Pragmatic Studies:

“Would you say that a belief system is no more than an aggregate of many facts accrued over time? - Or is belief an emotional condition which then selects facts to maintain itself?” –Chris

“I would argue, Chris, that since it would be hard to see how one might derive a belief from a fact such as 1+1=2, that beliefs are more closely tied with data (formal and informal (and truth as defined by Rorty: an intellectual construct that seems sufficiently justified.” –me

“As you know we are born into many beliefs religious and political, sometimes seeming more like ideology than belief but functioning the same. Beliefs are required for everything we do. I think you’re right. They do seem to have a life of their own when tribalism and identity are entwined with beliefs.” –David

“Yes, the problem with tautolgoical facts is they tend to be trivial and lack the complex meaningfulness of belief which as David McDivitt explains is also about constructing a narrative. There’s a circularity in believing in the idea that facts make up your beliefs, if that makes sense…” –Chris

“Yes, I agree with David McDivitt’s point as well. And it does make sense. In fact, I would argue that the endgame of truth (with a lower-case “t” as defined by the pragmatic approach (is synonymous with beliefs. I would also argue (in terms of the circularity you describe (that the relationship between facts, data, and truths is not one way. Our truths (beliefs (can sometimes effect what facts we choose to focus on.

“Because of this,I stand with David McDivitt’s stand against over-zealous secular obtuseness when it comes to dismissing religious beliefs. The problem with Cervais’ point is that he confuses data with facts.” –me

And I would say the same concerning Dawkins’s, Bill Maher’s, and Sam Harris’ rather obtuse dismissal of religious belief systems that are based on informal data that leads to their individual truths. And I am not (being an agnostic myself: an atheist that hedges their bets (suggesting that we accept religious belief systems. What I am suggesting, however, is that we push the pragmatic agenda to the point of recognizing that there are religious people out there who see the same problems with Capitalism that people like me do. And for my pragmatic purposes, it really doesn’t matter what belief systems my potential allies may hold, that is as long as it gets the job done: social justice: a world in which I can enjoy what I have while knowing that the worse off among us have, at least, a minimum of comfort.

Rorty says:

“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…” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 135-137). Kindle Edition.

So by what criteria do we dismiss religious statements beyond the pragmatic criteria of working in a pragmatic way? In other words, from a pragmatic stance, if a religious perspective is useful to the extent that it furthers social justice (if it works to our ends, there is no reason we shouldn’t use it.

“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.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 137-138). Kindle Edition.

I mainly throw this out to my worthy (as in useful (jam-mate, David McDivitt, who crystallized this point for me which applies to both of my main influences: Deleuze and Rorty (:I’m drawn to French concepts while being equally drawn to the Anglo-American style of exposition . Unfortunately, I cannot track his actual quote and will have to paraphrase it. He basically pointed out that in the old days, the objects that occupy our space were considered to be the language of God. It therefore followed that anyone capable of interpreting that language more accurately than anyone else had to be higher up the ladder: the hierarchy. And we can see, based on this, how that dynamic has managed to evolve into the hierarchies and secular religions of today –something I hope to go into later.

That said, for today’s rhizome, I want to go into the dynamic that I have been seeing throughout Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Pragmatism in general, and has haunted our cultural history in its capacity to undermine the hierarchal belief systems that are always re-emerging: the nihilistic perspective: that which comes from the often unconscious recognition that we are (when we could easily not be (as we are as compared to infinite number of others we could be, that which recognizes, eventually, that any argument we can make about our world ultimately breaks down to assumptions that, ultimately, float on thin air. Note, for instance, Rorty’s recognition of the limits of his pragmatism:

“The difficulty faced by a philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this suggestion - one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist - is to avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are. For this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature.”

What Rorty is up against (and pre-empting (is the very argument that the nihilistic perspective is always confronting: the skeptic’s paradox. And his approach, as I will try to demonstrate, is closer to the nihilistic perspective than that of the skeptic.

Say you walk up to a skeptic and the nihilistic perspective and say:

“You cannot say that there are no absolutes, since to do so is to try to establish an absolute.”

The skeptic will do what they usually do, scrutinize, until they come to the realization that there is a big difference between saying we live in a world in which there are no absolutes and actually living in one, and just go about the business of being skeptics. This is because they recognize in the argument a failure to make the leap from the semantic to the existential. The nihilistic perspective, on the other hand, picks this up and takes it further. They cross their arms, glare at you impatiently, and snort:

“Right! Nothing is engraved in stone…. not even that nothing is engraved in stone. So what’s your fucking point?”

Once again, Rorty:

“The difficulty faced by a philosopher who, like myself, is sympathetic to this suggestion - one who thinks of himself as auxiliary to the poet rather than to the physicist - is to avoid hinting that this suggestion gets something right, that my sort of philosophy corresponds to the way things really are. For this talk of correspondence brings back just the idea my sort of philosopher wants to get rid of, the idea that the world or the self has an intrinsic nature.”

