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To me it’s historically unmatched. I’ve never read or heard of a period like this and I’ve read about many historical periods. But not one in which you can talk to young people the way you can at the college level today and find out that they believe nothing, want nothing, hope nothing, expect nothing, dream nothing, desire nothing. Push them far enough and they’ll say “yeah, I’ve got to get a job. I spent a lot of money at Duke”. That’s not what I’m talking about here. They hope nothing. Expect nothing. Dream nothing. Desire nothing. And it is a fair question to ask whether a society that produces this reaction in its young is worthy of existence at all. It really is. It’s worth asking that. Whether it’s worth being here at all
In 1993 Rick Roderick talks about the students he met while teaching at Duke university. As he goes on to say, these are the youth he met at a site of great privilege… what of youth elsewhere? More to the point, what of the society which works to produce the conditions within this (postmodern) reason manifests itself. What I take Roderick to essentially be saying here is that late capitalism has begun to produce the last men of whom Nietzsche wrote a century earlier. Of course this is ultimately an empirical thesis and one that can only be investigated from a standpoint which takes human concerns seriously. Otherwise the possibility of understanding their debasement and loss is foreclosed from the start.
Truth might be better understood as ‘practical adequacy’, that is in terms of the extent to which it generates expectations about the world and about results of our actions which are realised. Just how practically adequate different parts of our knowledge are will vary according to where and to what they are applied. The differences in success of the same beliefs in different contexts and different beliefs in the same context suggest that the world is structured and differentiated, and has some degree of stability, so that while some things are transient, some are not.
While on the one hand I find this account given by Andrew Sayer plausible, on the other it seems much less so, all the more given that the fact that it’s offered in conscious opposition to Rorty’s pragmatism i.e. what is true is what works. As Rorty once said of science “Modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope”. Obviously there’s a trivial sense in which this is obviously false: unless we accept that modern science somehow captures something that, say, Voodoo does not then the manipulative capacity it grants us becomes nonsensical. Modern science allows us to cope - an unfortunate term given that it conflates the practical-instrumental and moral-existential dimensions of our engagement with the world – in the way Rorty admits it does because while it many not ‘correspond’ (with all the centuries of philosophical baggage that term brings with it) to the world, it certainly offers us the conceptual tools and structures our engagements with the world in a way that’s possessed of a far greater degree of practical adequacy than the alternatives available to us.
Once we dispense with the representationalist metaphores that Rorty is objecting to – i.e. that the world out there corresponds to the representation of it in my mind - the difference between what Rorty’s account of truth and that which Sayer gives seems rather semantic. Perhaps it’s far more a consequence of Rorty’s intellectual pseudo-radicalism and inability to break from the confines of the analytic tradition – the sort of thing which leads him into the quagmire of claiming that there’s no privileged relation between discourse and the world - than it is of some fundamental anti-realism that’s genuinely felt? One can’t help but feel that if Rorty had simply started life in a literature department, he never would have meandered into the intellectual cul-de-sac that he did. Or indeed if he’d trained in a Sociology department, he might well have endorsed the account of truth as practical adequacy that Sayer’s proposing.
I really like the idea of rights as a global meta-discourse: something that informs how we think about humanity on a universal level, the dimensions of human particularity and the ethical/social/political questions that flow from this. However as a political discourse, active in the life of capitalist liberal democracies, I think it’s a very negative thing: it goes hand-in-hand with a zero-sum approach to human freedom, a juridicial understanding of social conflict and self-assertion of a kind which is fundamentally inimical to solidarity and collective agency. Is it possible to contextualise rights discourse or is the extent to which it’s taken up and seen to work as a language in which to speak about the human moral/political situation a consequence of its affectivity, the intuitive semantic force of it? Taking this as anempirical premise then, if it’s the case, does this suggest we ought to give up rights discourse because despites its moral and conceptual value in certain domains it will create and reinforce the kind of liberal and legalistic individualism which meshes so neatly with the capitalist order and which provides its moral and ideological underpinning i.e. the people offering the most moral and moralising defence of capitalist are those who are defending the political and economic commitments that flow from liberial individualism (formal and negative freedom with all this entails in terms of tacit commitments about the human existential situation).
According to Mannheim, all human thought is “existentially bound” and can be properly understood only by taking into account the situation from which it arises. This applies even to philosophical thought, which claims to be unaffected by particular points of view and to embody truth as such, thus assuming absolute validity for itself. But this claim to absolute validity cannot be refuted simply by pointing out that all thinking is situation-bound. It can be seriously undermined only by tracing specific philosophies back to their origins in particular situations.
Relativizing in the context of existential-boundness is the same thing as relativism only – and Mannheim stresses this – to the extent that historical understanding is consistent with a concept of truth that is itself traditionally bound and goes back to an era in which “existentially bound thinking” had not yet been discovered.
Is this the basis for treating philosophy in a sociological way i.e. recognising the situatedness of philosophy as a social practice, while avoiding the collapse of philosophical inquiry into those conditions by rejecting a universalising theory of truth – at least in the human domain – and instead, as Taylor suggests, adopting a form of practical reasoning to ensure that inquiry can be both truth-functional and situated.
I just came across this group on facebook trying to get angry people together to make the world a better place (etc):
This is about fundamentally changing the society we live in, and that begins with each one of us. I propose a code through which we should live our lives:
1. Treat others as you would like to be treated
2. Respect other people’s beliefs – to do this, you must not assume your beliefs are right; you must recognise that other’s beliefs, views, opinions and choices are of equal value to your own; and you must not allow your beliefs to impact other peoples’ views, opinions and choices.
