9

postmodernism and pragmatism

 

 

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.

Francis Bacon

Ultimate skepsis – What are man’s truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Relativism, like skepticism, is one of those doctrines that have by now been refuted a number of times too often. Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be neglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once.

Alasdair MacIntyre

Don’t talk to me about the post-modern age. We’re not even in the modern age yet for Christ’s sake. There are still 150 million people in America who believe in Genesis.

Simon Critchley

Shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, a supporter of the Natural Law Party reportedly attempted to tender for President George W. Bush’s ballistic missile defence programme. Major General Kulwant Singh, a former Indian Army officer, reportedly proposed that 10,000–25,000 trained ‘yogic fliers’ could generate enough meditational energy to deflect any threat directed at the United States and her allies.1 Unfortunately, more than the power of positive thinking is needed when national survival is at stake, and it was Lockheed Martin who duly won the contract. Major Singh was an extreme expositor of a common conviction: that if we believe something strongly enough, then that will help to make it true. To some this is a harmless aid to self-motivation, while to others it is a way of life. For example, according to the Wicca faith, Christians go to heaven when they die, whereas Vikings go to Valhalla, Buddhists are reincarnated and atheists sleep the Big Sleep. Wiccans subscribe to the doctrine that whatever you believe lies ahead for you after your death will in fact come true. It would be just as well if something like this happens after death, because it certainly does not happen before it. We all know that there is a link between what one believes will happen and what one subsequently perceives, but there is no evidence that this affects what actually becomes the case. Reality does not take care to answer to human expectation, even with the weight of the beliefs of 400,000 devotees of America’s fastest-growing religion behind it. After all, hundreds of millions once believed the world to be flat without this making the globe any less round.

The belief that we can shape the world by thinking about it has been behind the periodic resurgence of relativism. The relativist believes that there is no Supreme Court that can settle the truth of a judgment, but only the smaller, competing jurisdictions of a culture, a society or an individual. The first thinker to espouse the theory was the Ancient Greek sophist Protagoras, who claimed that ‘Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things there are not, that they are not.’ Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, defined himself partly in opposition to this view. He noticed a paradox in relativism, pointing out that if no judgement were objectively true, then this would hold also of the truth of relativism itself.

Relativism was given a new hope in the eighteenth century when the German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that space and time are not inherent features of the world around us, but rather ways in which our minds order our experiences. This is no doubt true to some extent. Zoologists tell us that different animals perceive the passage of time differently. For example, the optic system of a starling has a higher ‘frame-rate’ than a human’s, so perhaps if we could see through the bird’s eyes, the world would appear to move in slow motion compared to what we are used to. Television programmes broadcast at seven frames per second look perfect to human eyes, but to a starling they would seem unwatchably disjointed – as if lit by a stroboscope. The difference in a starling’s perceptions is not a function of the bird’s will – it does not ‘want’ to see the movement of its prey in slow motion, it is simply how its nervous system works. Neither is it an illusion that ‘pleases’ the bird or allows it to ‘live at peace with the world’. Rather, it is the result of the pressures of natural selection – starlings have had to track and intercept fast-moving insects on the wing if they were not to starve. With humans we suspect that matters are more complicated.

However, to say that our minds order the way we perceive the world does not mean that we thereby have any power over how the world is. Anti-realists – even Major Singh’s trained yogic fliers – are no better at acts of mind-over-matter than the rest of us, no matter how much time they spend meditating. For, even if the world is in fact ‘unreal’ and created in some way by the mind, this need not make it any more malleable to our desires. As Immanuel Kant argued, we may not be capable of ordering the world in any other way than we do. A world structured by the mind in accordance with strict laws of design over which we have no control begins to look more like the concrete external reality of common sense than the illusory fantasy of a madman or the wishful thinking of a mystic. That the construction work takes place partly within our skulls does not help to bring it within the power of our minds. The point is that though the character of the world may not obtain independently of our perceptual machinery, it nonetheless exists independently of our desires, and this amounts to much the same thing.

