Dear Diary Moment 3/22/2020
Have recently been going through Rorty’s Objectivity, Relativism, Truth and am struck, yet again, with the double-edge sword we “fuzzier” thinkers are faced with. At the heart of Rorty’s pragmatism is the recognition that language is not a mirror representative of reality, but a rather tool by which we adapt to a given reality. Language is one of the primary means by which we have managed to evolve. I mean think about it: would we actually think with words unless we had developed a language to communicate with others outside of us in the first place. And given intimate relationship that implies, it’s easy to see how some confusion might emerge between reality and language.
And we see a pragmatic overlap with Deleuze who encouraged people, when reading his books, to not ask what it means but, rather, what it does. And this later evolves into his work with Guattari in which it was argued that a book does not so much reflect the world as form a rhizome with it. (Think: Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.) The point here, again, is that language is not a matter of perfectly reflecting reality as it is utilizing it to create an effect on reality: a kind of feedback loop.
That said, we are now looking at the most telling expression of the double-edged sword when it comes Trump and many Republicans. They basically look at language as a tool that can get them what they want if they manipulate the rules of the language game –albeit to the point of divorcing language completely from reality. And this, of course, is what is behind these neo-classicist criticisms of Continental and Pragmatic thinkers: this complaint that the “fuzzier” thinkers and soft disciplines are to blame for the so-called “post-truth” society we are in.
The problem, however, for the neo-classicists is that they seem to think that the epistemological system of the Pragmatics and the Continental was (or is even (prescriptive, like they were describing how thought should work, when, in fact, they were actually describing how thought actually evolves. What the Pragmatics and Continentals were doing is seeing thought, and its relationship with reality, for what it is as compared to what the neo-classicists think it should be. And they make this assertion based on the neo-classicists’ failure to find some “skyhook” or transcendent epistemological criteria by which all statements can be judged.
In other words, they put their faith in the free market of ideas and an open and democratic discourse that lets it come out in the wash, even if every once in a while it produces a Trump.