Postmodern Pragmatisms, Part 1 of 3

8/9/2019 Postmodern Pragmatisms, Part 1 of 3

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>> So, today we, we draw towards the end ofthe course.it seems like just a little while ago wewere talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseauand Immanuel Kant.But today we are moving on to threeAmerican thinkers.We have not said much about Americanthinkers in this class, except forEmerson and Judith Butler.But today we're going to be talking aboutRichard Rorty and Cornell West andAnthony Appiah.three more or less contemporaryintellectuals.Richard Rorty died a few years ago.Cornell West and Anthony Appiah, stillvery productive scholars and stillputting out work in cultural criticismand philosophy and related domains on aregular basis.We ended last time talking about Zizekand talking about how he approached what

he called sometimes postmodern authorityor postmodern desire.And when I've talked about Zizek in classI I always get questions along the linesof: So, what has he expect people to dowith the insights that he he says he'sgiving us into how the contemporary worldworks?And, Zizek does not recommend anything inparticular.I think that should be clear from thereading and from the film clips thatwe've, I, I've asked you to look at.

And there are quite a lot of videos aboutZizek on, on, available online now.And you can get a sense of his style ofphilosophizing.And his style of philosophizing is toplay the role of really of apsychoanalyst of asking us what we thinkwe're doing when we do x.What you, do we really think is going onwhen we do y or do z.Because his approach is less to find apath that we could agree with, then toshow how our easy agreement be that about

democracy, about diversity, or aboutegalitarianism.That those kinds of commonsensicalagreements mask desires that are twisted.That are bound up with repression andwith diversions and with assumptionsabout meaning and, and direction that areunfounded.And when we discover those things it'sreally up to us what we're doing, what


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we're, what we, how we might react to ourdiscovery of the relation of our desiresto the world.And Zizek leaves us in that space, where,we understand better the confusion of ourown desires.What, what Freud called the ambivalenceof our situation as desiring humanbeings.And when we confront that that's whereZizek leaves us, in a way.leaves us with an acknowledgement of ourcontradictory our conflicted place in theworld.Richard Rorty has a very differentapproach when you look at the these,these film clips.You'll see where Zizek is animated andhe's provocative and he's he's, he's he'sstirring things up.Richard Rorty who I think I've told youalready was my teacher at in graduateschool, at Princeton.Richard Rorty is he's, he's sitting back

in his chair.He's talking rather laconically about thetruth isn't that important.[LAUGH] And so it's a very differentaffect.A different, a different presentation ofemotion because what he really wants todo in his work is to deflate thepretensions of philosophy in criticaltheory.>> The, the idea is, I mean the Greekidea is that, at a certain point in theprocess of inquiry, you've come to rest

because you've reached the goal.And the pragmatists are saying, wehaven't the slightest idea what it wouldbe like to reach the goal.And the idea that the aim of inquiry is,you know, conformity to, correspondenceto reality, or seeing the face of God.Or substituting facts for interpretationsis one that we just can't make any useof.All we really know about is how toexchange justifications of our beliefsand desires with other human beings.

And as far as we can see, that will bewhat human life will be like forever.So, pragmatists regard the Platonistattempt to get away from time intoeternity or to get away from conversationinto certainty as a product of an age ofhuman history where life on earth was sodesperate and it seemed so unlikely thatlife could ever be better that peopletook refuge in another world.


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Pragmatism comes along with things likethe French Revolution, industrialtechnology, all the things that made the19th century believe in progress.when you think that the aim of life is tomake things better for our descendants,rather than to reach outside of historyand time, it alters your sense of whatphilosophy is good for.In, in, in the Platonist and theisticepoch the point of philosophy was to getyou out of this mess and to a betterplace.And.>> God?>> God, the realm of Platonic ideas ofthe,the contemplative life, somethinglike that.And the reaction against this GreekChristian pursuit of blessedness throughunion with the natural order is to saythere isn't any natural order.But there is the possibility of a betterlife for our great, great, great

grandchildren.That's enough to give you, you know, allthe meaning or inspiration or whateveryou could use.Hans Blumenberg had a remark thatimpressed me enormously.He said, At some point, we stopped hopingfor immortality and in place startedhoping for our great-great-grandchildren.You know, this was a sort of turn in, inthe culture of the west, and, you know, Ireally believe that.I mean, I, I think it had to do with

simple improvement in materialconditions.You know, when we got a comfortablebourgeois existence for, you know, largenumbers of people.The bourgeois was able to think not aboutescape from the world and pie in the sky,but about creating a future, mortalfuture world for future mortals.This seem to may have been, yeah, a greatimprovement.>> The text I have assigned for thisclass, a small thing called Postmodern

Bourgeois Liberalism is a it's an, hethinks of it as an, as a contradiction interms.That is he, he wants to show that thepostmodern response to the death ofphilosophy or the, the realization thatepistemology isn't necessary orsignificant.That the postmodern response to thatisn't radicalism.