It is tempting to divide the world into those aspects that depend upon human observers and those that do not, and then to deem the latter variety more real or objective than the former. The human-dependent phenomena may then provide a window for relativism. But perception is a form of cause and effect like any other worldly interaction. The way in which an armchair forms an image on someone’s retina is no different in the relevant sense from the way in which it displaces air or squashes the carpet beneath. Yet there is a long tradition in Western philosophy of privileging the carpet over the chair’s occupant. The seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke proposed that objects exhibit two kinds of qualities that he called ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’. Primary qualities are those that an object supposedly possesses innately, such as shape and mass, whereas secondary qualities are traits like colour that require an observer. So had people never existed, Mount Everest would not be grey and white but would still have weighed millions of tons. Yet something needs to interact with Everest even in the case of its more lumpen qualities and, were the existence of the ground beneath the mountain as fleeting as that of a sherpa’s gaze, we would find no reason to make a category distinction between its colouring and its mass. The only difference is that people have been observing Everest’s hues for only a minute fraction of the Earth’s history, whereas the continental plate upon which it rests has been around for far longer. It seems that Locke’s theory amounts to a prejudice against brevity.

In addition to the normal perceptual faculties that enable us to hunt for food, earn an income and generally ensure our physical well-being, philosophers have imagined that there are other ways in which we employ our faculties to ensure our psychological survival, to enable us to cope with the prospect of death and the everyday pressures of life that would otherwise drive us to suicide or paralysis. This brand of self-delusion is complemented by the willful misdirection of others towards the goal of social or political survival. We can think of the notions of racial superiority that enabled the Nazis to maintain power by appealing to the common prejudices of the 1930s, or the belief that a woman’s place is in the home. The problem is how to differentiate between coping strategies and genuine perceptions of the truth.

The answer of the modern relativist is that we cannot, because there is no difference. It took the suspicious minds of Kant’s fellow countrymen Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to unseat reason once and for all for a section of philosophers. Although they were themselves masters of reason, the two thinkers showed it scant respect at times. They did so without shame, for reason as we understand it was, to Marx, a tool in the class struggle and, for Nietzsche, an instrument of the individual’s Will to Power. Their followers have mimicked these traits – Marxists reinterpreting history to their own ends without qualm; Nietzscheans revelling in the paradoxes and contradictions of their hero’s thought. Like individual human beings, truth is for Marxists something that has to be sacrificed occasionally in the service of a higher Truth – the doctrine of dialectical materialism that predicts the eventual victory of the proletariat. For Nietzscheans, the truth is that which crushes weaker lies, and it does so by force rather than via any humdrum correspondence with the facts. Ironically, both figures have lately come to be used as tools to divine a still higher truth, or rather a lack thereof. This is the nihilistic postmodern world view in which ‘Truth’ is regarded as a stage in history that we have now overcome.

Shortly before his death, the English philosopher Bernard Williams warned that the popularity of this belief ‘signals a danger that our intellectual activities, particularly in the humanities, may tear themselves to pieces’. His concern was that the end of truth would mean the end of honesty and integrity, for ‘If you do not really believe in the existence of truth, what is the passion for truthfulness a passion for?’2 Postmodern philosophers would be more than happy to provide answers to this question in the form of ideological motives. Indeed, in the recent Continental European tradition, every philosophical problem has been interpreted as a political question – and one to which the answer is usually some form or other of Marxism. Inspired by Nietzsche, its followers do not seek to replace existing reasons with alternative ones – they wish to abolish reasons entirely and replace them with motives, sometimes Freudian and sometimes economic. That is, they want to replace post-Enlightenment society’s leading ‘motive’ – reason – with their own ideological ends. Reason is to be analysed in terms of power rather than vice versa. However, once authority has been reduced to raw power it is, as Williams says, ‘always a mistake for a minority or the disadvantaged party to reduce things to the bottom line, for on the bottom line they are simply a minority’.³

If there is something familiar about the continental attack on the Enlightenment, it is because the analysis of an opponent’s motives for holding his belief, rather than his reasons, is a variety of the ad hominem attack. It is a way of dismissing beliefs that prove resistant to refutation in the logical way. Instead of impugning the victim’s religion or sexual habits, postmodernists imagine themselves less crude for appraising his upbringing and class interests. The only difference is that they begin from this approach rather than turning to it as a last resort. For the postmodernist, imperialism is a kind of original sin that ensures that nothing we do or assert is free from the interests of power. The traditional challenge to reason’s authority to adjudicate between different people’s perceptions was the fear that whim or drink and drugs would get in the way of impartiality. The doubters of the ancient world never imagined the roster of biases that we supposedly hold today, owing to gender, social class and language.