Rorty, like the nihilistic perspective (that which he shares with Deleuze, embraces the idea of his assumptions floating on thin air, considers it an open field in which he (and we (can create.

(And I would note here a notion that has been associated with Deleuze: the idea that the primary domain of philosophy is paradox.)

That said, I want to commit tomorrow’s rhizome to noting (and quoting (some of the sociopathic implications (that is in terms of Rorty recognizing it, not practicing it (involved in the book.

“Ultimately, all arguments for beauty are arguments for freedom. “ –Camus

During my present immersion in Rorty’s Irony, Contingency, and Solidarity, I have come to realize that, while there are a lot of excellent attempts out there to explain the nature and characteristics of a totalitarian state, I would add to it a tendency to put the petty and mundane over self transcendence: self creation to put it in Rorty’s terms, terms I believe he shares with Deleuze despite their differences. And all I have to do is watch a few TV commercials or note that the workplace (not government (via smoking policies and drug testing (has become the most effective form of social control to see how far Capitalism has pushed us to that end. In this sense, philosophers like Rorty and Deleuze have become as important as they ever were. But this is not to say that this form of social control cannot take more sophisticated forms. I return to an earlier point:

“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.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 137-138). Kindle Edition.

“I mainly throw this out to my worthy (as in useful (jam-mate, David, who crystallized this point for me which applies to both of my main influences: Deleuze and Rorty (:I’m drawn to French concepts while being equally drawn to the Anglo-American style of exposition . Unfortunately, I cannot track his actual quote and will have to paraphrase it. He basically pointed out that in the old days, the objects that occupy our space were considered to be the language of God. It therefore followed that anyone capable of interpreting that language more accurately than anyone else had to be higher up the ladder: the hierarchy. And we can see, based on this, how that dynamic has managed to evolve into the hierarchies and secular religions of today –something I hope to go into later.”

And now’s as good a time as any. But to explain how I see that subject/object presupposition evolving into modern forms of oppression, I have to offer a quasi sy fy prediction based on an actual experience I had on the old Yahoo boards. During the Bush/Kerry campaign, being the vocal progressive I was, I came up against a libertarian economist who was clearly college educated and had a lot of time to focus on board spats. For every argument I made, he was able to come up with 10 pieces of data that made him seem impressive to the fellow goons he brought with him. And the fact that I knew perfectly well that had I of had the time he apparently did, I could likely find ten other pieces of data that put his into question mattered little under the “rules of discourse” according to the language game he was (via common doxa (controlling the rules of. Eventually, the 2008 economic meltdown proved my instincts right. But more important is what I found out via Thom Hartman: that corporate and conservative think-tanks were paying ideological hit-men (like the one I encountered (to go about the boards and undermine anti-Capitalist stances.

Now we go syfy:

Say Sanders gets the nomination. Isn’t there the very real possibility that those corporate and conservative think tanks will release the ideological hit-men again? And isn’t there every possibility that the strategy those hit men will use is to barrage you with data, thereby engaging you in a data war that most people (those that actually work (cannot win? What they will basically do is claim victory based on the very subject/object dynamic described by David McDivitt: that which gives hierarchical status to those who can read the voice of God (via the object (based on an arbitrary human construct constructed in a power discourse.

Before I move on to my next immersion (Zizek’s The Indivisible Remainder (I would like to touch on some the issues I have not so much with Rorty as with my relationship with him. Coming to him from the challenge of Deleuze, as I often do, I sometimes get the feeling of something almost too familiar. It’s like my philosophical filters are so tuned to him (as well as American Pragmatism (that it begins to feel like little more than self flattery. On the uptick, though, much as Joseph Campbell did when I first started my intellectual process, it excites me about what I’m doing. It’s almost like a war dance or pep rally that, through the communal energy and validation of a successful philosopher, accelerates my process. And I would also point out that what Rorty does offer me is a survey of the various ways in which one can approach the pragmatic method (Donaldson, Dewey, etc.), the various angles that helps me develop my own process, as well as an articulate and clear explanation of the historical context in which I am working.

The downside of this accessibility is that it has allowed me to recognize an issue with Rorty’s propensity towards meta-philosophy –one that his more vehement critics have likely grabbed onto and exploited. He’s clearly committed to social justice. The problem is that most of what I read in Rorty is a lot talk about how to talk about social justice. What I don’t see, outside of passing references to support his meta-philosophy, are concrete discussions about actual social justice. No doubt Habermas would have noted this.

In his defense, though (and in an abstract way, it is as if he is following the same mandate laid upon writers: to show rather than tell. He doesn’t just tell you that the idea is to seek to change the dialogue, metaphors, and vocabulary involved; he, in his writing, actually seeks to change the dialogue, metaphors, and vocabulary involved.

So while it leaves you longing for more concrete descriptions of and prescriptions for social injustice (like that of social criticism (it still presents an important and powerful tool (one among many (towards that end. As the latest unwitting victim of my diabolical propensity towards bricolage, Tony, says:

“ It seems to me that I am reading; for as long as there have been power portals there have been philosophers. But as philosophers are unchanged in their core stance;- to philosophise and philosophically hope that others may feel the same. Thus adopting the changes however glacial in their becoming. On the other hand the power capitalists can mutate new ways to push these ideas and philosophies out into the cold to further quarantine those useful to them from critical thought.”

