The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche To A Postmetaphysical Culture

HUM 301-RESEARCH THESIS
THE PROBLEM OF REDEMPTIVE TRUTH

FROM NIETZSCHE TO A POST-METAPHYSICAL CULTURE
BY
Abbas Askar 3095037 Supervisor: Dr. F.G. van der Burg University College Utrecht 29th August 2008
The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Nietzsche and the Project of Self-Creation Richard Rorty and a Post-Metaphysical Culture Conclusion and the Future of Philosophy Bibliography
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Acknowledgements
For offering in-depth discussions, lectures, valuable suggestions and help in preparing this research thesis, many thanks to my teacher and supervisor, Dr. Floris van der Burg. I am deeply grateful to my family for their continuing support and encouragement. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Thomas Hart, Prof. Dr. Jan van Ophuijsen and the other lecturers at the humanities department of University College Utrecht for all the knowledge they have imparted to me. Lastly, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues for all their suggestions and support.
Abbreviations
Works by Nietzsche
GS The Gay Science, translated by Richard Poit. Hackett Publishing Co: 1995
WTP
The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufman, Vintage, New York, 1968.
TI
Twilight of the Idols: Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Duncan Large. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press
Works by Rorty
CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989
DRT
The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture, 2001
TP
Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
ORT
Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
PMN
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979
Works by Other Authors