Even the natural sciences are not immune from such attack. The French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard argued that there were two varieties of knowledge: scientific knowledge and narrative knowledge. Narrative knowledge is the kind that underpins social institutions, values and cooperative conventions, and consists of myths and legends and popular stories. Such knowledge has obviously retreated in recent times in the face of the abstract, more logical knowledge offered by the sciences. It simply cannot live up to its rival’s standards of evidence and rigorous argument. However, Lyotard alleges that science cannot crown itself the true form of knowledge without resorting to the narrative form it despises. It is worth looking at what happens when the latter takes place.

In 1999, a panel of botanists called for the common-sense based Linnaen system of taxonomy to be replaced by one reflecting the genetic history of each species that was displayed in its DNA. It was argued that the scheme would represent the true family ties between organisms rather than idiosyncratically human categories. In a sense, this overthrow of the old order constitutes a political move by molecular biologists over zoologists. So long as we all know which species is truly related to which, it does not matter if lilies appear in the same section as orchids in an encyclopaedia, even though they are directly related in nothing but appearance. There is no reason why we should not group organisms according to their shapes rather than their genetic similarities if we so choose. The scientific establishment has judged that the new taxonomy is the more useful one for their purposes, but why should the purposes of scientists outrank those of horticulturalists? However, what scientists were not doing at any point was attempting to change the facts. The revolution they wished to effect was ultimately a matter of mere labelling. Unusual political positions that do claim a substantively different take on the known facts have a habit of misdescribing themselves, for what they offer is really a differing account of what those facts actually are. It may turn out that most instances of political colouring are ordinary subjective accounts of the facts available to everyone of any persuasion, for when a racist geneticist looked at human DNA under the microscope, he would have seen the same thing as any other scientist would. His political inclinations may have led him to dismiss the evidence of his senses, and he may have decided to impute more than his instruments could measure, but he would have differed from opposing researchers in his lack of honesty rather than his eyesight.

Postmodernists have also argued that the matter is not in the hands of individuals and their integrity, for the rot goes all the way down to the very words and concepts we use, leaving language far from the neutral tool we imagine it to be. For example, the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida contended that our values require an involvement with their opposites and that this infects our every judgement with paradoxical ‘binary oppositions’. This sets out to be a true theory which we do not yet believe in, but in fact it is a false theory which we cannot help believing in. According to Derrida, the concept of a hero requires there to be a villain, but a hero of the hour can rescue a child from a burning building without there being an arsonist who started the fire. We do tend to look for a scapegoat – whether this be an individual, a god or, via a god, ourselves – so, as a remark on human psychology, Derrida’s point is fair, but it cannot stand as an appraisal of the logic of values. The French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard’s position is similar to Derrida’s, maintaining, for example, that the government sometimes acts like a medieval flagellant during the plague years, punishing itself so as to avoid a greater punishment from God or, in this case, the downtrodden masses. Thus the political system generates scandals that periodically purify the centres of power without risking serious upheaval, rather as the body benefits from small doses of disease in the form of inoculations.