And for context, my response:

“I’m thinking reality TV here, Tony. (Good points, BTW.) In fact, I would expand this into the general way that corporate media has spiraled into a general race to the bottom. Not sure how old you are, but there was a time when The Learning Channel was actually about learning, when A & E was actually about Arts and Entertainment, and Bravo was actually the culture channel. It’s like they’re doing everything they can to dumb us down.”

What we are talking about here are discourses (language games (as well as power discourses in the case of corporate media. And as Layotard points out, language games too often (especially in terms of power discourses (end up being about controlling the rules of the game: what Marcuse referred to as operationalism. In this sense, Rorty’s agenda was almost prophetic. Nothing could define the traditional role of the philosopher (as Tony suggests (make them so important as that of asserting the poetic/metaphorical (for instance: the subjective experience of those suffering under Capitalism (in the face of the so-called objective understanding of the world that Capitalism claims (via science (it can produce.

As Rorty suggests, before we can change anything, we have to (via the poetic: resonance and seduction (change the sensibility of the actors involved. And we will have to do it by staying ahead of the power discourse that tends to assimilate our attempts at doing so.

Once again, Camus:

“Ultimately, all arguments for beauty are arguments for freedom. “

“And I think this has application to Nicolae and Tom’s proposal that it should be about social justice as well as my proposal concerning the import of Play. Basically, Rorty starts the book by pointing towards the historical conflict between private and public approaches towards philosophy and culture in general: the private being about self creation and the public being about social justice, both of which must use language games that are incommensurable. And his solution is to simply accept the incommensurability while looking at the various language games as tools designed for various tasks:”

“To say that Freud’s vocabulary gets at the truth about human nature, or Newton’s at the truth about the heavens, is not an explanation of anything. It is just an empty compliment - one traditionally paid to writers whose novel jargon we have found useful.” -Richard Rorty. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Kindle Locations 182-184). Kindle Edition.

And use value is what it is all about. As T.S. Eliot said of poetry:

“Mediocre poets imitate. Great poets steal.”

And if we think about what makes the great works we look at, read, or listen to important to us, it basically comes down to what we can use to further our own processes. It comes down to what we can use in either a positive way (what can make our process better (or a negative one: what we would choose to avoid to make our processes better. All other criteria are merely a means to that end: that of resonance and seduction through which Play works.

This is why it makes no sense to come on these boards and start flashing around words like “objectivity” or “rationality” or “the scientific method” like badges of authority (which are basically attempts to control the rules of the language game –think: Layotard (when one would be far better off just showing us the results of their methods and let the results speak for those methods. To not do so, as Rorty points out, is to act like language is somehow out in the world waiting for us to find the right way to say or write it. But as Spinoza would say: this is absurd. And it’s not just the boards we see this at work in, but professional scientists as well such as Hawking and de Gras Tyson who turn the whole thing into a pissing contest like a couple schoolyard punks when they argue that science will displace philosophy. The irony of it, though, is their failure to see the extent that the validation of Capitalism is propping up their hubris.

Once again, like the trolls flashing the badge of scientific and objective authority on these boards, they would have been far better off shutting their fucking mouths, showing their results, and letting their results speak for their methods. And if you think about it, what they’re basically engaging in is a form of censorship which, as has been pointed out, shows a lack of faith in one’s own belief system. And I would also add that it suggests that they have completely lost the sense of Play that got them where they are in the first place. And it is likely due to the fact that the success of their Play has gotten them far too immersed in the system that makes it pay. Somewhere along the line, it got too serious.

In this sense, Rorty and the Pragmatic method shows way more integrity, is willing to show rather than tell:

“Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.”

Once again: the value of Play as a method, as well as resonance and seduction as a means; that which many of those of a scientific slant are in complete denial about.

“What is data is also contextual and based on values, such as whether data is skewed and what individual pieces of information should be included in overall data. Then facts may be inferred, so it is a long string of subjective assertions. We need data and we need facts, so the best thing is to acknowledge the subjectivity by which they are constructed, go ahead and do that, and quit assuming any points to reality or is representational.” –David McDivitt​

“Yes, David, and we also need truths to temporarily anchor us and give us something to work with until further facts and data force us to move on to further truths.” –me

This discourse was basically a bounce (or a couple of them (off of the distinction I made between facts, data, and truths: facts being the building blocks of data and data being the build blocks of truths which are always shifting according to incoming facts and data. Now I want to connect this with a quote I extracted from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others:

“To my mind, the persistence on the left of this notion of ‘radical critique’ is an unfortunate residue of the scientistic conception of philosophy. Neither the idea of penetrating to a reality behind the appearances, not that of theoretical of theoretical foundations for politics, coheres with the conception of language and inquiry which, as I have been arguing, is common to Heidegger and to Dewey. For both ideas presuppose that someday we shall penetrate to the true, natural, ahistorical matrix of all possible language and knowledge. Marx, for all his insistence on the priority of praxis, clung to both ideas, and they became dominant within Marxism after Lenin and Stalin turned Marxism into a state religion. But there is no reason why either should be adopted by those who are not obliged to to practice this religion.”