RR Guignon, Charles, and David. R. Hiley, ed., Richard Rorty Cambridge University Press, 2003
RHC Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.
Other references and sources can be found in the bibliography section. The parenthetical in text citations for those sources are indicated by the writers last name.
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Introduction
As a child I remember annoying my parents with questions like, why are we here?, why cant everything just be blank? I think that the fundamental question that underlay all such annoying questions was, why must we be here? I believed that perhaps the answer to my questions could satisfy my desire to know the necessary reason for the existence of the world in which I found myself thrown into. However, I found it very difficult to devoutly attach myself to any theological reason
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that could answer a
question like why are we here? In fact any reason for our existence and gathering in this world that justifies and ascribes a particular goal to our existence has always seemed incoherent and unsatisfying to me. This is primarily because such reasons make use of transcendental axiomsabsolute assumptions that are entirely unproved and thus cannot be taken as being self evident. However, the issue that is important here and that lies in the naivety of my puerile questions is the assumption that there is indeed a necessary reason for the existence of the world or even the beliefs and values that individuals uphold. I may understand questions such as why are we here? rather than to be asking, Why must we be here? and to be looking for a necessary reason for our gathering. Or I may understand it to mean, why do we happen to be here? and to be looking for a reason that is contingent (Arcilla 201). The thesis of contingency is central to Richard Rortys essays in his prominent book, Contingency, irony, and Solidarity (1989). The idea that solutions to the questions (or any other request for reasons) posed above are contingent is: premised on the failure so far of human beings to identify a convincing, necessary reason for why things must be the way they are. In response to that failure, the thesis holds that we should from now on settle for contingent reasons. It urges us, in effect, to find in the futile quest to discover apodictic facts about the universe's essential nature, a quest which has motivated most pursuits in metaphysics and epistemology, a historical, even historicist lesson. It recommends that we try to cure ourselves of the desire for such facts, and to accept that all the reasons we have come up with so far for why things are as such, and all the reasons we can reasonably hope to come up with, are bound to beg the question of their own reasons. We should accordingly acknowledge that
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The answers to my childish questions usually entailed a theological/metaphysical assumptiona god figure who created everything
the in-principle infinite quest for a reason for that reason can only be concluded by circular argumentation, arbitrary fiat, or happenstance causes, thus by an appeal to contingency. (Arcilla 201) This paper aims at not only defending the thesis put forward by Rorty but presents a critique of Western philosophical culture and in particular the appearance reality debate, based on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In my opinion, Nietzsche is a pivotal figure in Western thought and sets the parameters for writers like Rorty. The case in point for Nietzsche is the culture of the West, which, with its origins in Judaism and Christianity, created a human type that needs transcendent meaning and absolute conceptions of value (Casey 4). After the enlightenment and the decline of Christianity, the metaphysical presuppositions of the religious thought were secularized and the need for necessary reason and meaning continued and was met through the pursuit of truth, objective reality, and the essence of existence (Casey 4-5). Nietzsches main contribution was to shift the locus of thought about the self from discovering deep truths about the self to the project of self-creation (RR 22).
Richard Rorty by demonstrating the sheer contingency of language establishes that truth is not out there, it is in fact the descriptions of the world which are true or false (CIS 5). Like Nietzsche, Rorty believes that the suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own (CIS 5). Throughout the 1970s, Rorty published papers, blended the ideas of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein in a crusade against any concept of philosophy that gave legitimacy to mainstream philosophical debates about truth, knowledge, and realism (RR 7). I think it is important to point out here that what Rorty himself advocates is not that he has discovered. That there is no such thing as redemptive truth but that it is an unfruitful endeavour to search for itto say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or true as a term which repays analysis. The nature of truth is an unprofitable topic, resembling in this respect the nature of man and the nature of God (CIS 8). Redemptive truth is what Rorty describes as a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselveswhen we start capitalizing
the word truth and treat it as something that is identical either with God or with the world as Gods project (CIS 5).
For me, the search for redemptive truth is a problem which needs to be overcome in order to realise that if we want to make our inquires profitable, the motivation of all inquiry should not be towards a final goal, such as redemptive truth, but it should come from the realisation that life presents limitless possibilities. The motivation for our inquires should be to explore these limitless possibilities of life. This opens the door for a new culture in which unlike religion and philosophy, the need of a finale is no longer the driving force for inquiry. This literary, post-metaphysical culture is described by Rorty as [a culture]...in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics to find an historical, trans-cultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place - has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or "the nature of reality," which tells them what kind it is (OShea 59) The pragmatist strand of Rortys thought paves the way for his concepts of solidarity and loyalty. By heightening our sense of our contingency we will recognise that, like truth, we and our community are made, not discovered. A post-metaphysical, literary culture as proposed by Rorty, emphasises the need for solidarity instead of getting things right. However, at the same time, the existentialist strand of Rortys beliefs proposes greater freedom at a personal level and recognises that there is no common human nature that necessarily binds us to fellow humans. The upshot of accepting Rortys brand of pragmatism and recognizing the contingency of the community will be greater freedom, on the one hand, and increasing solidarity, on the other (RR 24). The desire for solidarity seeks only an ethical basis for cooperative inquiry and human community; it replaces the search for objectivity with the search for solidarity.
In my opinion, overcoming the need for objectivity and redemption from God, truth, rationality or any other ultimate ground will indeed be beneficial. I think that, Rorty correctly identifies that intellectuals of the West, since the Renaissance, have progressed through three stages: They have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature. Monotheistic religion offers hope for redemption through entering
into a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person. Beliefas in belief in the articles of a creedmay be only incidental to such a relationship. For philosophy, however, beliefs are of the essence. Redemption by philosophy is through the acquisition of a set of beliefs which represent things in the one way they really are. Literature, finally, offers redemption through making the acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible. Here again, as in religion, true belief may be of little importance (DRT 4) Literature encompasses both religion and philosophy, but unlike philosophical books and religious scriptures, it does not specifically rely on getting things right and it does not proclaim itself to be the truth. Literature such as poetry, novels and drama address questions such as, What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth-century democratic society? It replaces those unprofitable questions put forth by philosophy like What is it to be a human being? (CIS xiii). Literature provides solutions to human problems and explores the limitless possibilities which life presents.
I, like Rorty and Nietzsche, believe that traditional philosophys search for final accounts of knowledge, if achieved, would result in the freezing-over of culture and the dehumanization of human beings (PMN 377). The quest of philosophy reflects our craving for metaphysical comfort, as Nietzsche had put itthe desire to bring inquiry to an end in order to escape our contingency. By contrast, Rortys antifoundationalism aims at heightening our sense of contingency in order to avoid dehumanization and the freezing over of culture. Anti-foundationalism aims at expanding possibilities for selfdescription, thus rehumanizing humans by affirming freedom and opening up possibilities through greater tolerance (RR 22). By abandoning the search of the final accounts of knowledge, man can realise the potential and the freedom to envisage and explore new avenues, and create new vocabularies by critically evaluating his beliefs and values.
Nietzsche and the Project of Self-Creation
The philosophical workhorse of Western metaphysics is the distinction between appearance and reality (Kolenda 1). The distinction was introduced by the pre-Socratics, was made prominent by Parmenides and was the centrepiece of Platos theory of knowledge. According to Plato, the world is but a highly imperfect copy of the World of Forms, eternally existing beyond time and space and only dimly accessible to properly prepared philosophical minds through a special activity Socrates called anamnesis or recollection (Kolenda 1). Platonic realism postulated the prospect of encountering reality wordlessly, by an act of intellectual seeing. Since the true nature of reality was encountered in the minds eye, it is not surprising that inspired by Platonic realism, modern rationalistic philosophy could easily convert into the form of idealism (Kolenda 1). Central to the history of Western thought since the time Plato employed the notion to consider the things the way they appear as something [that is] derivative, secondary, and inferior [and the way things really are] as original, primary, and superior (Guignon and Pereboom 90). This idea of the appearance and reality has not only been very influential in the development of western philosophy but also has had a profound effect on the way humans lead the life. For it leads humans to believe that their present life is currently wedged in a veil of mere appearance, out of touch with reality, and our task [as humans] is to extricate ourselves from this illusion and distortion in order to get in touch with what is real (Guignon and Pereboom 90).
Nietzsche in his work The Gay Science (1882) recognised this possibility of being able to extricate ourselves from our own existence to arrive at a true reality as a cause of the illness of mankind (Guignon and Pereboom 90). In the preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche identifies this idea of fantasizing for a better future (Guignon and Pereboom 90) or finding the redemptive truth (which is the cornerstone of philosophical and even religious thought) as a sickness. He writes: Every philosophy that puts peace higher than war, every ethics with a negative appraisal of the concept of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that knows of a finale, a final state of any sort, every predominantly aesthetic or religious longing for an elsewhere, a beyond, an outside, an above, allows one to ask whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher. (GS 2)