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But it actually may be a commitment tothe the best aspects of our contemporarysituation and, and it doesn't necessarilydemand revolutionary response.In fact, the response can be liberal inin the mainstream sense of that word.So Rorty in this text I've, I've assignedin the class, talks about a threecornered debate, remember that?A three cornered debate.the first piece is those who want toprovide foundations to support ourinstitutions.The, the second is those who want to showthat the foundations are weak and, and sothat we can change those institutions.And the third are those who don't thinkthere are foundations, but theinstitutions are okay.And, and for Rorty those are the threepositions.the first, let's support what's going onwith buttress those foundations.And the second to say, ah-hah, there are

no foundations.This agrees with Zizek, and to someextent with Judith Butler response.There are no foundations.You see, these institutions are shaky,these institutions are, are, we can makethem fall.And the third which is Rorty's is thereare no foundations and that's okaybecause institutions are great.They can be a little better, we cantinker with them, we can make thembetter, but they've never needed

foundations.[LAUGH] So, in some ways Rorty's is themost radical philosophically that saythese foundations were never necessary,we used to think they were.We used to think they were but now we cansee the foundations aren't necessary butthat doesn't mean we have to change thegame that we're playing.And here I use the word game to harkenback to Vickenstein.Because remember that Vickenstein talkedthe rules of the games are within the

game itself.They they don't get established outsidethe game.And so for Rorty, when you realize thatthere's no foundation to the game, itdoesn't mean you stop playing.If you think the game is helping you copewith reality.If you think the game is bringing youpleasure and satisfaction.


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If you think the game is good for thepeople playing, you continue to play.and you have to answer those questionswithin the vocabulary of the game itself.so he said, he knows that this mostpostmodern bourgeois liberalism sounds,like an oxymoron, like a contradiction interms.I have this quotation for you.I hope thereby to suggest, Rority writes,how such liberals might convince oursociety that loyalty to itself ismorality enough.That's the key for him.Loyalty to itself is morality enough, andthat such loyalty is no longer needs anahistorical backdrop.I think they should try to clearthemselves of charges irresponsibility byconvincing our society that it need beresponsible only to its own traditions.And not to the moral law as well.And so for Rorty again there are nofoundations, but that doesn't mean things

are about to fall down.Because they've actually never beennecessary those foundations.Rationality for Rorty as he says a littlelater in the piece, is a product ofparticipation in a community.Rational behavior is just adaptivebehavior.That, that's really key for Rorty.It doesn't conform to some externalahistorical standard.Rational behavior, which is I think frompage 333, is just adaptive behavior.

The kind of thing others like us would doin similar circumstances.So, rationality is always dependent onthe group you're in.As he says in that same page,irrationality in both physics and ethicsis a matter of behavior that leads one toabandon or be stripped of membership in acommunity.Irrationality is a decision made by acommunity about someone's abborantbehavior.Not a violation of epistimology.

So, no vocabularies are privilegedagainst other vocabularies from Rorty'sperspective.>> I think it was unfortunate thatpragmatism became thought of as a theoryor definitional truth.I think it would have been better if thepragmatists had said.We can tell you about justification, butwe can't tell you about truth.


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There's nothing to be said about it.[SOUND] That is, we know how we justifybeliefs.We know that the adjective true is theword we apply to the beliefs that we'vejustified.We know that a belief can be true withoutbeing justified.That's about all we know about truth.And, you know?Justification is relative to an audience,and to a range of truth candidates.Truth isn't relative to anything.Just because it isn't relative toanything, there's nothing to be saidabout it.And t-, truth, with a capital T, is sortof like God.you know?There's not much you can say about God.That's why theologians talk aboutineffability.Contemporary pragmatists tend to say theword true is indefinable, but none the

worse for that, we know how to use it, wedon't have to define it.>> if you define that in the Nietzscheterm there are no fixed interpretations.>> Yes, that, that gives us the generalpragmatist idea that no description, orif you like, no interpretation is closeto reality than any other.Some of them are more useful for somepurposes than others.But that's about all you can say.A Nietzschian perspective is which says,you know, you can't rise above

interpretations and get the facts.Or dig down below interpretations and getthe facts.It's substantially the same thing, as Imeant before, when I said thatpragmatists try to get rid of thereality-appearance distinction.>> So he says that, what he wants tohave happen, is to have art andliterature become the backup for ourmoral decisions, rather than thephilosophical search for foundations.The moral justification of institutions

and practices of one's groups is mostly amatter of historical narratives ratherthan philosophical meta-narratives.Now what does he mean by philosophicalmeta-narratives?He means that we should stop chasing a, aframework that is supposed to givesupport to all other stories.That's what it means by a meta-narrative.A narrative, a story, a big story.


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[LAUGH] It's supposed to support allthose small ones.There is no big story for Rorty and the,the second part of that is and that'sokay.[LAUGH] You know there is no "big other"to use Zizek's term.And that's okay, we never actually neededone.And now the charge that you'd expectpeople to make against him in thiscircumstances is a, a, is a charge thathe's being relativist.Right?That he's being a relativist because he'ssomehow not giving us criteria accordingto which we can choose among competingvocabularies.But Rorty's point is relativism onlymakes sense if you think there's a placefrom outside of these vocabularies tojudge them.In another words, if you think you cansomehow step out of history to make a

judgment about the various groups.If you could step out of history, and youcouldn't decide which group you shouldjoin, then you would be in thisrelativist position.But for Rorty, no one is ever outside ofa vocabulary making a decision.You're always already within a languagegame.You're always already within a community.And so, there is no perspective fromwhich you could be a relativist.Relativism as a charge, depends on a

notion of a God's eye view which isalways unavailable to us.

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Postmodern Pragmatisms, Part 1 of 3