Now I want to re-emphasize a quote in David’s quote:

“What is data is also contextual and based on values, such as whether data is skewed and what individual pieces of information should be included in overall data.”

And further emphasize a point in Rorty’s:

“For both ideas presuppose that someday we shall penetrate to the true, natural, ahistorical matrix of all possible language and knowledge.”

Now I want to zero in on the term “ahistorical”.

The point I’m trying to get at here (in my bricolage/found poem kind of way (is that truths are always shifting according to the facts and data (both formal and informal (available to any given truth: that point of capture in a process of constant becoming. In other words: truths can never be truly “ahistorical”. They must, as my audio book on Dewey points out to me, be always conditional on the facts and data (the contingencies and variables (that a given point in history offer them. This is why, for instance, solutions that might have worked in the past can no longer work for us now: such as Adam Smith’s notion of Capitalism –as brilliant as it may have seemed at the time.

Rorty then goes on to say:

“The moral I wish to draw from the story I have been telling is that we should carry through on the rejection of metaphilosophical scienticism. That is, we should let the debate between those who see contemporary democratic societies as hopeless, and those who see them as our only hope, be conducted in terms of the actual problems now being faced by those societies. If I am right in thinking thinking that the difference between Heidegger’s and Dewey’s ways of rejecting scientism is political rather than methodological or metaphysical, then it would be well for us to debate political topics explicitly, rather than using Aesopian philosophical language. “

I fully agree with Rorty here. And it is why he is part of my holy triad. At the same time, I return to my main criticism of Rorty in that he talked a lot about how we should approach the discourse about social justice while never really addressing individual issues concerning social justice. On the other hand, it was like he was fighting the good fight on another front. What we have to put in mind here is that he was making his way through the academic system in opposition to the increasing influence of the analytic approach to philosophy (via the universities’ increasing dependence on corporate financing (and the consequent hierarchal notion of philosophy. It’s as if he got so caught up in the debate over the rules of the language game (basically distracted (that he never got to apply his rules in the very tangible ways he describes above.

d63 long time no hear.
Question : would you gather some kind of tie in with Haberman’s notion in this regard? Especially if you would be familiar with an embedded social consciousness in terms of a universal ethics?

There is a veiled reason for asking this, and it has to do with an intuitionism relating to early revelations into embedded ideas.

Thanks.

If you defer this question I will absolutely not hold you to it.

If you are talking about Habermas (which I suspect you are (he is an approach different than Rorty’s while being more similar to that of Zizek’s: he sees an ultimate truth that can be obtained to achieve ultimate social justice. And while I take the Other approach, I’m not totally unsympathetic with it. Knowing the frustration that comes from trying to negotiate with Capitalism as it is practiced today, I can see why some individuals would want to go to the extremes of radical change as compared to the revisionist approach I embrace.

Do you think our understanding (Rorty’s), of an eventual incompatibility between foundations of Capitalism and Democracy are regional to the extent, that limits of conflict have not been met in the United States; whereas Habermas, a Continental, would be more prone with the kind of impatience you are talking about?

And is not something missing here, the approach of a conservative religious approach to the Truth, whatever that might be; -as in the mainly Germanic-Lutheran tradition , there is a conflation between political principles and religious ones.

Does the eventual functional approach of a US based pragmatism not exhibit the kind of impatience that Europe should, because of the above, therefore the Absolute Universal Principles which inspire an anarchy, not universally useful in Rorty’s functionalism?

Can the above start as a guide in seeing a change in perception, as a universal or regionally dominating trend, in light of these dissimilarities -in a positive re-presentational sense in EU- and in a regional socially accepted modus operant in the US?

I don’t mean to overload this train of thought, but my reason for asking is multiform: the embededness which Polanyi thinks of as determinative toward Rorty’s sense of the more Kantian intuitive approach of Habermas seem irreconcilable, almost to the extent of the relative conflict between those camps who have a conflicting understanding of what delineates conscious and sub conscious material.

This is important, but seems insignificant from a utilitarian, pragmatic perspective.

What do you think?

A lot of stuff there, Jerkey. And I really appreciate your input. But my process has to work in a limited window -that is as concerns time. Let me put in what I have done today and look at this tomorrow. Once again, I really do appreciate your input. I’ll focus on it tomorrow.

"Earlier I said that theorists like Heidegger saw narrative as always a second best, a propaedeutic to a grasp of something deeper than the visible detail. Novelists like Orwell and Dickens are inclined to see theory as always second-best, never more than a reminder for a particular purpose, the purpose of telling a story better. I suggest that the history of social change in the modern West shows that the latter conception of the relation between narrative and theory is the more fruitful.