The sickness here lies in our thinking that the present human reality is part of this greater cosmological reality and we define our place in it by presenting a presupposed teleological picture of our history (Guignon and Pereboom 90) instead of seeing history as being arbitrary. The sickness makes us think that there is indeed something like the truth that exists out there. Furthermore, it creates a negative attitude in the sense that it makes us detest our current human reality and glorifies our potentiality by establishing goals which mankind ought to be striving for in order to arrive at the true reality. This sickness is not only deeply ingrained in western thought but is much more of a global phenomenon. In most monotheistic religious expression, the teleological narrative is used to show that the present reality is a test in which mankind is at loss unless it accepts the goals of existence given by the creator and behave in the way which religion prescribes in order to make this world a lot better and a happier place (a world which is truly in accordance with some presupposed cosmological order) and as a reward for accepting the will of the creator, man is promised eternal bliss in the hereafter (conversely, refusing to do so would result in eternal suffering). Such expression of the teleological narratives always make a negative judgment about life, because they assume that there is something bad or lacking in our ordinary existence that needs to be rectified by discipline and sacrifice. All notions such as "progress," "improvement," "betterment," "development," and "goals" presuppose this essentially negative assessment of life as it is in the here and now (Guignon and Pereboom 91). Nietzsche in The Gay Science specifically attacks such negative presupposed ideas and the teleological narratives which indoctrinate that by achieving the goals of existence, mankind will be able to arrive at the true reality, which for Nietzsche means an end to all critical inquiry and culture (Guignon and Pereboom 92). Furthermore, he propounds that his science which he believes is content with the way reality is as it appears to us and argues against the creation of arbitrary existence which one assumes to be better then the present existence.
The critique of the traditional idea of Western thought and religion which strives for betterment or improvement of the world fails to see that it is acknowledging those metaphors, standards and values which have been passed down by the teleological narrative embedded in our historical culture as being objective universals which are independent of human sentiment and societal practices. As a result what has happened is that these standards, values and ideals have assumed the status of absolutes which
are regarded as timeless, unchanging, objective bases for assessment and aspiration (Guignon and Pereboom 93). For Nietzsche the existence of these absolutes is a direct consequence of the teleological narrative so much so that these absolutes are not even questioned anymore. Nietzsche does away with the idea of the existence of such absolutes by demonstrating the rise of scepticism in the West and how the scientific methodology has led us to doubt the existence of an absolute god, an idea that has been around for over five thousand years now. Guignon and Pereboom write on this very point illustrated by Nietzsche At this stage in the history of scepticism in the West it has become increasingly difficult to believe in a transcendent ground for 'values and belief. God, reason, the cosmos, providence, divine rights, the noumenal realm, Geist, humanity, history all these conceptions of the ultimate foundation for our beliefs and practices have been publicised for what they are: human constructs, expressions of our own hopes and needs, with no basis in a transcendent reality beyond our ways of thinking and acting. The "self-grounding grounds" that traditionally were used to legitimate beliefs and institutions now appear as products of .our own "craving for metaphysical comfort," as symptoms of our wishful thinking rather than as foundation stones of reality (93). The important idea that needs to be highlighted here is that all these absolute ideas are merely nothing more than constructs, which do not derive from higher grounds but are bounded by human constructs. It is the denial of such absolute unquestionable values, ideals, absolutes (which are merely human constructs) which will eventually lead to nihilism. For as soon as we begin to doubt the existence of these absolutes we immediately begin to realise that the teleological narrative which assumes a higher realm of existence falls apart and one realises that there is no goal of existence, and life and all that was valued becomes meaningless. Due to the rise of this sceptical attitude and more importantly the failure to realise that all our values and beliefs are merely human constructs (which have no superior reality), sooner or later lead us to doubt and reject all that we value which will consequently result in complete nihilism. In other words, it is this unannounced secularization of values and beliefs (realisation that they are temporal and not timeless absolutes) which for Nietzsche in due course is inevitable unless we realise that all such values and beliefs are constructs of the apparent reality. Nietzsche writes in the Twilight of the Idols that ... 'Reason' is what causes us to falsify the evidence of the senses. If the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they
do not lie ... But Heraclitus will always be right that Being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real world' has just been lied on ... (TI 17).
Nietzsche is of the opinion that the pre-Platonic Greeks took the world as it presented itself and this was their true greatness for they were able to embrace life on its own terms, with its ceaseless ebb and flow, its risks and uncertainties, and they did so with neither nostalgia for a Garden that never was nor fantasies about a future that can never be (Guignon and Pereboom 92). Viewing history as being arbitrary and fearlessly accepting all aspects of life without pondering over what it installs for humankind is for Nietzsche the life embracing/affirming attitude, which is opposite to the teleological story lines that construct these apparently idealistic fantasies of what ought to be (Guignon and Pereboom 92). In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche goes on to briefly (in one page) yet brilliantly describe How the Real World Finally Became Fable (20). In the very last phase of this journey of the idea of the real world, Nietzsche writes: 6. The real world-we have done away with it: what world was left? The apparent one, perhaps? ... But no! With the real world we have also done away with the apparent one! (Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; pinnacle of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)* (TI 20). What Nietzsche signifies here is that the idea of this fable of the real world has had such a profound influence on our lives, culture and the world (as it is out here or the reality as perhaps for him the pre-Platonic Greeks had) that even when we do away with the idea of the real word (which he calls an end of the longest error) then we also do away with the apparent one; for all life loses its meaning and we are left immersed in nihilism. Nietzsche believes that in response to nihilism, there will be an attempt to find a new absolute-a new god-term in science or history or art-to fill the hole left by the collapse of absolutes (Guignon and Pereboom 94). However, all such attempts at filling the hole left by the collapse of absolutes will again eventually result in nihilism. For we are mistaken even if we think we can carefully discern and come up with supposedly scientific systems to replace the absolute. This is a futile attempt for as I have previously discussed reality is as it is to us, and is largely a product of our own modes of apprehension and interpretation (Guignon and Pereboom 94). We assert upon the world what we want to ascertain (which is very much arbitrary and cannot be taken as an independent reality). However, what happens is that statements concerning the way we
think reality is, are taken to be beyond criticism much in the same way the existence of god was seen as being beyond criticism for people during the middle ages. The problem here lies in not realizing this notion that all that we know of the world is through our existence and it cannot be taken as something which is beyond criticism or an actual reality. Therefore, from denying the existence of any absolutes, it follows that there are no ultimate basis for anything that we ascribe to the world and thus it cannot be beyond criticism.
Clearly for Nietzsche reality is nothing more than what an individual takes it to be and using this assumption he derives the solution to the nihilism which is an inevitability due to the dichotomy caused by this fallacious belief in absolutes and superior reality. By doing away with all the absolutes one has to conclude that all values, morality and scientific systems are social constructs invented by people to try to satisfy their "craving for metaphysical comfort." They are products of dogmatic systems of belief that are no longer tenable in the modern world (Guignon and Pereboom 99) and are ultimately matters of choice and preference (Guignon and Pereboom 95). The idea of choice and its importance in Sartres project is discussed later in the paper. Morality and values are thus nothing more than the expressions of the way a community wants to function. However, these expressions have taken the status of those timeless absolutes with the supposed purpose of preserving the herd mentality. It is because we mistake these humanly constructed expressions for absolutes as we witness the
institutionalization of hypocrisy in religion, ideologies etc.
The point I am emphasizing here with respect to institutionalised hypocrisy is the conflict which arises by falsely creating absolutes, such as morality and value systems and then by devising a great purpose which is the goal of our existence, instead of just accepting the freedom that is present there in the reality as it appears to us, (reality, free from all absolutes). Because of having uncritical belief in the former and denial of the latter, we see that a growing number of people are not sincere to their absolute beliefs or values that they uphold. I, therefore think that Nietzsche is right in pointing out that upholding absolutes will lead to nihilism since this institutionalised hypocrisy will eventually create cynicism and doubt that will lead to scepticism (which is responsible for the denial of the existence of God in the twentieth century) and then eventually nihilism.
Nietzsche uses an interesting thought experiment by applying the doctrine of the "eternal recurrence of the same" to life as it is dictated by any sense of teleology (Guignon and Pereboom 97). If one is stuck in a loop where every minute detail of his life is repeated over and over again then what use is the idea of having teleological sense in life? Guignon and Pereboom point out that what gives our lives cumulativeness and direction is precisely the feeling that we are accomplishing something that things are adding up for us as a whole (97). Nietzsches thought
experiment simply weakens this feeling of any accomplishment, as one is stuck in a loop. Thus, there is no cumulativeness. From the very same doctrine, Nietzsche derives his solution to nihilism. If one knows that every detail of his life would be repeated for an infinite number of times, then he would ascribe a certain weight to his existence and this would force him to embrace and affirm his life (similar to the way pre-Platonic Greeks viewed reality). All his actions and all that he does in his life with this new optimism, as Guignon and Pereboom see it as to affirm your own life in all its details is also to affirm everything that has happened and ever will happen in the universe the important and the trivial, the good and the bad, everything! (98). The existentialism evident here is in the realisation that if one truly affirms life the way Nietzsche suggests, then one frees himself from negativity (such as regret or the desire for better alternatives) which entails from having a teleological view of life. Through embracing and accepting ones existence as it is, one frees oneself from the need of envisioning as being part of a grand scheme in which ones existence has a particular goal. For Nietzsche, central to annihilating nihilism is the idea of the will to power. An individual has to will to make his life his own, instead of someone else defining his life for him. This is expressed by Nietzsche in the Antichrist when he writes that The man of faith, the 'believer' of every sort is necessarily a dependent mansuch as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The 'believer' does not belong to himself; he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will use him ( 54) Therefore, it is important to extricate oneself from the tradition and be critical of all values and beliefs. It is only through this extrication that one can free oneself from the herd mentality (which can be seen as having the teleological view based on some absolute) and by affirming ones own context and judgment and embracing the fact that the individual alone is responsible for his/her reality. It is specifically important to point out the context and judgments that I have just mentioned as these play an important