The duality of all concepts, it is held, can have extreme consequences – up to and including the Holocaust itself. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote that ‘the unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust…is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress, more than a cancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body of the civilised society…We suspect…that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, so familiar, face we so admire.’4 Commenting on the industrialized rationality of the death camps, the railways to Auschwitz and the construction of the gas chambers, Bauman argued that it was difficult to separate the ‘rationality of evil’ from the ‘evil of rationality’. However, we can be thankful that millions of Americans, Britons, Australians and Scandinavians found it quite easy to do this. They pursued the Enlightenment project without falling for either of the twin evils of fascism and communism. Contrary to what some intellectuals believe, the world did not go mad in the 1930s – only Russia and Germany did. It is fair to assume that if a hundred-foot wall had been built around the latter’s borders in 1913, then Europe would have been a quiet neighbourhood in the early to mid-twentieth century. The demands of rationality apply not just to the means one employs, but also to the ends to which those means are directed. The Enlightenment was a humanistic movement, not a fetishization of rationality without thought for consequence.

It needs to be noted here that any criticism of postmodern thinking runs the risk of misunderstanding its advocates. This is because they tend to express their ideas in inscrutably nebulous prose. André Comte-Sponville, one of the most lucid living French philosophers, has written of this phenomenon that ‘Shallow waters can seem deep only if they are turbid’. It is hard not to sympathize with Comte-Sponville when one reads the gloriously meaningless work produced by his fellow countrymen. Here is a typical excerpt from the psychiatrist-turned-philosopher Felix Guattari:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multidimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic nondiscursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.5

Derrida has complained that philosophers such as Roger Scruton misinterpret him as a nihilist, but a recurring argument in his own work is that there can be no unequivocal interpretations of anything whatsoever. Annoyingly, he refused to provide a definition of ‘deconstruction’, the term with which his thought was most closely identified. At the same time, he constantly complained about the way the word was used, and maintained that the lack of fixed meanings for our words and concepts did not excuse writers from expressing themselves clearly. When in 1998 a reporter from the New York Times had the temerity to point out to Derrida that he would do well to follow his own advice, the philosopher snapped, ‘Why don’t you ask a physicist or mathematician about difficulty?’ The difference is that a physicist or mathematician is trying to get things right, and finds that he or she must employ difficult means along the way. Derrida looked for difficulty first and foremost – not because these qualities were necessary to attain the right answer, but because they were a fertile source of allegedly interesting philosophical thoughts. Althought he is renowned for his charm, I am unable to give a personal account of Derrida since he declined to be interviewed, and woke me up with a phone call at 7.30 a.m. to tell me so. I went back to bed and when I awoke an hour later, I was unsure whether I had dreamed our conversation. I wrote to him again to find out, eliciting a one-sentence reply by return of mail: ‘Monsieur Fearn, You were not dreaming.’ At least he was clear.

One commentator remarks: ‘It is always possible that a more extensive or more insightful reading of Derrida’s work, or of Mein Kampf, or of The Flopsy Bunnies, will reveal previously unsuspected depths of significance; but life is too short to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.’6 By contrast, postmodernists themselves have demonstrated astonishing patience and goodwill, among them the editors of the respected journal Social Text. They suspected nothing when Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, submitted a paper entitled ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’ in which he ridiculed the ‘dogma’ that:

there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative knowledge, of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.⁷

Sokal was the perpetrator of a hoax designed to expose the abuses endemic in a certain sector of philosophy – one in which half-understood scientific claims are taken out of context and used to bolster the verbiage of intellectual charlatans. The parody was deliberately riddled with absurdities, including the suggestion that the value of the mathematical constant ⊓ changes according to the attitudes of the age. Yet nothing out of the ordinary was noticed until the author revealed his intention. The episode showed that while philosophers working in the Anglo-American analytic tradition are trained to doubt the truth of incomprehensible positions, their counterparts in the Franco-American postmodern school prefer to think that if they cannot be understood then they must be on to something.8 Sokal’s hoax confirmed that the refutation of the postmodern world view is best achieved not through reason – at least, not if one wants its targets to listen – but through the sort of methods its proponents employ. Postmodernism appeals to thinkers who respect ideas more for their aesthetic qualities than their veracity. When their theories fail to match the evidence at hand, it is simpler for them to acquire a new theory of truth than give up their dearest insights, especially those upon which their professional esteem is built.