“To say that it is more fruitful is to say that, when you weigh the good and the bad the social novelists have done against the good and bad the social theorists have done, you find yourself wishing that there had been more novels and fewer theories. You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had read fewer books which gave them general ideas and more books which gave them an ability to identify imaginatively with those whom they were to rule.” -from Rorty’s Essay’s on Heidegger and Others

This one is powerful in the complex way, for me, it winds its way through the subtle relationship between theory and the personal. To start, while I fully agree with Rorty’s lean towards narrative, and its efficacy as concerns social justice, I find, as I sink into middle age, that philosophy and theory has basically hijacked my aesthetic. The older I get, the harder I find it to go back to the arts. More and more, it’s getting like I have to force myself in the same way one might force themselves to eat spinach because it is good for them. This scares me because it reminds me of a point made in M. Merleau Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception in which he describes a case study in which the individual, having lost their sexuality, loses a lot more than sexuality: their ability to respond to beauty in general. Luckily, it hasn’t gone as far as it sounds as, right now, I am listening to Bon Iver and finding it essential to what I am writing right now.

That said, Rorty gives me every reason to force myself (or fake it until I make it as we’re told in 12 step groups (since, as he rightly points out, theory requires a kind of detachment that is counterproductive to social justice. Art, on the other hand, is useless without empathy or even sympathy. I would focus in on:

“You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had read fewer books which gave them general ideas and more books which gave them an ability to identify imaginatively with those whom they were to rule."

And as he suggests without explicitly saying so, this is pretty much what happened with the communist experiment in Russia and China, and it is the same experiment at work with Milton Friedman’s Neo-Liberalism. Make no mistake about that. And make no mistake about the fact that America is about to engage in that experiment which has never been (nor ever can be (implemented through democratic means. Think Pinochet here: pure theory over the actual experiences of the subjects involved.

Thanks for that d63. I am particularly interested in the concept of embededness, not to be confused with embodiment.

This concept, although seems relatively harmless, declawed as it were, by such as the search for a kind of twilight sleep in philosophy, a sleep akin to the ‘relative objectivity’ of the required aesthetic distance in art appreciation, is not available to mainstreamers such as Friedman, et al.

However that said, such a stance if taken at face value, would seem to tilt the table toward an abstract representation, or the search for, more in tune with
the Continentals, rather than an anti-fundamentalist like Rorty. So you seem as irreducible as I think you are, and on this level, there appear no inroads to any grey areas.

Not withstanding, I am looking forward to any correspondence toward what appears some sort of normative solution, again only prima facie, and the shift enough to cause mutual misunderstanding and even conflict.

The particular players in today’s political arena perhaps, are overlooking subtleties of the kind, where one little oversight can cause large effected and even unintended consequences.

Again, I suggest a format of communication where stuff be left out or included, which in the opinion of the correspondent is insignificant, or relevant, respectively.

A pleasure jamming with you Jerkey. I’m sorry if I seem neglectful. My limited window tends to be hijacked by my discourses on Facebook as you will see in the next post. I really do hope to go deeper into our discourse here. But your responses tend to be more of an exception (in that I never expect anyone on here to engage with me (than the rule. I will try to fit this in.

"Earlier I said that theorists like Heidegger saw narrative as always a second best, a propaedeutic to a grasp of something deeper than the visible detail. Novelists like Orwell and Dickens are inclined to see theory as always second-best, never more than a reminder for a particular purpose, the purpose of telling a story better. I suggest that the history of social change in the modern West shows that the latter conception of the relation between narrative and theory is the more fruitful.

“To say that it is more fruitful is to say that, when you weigh the good and the bad the social novelists have done against the good and bad the social theorists have done, you find yourself wishing that there had been more novels and fewer theories. You wish that the leaders of successful revolutions had read fewer books which gave them general ideas and more books which gave them an ability to identify imaginatively with those whom they were to rule.” -from Rorty’s Essay’s on Heidegger and Others

“When you say theory, you mean a totalizing political system which is then implemented. What alternatives to some organizing principle, or theoretical framework are there as an antidote? It seems we are forced to choose one theory or another.” –Chris

“Not necessarily political, Chris. But it is in the political that theory becomes problematic -that is, as I am trying point out, in giving itself privilege over concrete answers to concrete problems. The very paradox you present seems to me to be what the the pragmatic approach is attempting to overcome.” -Me

” I see all theory as political in the final analysis! Also I think, without owning up to the inescapable necessity of ideology we induce the worst form of theory, the ‘given’ - or as you’ve put it, the concrete answer. Very non-pragmatic as this presupposes some real, solid politically disinterested neutral foundation that appears to do away with theory and lets in the common sense brigade - BUT it’s just another theory!” –Chris again

With all due respect Chris (you have made some insightful and challenging points (I would argue that you are neglecting the recognition that ideologies do nothing while people, on the other hand, do everything. Ideologies (as are often expressed through theories (tend to be expressions of our basic impulses and desires and therefore tend to follow human praxis. For instance, neither Communism nor Marx exterminated 6 million plus people; Stalin (a paranoid narcissist with a Christ complex (remind you of anyone? (did.