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role in the way an individual sees human reality. These are the prejudices which are at play during interpretation and judgment (which are also central to Gadamers hermeneutics). One can be critically aware of these prejudices that arise through the historical culture but cannot completely do away with them when interpreting (though as Gadamer suggests they can be transformed through a fusion of horizon). The idea of human reality is in some sense similar to the anthropic principle in physics which states that we see the universe as it is, had it been different from what we see it as then we would not exist to observe it. One can never be certain of the existence of some independent reality, we would have to assume that there is some form of being existing in such a reality and observing it, but for us, as we exist in this universe, reality is simply what appears to be in the universe as it for us (the ones observing it). In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche sums up his critique of the appearance-reality distinction in four propositions: First Proposition. The reasons which have been given for designating 'this' world as apparent, actually account for its reality any other kind of reality is absolutely unprovable. Second Proposition. The characteristics which have been given to the 'true Being' of things are the characteristics of non-Being, of nothingness the 'real world' has been constructed from the contradiction of the actual world: an apparent world, indeed, to the extent that it is merely a moral-optical illusion. Third Proposition. Concocting stories* about a world 'other' than this one is utterly senseless, unless we have within us a powerful instinct to slander, belittle, cast suspicion on life: in which case we are avenging ourselves on life with the phantasmagoria of 'another', 'better' life. Fourth Proposition. Dividing the world into a 'real' one and an 'apparent' one, whether in the manner of Christianity, or of Kant (a crafty Christian, when all's said and done), is but a suggestion of decadence a symptom of declining life ... The fact that the artist values appearance more highly than reality is no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' here means reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected ... The tragic artist is no pessimist-- on the contrary, he says yes to all that is questionable and even terrible; he is Dionysian* ... (TI 19)
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The first three propositions point at the absurdity of thinking that the world that is out there is only an apparent one and to think that reality is something different from the appearance is simply a useless thing to stay. As Nietzsche points out in the last proposition that there can be no escape from the world around us and that a tragic artist understands this and thus accepts all the possibilities of life. Nietzsche in his early work The Birth of Tragedy proposed that at its deepest level, art is a tension or agon (the Greek word for a contest or struggle) between the opposing forces of the Dionysian and the Apollonian (Guignon and Pereboom 88). Nietzsche suggested that tragedy originated in the droning music, frenzied dancing, and ecstatic choral chanting of Dionysian worship (Guignon and Pereboom 87). The Dionysian worshippers acknowledged the totality of nature and openly embraced even the most terrible things in life.
The importance of the life of the self is highlighted by both Sartre and Heidegger and I think this is precisely what separates existential thought from the type of phenomenological method propounded by Husserl, through which one could understand the essence by bracketing off all objective reality, except that it is not really possible to bracket off ones life and therefore it is the methodology which is inquiring and determining the essence of an object instead of the object elucidating its own essence by dominating the method which studies it.
Jean Paul Sartres Existentialism and Humanism also builds on the idea that there are no absolutes and reaffirms the philosophical basis of existentialist thought by emphasizing that human existence is prior to all essences. Sartre writes that Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism. (68). Sartre establishes this first principle by recognizing the weight of existence which was also discussed above in Nietzsches use of the doctrine of the "eternal recurrence of the same". Furthermore, Sartre here also puts the freedom and responsibility of what the man becomes entirely on man himself. Sartre uses this idea to show existentialism is humanism by expanding the implication of the choice onto entire human reality. Sartre writes in Existentialism and Humanism:
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when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. The word 'subjectivism' is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that, we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men. (68)
Sartres denial of the existence of anything such as human nature which defines who we are, certainly leaves no room for any abrogation of responsibility. Just as Nietzsche by thoroughly criticizing the teleological narratives and pointing out the nihilism which it leads to, gives man the opportunity to embrace his life and reality in its entirety. Furthermore, Sartres humanistic turn and expansion of the scope of ones choice on to the whole humankind is also reflected in Nietzsches doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same", in which when one realises that there is no goal to life and that everything he does will be repeated over and over again, would always be aware that every choice he makes will directly influence the universe and by affirming and accepting his life, he would also affirm everything that happens in the universe and he would be aware of this idea when he makes his choices.
Coming back to Nietzsche, what one needs to understand from his writings is the important aspect of critically looking at the values and beliefs that arise from man-made absolutes. Nietzsche believes that it is important for man to have an attitude which is critical of the world around him yet embraces life for all that it brings. Through critical creativity and a positive struggle in life one can avoid the nihilism evident for Nietzsche in any teleological approach to life. Guignon and Pereboom write in the introduction to Existentialism: Basic Writings that This emphasis on the individual's own responsibility is perhaps the most valuable and enduring contribution of existentialism to philosophy. (xxxviii). Sartre is the philosopher who particularly points out this idea of the individuals freedom to choose. Like Nietzsche, Sartre too believes that there are no absolutes. Quoting Dostoievsky in Humanism and existentialism, he writes:
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Dostoievsky once wrote 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse (70). The deepest meaning of Nietzsches famous parable on the death of God is freedom of the most unlimited kind, and as awareness of this opportunity grows, so does the strength necessary for responding to it (Casey 28). God here is not merely the metaphysical underpinning of the Christian cosmology. He is the very notion of a basis, an external authority, on which opinions are founded the very notion of a horizon against which everything can be seen and judged (Gemes 50). As Dostoievesky pointed out, that if God does not exist then man cannot abrogate his responsibility to create himself. Nietzsche believed that: the primary function of the invocation of God is the provision of a means of escaping responsibility. For the Christian, the world including himself, is a product of the will of God. Truth, reality, is founded in God for the world is God's world. Typically, atheists who, having rejected God as the basis of all values and belief, supply a new basis. For instance, positivists take experience to be the ultimate justifier of our beliefs. Utilitarians and Socialists take the summum bonum as the grounding for all actions. Nietzsche rejects these new gods as further attempts to evade responsibility for one's beliefs and actions (Gemes 50)
As discussed earlier, the desire to substitute God will, as Nietzsche prophesised lead to nihilism, like one cannot talk much about God neither can he talk much about Truth. Gemes points out that when people talk about their beliefs and value, they often [claim to] believe what [they] believe because it is the truth [, not] because [they] wish to believe but because that is how things are even though [they] might wish them to be otherwise (50-51). It was suggested in the introduction to this paper, that if we want to make our inquiries more profitable then we need to realise the contingency of our own beliefs and values. I think Nietzsche presents the first step towards realizing the contingency and that is to understand that man is indeed the one who creates his beliefs and values. As Nietzsche observes in the The Will to Power, "one positively wants to repudiate one's own authority and assign it to circumstances" (WTP 422). So in order to become Gods, is in part, to forgo the balm of deferred responsibility (Gemes 50). Once man realises
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this then it allows him to choose and self create himself with limitless freedom. Nietzsche illustrates this point in his criticism of any need for redemptive truth or getting things right in The Will to Power, he writes that a powerful seduction fights on our behalf, the most powerful that there has ever beenthe seduction of truth-"Truth"? Who has forced this word on me? But I repudiate it; but I disdain this proud word: no, we do not need even this: we shall conquer and come to power even without truth (WTP 749).
The need for redemptive truth is embedded in the history of Western philosophical thought. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger point out that attempt to find something which is not made by human beings but to which human beings have a special privileged relation (not shared by the animals) is a futile passion, a foredoomed attempt to become a for-itself-in-itself (DRT 10). Nietzsche, through his critique of Truth and any foundation or ultimate grounds for beliefs emphasises the contingency of the self. As Rorty points out that the historicist turn has helped free us gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysicsfrom the temptation to look for an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking and of social progress (CIS xiii). In the next section, I will take on another approach to show the contingency of our beliefs and values by elaborating on Rortys arguments against the concept of truth existing out there in the world. Furthermore, I shall discuss the consequences of realizing this contingency and I shall put forward the view that the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair (DRT 10).
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Richard Rorty and a Post-Metaphysical Culture