Attacks on the idea of truth tend to follow revolutions in our beliefs. A generation of European philosophers took the death of Marxism to spell the end of the Enlightenment project, while some of the brightest commentators on both sides of the Atlantic are people who have repeatedly been turned into fools by their beliefs. Imagine someone who goes from an abortive devotion to sharia law, converts to fascism and then on to revolutionary communism. The simplest explanation here is that this person is not suited to grand schemes and would be well advised to steer clear of politics. Yet remarkably often he will conclude that the problem lies not with his own cognitive powers, but with the status of truth itself. They are determined not to be duped again, so they resolve to reject the superior claims of any system, including liberal democracy. Thus they commit an even greater blunder – thinking that they never actually made any mistakes, because mistakes cannot be made.

Given the parade of error that is the history of philosophy, it was inevitable that the idea of truth would come under sustained attack at some point. When it did, it was no surprise that this was carried out by those with ‘post-traumatic truth disorder’ brought on by years of bad judgement. Lyotard – perhaps the most extreme of the major postmodernists – was once a Marxist, years before he wrote that ‘We no longer have recourse to the grand narrative – we can resort neither to the dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for postmodern scientific discourse.’ 9 The American pragmatist Richard Rorty has said as much of his would-be allies: ‘It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard are so afraid of being caught up in one more metanarrative about the fortunes of “the subject” that they cannot bring themselves to say “we” long enough to identify with the culture of the generation to which they belong.’¹⁰ More often than not, the philosophers of motive are themselves the only ones guilty of the biases they imagine everyone else to harbour. Their work has achieved nothing so much as self-description. Like those who believe that the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001 were part of a Jewish conspiracy, their attitude towards truth demonstrates that scepticism taken far enough becomes gullibility.

A contrasting form of postmodernism has evolved in the United States. Whereas Europe’s Nietzschean tradition talks of truths forced into shape by belligerent wills, the American pragmatic tradition wishes truths to be nurtured and shaped in order to help us all get along. Pragmatism is the view that ‘true’ beliefs are those that work towards successful interaction with the world. As Rorty – its most eloquent exponent – puts it: ‘The pragmatist drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope.’ Though he is often dismissed as a dressed-up relativist, Rorty enjoys a grudging respect among mainstream analytic philosophers. This is partly because he was once a celebrated member of their school, rather like an abstract painter who has won the esteem of his classically minded peers by demonstrating that he is also a fine draughtsman. Due to the quality of his prose he is also one of the few academic philosophers to have gained an audience outside his discipline. Rorty’s books have delighted his readership, but they seem to have had no such effect on the author himself. The energy and mischievous humour of his written work is a source of surprise to those who meet him in the flesh, for he gives every impression of a man in such deep despair that some of his fellow philosophers refer to him affectionately as ‘Eeyore’, after the depressive playmate of Winnie the Pooh. When I met Rorty at Stanford University, the sunshine, clear skies and the Spanish mission-style campus were an odd setting for a man jaded with the subject that had brought him a degree of fame. He told me that he was grateful for thinkers such as Derrida, because ‘otherwise philosophy would be even more boring than it is’.

According to Rorty, pragmatism is not a positive doctrine. ‘It’s just saying that we don’t need metaphysics, we don’t need epistemology, we don’t need a semantics for natural language – a lot of the things people think is essential for clarity of thought we don’t need. It’s not a wonderful new positive suggestion. It’s primarily a therapeutic enterprise.’ It had better be, he believes, because:

several hundred years of effort have failed to make interesting sense of the notion of ‘correspondence’ (either of thoughts to things or of words to things). The pragmatist takes the moral of this discouraging history to be that ‘true sentences work because they correspond to the way things are’ is no more illuminating than ‘it is right because it fulfils the Moral Law’.…He maintains that there is no pragmatic difference, no difference that makes a difference, between ‘it works because it is true’ and ‘it’s true because it works’ – any more than between ‘it’s pious because the gods love it’ and ‘the gods love it because it’s pious’.11