And I would point out, as Rorty did in the book I am quoting, that under Stalin’s regime there was always someone (a kind ascetic priest (appointed to interpret Marxist theory in the “correct way”. And that person was always the second most feared person in the Stalinist regime and may be the foundation of a phenomenon that Zizek correctly noted: that Hitler’s regime was relatively rational in that, unless you were a Jew or rocked the boat, you were reasonably safe, while under Stalin’s regime there was no way of knowing, regardless of what you did, if the men in dark suits might come knocking at your door.

This is not to say that theory is evil, but rather that it is a mixed package much as the pragmatic approach is. As you impressively point out:

“But the breakdown in social systems that have a classical polis, ie a control and command centre, networks, common legal overview etc, has given rise to de-centred neo-liberal capitalism which thrives on a certain anarchy that allows money to free flow according to market forces with no "god’ to adjudicate - or collect the taxes.”

I would compliment your point with mine concerning the sociopathic response to the nihilistic perspective in relation to the symbolic: that in which, having no other criteria of right action, turns to the criteria of power:

“I have power because I am right; therefore, I am right because I have power.”

And this, to me, is the underlying alibi of the abuses of Neo-liberalism. In this sense, your description seems perfectly accurate to me. At the same time, I would ask you to consider Deleuze and Guatarri’s point that Capitalism should act as a deterritorializing force, but always seems to return to territorializing ones or what I refer to as the tyranny of the functional. Neo-Liberal Capitalism is the wolf of perfect control (it can never be implemented through democratic means as examples like Pinochet show us (dressed in the sheep’s clothing of freedom. It does have fossilized ways of thinking that require that we break free of them via concrete solutions to concrete problems. Therefore, it makes sense to follow the D & G nomadic prescription of pushing Capitalism’s tendency towards deterritorialization further than it, itself, would want to go. Rorty’s pragmatism is just a less abrasive approach to it.

Revolution is not theory. It is a series of concrete acts.And in the process of revolution, it would make no sense for any of us to ask: what would Rorty or Plato or any other theorist do?

The following is a continuation of discourse between me and a respected jam-mate, Chris, on the relationship between and preference for the theoretical or the day to day pragmatic:

"As Habermas puts it [about Heidegger], “under the leveling gaze of the philosopher of Being even the extermination of the Jews seems merely an event seems merely an event equivalent to many others.” Heidegger specializes in rising above the need to calculate relative quantities of human happiness, in taking a larger view. For him, successful and unsuccessful adventures -Gandhi’s success and Dubcek’s failure, for example -are just surface perturburations, distractions from essence by accidents, hindrances to an understanding of what is REALLY going on.

“Heidegger’s refusal to take much interest in the Holocaust typifies the urge to look beneath or behind the narrative of the West for the ‘essence’ of the West, the urge which separates the philosophers from the novelists. Someone dominated by this urge will tell a story only as part of the process of clearing away appearance in order to reveal reality.” -from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others

And I apologize, as always, for my wordy (rhizomatic (bricolage, but I would also like to connect this to (and, in the process, pay tribute to (a point made by a jam-mate, Lewis and fold in a response:

“I almost agree that ideologies do nothing while people do. Was thinking about William of Occam this morning and his condemnation of over-complexity.”

I mainly fold this in to today’s rhizome, Lewis, because it parallel’s the issue at hand: the relationship between theory and the pragmatic and which is preferable. While I agree with your point as concerns Ockham’s razor, I would define it in terms of our always being caught in the push and pull between theoretical overreach (that which results from the radical purely for the sake of the radical (and theoretical stagnation: that which results from failing to think or inquire beyond our immediate intuitions. While I agree that in many cases the simpler solution to a problem is the better one, we have to be real careful about oversimplified perceptions of what the problem actually is.

That said, I want to make a couple of observations about Rorty’s quote. The first is about composition and style. The above quote, to me, is a good example of what makes Rorty as good a writer as he is a philosopher. He fulfills my criteria of resonance and seduction the most when he goes into these kind of satiric descriptions of other philosophers such as he does here with Heidegger. To me, it fits in with that image of the of the generous teacher (much like Jaspers (which he props up with a healthy sense of humor, but a sense of humor that flatters you since you would have had to do the footwork necessary in order to find it funny.

But on a more serious note, we can see here in Heidegger (as ascetic priest (how theory can go awry. As another Jam-mate, Steve Orsli points out:

“‘Theoria’–what is the essence of the original idea. It’s related to the word ‘theatre’ and the sense of looking at things ‘at a distance’ a visual, detached understanding. Western man looking down from above–the objective, ‘Gods-eye’ view.”

