I have a certain rough interest in Rorty (he was "hot" enough to get a NYT Magazine article written about it, IIRC; pretty sure that's where I first heard of him. I still have my copy of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) I flipped open the book cover and read precisely this on the jacket blurb:
Marking a new stage in the evolution of his thought, Rorty’s final masterwork identifies anti-authoritarianism as the principal impulse and virtue of pragmatism. Anti-authoritarianism, on this view, means acknowledging that our cultural inheritance is always open to revision because no authority exists to ascertain the truth, once and for all. If we cannot rely on the unshakable certainties of God or nature, then all we have left to go on―and argue with―are the opinions and ideas of our fellow humans. The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for others’ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else’s.
A supple mind who draws on theorists from John Stuart Mill to Annette Baier, Rorty nonetheless is always an apostle of the concrete. No book offers a more accessible account of Rorty’s utopia of pragmatism, just as no philosopher has more eloquently challenged the hidebound traditions arrayed against the goals of social justice.
Granted that's a publisher's blurb, and Rorty being dead, he had no input on that text. Still, it struck me as kinda funny, in an ironic way. If this is the "new stage in the evolution of his thought":
The test of these ideas, Rorty suggests, is relatively simple: Do they work? Do they produce the peace, freedom, and happiness we desire? To achieve this enlightened pragmatism is not easy, though. Pragmatism demands trust. Pragmatism demands that we think and care about what others think and care about, which further requires that we account for others’ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs. After all, our own beliefs are as contestable as anyone else’s.
Then I could have saved him the effort by putting him in touch with some of my seminary professors. I spent four years in seminary (yes, it was a three-year course; I took the last two years more slowly, as I was serving a church as a student, providing income and housing for my family as I could at the time) learning precisely what that highlighted text above says. It wasn't a product of pragmatism, though; not in Rorty's philosophical sense, anyway. It was pragmatic in the more common sense of the word: it was necessary if you were going to be a professional (M. Div. is a professional degree, not an academic one) pastor. I think (I have another book with Rorty's thoughts on religion; not very well-informed or particularly interesting after reading Bultmann and Crossan and Tillich, among others) he would disapprove of my saying so, but I suspect there's not much in his final book I didn't learn while learning to be a better Christian.
Which is not so much a slam on Rorty as it is a plea for a broader, more inclusive discussion among disciplines. Rorty, if that blurb is an accurate summation of his final work, labored mightily to...reinvent the wheel. After all, what I learned of this in seminary wasn't exactly new information unearthed by Crossan or the then au courant Jesus Seminar (all now hoary old men like your humble host; time is cruel). It was as old as the Acts of the Apostles, in many cases; or the letters of Paul, most of which predate the gospels. I know Christians are supposed to be narrow-minded and insistent that their "true" beliefs are the only "truth" allowed, but frankly that's a Greek notion, and it was never a very sound one (it also arose from the Greeks being as isolationist in their culture and as arrogant about their superiority as the Jews are supposed to be, according to basic anti-Jewish thinking. The Jews labeled all non-children of Abraham, all those not subject to the covenant, Gentiles. The Greeks labeled all non-Greeks "barbarians," because their speech, not being Greek, sounded like baby talk. The Hebrews expected God's wisdom to inspire the people of the earth, to draw them to the holy mountain of Isaiah. The Greeks just disdained anyone who didn't see the world they did, and were happy to leave them benighted. Consider that there is no Hebrew/Jewish equivalent story to the tragedy of Medea.) That "truth" is singular and also knowable are very restrictive Greek notions Western culture should have discarded ages ago. It would have saved us a lot of grief.
This kind of thinking I gained from a seminary education. I also learned by beliefs were as contestable as anyone else's; and again, I don't think that was due to post-modernism or Continental French philosophers (few of my professors had ever heard of Derrida, and seemed to know Heidegger more in connection to Bultmann, his contemporary and colleague, than from Sein und Zeit. On the other hand, it was at seminary that I first read Emmnuel Levinas, so....). I learned there, the hard way, not to give simple answers to simple questions, because the simple answers don't really exist. I especially learned to "think and care about what others think and care about," which does indeed "further require[] that we account for others’ doubts of and objections to our own beliefs."
Not to dump on Rorty or his publisher (who I'm willing to accept his possibly misrepresenting and over-simplifying Rorty's work). Perhaps the best sentence in the blurb is this simple three word statement: "Pragmatism demands trust." Yes, it does. So many things do; especially when you remember a synonym for "trust" is: "Faith."
May it be unto you according to your faith. That's a lesson I learned from the German Evangelical and Reformed Church, which was saying it for probably nearly a century before I even came along.
Interesting, isn't it?
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