Under early twentieth-century doctrines of truth and meaning, the correspondence of language to reality was held to be piecemeal, with discrete components of language mapping on to discrete parts of the world around us. This was envisioned as a direct and pure contact, albeit one we did not fully understand. Rorty agrees insofar as using the words and sentences of language is ‘as direct as contact with reality can get (as direct as kicking rocks, for instance)’. The fallacy, he believes, ‘comes in thinking that the relationship between vocable and reality has to be piecemeal (like the relationship between individual kicks and individual rocks), a matter of discrete component capacities to get in touch with discrete hunks of reality’.¹²

However, getting rid of this discrete relationship does not mean we have to get rid of truth. The late American philosopher Donald Davidson, whom Rorty greatly admired, has written:

If I were bolted to the earth I would have no way of determining the distance from me of many objects. I would only know where they were on some line drawn from me toward them. I might interact successfully with objects, but I could have no way of giving content to the question where they were. Not being bolted down, I am free to triangulate. Our sense of objectivity is the consequence of another sort of triangulation, one that requires two creatures. Each interacts with an object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language. The fact that they share a concept of truth alone makes sense of the claim that they have beliefs, that they are able to assign objects a place in the public world.13

It seems that objectivity could be something like a three-dimensional image of the world formed out of the two-dimensional visual representations that are given by our eyes. It means that to know something ‘objectively’ is similar to simply knowing more about it in the ordinary way. The objective world is the normal world, and not some heavenly realm.

There are echoes of Davidson’s point in the following passage by Rorty:

The ideas of ‘discovering the intrinsic nature of physical reality’ and of ‘clarifying our unconditional moral obligations’ are equally distasteful to pragmatists, because both presuppose the existence of something non-relational, something exempt from the vicissitudes of time and history, something unaffected by changing human interests and needs. Both ideas are to be replaced, pragmatists think, by metaphors of width rather than height or depth. Scientific progress is a matter of integrating more and more data into a coherent web of belief…It is not a matter of penetrating appearance until one comes upon reality. Moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy. It is not a matter of rising from the sentimental to the rational. Nor is it a matter of appealing from lower, possibly corrupt, local courts to a higher court which administers ahistorical, incorruptible, transcultural moral law.¹⁴

However, Davidson’s triangulation does involve a component outside the minds of human observers working together – namely, the external world. And it is no less external, no less real, for our relationship with it being holistic rather than piecemeal.

It is important to Rorty that the world is not written in a language, as it were, let alone our language, as there can then be no question of getting our language to correspond with that of the world. We get the impression from Rorty that the scientific dream is less one of describing Nature and knowing her mysteries than of reproducing her, being like her, making the internal life an analogy of the external. Whatever science achieves will be written in a language that humans have created, but this is no great impediment to objectivity, any more than the fact that my words are words, rather than suns, planets and orbits, would be an impediment to my describing the motion of the solar system. We might think that something is lost if our thoughts do not resemble the world, but only pertain to it. But what matters is that the relationship between mind and world, or language and world, bears up – that is, that it results in reliably successful action.

However, there seem to be truths that have no bearing on our actions, successful or otherwise. When I spoke to Rorty in his office at Stanford, I asked him whether his ideas implied that there is no truth about the way the world was before humans existed. He replied:

We know exactly what it was like. It was full of mountains and dinosaurs and things like that. But the philosophical question about this is ‘Were there really mountains and dinosaurs or is this just a human way of talking about what there was?’ and this seems to me a truly stupid question, because nothing could ever be relevant to its solution and nothing would ever turn on the answer to it.

Unfortunately, much seems to turn on the answer for certain individuals, such as Christian fundamentalists who believe the world to be only 4,000 years old. ‘People who believe that have an alternative story to tell of how we got here,’ Rorty explained, ‘and I don’t think that philosophers are any help in deciding between creationism and Darwin. You don’t need a philosopher to find inconsistencies in the creationist viewpoint. The creationist account is so bad that any fool can spot inconsistencies.’ It seems that it is only specifically philosophical truth that Rorty has no time for, in which case the scientists who find his views absurd might be rather likely to agree with him once they had overcome their initial revulsion. If the crux of Rorty’s attack is that philosophy is irrelevant, then no one need worry about it too much other than professional philosophers.