Here, we see my main difference with Chris in that while he rightly points to how the scattered, chaotic (rhizomatic even), approach to thought contributes to the tyranny of Neo-Liberalism:

“But the breakdown in social systems that have a classical polis, ie a control and command centre, networks, common legal overview etc, has given rise to de-centred neo-liberal capitalism which thrives on a certain anarchy that allows money to free flow according to market forces with no "god’ to adjudicate - or collect the taxes.”

:the God’s-eye view, propped up by corporate financing, is as implicit in it as the lack of theory might be.

I want to lay down some quotes from a I Love Philosophy Jam-mate, Jerky, and see what I can do with them:

“Do you think our understanding (Rorty’s), of an eventual incompatibility between foundations of Capitalism and Democracy are regional to the extent, that limits of conflict have not been met in the United States; whereas Habermas, a Continental, would be more prone with the kind of impatience you are talking about?

And is not something missing here, the approach of a conservative religious approach to the Truth, whatever that might be; -as in the mainly Germanic-Lutheran tradition , there is a conflation between political principles and religious ones.

Does the eventual functional approach of a US based pragmatism not exhibit the kind of impatience that Europe should, because of the above, therefore the Absolute Universal Principles which inspire an anarchy, not universally useful in Rorty’s functionalism?

Can the above start as a guide in seeing a change in perception, as a universal or regionally dominating trend, in light of these dissimilarities -in a positive re-presentational sense in EU- and in a regional socially accepted modus operant in the US?”

“I don’t mean to overload this train of thought, but my reason for asking is multiform: the embededness which Polanyi thinks of as determinative toward Rorty’s sense of the more Kantian intuitive approach of Habermas seem irreconcilable, almost to the extent of the relative conflict between those camps who have a conflicting understanding of what delineates conscious and sub conscious material.

This is important, but seems insignificant from a utilitarian, pragmatic perspective.

What do you think?”

Okay, Jerkey: the best I can do here is cherry-pick what I can respond to. I hope I don’t wander off topic.

“And is not something missing here, the approach of a conservative religious approach to the Truth, whatever that might be; -as in the mainly Germanic-Lutheran tradition , there is a conflation between political principles and religious ones.”

There is always a conflation, Jerkey. This is because people will always be people. And it is why we have to look at history in order to understand what we are doing now. In this sense, it would be useful to apply Saussure’s paradigmatic concept of language. As I like to joke (in reference to Weber’s book on protestant ethics and Capitalism:

It use to be: pray hard and follow these principles and you too may enter the kingdom of heaven.

Now it’s: work hard and follow these principles and you too may enter the kingdom of success.

In fact, if you look at it, Jerkey, there is nothing new about Capitalism. It comes down to the same old thing: the fact that there has always been a handful of people who thought they deserved more than everyone else, even if it came at the expense of everyone else. And if you think about it, the “market” that justifies the high pay of corporate CEOs, that god-like invisible hand, is not that different than the “divine right” that justified monarchs in older days.

And in both cases, as you rightly point out, we see a conflation (thanks for that word BTW) between the political and the religious.

“This chapter defines three terms: information, knowledge, competence, and their relationships to one another. Here is a list of the chapter’s main lessons:” -Lupia, Arthur. Uninformed: Why People Seem to Know So Little about Politics and What We Can Do about It (p. 25). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Now, had I approached this more logically, and methodically, I would have started this discourse with these terms as the model lies at the core of Lupia’s approach (definition attached). But I mainly bring it up because of the parallel and somewhat perfect compatibility with my own model of facts, data, and truths.

Facts (the almost equivalent of information) involves those things we can hardly deny. 1+1=2, for instance. Or say we are standing together in front of cat on a mat. We could safely say that it is a fact that there is a cat on a mat. Data (which holds a loose equivalence with knowledge) is an accumulation of facts put together to get a sense of how individual facts are acting together. A poll, for instance, is a collection of the individual facts of how people answered the pollsters. Several things are interesting here. First of all, data is always as interesting for the facts it leaves out as it is those it includes. This is a product of the finite nature of the human mind in the face of the infinite. And it was clearly demonstrated in the Dewey/Truman campaign in which pollsters did a phone survey that showed Dewey winning while leaving out the fact that most people who had the money to own a phone at the time generally voted republican. Secondly (and to make things more complicated), we have to recognize two kinds of data: formal and informal. While the formal is the domain of the scientifically trained, the informal is what we all engage in. We can see the informal at work in prejudices in that they consist of repeated experiences (facts in themselves) of a certain category of person that results in a general conclusion about the category as a whole. Finally, it is at the level of data that the parallel between my model and Lupia’s starts to loosen a little. In Lupia’s model, we can see how both facts and data can play a role in information while also playing a role in knowledge: that which is the cumulative effect of facts and data (both formal and informal). But that doesn’t make them incompatible.

But the parallel gets even looser at the level of truth (with a small “t”) which I define in terms of Rorty’s pragmatism: that which seems (via facts and data (both formal and informal)) sufficiently justified. At the same time, I would confidently parallel truth with Lupia’s competence in that competence (via information (is about what serves a given end much as pragmatism is about what works.

