Today’s study point (at the “library” (in Rorty’s Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth in the chapter “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”) brought me back to the issue of Rorty’s more expanded understanding of ethnocentrism. Again (or rather to articulate on points I’ve made earlier), the boards we tend to associate with on Facebook involve a kind of ethnocentrism (that is by Rorty’s definition (to the extent that when we ally ourselves with a given board, we do so because we happen to share certain assumptions. And it is that ethnocentrism that allows us to engage in productive discourses together.
That said, Rorty points to two different approaches to social justice: the Kantian de-0ntic approach in which we have some universal non-temporal standard that applies to everyone that could possibly exist in the universe, and the Hegelian identification with community: hence Rorty’s embrace of the ethnocentric in that by achieving empathy with those within our immediate circle (especially in the case of progressives (we develop the tools to empathize with those in the expanding circles of the others. In other words, the others don’t need to become us in order for us to empathize with them and choose policies that will help them. All that really matters is that we help make things better for them. In other words, Rorty as I understand him is arguing that we have to work from our ethnocentric position towards understanding and justice for the other: a, BTW, typical Bourgeoisie Liberal position. And would that really matter to the individual it happens to be helping?
And the main reason I’m on about this today is that I see a connection with Arthur Lupia’s (in Uninformed: Why People Know so Little About Politics and What We Can Do About It (model concerning how people tend to develop intellectually: from information to knowledge to competence. And the reason that I bring Lupia into this is that Rorty seems to have an instinctive grasp of the model. Rorty understands that the process always starts with information. But more importantly, he understands (as Lupia did (that the knowledge part of the process is always intertwined with the individual’s belief system. In other words, the knowledge part of the process (dependent yet exploitive of the information offered to it (is always facts, data, and belief systems intertwined. The knowledge part of the process is always organic in nature in that it has to grow out of itself: an evolutionary mandate if you will –even neuro-plasticity if you think about it.
To put it another way: our growth process is not so much a matter of making ourselves a completely different other, but of always reaching beyond ourselves into the “impossible other” that Lacan described. We grow out of ourselves towards the other.