What we do need to worry about is the implication that if our words terminate not in objects of reference but in more language, then language is a castle in the sky. But the foundations of language are commonly thought to be the moments when the world meets or confounds our expectations. If you prick a postmodern philosopher he will bleed, and if you kill him he will die – whether or not he agrees with your interpretation of killing. The notion that meanings depend only and always upon other meanings, rather than ever penetrating through to a world to which they refer, finds a parallel in the work of the anthropologist Albert Kroebner. ‘Heredity cannot be allowed to have any part in history,’ Kroebner wrote, ‘since every event in human history is conditioned by other environmental events and never by what particular people are like innately.’15 Kroebner cannot be correct because environmental events such as floods and famines, booms and depressions could have no purchase if people were nothing but their vessels. Even if we are in their grip, it will be because our nature finds them irresistible, and this nature will be something that is innate. Similarly, language needs a foothold in the world to get started – a point where it connects faithfully with the facts – or it would never have achieved ubiquity.

I asked Rorty what could allow us to ‘get things right’. That is to say, how does the pragmatic success of a belief not inevitably terminate in a truth. ‘We have a synthetic vocabulary that allows us to, as it were, move back and forth between vocabularies,’ he explained. ‘We are able to see how things hang together in a way that we weren’t before. You can put it as “Now we have arrived at Truth” if you want to, but it’s just a way of patting yourself on the back.’ I enquired if this was a yes or a no, but he insisted that:

It’s a way of saying that it doesn’t much matter if you call it the quest for Truth or you don’t. What matters is that a certain social function is being fulfilled. The vocabulary of getting more accurate mental representations which correspond more closely to reality and, as they do, bring us closer to the Truth is a set of metaphors that have outlived their usefulness. It isn’t that they’re false, its just a somewhat antique, puzzle-generating way of putting this thing.

I protested that most scientists believed in Truth and Reality nonetheless. ‘And most people believe that morality expresses the will of God too. It’s just a way of patting yourself on the back by saying “I not only have the following views on how to live, but they’re God’s too. I’m not only looking for theories that solve more problems than other theories, I’m looking for Truth.”’ As he once wrote:

The trouble with aiming at truth is that you would not know when you had reached it, even if you had in fact reached it. But you can aim at ever more justification, the assuagement of ever more doubt. Analogously, you cannot aim at ‘doing what is right’, because you will never know whether you have hit the mark. Long after you are dead, better-informed and more sophisticated people may judge your action to have been a tragic mistake, just as they may judge your scientific belief intelligible only by reference to an obsolete paradigm. But you can aim at ever more sensitivity to pain, and ever greater satisfaction of ever more various needs.16

The only trouble with needs is that those of one group may be different from those of another. However, Rorty has only contempt for the brand of cosmopolitanism that excuses theocracy and dictatorship by explaining that human rights are all very well for Eurocentric cultures, but that ‘an efficient secret police, with subservient judges, professors, and journalists at its disposal, in addition to prison guards and torturers, is better suited to the needs of other cultures’. He hopes for a universal human community, but does not think that the way to go about achieving this is to preserve the elements of every intellectual tradition and all the intuitions anyone has ever had.

It is not to be achieved by an attempt at commensuration, at a common vocabulary that isolates the common human essence of Achilles and the Buddha, Lavoisier and Derrida. Rather, it is to be reached, if at all, by acts of making rather than of finding – by poetic rather than Philosophical achievement. The culture that will transcend, and thus unite, East and West, or the Earthlings and the Galactics, is not likely to be the one that does equal justice to each, but one that looks back on both with the amused condescension typical of later generations looking back at their ancestors.17

This kind of ‘wait and see’ approach to relative values is the best one in everyday life. For example, teenagers often prefer the derivative pop music of the charts to that of the ‘great’ artists, but often they will eventually come round to Mozart or Marvin Gaye should they take the time to listen to them.