“Given this interpretation of how Derrida thinks he can do what Heidegger failed to do, how he hopes to move outside of the tradition instead of being mired within it as Heidegger was, I want to make two criticisms of his attempt. First, it is just not true that the sequence of texts which make up the canon of the ontotheological tradition has been imprisoned within a metaphorics which have remained unchanged since the Greeks. That sequence of texts, like that which makes up the history of astronomical treatises, or of the epic, or of political discourse, has been marked by the usual alternation between “revolutionary”, “literary”, “poetic” moments and normal, banal, constructive interludes. Speaking several languages and writing several texts at once is just what all important, revolutionary, original thinkers have done. Revolutionary physicists, politicians, and philosophers have always taken words and beaten into new shapes. They have thereby given their angry conservative opponents reason to charge them with introducing strange new senses of familiar expressions, frivolously punning, no longer playing by the rules, using rhetoric rather than logic, imagery rather than argument.” –from Rorty’s Essays on Heidegger and Others (pg. 98….

First of all, for those who might not have seen it, I would note the reference to Walter Kuhn in:

“That sequence of texts, like that which makes up the history of astronomical treatises, or of the epic, or of political discourse, has been marked by the usual alternation between “revolutionary”, “literary”, “poetic” moments and normal, banal, constructive interludes. Speaking several languages and writing several texts at once is just what all important, revolutionary, original thinkers have done.”

That said, I should provide a little context. It came out of a comparison of Derrida and Heidegger in terms of their shared sense that the history of philosophy had been stuck in the trap of the old Platonic hierarchy. Out of this came a common ambition: to create a new language that could break out of that rut. However, as Rorty points out, Derrida (being further down the line than Heidegger (was no more likely to pull it off than Heidegger. This is because Derrida was working under the same false assumption Heidegger was. As Rorty put it:

“First, it is just not true that the sequence of texts which make up the canon of the ontotheological tradition has been imprisoned within a metaphorics which have remained unchanged since the Greeks.”

That said, I would offer my own theory as to how this kind of thing happens. It comes down to Hermeneutics which is an unfolding process in which content becomes form via form. Ultimately, what this results in is reducing our cultural artifacts to simple cores and assumptions. I, for instance, have come to a core of chaos and order which is reflected in Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science. And I would argue this has to do with us whittling our mental activities down to basic functions in our brains: those that result from evolutionary adaptations. Therefore, it stands to reason that people like Heidegger or Derrida might see our cultural history as just repeating the same old thing. But as Rorty said later:

“So it is not clear that we need a “new sort of writing.”

This is because, given the deeply buried nature of these basic motifs, there is no guarantee that a “new sort of writing” will truly break from that tradition. It’s always too personal to do so. Still, it can change things: make us see them in new ways. And as a culture, we are nowhere near the same as we were when we started.

“Insofar as a left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left. I shall be claiming in these lectures that the American Left, once the old alliance between the intellectuals and the unions broke-down in the course of the Sixties, began to sink into an attitude like Henry Adams’. Leftists in the academy have permitted cultural politics to supplant real politics, and have collaborated with the Right in making cultural issues central to public debate… The academic Left has no projects to propose to America, no vision of a country to be achieved by building a consensus on the need for specific reforms.” –a quote from Rorty’s Achieving Our Country via Eduardo Mendieta’s intro to Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: a collection of Rorty interviews….

Mendieta then goes on to say:

“For this reason, Rorty calls for a “moratorium” on theory. Rorty admonishes that the academic and cultural left “kick its philosophy habit.” Just as importantly, Rorty urges the left to abandon its apocalyptic self-loathing and to become emotionally engaged in the nation by feeling, at the very least, shame.”

I have other thoughts. But I have, in the process of writing out the quotes, noticed a connection between the issues taken with Rorty and those taken with Bernie Sanders in their northeastern provincial and bourgeoisie liberalism. Being something like that myself, I have noted that the main thing that cock-blocked Bernie was his tendency to assume that if he addressed the issue of neo-liberalism, the problems addressed by multi-culturalism would take care of themselves. And Rorty has been attacked on this very issue. This is not to say that either Rorty or Sanders are indifferent to the plight of minorities. I would argue that (as I would for myself since I am a lot like them (that they are perfectly sympathetic to the plights of the less fortunate.

But that’s not why I quoted this. What I mainly want to address here is that while I am perfectly sympathetic with Rorty’s recognition of the disconnect between theory and day to day practice, I’m not sure that is cause for demanding that those engaged in theory stop doing so. But then I’m not sure Rorty demanded that either –that is given his admiration for Derrida. I’m perfectly on board with his desire to take philosophy to the streets. But I don’t see that as justification to condemn those who prefer to work in their scholastic ivory towers. They are basically engaged in a form of Play. And the only problem occurs when they act like it is anything more than that: such as the only way to describe reality as is.

The thing is, it is going to take a lot of different people doing a lot of different things to fix this. And no one of us (no matter how clever our technologies (is going to do it alone. But when we do fix it, it will be a matter of a lot of different people engaged in different acts and doing so at the right time.