Richard Rorty in his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature challenged a conception of philosophy that was almost unanimously accepted by mainstream analytical philosophers in the 1970s. This conception of philosophy, inherited from Descartes and given its clearest formulation by Kant, holds that before philosophers began to speculate about what is and what ought to be, they should first get clear about what they can know and what they cannot know (RR 7). From this standard conception of philosophy, it follows that all areas of philosophy should accede to epistemological judgements about the limits of knowledge. Central to traditional epistemology is representationalism, the view that we are, at the most basic level, minds containing beliefs of various sorts, and that our first task is to make sure our beliefs accurately represent reality as it is in itself (RR 7). The epistemological project of determining which representations are accurate and which are not are seen as having broad implications for culture as a whole. Philosophy has aimed to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide up culture into areas which represent reality well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretence of dong so) (PMN 3).
Epistemology-centred philosophy thus assumes that the primary goal of philosophers is to find a set of representations that are known in such a way as to be beyond the pale of doubt and once such privileged representations are identified, they can serve as the basis for the foundationalist project of justifying believes that make a claim to being knowledge (RR 8). Certain representations are taken to be inherently and automatically accurate because, there are beliefs based solely on the meanings of the terms they contain, analytic sentences such as A doe is a female deer and there are beliefs that immediately register the deliverances of sensory experience. The ideal of foundationalism is to ground our entire system of beliefs on the basis of such bedrock representations (RR 8).
In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty looked at core assumptions about foundationalism and representationalism. It is widely accepted in Anglo-American analytic schools of philosophy that the world consists of natural items and that our task
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is to achieve a correct mapping of these types a grasp of how the world is carved up at its joints. This approach assumes a sharp distinction between the world of facts, on the one hand, and our minds and their representations, on the other (RR 8). Furthermore, it also assumes that natural science alone is properly equipped to know reality as it is in itself since it succeeds in identifying facts and is the only form of inquiry that achieves true knowledge. Therefore, all other purported forms of knowledge (moral reflection, literary criticism...) can only hope to approximate the ideal of knowledge achieved by natural science (RR 8). Rorty feels that the entire conception of our epistemic situation is shot through with conceptual logjams and insoluble puzzles. The prime offender in this circle of problems is the uncritical assumption that representationalism gives us the right picture of our basic predicament. In order to circumvent these puzzles, Rorty suggests that we need to replace the notion of knowledge as the assemblage of representations with a pragmatist conception of knowledge (PMN 11) that focuses on what humans do in coping with the world rather than on what they find through theorizing (RR 8).
Rorty terms his brand of pragmatism as behaviourism, (terms the pragmatists conception of knowledge epistemological behaviourism) because it rejects the idea that experiences play a crucial role in making sense of our claims to knowledge and proposes instead that we see knowledge as based on social practices (RR 9). In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty takes three philosophers as role models for his critique of traditional philosophy Wittgenstein, Dewey and Heidegger. However, the arguments that he uses to support his view are taken from the analytic philosophers Quine and Sellars.
From Quines famous paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1953), Rorty takes the critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, the distinction between sentences that are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words they contain and others that are known through experience. The upshot of this argument is that any statement can be revised when it is found to be inconsistent with a large enough batch of our beliefs. Although we are inclined to suppose that such sentences as A doe is a female deer are analytic that is, true by virtue of the concepts they contain Quines argument suggests that the apparent infallibility of such sentences results more from their central position in our web of beliefs than from anything having to do with the meanings of
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concepts (RR 9). There will be a willingness to abandon such beliefs given that there is sufficient pressure from other areas of our web of beliefs. What this shows is that no beliefs have the status of being privileged representations solely because they are analytic or conceptually true. Instead, our beliefs form a holistic web in which the truth of any particular belief is established on the basis of its coherence with the whole set of beliefs (RR 9). From this critique of the idea that certain sentences are true only by virtue of the meanings of their terms, Quine calls into question the usefulness of the very idea of meanings understood as mental items in determining reference or the correctness of belief. Quines rejection of the idea idea the idea that ideas mediate between us and things is one key building block in Rortys attempt to show that the mental has no crucial role to play in making sense of our capacities as knowers (RR 9).
The second building block (RR 9) of Rortys epistemological behaviourism is Wilfrid Sellarss attack on the Myth of the Given in his essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Sellars in this essay, questions the traditional empiricist assumption that our ability to use language and our knowledge of the world must be grounded in immediate sensory experiences, in raw feels and preconceptual sensations are just given in the course of our transactions with objects (RR 9). Challenging this assumption, Sellars claims that all awareness is actually a linguistic affair. He argues this claim by drawing a distinction between (1) awareness as discriminative behaviour (the raw ability of sentient creatures to register inputs from the environment, a capacity common to humans and amoebas) and (2) awareness that involves the ability of sapient beings to perceive something as such and such). The first type of awareness is simply a matter of causal interaction with the world being affected by pain, for example or responding differentially to stimuli in ones environment (RR 10).
Sellars argues that while such episodes and states do occur, they can have no role to play in grounding knowledge. This is so because knowledge, that is, justified true belief, always has a propositional structure it is belief that such and such is the case. Moreover, the only way a proposition can be justified is by means of inferences from other propositions in Rortys word, there is no such thing as justification which is not a relation between propositions (PMN 183) (RR 10). From this argumentation, it follows that only the second type of awareness can be used to justify knowledge claims. Therefore, it is not the raw stimulus in the perceptual field that is relevant to knowledge,
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but the awareness that this is red, which contributes to the formation of justified true belief (RR 10).
Empiricism tried to sow that all concepts arise from particular instance of sensory experience but Sellars, like Wittgenstein before him, argues that one must already possess a fairly wide range of concepts before one can have sensory experience in the epistemically relevant sense (RR 10). In order for something to serve as a basis for knowledge, it is important to know what sort of thing it is, and that means being able to experience the thing under a description to see that that it is F but not-G, not H, and so on (RR 10). We have the ability to notice a sort of thing only if we already have the concept of that sort of thing (Sellars 5). For Sellars, having a concept is being able to use a word, therefore having a concept involves being a participant in a linguistic community in which justifying claims is carried out. Awareness in the relevant sense always presupposes the ability to abide by the norms that govern the shared space of reasons of a linguistic community (RR 10). Rorty thus writes that justification is always a matter of social practice (PMN 186). Sellars sum this up saying, The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or state [of observing] as that of knowing, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says (Sellars 76) (RR 10).
What Rorty interprets from Selllars is that justifying knowledge claims is not a matter of special relation between ideas (words and objects, but of conversation, of social practice (PMN 170). So forming beliefs, determining what we know, defending our claims these are all matters of interacting with others in a linguistic community where the members exchange justifications of assertions with one another. There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what ones peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims, and reasons. And this means that justification reaches bedrock when it has reached the actual practices of a particular community (RR 11). As Rorty writes in his essay Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, reference to the practices of real life people is all the philosophical
justification anybody could want for anything (ORT 157). What Quinean holism and Sellarsian antifoundationalism tell us that, in the search for grounds for beliefs, there is no exit from the beliefs and reasons we currently accept as a community (RR 11). The conclusion to draw is that nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we
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already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence (PMN 178).
Guignon and Hiley write that Rorty is the first to admit that this conception of the public space of reason entails a thoroughgoing ethnocentrism, the claim that the project of grounding knowledge claims is circumscribed by the practices of a particular cultural group at a particular point in history (11). Similar to the problem with the phenomenological method that I discussed in the previous section, humans have no way to step outside themselves to look at the unprocessed causal inputs as they are prior to processing in order to compare them to the way they come out after they have been processed. There is simply no way to gain access to reality as it is in itself in order to ground our ways of talking in the things themselves, no way to distinguish the role of our describing activity, our use of words, and the role of the rest of the universe in accounting for the truth of our beliefs (TP 87) (RR 12). If there is no independent test of the accuracy of our beliefs, and if there is no way to compare belief and object to see if they correspond, we have nowhere to turn for justifications than to the ongoing practice of reason-giving and deliberation (RR 12). Objects and their causal powers thus become explanatorily useless and they can play no role in justifying belief. justification for our beliefs can only come through other beliefs (TP 141). The
The picture of our situation as knowers presented by pragmatists leads to a radical overhaul our ordinary ways of thinking about truth. Traditionally, truth has been conceived as a matter of correspondence between beliefs in our mind and facts out there in the world, between a sentence and a chunk of reality which is somehow isomorphic to that sentence (ORT 137) (RR 12). This traditional picture of truth,
problematically assumes that we can pick out and identify facts, items that have objective existence independent of us and our beliefs, in order to establish that there is relationship between them and our beliefs. Yet the only way to pick out and identify a fact is by means of the vocabulary in which we formulate our beliefs. In this sense, facts are artefacts our language, not tings that have an independent existence distinct from us and our beliefs (RR 12-13). This argument does not deny that there are in fact objects out there in the world that have causal powers. But there is no way that these objects congeal into sentence-shaped facts except through our use of language to describe and talk about them (RR 13). Once we let go of the concepts of facts then beliefs can no