According to Rorty, playing off various vocabularies and cultures against one another produces ‘new and better’ ways of talking and acting. By ‘better’ he does not mean that they are superior according to some pre-agreed standard, but that they come to ‘seem’ clearly better than what preceded them.¹⁸ However, one would think that that ‘seeming’ could be unpacked. Part of the change often involves wanting to say, at the later stage, that we have now realized what the standard was all along, and that our prior beliefs were mistaken – whether that means the embarrassment of remembering how good we thought we looked in flared trousers, how naive we were to argue for a 90 per cent top rate of income tax, or how heartless we were for not caring about animal welfare. It is not as though the changes our outlook undergoes are mystical experiences.

Something akin to mystical experiences were precisely what the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn had in mind in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The physicist Max Planck once wrote that ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’19 Echoing this remark, Kuhn argued that science does not progress gradually as new facts are steadily uncovered, but rather by means of revolutions that he called ‘paradigm shifts’. Inquiry periodically reaches a point of rupture in which a new paradigm – or ruling idea – is found to be incomprehensible in the conceptual scheme of its predecessor, whereupon a new framework of ideas, be it Newton’s laws, relativity or quantum mechanics, is imposed upon the facts at hand. To Kuhn there was no pre-scientific über-scheme that stood outside both paradigms and could be used to pronounce the new one the winner. There are two ways the constructive person can go from here. Either we say that the move has already been made, or that it does not have to be made – in other words, either the new paradigm is not, in fact, radically new and can be understood perfectly well by its predecessors, or that it has some other way of forcing itself upon the scientific community. As Martha Nussbaum remarked, Aristotle was an intelligent man and would have no trouble understanding modern science were he alive today. Having written one of the best-selling philosophy books of all time, Kuhn recanted his views before he died.

Like many contemporary philosophers, Rorty is eager for his work to be sanctioned by Charles Darwin. He writes:

Inquiry and justification are activities we language users cannot help engaging in; we do not need a goal called ‘truth’ to help us do so, any more than our digestive organs need a goal called ‘health’ to set them to work. Language users can no more help justifying their beliefs and desires to one another than stomachs can help grinding up foodstuffs…There would only be a ‘higher’ aim of enquiry called ‘truth’ if there were such a thing as ultimate justification – justification before God, or before the tribunal of reason, as opposed to any merely human audience. But, given a Darwinian picture of the world, there can be no such tribunal…if Darwin is right, we can no more make sense of the idea of such a tribunal than we can make sense of the idea that biological evolution has an aim.20

Just because there is no courtroom and no attorney general, this does not mean that we can neither be guilty nor innocent, but it does mean that there is nowhere for the concept of Truth to have a human use. But we know that such a courtroom must exist, since the alternative is to imagine that human perceptions have the power to change their objects. A philosopher can believe in Truth without maintaining that it should be within our grasp.

When I finally asked Rorty if he did not at least believe that pragmatism itself was ‘true’, he refused to blink: ‘It isn’t true “because it corresponds to the way that human reality really is”. It’s a way of talking about inquiry, science and so on that raises fewer artificial problems than other ways and lets more flies out of fly bottles.’ I wondered what the difference was between saying that the hard concrete floor beneath my window is real and saying that I will always hurt myself if I jump out. If you can get law-likeness then why do we not thereby have Reality? Rorty said:

The only difference is that if you put it the first way then some philosopher will say ‘Let us think about the nature of reality’, whereas if you put it the second way then maybe you can avoid that. I don’t want to encourage them. There are lots of choices you can make that will result in disasters, and if you want to call that the impact of reality, then fine.

I asked if his argument had convinced many others. With his deepest sigh, he replied:

A few. Not many. If everyone became a pragmatist, there would be a certain sense of liberation. Just as the eighteenth-century enlightenment liberated us to become secularists, I think that the triumph of views like mine would remove a certain amount of worry and guilt – ‘Am I really in touch with reality? Am I using objective procedures?’ – and would, in that sense, do some good, but I think we have more urgent problems on our hands. I’d like to think that pragmatist views have finally come into their own now but…the world won’t collapse if they haven’t.