Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

 
An interesting piece by Richard Rorty on the relation between metaphysics and politics. The debate concerns the Platonic correspondence of moral and political propositions to reality and whether these can be dectermined as clearly as more empirical matters; and if not, then how can a rational choice between a liberal Athens and a fascist Sparta be made?

"To agree with Protagoras and Nietzsche that "man is the measure of all things" is, Wolin thinks, to reduce the choice of democracy over fascism to a matter of taste... Nietzsche and Heidegger thought that once one rejected the Platonic claim to provide rational foundations for moral truth, all things would need to be made new. Culture would have to be reshaped. James and Dewey, by contrast, did not think that giving up the correspondence theory of truth was all that big a deal. They wanted to debunk it, and so help get rid of Platonist rationalism, but they did not think that doing so would make that much difference to our self image or to our social practices. The superstructure, they thought, would still be in good shape even after we stopped worrying about the state of the foundations. Democracy could be adequately defended by empirical, nonmetaphysical arguments of the sort Churchill offered when he said that it was "the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."It did not need "normative resources."


As a defence, there is much to be said for this, but it seems a rather weak defence. As a concept, democracy requires a notion of pluralism that hardly seems compatible with attempts to establish any moral or political concept as definitive. The results of such attempts (The Inquisition in Catholic Spain, theocracy in Calvin's Geneva, Lenin, Stalin and the "ein reich, ein volk, ein fuhrer" approach of Hitler's Germany to take a few rather obvious examples) were no more democratic than Plato's ideas; in each case since each set of propositions was assumed to be beyond question they invariably led to a choice of Sparta rather than Athens.

This debate reminds me of Karl Popper's distinction between open and closed societies; since events could not be predicted the only sensible approach is to proceed through continual open scrutiny; to Popper the notions of democracy and rights can almost be considered as being analagous to peer review. For example, communism had always described itself as being scientific, but was criticised by Popper for failing to pay heed to instances where its tenets had been falsified. Since communism failed to fulfill its predictions it has since fallen into the realm of belief. Another example is Stuart Hampshire's view that the political aim of building consensus is fatally flawed since conflict presumes the right to question authority and safeguards against tyranny; a free society should instead attempt to develop institutions to fairly arbitrate in such cases. Rorty himself has elsewhere argued that since no interpretation of phenomena can lay claim to certain universality, a democracy accompanied by freedoms of speech is the most sensible approach.

The most obvious reply to such defences is that if one has a society of people who take an entirely pluralistic approach to morals and politics then they are unable to respond appropriately to threats to that pluralism from more monologic philosophies. On the whole, while this claim has a superficial value I'm more and more convinced that it is nonsense. To take one illustration, Soviet intelligence proved extremely effective in inflitrating open Western societies but proved extremely ineffective at utilising that intelligence; cases where the intelligence conflicted with official ideology were simply dismissed. The weakness of monologic philosophies is that they have no means of compensating for their own errors. As Hannah Arendt put it:

"Lessing rejoiced in the very thing that has ever, or at least since Parmenides and Plato, distressed philosophers: that the truth, as soon as it is uttered, is immediately transformed into one opinion among many, is contested, reformulated, reduced to one subject of discourse among others. Lessing's greatness does not merely consist in a theoretical insight that there cannot be one single truth within the human world but in his gladness that it does not exist and that, therefore, the unending discourse among men will never cease as long as there are men at all."


Update: Another interesting riposte:

"Imagine a companion volume to Wolin’s, titled The Seduction of Reason, which would trace Karl Marx’s political economy and philosophy of history to their Enlightenment and rationalist foundations, along with various other utopian schemes. Such a book might offer, in opposition to Wolin’s bitter attack on Jung, a chapter on the thoroughly rationalist and scientific B. F. Skinner,
proponent of the soulless utopia Walden Two and the Skinner box... Or it might include, as a counter to Wolin’s discussion of "America" in the imaginations of Heidegger and other European thinkers, a chapter on Frederick Taylor’s influential The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), with its chilling pronouncement "In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first," which helps us to understand the dark image that "America" evoked for Heidegger and others."


Of course, such a history exists, as with Zygmunt Bauman's observation that most of the terrors of the twentieth century had a rationalist foundation, being primarily concerned with abandoning liberal freedoms for the totalitarian enforcement of rational schemes, most obviously with communism.

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posted by Richard 9:21 pm