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longer be seen as intentional relation to reality, but instead as tools for coping with things, means of adaptation to the environment we have picked up over the course of our evolution (RR 13).
In the first essay of Contingency, irony, and solidarity entitled the contingency of language, Rorty, drawing from the influence of Wittgenstein and Davidson points out the impossibility of [stepping out] of the various vocabularies that we have employed in order to find a meta-vocabulary which somehow takes into account of all possible vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling (CIS xvi). While emphasizing the contingency of language, Rorty highlights that these are human beings who assert an intrinsic nature to things existing in the world. Rorty writes that Truth cannot be out there cannot exist independently of the human mind because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own unaided by the describing activities of human beings cannot (CIS 5). The world itself does not speak, only humans do, the world only causes us to hold beliefs when we have programmed ourselves with a language (CIS 6). What needs to be realised is that truth is not something which is discovered or beyond reality but in fact truths are made with our languages and the way we use them.
Truth and falsity are not out there in the world and without human propositions they are irrelevant. Since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings, so are truths (CIS 21). However, within particular language game or practice, we can speak of letting the world determine what is right or wrong. Given the game of checkers, for example, the position of the pieces on the board can justify us in saying, Red wins. But the idea that reality determines correctness seems to fail when we speak of vocabularies as wholes. When it comes to questions about vocabularies as wholes, our concern should be achieving solidarity with others in our community, not with getting reality right (RR 14). Rorty believes that we need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that the truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no
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sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations (CIS 5). If languages are indeed contingent in their origins then all our "intellectual and moral progress [is nothing more than] a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than [an] increase of understanding how things really are" (CIS 9).
Central to Rortys version of pragmatism is the concept of a vocabulary or language, a concept which he draws partly from Wittgenstein and partly from Quine and Davidson (RR 14). This concept can be best understood as a development of Thomas Kuhns conception of normal discourse in the The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Kuhn defined paradigms as disciplinary matrix which include
standardised and widely accepted texts and formulations; a tacitly agreed-upon sense of what is real; agreement about what questions are worth asking, what answers make sense, and what criteria of assessment are to be used; and a background of shared practices and skills that have become second nature for a particular group (RR 14-15) (Rouse 30-36). For Kuhn, science is normal as long as the vast majority of researchers in that field are in agreement about a disciplinary matrix. Science becomes revolutionary when conditions arise in which researchers are no longer in agreement about an older disciplinary matrix and are chaotically shopping around for a new paradigm (RR 15). Rorty generalises and expands Kuhns model of the disciplinary matrix to embrace human creations in all areas of culture, including poetry, morality, religious belief, pop culture, and so on (RR 15). As discussed above, Rortys view is that language is contingent. Concerning this point, Guignon and Hiley remark that: The fact that we speak one way rather than another is determined by historical events that could have been different, events that have no bearing on whether a way of speaking is more in touch with reality of objectively better than any other. For example, 500 years ago people were worried about the question of
consubstantiation in the Holy Eucharist. Today, not many people worry about this. Does this mean that we have gotten closer to the issues and questions that are rooted in the things themselves? On Rortys view, the answer is No. All that happened is that one of way of talking has replaced another. Perhaps in 500 years all our talk about quarks and punctuated equilibrium will seem as quaint as talk about consubstantiation seems to us today. Will that mean our successors are closer to the truth than we were? Once again, the answer is No. All it will mean,
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Rorty thinks, is that our contemporary scientific language game has been replaced by another, not because of insight into the way the world is, but rather in the same sort of way that dinosaurs came to be replaced by mammals. Change just happens [and it is contingent] (RR 15)
Language and vocabularies should not be seen as ways to map the world, they should be thought of as tools that may prove useful for some purposes and not for others (RR 15). Rorty emphasises on the contributions of Davidson and Wittgenstein in showing precisely this point. Rorty writes that Davidson does not view language as a medium for either expression or representation. So he is able to set aside the idea that both the self and reality have intrinsic natures which are out there waiting to be knownIn avoiding both reductionism and expansionism, Davidson resembles Wittgenstein. Both philosophers treat alternative vocabularies as more like alternative tools than like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. To treat them as pieces of a puzzle is to assume that all vocabularies are dispensable, or reducible to other vocabularies, or capable of being united with all other vocabularies in one grand unified super vocabulary. If we avoid this assumption, we shall not be inclined to ask questions like What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules? Are colours made more mind dependent than weights? What is the place of value in a world of fact?We should not even try to answer questions for doing so leads either to the evident failures of reductionism or to the short-lived success of
expansionism (CIS 11-12)
It is interesting to point out that for Rorty (unlike pragmatists like Dewey), even science has no privileged status among language games, it is just one of the tools among many others, with no special access to reality (RR 15-16). Rorty writes that science is one more human activity, rather thanthe place at which human beings encounter a hard, nonhuman reality (CIS 4). Like I discussed before, Rorty would like us to let go of ideas such as hard facts, he is of the view that the reputed hardness of facts [is] an artifact produced by our choice of language game (ORT 80). The strong conclusion Rorty draws from his conceptions of the contingency of language is that No area of culture and no period of history gets reality more right than any other. The difference between areas and epochs is their relative efficiency at accomplishing various
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purposes. There is no such thing as Reality to be gotten right only snow, fog, Olympian deities, relative aesthetic worth, the elementary particles, human rights, the divine right of kinds, the Trinity, and the like(RHC 375). The only way that one can speak of progress in knowledge, is to consider cases where the individuals produce radically new metaphors, ways of speaking that do not fit into any existing language game and so produce a sort of revolutionary discourse for a period of time (RR 16).
Rorty reckons that about two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of European intellectuals. (CIS 3). The revolutionaries and poets at the end of eighteenth century had begun to see that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed (CIS 7). It is because of this gradual realisation that the literary culture has arisen and has sidelined philosophy, Rorty mentions in an interview that Philosophy in the English-speaking world is simply not a big deal to most intellectuals, and the reason is that the weight of nonscientific culture has been thrown over to literature (OShea 61). Rorty sketches an account of intellectual and moral progress which fits in with Davidsons account of language. Rorty writes that To see the history of language, and thus of the arts, the sciences, and the moral sense, as the history of metaphor is to drop the picture of the human mind, or human languages, becoming better and better suited to the purposes for which God or Nature designed them, for example, able to express more and more meaning or to represent more and more facts. The idea that language has a purpose goes once the idea of language as medium goes. A culture which renounced both ideas would be the triumph of those tendencies in modern thought which began two hundred years ago, the tendencies common to German idealism, Romantic poetry and utopian idealism (CIS 16)
The critique of the idea of redemptive truth is important in Rortys project for it is still central to the inquiries of an epistemologically centred philosophical tradition. Towards the end of the first essay in Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Rorty bluntly summarises how historically, the contingent truth is thought of something which actually is part of some greater reality. Rorty writes that once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by
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science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one ore quasi divinity (CIS 22). According to Rorty, the ironist thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Davidson, suggest we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everythingour language, our conscience, our communityas a product of time and chance (CIS 22). In the second chapter of Contingency, irony, and solidarity entitled, The Contingency of Selfhood, Rorty draws on Nietzsche in trying to get us to see that our own identity as humans, our deepest self-understanding, has been shaped by accidental historical and cultural factors that have no binding significance on us. Rortys hope, is that recognizing this will open us to a way of living that sloughs off the shackles of older traditions and makes possible a freer, more play form of life (RR 21).
In the introduction to this paper, I put forth that there is both an existential and pragmatic strand to Rortys way of working out the consequences of
antifoundationalism. The existential strand of Rortys thoughts follows from his critique of the Cartesian picture of the self. In Part I of the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argued that the Cartesian tradition conflates ancient concerns about reason, personhood, and moral agency with the specifically modern concern about the nature of consciousness and what distinguishes us from the brutes (RR 21). Rorty shows that there is nothing about the Cartesian conception of mental that is necessary or intuitive. The idea of the mental is thus merely a part of the language game that we happen to be playing today, and once we realise that the Cartesian metaphor of the mirror of nature and the view of knowledge proper to it are optional, we realise that knowledge is not the sort of thing that presents a problem that a foundational theory of knowledge must solve. Knowledge is simply successful coping or what society allows us to get away with saying, or What inquiry, for the moment is, is leaving alone (RR 21). Rorty is able to undermine the central motivation for epistemology-centred philosophy, the kind of philosophy that extends from Plato through Descartes and Kant, by realizing that there is something optional about it, that is the need to liberate ourselves from the enslaving shadows and appearances of the cave, the need to ground our knowledge and discover truth in order to be fully human (RR 23). Rorty allows us to see the idea of knowing as one among various human activities and social practices, characterised by the entire
