd love to hear from you what you would like us to cover. Pel. Examine life.com Twitter, x as it is now called Facebook, Instagram, leave something on the blog, whatever you want to do.

47:26 Seth: Skywrite. I would love to see some skywriting in Austin.

47:31 Mark: Whisper into the ear of a duck and put it in the water and it will eventually get to us. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

47:36 Seth: Good night.

47:37 Mark: Good night.

47:38 Wes: I.