Over the past two months I have been trying to redress a gaping hole in my education - modern philosophy. I had a pretty good grounding in ancient and medieval philosoophy, and over the years in Rambam, but never formally studied what came later. So I have been working on existentialism and phenomenology. It is like looking into a new, inverted and strange world... through a mirror.... darkly. Living without faith and moorings is really a very different way to live. I hope to soon post on some thoughts and conclusions from this dubious pursuit. In the meantime here is something from a eulogy for the Father of Post-Modernism.
"He read Thomas Kuhn’s critique of science. He read the later Wittgenstein. He read Quine. He read Foucault. And he also returned to John Dewey. He read him along with disillusioned logical positivist, and he gradually went through a deep change of heart and what would become his own philosophy began to take shape: Philosophical writing should not help us get closer to the truth; it should do the opposite: Cure us from the desire for it. Rorty’s was a plan of philosophical therapy.
Rorty did not think of himself as a great philosophical innovator. He thought he was only helping to make explicit what had been latent for many years and was now coming into its own. As he retold the history of modern Western thought, it was not so much a quest for truth as a gradual relinquishing of it in favor of greater pluralism. First there was religious truth, firmly anchored in heaven; it drove people to kill over dogma in endless religious wars. Then came the Enlightenment, and truth was taken down from heaven to earth. It became our own, and therefore more flexible.
But Enlightenment still wished to set truth on the firm objective foundations of Nature, Reason, Science. It still carried the seeds of dogmatism and intolerance, which served, among other things, to justify colonial enterprises. Then came Hegel, who made truth relative to time and place. But Hegel still thought all the many relative truths of history were part of an all-encompassing dialectical process that ultimately would lead to the one Absolute Truth. Darwin came next, and taught us to think differently about historical processes: History had no telos. It was random and led nowhere. Though Darwin wrote about biology, his impact on Western culture in general was profound. William James, Nietzsche and then Dewey, Rorty believed, spelled out the philosophical implications of the theory of evolution: The human environment, too, was ever changing, and here, too, the changes led to no particular destination. They certainly did not lead to The Truth. Our ideas are not objectively or universally true. They are born of time and place. They are means to help us cope with a specific environment. Since the environment is in constant flux, our ideas must also constantly change. We should stop asking if they capture “the true essence of reality,” and start asking if they are useful to us in the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Now, only one last step was needed: Dewey still believed in science, and he still thought that usefulness was an objective criterion. What works, he thought, is ipso facto the Truth. All that was left to complete the move begun by the Enlightenment was to forget about objective Truth altogether. This would be “neo-pragmatism.” It would be a final farewell to truth. And this would be good news. It would help, Rorty wrote, “make the world’s inhabitants more pragmatic, more tolerant, more liberal, more receptive to the appeal of instrumental rationality.”
Rorty’s neo-pragmatism had a seductive subtext. The text said that liberalism needed no objective philosophical justification, but the subtext seemed to supply it with one: If all beliefs were relative, then a tolerant liberal democracy seemed to be the only philosophically consistent conclusion. Forgetting about The Truth will make us more egalitarian and less authoritarian, more open and less self-assured, more tolerant and less fanatic.
Rorty’s success in advancing these ideas was spectacular. They became the intellectual prejudice of the time. When we speak of “postmodernism” we don’t mean Foucault’s dark anti-liberal views, we mean something like Rortian “anti-ideological liberalism.” Doing away with Truth will pave the way for a more liberal polity. But philosophically speaking, as exhilarating as the ride was, it ultimately fell short of successes, both analytically and as a way to think about ethics.", from http://www.forward.com/articles/11035/
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