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contingency, fallibility, and finitude as the rest of life [Rorty] disconnects Cartesian Issues about irreducibility of mental representations from concerns about the self, autonomy and moral agency. No single description can capture the whole truth about human beings (RR 23). Rorty believes that both Nietzsche and Freud have ended all attempts to discover human nature or a substantial centre to the self, and have hereby undermined any notion that there is something about human being that is either realised through self-discovery or waiting to be developed through establishing the right sorts of social institutions (RR 23). Rortys antifoundationalism approach is ironic in the sense that it does acknowledge that people do have beliefs and values but there are no bases for those beliefs and values. Rortys pragmatism thus copes with this irony by emphasizing the need for solidarity in public life while at the same time, the existentialist strand of his philosophy allows a great deal of freedom in ones private sphere. Rorty does not see any need for any overarching standpoint that incorporates both [spheres of life] (RR 25).
The brand of pragmatism put forth by Rorty also has certain political consequences which are increasingly prominent in Rortys critique of philosophical liberalism and his prise for liberal democracy. Rorty criticises the need for philosophical liberalism to ground values of liberal culture such as justice and equality in a metaphysical conception of reason and human nature (RR 24). For instance, Michael Sandel, has given John Rawlss A Theory of Justice a Kantian reading. Sandel criticises Rawlss theory of justice as fairness because he thinks it cannot be supported by the conception of the individual antecedent to society that he sees as presupposed by Rawlss theory. By contrast, Rorty reads Rawls as a pragmatist rather than as a philosophical liberal. To say that Rawls is a pragmatist is to say that he is working out his conception of justice as fairness from within the background of our democratic social practices and institutions rather than trying to ground it in something outside our practices (RR 24). This is why when Rorty defines liberalism in terms of reducing cruelty, he does not attempt to answer the question Why is cruelty a bad thing? He believes that there is no noncircular answer to this or to any other moral question. If we accept Rortys ideas claiming that language, selfhood, and community are contingent then the most important consequence is that we cannot justify what we believe in or what we value in a way which is noncircular.
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There is simply no transcendent justification for what we believe and value. The self-grounding grounds that are traditionally used to legitimatise our beliefs and institutions will then appear to us as what they really are, as Nietzsche had described them as products of our own craving for metaphysical comfort, as symptoms of our wishful thinking rather than as foundation stones of reality (Guignon and Pereboom 93). I think it is precisely this realisation that all our beliefs and values are human constructs which distinguishes Rortys ironist intellectual from everybody else. As Rorty points out the ironist intellectual realises that there is no order beyond time and space which determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities (CIS xv). As Rorty points out then it becomes irrelevant to ask questions like Why not be cruel?, or How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self creation?, Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of n and m? (CIS xv). Rorty writes that people who think that there are indeed well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort is still, in his heart, a theologian or a metaphysician (CIS xv).
In my view, it is very important to note that Rorty points out that there is no reason to believe that there is an order which dictates the teleological picture of life. As long as we do not realise the contingency of our language, our conscience and our community, we will still treat our values and beliefs as if they are justified by something that is a quasi divinity. By accepting Rortys claim, we can do away with all justifications and conclude that all values, morality and scientific systems are social constructs that are invented or rather imposed upon the world by people through language in an attempt to satisfy their own craving for metaphysical or theological comfort. As Nietzsche described them, they are mere products of dogmatic systems of belief that are no longer tenable in the modern world and are ultimately matters of choice and preference.
One of the points of concern for me here is that when people take their final vocabularies 2as having a superiority over someone elses final vocabulary. It is the failure to see the contingency of our final vocabularies which results in this attitude, and what follows easily from such a blind attitude is the idea or rather the need to force upon
2
Words which human beings employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives (Rorty 73)
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ones own final vocabulary onto another persons vocabulary. For me, this idea is at the root of all conflicts which have bred hatred, violence and destruction. The second main point of concern for me (which is closely related to the first point of concern) is a problem that also arises from the failure to see our final vocabularies and our society as a historical contingency. The failure to see the contingency makes us uncritical of the final vocabularies that are passed onto us. Therefore the expressions that we use to justify our beliefs take the status of those timeless absolutes. Like I discussed in the previous section of this paper, it is because we mistake these contingent expressions constructed by humans for absolutes that we witness the institutionalization of hypocrisy in religion, ideologies and moral systems. By uncritically following our final vocabularies we fail to realise or understand exactly what it is that we value, thus we see a growing number of people that are not sincere to their absolute beliefs or values that they uphold.
Uncritically following final vocabularies will eventually lead to the unannounced secularization of values and beliefs. For the hypocrisy within the institutions that uphold those values will eventually result in cynicism and the hollowness of our contingent beliefs will become more apparent As Rorty points out that the heroes of his liberal society; the strong poet and the utopian revolutionary alienate themselves by protesting in the name of society itself against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own self-image (CIS 60). If we are to see ourselves as the historical contingencies that we are then we will indeed, critically look at all the beliefs and values that are passed onto us. The first condition for Rortys ironist is someone who has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary [they] currently use (CIS 73). He further goes on to add that these ironists realise that anything can be made to look good or bad by [simply redescribing it] (CIS 73) and also understand that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, [they are] always aware of the contingency the fragility of their own final vocabularies (CIS 74).
So if we are to realise the contingency of our own final vocabulary then we will not think of our beliefs and values as being superior or better than those that are central to someone elses final vocabulary. I, therefore, think that Rortys ironist would be far more tolerant (will be more accepting of people with different final vocabularies) and will not impose his final vocabularies onto others for he himself is in constant doubt of his own set of beliefs. Secondly, by being aware that our final vocabularies have no non circular
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justification, we will be in the position of being able to constantly re-evaluate and be critical of our social values, beliefs and institutions which govern us. So instead of blindly following the beliefs and values we have, what we need to do is compare different values. Rorty rightly points out through his description of the strong poet; we need to recontextualise what we uphold by using new vocabularies. Thus we will be able to propagate our intellectual culture and develop new vocabularies with changing times instead of clinging onto final vocabularies and the traditional epistemology-centred philosophy which will result in the freezing over of our intellectual culture.
Rortys views have come under substantial criticism. The common thread of the criticism is that his critique of the epistemology-centred philosophy, his rejection of the idea that liberal democracy is in need of justification, and his notions of loyalty and solidarity, taken together, undercut the possibility of meaningful criticism of the practices of ones culture (RR 27). Part of what arousesoutrage among philosophers [(who are critical of Rorty)] is [his] willingness to throw out the entire philosophical tradition that defines the work of mainstream philosophy today (RR 30).
I think most of such criticism against Rorty is based on other philosophers unwillingness to let go of the idea of redemptive truth. I shall go on to show how stale philosophy has actually become under the pretence of being inherently foundationalist and essentialist. Against the charges of relativism, Rorty uses Davidsons influential essay On the Very Idea of Conceptual Schemes to show that the idea of conceptual scheme, as conceived by philosophers who think such notion implies conceptual relativism or global scepticism, is unintelligible. [Davidson] does this by trying to show that we have no way to individuate or identify schemes in a way that enables us to speak of different schemes. If we can find no intelligible basis on which it can be said that schemes are different, Davidson says, then we have no criteria of identity for such things, and the notion is, strictly speaking, meaningless (Davidson 198) (RR 17). Relativism in the pernicious sense, for example, is the view that there are as many meanings of the word true as there are procedures at different times and places conclusion that every belief is as good as every other belief. Rorty claims that relativism in this sense is either self-refuting or a view that no one holds. He claims not to be a relativist in this pernicious sense, because he is loyal to the beliefs and practices we actually share at this time. Relativism in the innocuous sense, in contrast, is the view
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that there is nothing philosophical to be said about our beliefs ad practices, In other worlds relativism in the innocuous sense is simply pragmatism (RR 27).
Before I go on to discuss Rortys views on the post-metaphysical, literary culture, I think it will be a good idea to look at the way Rorty summarises how the need for redemption leads to the shift from religion to philosophy and then literature. Rorty writes that the transition from religion to philosophy began with the revival of Platonism in the Renaissance, the period in which humanists began asking the same questions about Christian monotheism that Socrates had asked about Hesiods pantheon. Socrates had suggested to Euthyphro that the real question was not whether ones actions were pleasing to the gods, but rather which gods held the correct views about what actions ought to be done. When that latter question was once again taken seriously, the road lay open to Kants conclusion that even the Holy One of the Gospels must be judged in the light of ones own conscience. The transition from a philosophical to a literary culture began shortly after Kant, about the time that Hegel warned us that philosophy paints its gray on gray only when a form of life has grown old. That remark helped the generation of Kierkegaard and Marx [to] realise that philosophy was never going to fill the redemptive role that Hegel himself had claimed for it. Hegels supremely ambitious claims for philosophy almost instantly flip-flopped into their dialectical opposite. His System was no sooner published than it began to be treated as a self-consuming artifact, the reductio ad absurdum of a form of intellectual life that suddenly seemed to be on its last legs. Since Hegels time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy, in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs. In the literary culture which has been emerging during the last two hundred years, the question Is it true? has yielded pride of place to the question Whats new? (DRT 4-5)