If other people’s beliefs are as equally valid as mine and I must not* allow my own beliefs to impact on other people then how the hell do you ever intend to justifiably make a difference to anything in the world given that there are scores of people who happen to disagree with you about what you’re trying to do? Obviously you could say this is simply an intellectual fallacy but in so far as it structures the way people approach social engagement – in this case it’s offered as a “code through which we should live our lives” – then I can’t see how it can do anything but disable the potential for actually making any change given that such change becomes illegitimate (again, says who?) as soon as it runs up against “other peoples’ views, opinions and choices”. Though obviously the issue here is not illustrating why the above approach is flawed, anyone who sits down and thinks about it properly for a second could work that out, it’s why such an ethic has (tacitly or otherwise) wormed its way into the moral common sense of a significant proportion of my generation so that there’s a mass fallacious influence from a morally worthwhile desire to respect other people to the incoherence quoted above.
*Whose belief is this exactly and why does it take priority over my own? Or is this beleif just objectively right? If so then why on earth can’t other beliefs be objectively right and hence take priority over a duty of respect to the wrong beliefs of others?
In this otherwise excellent book I just came across a passage that really bugged me:
Transcendence matters because the tensions between freedom and justification, individuality and belonging, pleasure and suffering, cannot be resolved within ourselves, only outside ourselves. In our Enlightenment Flatland, we can turn to other people, and to a rational conception of morality. They are valuable, indispensable. They are good things, but they will tend to let us down, and we them, because we and they do not go all the way down.
I really dislike this notion that the tensions inherent to human life can find some ultimate resolution in higher reality. Part of what it is to be human is to try and negotiate between these conflicting drives and imperatives and it is, at least in part, through such negotiation and the difficult choices that perpetually recur that our identities grow and change. In some sense I think the attempt to escape these conflicts and the never-ending questions they pose represents a denial of part of what it is to be human.
It’s weird to agree with the Pope but in this case I do:
Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of education is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ego
I just read a story about Alexander the Great in India around 325 BC. He came across a group of Jain philosophers who payed no attention to him. When he asked
King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! [...] You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.
Initially I loved this rebuke. The more I think about it though, the more the passivity of it bothers me. The natural order robs Alexander of his greatness and reveals it as simple hubris yet it also robs people of the moral resources to oppose a conqueror. I guess this is the problem I have with much of the Eastern philosophy I’ve encountered. Though the Bodhisattva Ideal doesn’t neatly fall into this criticised category.
A group of people was once traveling through a desert, when it so happened that three of them strayed away and got lost. Tired and thirsty this trio wandered around the desert in the hope of finding some respite. Finally their quest came to an end when they discovered a high well. The first man rushed to it, looked over the wall and found it full of delicious ambrosial water. He immediately exclaimed in a gesture of frenzied euphoria and jumped into it never to come back. The second too did the same. The third man finally walked over quietly over to the well, peeped over its high wall and then turned around and went back, returning to the desert to search for his other fellow travelers, to help guide them to this paradise.
A bodhisattva wishes to help all beings attain nirvana. He must therefore refuse to enter nirvana himself, as he cannot apparently render any services to the living beings of the worlds after his own nirvana. He thus finds himself in the rather illogical position of pointing the way to nirvana for other beings, while he himself stays in this world of suffering in order to do good to all creatures. This is his great sacrifice for others. He has taken the great Vow: “I shall not enter into final nirvana before all beings have been liberated.” He does not realize the highest liberation for himself, as he cannot abandon other beings to their fate. He has said: “I must lead all beings to liberation. I will stay here till the end, even for the sake of one living soul.”
I don’t remember reading this in the History of Western Philosophy – though it’s been a while since I looked at it – even so I just came across it quoted somewhere else and I liked it a lot.
The concept of ‘truth’… has inculcated the necessary element of humility [into politics]. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness – the intoxication of power.
The lower house of the US Congress has voted down a $700bn (£380bn) plan aimed at bailing out Wall Street.
The rescue plan, a result of tense talks between the government and lawmakers, was rejected by 228 to 205 votes in the House of Representatives.
About two-thirds of Republican lawmakers refused to back the rescue package, as well as 95 Democrats.
Shares on Wall Street plunged within seconds of the announcement, after earlier falls on global markets.
A White House spokesman said that President George W Bush was “very disappointed” by the result.
A US Treasury spokesman said that Mr Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke would meet to discuss the way forward.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7641733.stm
I was surprised by the extent of the Republican rebellion on this. Is this a principled defense of free-market ideals and is it one which trumps national self-interest? Obviously many other factors may be in play here. Even so, it’s an interesting counter-example to the kind of reductive critique of free-market economics that explains it away as a rhetorical tool of capitalists.
This is not an either/or thing: it would be a mistake to counterpose the ‘genuine’ beliefs of those Republican rebels who’ve defended these principles against the false/dishonest believers who’ve abandoned their principles out of self-interest. The beliefs people adopt and the stands they’re willing to take intersect with the social relationships they find themselves embedded within and the personal projects they self-interestedly pursue through them. A properly realist approach to understanding political beliefs, what they mean and why they form, requires that we avoid reductive explanations and try and understand the structure of people’s beliefs from the inside. Normative assessment of them should not inform the process of understanding and reductive explanations frequently smuggle them in in a way that precludes our properly understanding what people believe and what those beliefs mean to them. We can then engage with this understanding in a normative way but the question of why people believe what they do is logically distinct from of our appraisal of them. This is a methodological claim, rather than any sort of metaphysical one: it’s not claiming the fact/value distinction but simply saying that unless we’re careful excessive value-commitments can undermine particular factual inquiries.