The literary, post-metaphysical culture finds redemption in neither a noncognitive relation to a non-human person [or] in a cognitive relation to propositions, but in non-cognitive relations to other human beings, relations mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs. These artifacts provide glimpses of alternative ways of being human. This sort of culture drops a presupposition common to
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religion and philosophythat redemption must come from ones relation to something that is not just one more human creation (DRT 7). According to Rorty, Kierkegaard correctly pointed out that philosophy began to set up itself up as a rival to religion when Socrates suggested that our self-knowledge was knowledge of Godthat we had no need of help from a non-human person, because the truth was already within us. But literature began to set itself up as a rival to philosophy when people like Cervantes and Shakespeare began to suspect that human beings were, and ought to be, so diverse that there is no point in pretending that they all carry a single truth deep in their bosoms (DRT 7).
If someone believes that there is indeed redemptive truth out there, then they take philosophy as their guide of life. Since the premise of philosophy is that there is a way things really areway humanity and the rest of the universe are and always will be, independent of any merely contingent human needs and interests. Knowledge of this way is redemptive. It can therefore replace religion. The striving for Truth can take place of the search for God (DRT 8). Inspired by both Nietzsche and Rorty, I have shown the danger of holding on to the idea that there is indeed something like Truth out there in the world. If we want to prevent nihilism and the freezing-over of our intellectual culture then we need to accept that philosophy has indeed failed to live up to its premise. Literature, which is todays high culture treats books as human attempts to meet human needs, rather than as acknowledgements of the power of a being that is what it is apart from any such needs. God and Truth, are, respectively the religious and the philosophical names for that sort of being (DRT 4).
In the previous section, I mentioned how thinkers like Sartre see the quest for knowledge of quasi-divinity as being a futile passion but I would agree with Rorty and see philosophy as one our greatest imaginative achievements, on a par with the invention of the gods (DRT 10). Both religion and philosophy are relatively primitive, yet glorious, literary genres. They are genres in which it is now becoming increasingly difficult to write, but the genres which are replacing them might never have emerged had they not been read as swerves away from religion, and later as swerves away from philosophy (DRT 11). However, at the same time it has to be understood that literature is not going in any particular direction and we should not hope that it will one day supply us with the redemptive truth. Rorty suggests that literary culture should be seen as a
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self-consuming artifact and perhaps the last of its kind (DRT 27). In Rortys utopia, the intellectuals will have given up the idea that there is a standard against which the products of the human imagination can be measured other than their social utility, as this utility is judged by a maximally free, leisured and tolerant global community (DRT 28).
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Conclusion and the Future of Philosophy
In the introduction to this paper, my main point of contention with the traditional epistemology-centred philosophies search for final accounts was that if, achieved, it would result in the freezing-over of culture and the dehumanisation of human beings (PMN 377). Both Nietzsche and Rorty manage to show that final accounts of knowledge are not grounded in absolutes and there is no such thing as truth out there that is waiting to be discovered. The tradition of philosophy in the West began to set itself up as a rival to religion. It replaced the belief in God for the search of Truth and it assumed that as humans; we have a privileged access to this truth. Philosophy came to base itself on the ideal of redemptive truth. This was defined as something that is the reality behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret (DRT 3). The idea of redemptive truth requires the conviction that a set of beliefs which can be justified to all human beings will also fill all the needs of all human beings (DRT 10). Rortys antifoundationalism and critique of the epistemology-centred philosophy rejects the idea that such a truth exists out there in the world. By highlighting the contingency of language, self and the community, Rorty propounds that truth is made in our language, it is not something which is discovered. As Rorty points out, the world does not speak, only humans do. Even though, there are objects with causal powers out there in the world, there are as such, no sentences which talk about such objects. All descriptions of the world are made by humans and hence the idea of redemptive truth is nothing more than a human construct a product of our own imagination. The exhibition of contingency, extending to language, society, and the self, is Rorty's central theme. His work attempts to cure us of the desire to employ metaphysics to explain away the chance events that made us who we are; it seeks to give us the courage of our contingencies (OShea 59). Rortys antifoundationalism thus expands the possibilities of self description seeking to rehumanise humans by affirming freedom and open up possibilities of greater tolerance.
By doing away with both theological and metaphysical assumptions about the world, man can truly recognize his freedom to explore his imagination in a post-metaphysical culture. Just as the enlightenment produced a post-religious secular culture in the West, a post-metaphysical culture would abandon the need to find redemptive truth through
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philosophy. Rorty writes that a post-metaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a post-religious one, and equally desirable (CIS xvi). The rise of the literary culture has shown that people have realized that truth is indeed made and not out there to be discovered. I also believe that in order to make our inquires more useful, we should not aim for finding answers that supposedly represent the true nature of things but we should aim for redescribing and asking better questions. Philosophers need to recognize that their discipline was a transition between the religious and the literary age. Philosophers as Rorty writes can still serve the the main purpose they've served in the past [that] has been to get past common sense, past common ways of speaking, past vocabularies; modifying them in order to take account of new developments like Enlightenment secularism, democratic governments, Newton, Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. One thing you can count on philosophy professors doing is what William James called "weaving the old and the new together," in order to assimilate weird things like Freudian psychology with moral common sense (OShea 60) . However, they should at the same time critically look at the underlying assumptions of the traditional epistemology-centred philosophy and seek to redefine the discipline by asking better questions.
Rortys distinction between the private and the public sphere allows people with different final vocabularies to be more tolerant towards each other, since in his utopia there is a heightened sense of contingency. Furthermore, in a post-metaphysical culture the emphasis would be to explore human imagination and cooperation will be substitute competition, since the concept of getting things right or to conform with the true nature of reality will be absolutely unimportant. There will be no finale or the freezing over of our intellectual culture. In this post-metaphysical culture people will have stopped thinking that the human imagination is getting somewhere, that there is one far off cultural event towards which all cultural creation moves. They will have given up the identification of redemption with the attainment of perfection. They will have taken fully to heart the maxim that it is the journey that matters (DRT 28).
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Bibliography
Arcilla, Rena Vincente. "Contingency in Rorty's Philosophy." Studies in Philosophy and Education 12(1993): 201-203. Askar, Abbas. Interpretation in Humanities: Gadamers Hermeneutics (HUM 244 Paper 2) Askar, Abbas. Nietzsche and Existentialism: On Absolutes and Annihilating Nihilism. 2008 (HUM 346 Paper 1) Askar, Abbas. On Realising the Contingency of our Final Vocabularies. 2008 (HUM 346 Final Exam) Brandom, Robert B. ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 Casey, M.A. Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty. Lexington Books, 2002. Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. 2nd. Gemes, Ken. "Nietzsche's Critique of Truth." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 52, No. 1(1992): 47-65. Guignon, Charles, and David. R. Hiley, ed., Richard Rorty Cambridge University Press, 2003 Guignon, Charles, and Derk Pereboom. Existentialism: Basic Writings. Indianapolis!Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc Kolenda, Konstantin. Rorty's Humanistic Pragmatism. Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1990. Nietzsche, Friedrich . The Antichrist . Prometheus Books Nietzsche, Friedrich . The Gay Science translated by Richard Poit. Hackett Publishing Co: 1995 Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale,. New York: Vintage, 1968. Nietzsche, Friedrich . Twilight ofthe Idols: Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Duncan Large. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, O'Shea, Michael. "Richard Rorty: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Culture (Interview)." The Harvard Review of Philosophy (1995): 58-66. Quine, Willard V.O. Two Dogmas of Empircism in his From a Logical Point of View.
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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989. Rorty, Richard. " The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture." 2001 1-28. 28 Aug 2008 <http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/pdf/rorty.pdf> Rorty, Richard. Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism, London: Methuen, 1948 as published in Existentialism: Basic Writings Sellars, Wilfrid. Empiricism and the Philosopy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and a Study guide by Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. (The essay first appeared in Minnesota studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol 1, in 1956)
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The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche To A Postmetaphysical Culture

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HUM 301-RESEARCH THESIS

THE PROBLEM OF REDEMPTIVE TRUTH

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

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The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

that could answer a

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

Nietzsche and the Project of Self-Creation

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

institutionalization of hypocrisy in religion, ideologies etc.

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

Richard Rorty and a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

expansionism (CIS 11-12)

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

Conclusion and the Future of Philosophy

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

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