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Monday
Mar302009

Polytheism First Half

In 1911 Berthelot wrote this: "Pragmatism reveals itself to be a utilitarian romanticism". He did not like pragmatism but R thinks he read it correctly. He compared prag theory of truth with Nietzsche's perspectivalism. R cites a passage in N's Gay Science : "We do not even any organ at all for knowing, for truth; we 'know' . . . just as much as may be useful for the human herd. " R compares this w/ James's claims: "Thinking is for the sake of behavior" and truth = "the good in the way of belief." Humans = "clever animals" and therefore If the animal believes X, X is good only because if the animal needs something X dependably allows him to get X. Example: I need to get this paper done on time and I know that if I go down to Denny's with my laptop I an get it done because I've done this seven times in the past I got the work done every time, while if I remain in my room and try to complete the job my success rate falls below 40%. "No will to truth distinct from the will to happiness", just as Mill understood that there is no moral motive but the desire for happiness. General conclusion: "Good" and "True" and "Right" = assigned to claims/acts that are successful in producing happiness, or satisfaction that leads to happiness. But how exactly does this work? Is there ultimately something different between the claim that my transmission needs work or that I have a slight overbite, and the belief that love will trsnsform my slacker son into a concert level bassoonist? Both claims produce some form of happiness, although Peirce is very savvy in writing that since human beings do not have an instinct for truth and do have an instinct for happiness there is always a large amd sometimes debilitating tendency among humans to hope against facts, to believer what makes them feel good in preference to believing what is true, in the sense that it is publicly testable. But wait - according to R, citing J and N both, things are true because they produce happiness. there have to be more than one sense in which "produces happiness" gets read. If we are talking about an expensive transmission repair it might be superficially more pleasing to deny the truth and hope the grinding will go away, but in the longer run it will be better, and more productive of happiness, to recognize that the results of the diagnostic tests were valid and that the repairs are needed. But in other circumstances such maturity might not be required or might be much more ambiguous. Eating this French fry feels great and I know it is not terribly good for me, but the long-term health issue is less compelling than the immediate hope for pleasure, and so it becomes simultaneously true that I know the fry is bad for me and know that it is true that it will be good to eat. And I choose between these truths, sometimes one way, sometimes another. MILL = ROMANTIC UTILITARIAN. A utilitarian = one who believes that what makes an act good is the amount of pleasure it produces and/or the amount of pain it alleviates or avoids. But the initial formulation of the position by J. Bentham(see him in Wikipedia or SEP) was as R says "reductive", by which he means that Bentham made no distinctions among pleasures or among the things that could give human beings pleasure. Therefore, his theory was that any act that increased overall pleasure, no matter how crass that pleasure, was good. It was a kind of redneck ethic that failed to differentiate between more characteristically"human" pleasures and those that one shares with animals. Mill produced a more refined version of the position in which he argued that certain pleasures, such as those produced by high art and compassion. were inherently better and could be inculcated by reinforcement(giving pleasure through praise). He is a "romantic" utilitarian because he privileges these more 'spiritual' and more community- building activities. This move by Mill is really interesting because it represents an instance of doing what R does not want us to do. Here is what I mean. When Mill modifies Bentham arguing that there are human preferences that are better than others he is ranking human needs in a way that R rejects when it is done by an external figure such as God and his commandments. And R's proposal that poetry(or some other art form, some 'deep' and spiritual way to insight) can be a replacement for traditional religion is based in Mill and in this distinction between higher and lower forms of desire and happinesses and pleasures. If Bentham is right, a good utilitarian/pragmatist can just as easily, and just as justifiably, find meaning in life from bowling(Bentham's example is playing push-pin), playing Call of Duty 4 six hours a day, or surfing the net for porn. But, R reads this as Mill's desire that poetry should replace religion as the path to transcendence, to getting beyond oneself into a larger world. Mill also thinks that the insights into life, insights that give us pleasure, are the only true foundations for philosophy, for a general view of the world and the human condition that elevates rather than reduces human dignity. He rejects Bentham's "vulgar" utlitarianism, as does Rorty. Note: This has some bearing on R's discussion, later in the piece, of the relationship between pragmatism and democracy/fascism. Fascist writers typically tend to be anti-democratic elitists, as was Nietzsche. They believe, with Mill, that the truths it is good for us to believe are neither the truths revealed by God nor the crass truths imbedded in popular culture and its pleasures( aren't watching 'Celebrity Apprentice' and scrapbooking fun?) but those refined truths contained in a study and appreciation of the deeper nature and culture of whatever volk(noble Germans, latterday Roman-Italians, devout, loyal real Spaniards) they happen to privilege? It is somewhat more difficult, though not impossible, to be an elitist democrat pragmatist, a la Rorty, because there is an inherent logical tension between believing that "higher" things make us happier and being a full-out democrat. Then R makes a point that he does not argue for, that since poetry offers many different views of truth, rather than one, in contrast to monotheistic religion's claim that there is only a single true religion, one revelation and one right way to describe the human condition. Thus R sees poetry as " a secular(i.m.) version of polytheism." What exactly is R trying to say here? He sees both religious belief and poetry as "a source of ideals." What does this mean? I think he means that poetry is private -- whatever that means - and that as such it does not make public claims about what is true in the world. Rather it expresses highly individual ideals that the poet writing embraces and asserts. These values, these ideals, this vision, need not cohere with anyone else's vision of the world or with anyone else's values. I believe this has to mean that R is encouraging all of us to be our own poets, artists of our own life, an idea one also finds in Nietzsche. In this sense we each set ourselves up as local "gods", worshipping our own view of things because that makes us feel good. I am not sure. We will come back to this. But, going back to Bentham and vulgar utilitarianism, could one, as a good Rortyian, become a poet of Nachos, an artist of drinking a lot of beer? Could one express one's view of the world through waving a huge foam finger and chanting "We're Number One" at a basketball game? One wonders. One also has to wonder whether this is really an advance over an outmoded religious community. RORTY AND RELIGION Religion tells us how we are supposed to act, it ranks values in order, tells us what is higher or lower. R sees religion in this way: There is a non-human authority that - can rank human needs - therefore dictate moral choices This = Hebraism Hellenism = the opposite - that human beings can rank needs and decide their own moral choices, and poetry, reading it and writing it and letting it affect one, can help in this process. So "Different poets will perfect different sides of human nature, by projecting different ideals. " What R might be missing here and we will say more about this later is that religions were not only collections of beliefs and worldviews and statements of values; they were ongoing communities of practice, ways in which people, as a group, did things together, from praying to receiving communion to fasting on holydays. I do not think that either R's or Dewey's representations of religion captures any of this. There is a pervasive American educated Protestant bias that religion is a matter of assenting intellectually to a set of discrete propositions which can be either true or false. But as H suggests in his essay on styles of reasoning, claims being true-or-false, especially specialized claims such as one finds in a developed religion, depends on setting a complex, time-tested context, a style of reasoning developed for each major religion, one would imagine. It is within this style, which also includes -- something H does not cover because he says nothing at all about religion - rituals and gestures and verbal formulae and calendars and special clothing and religious objects - that religious claims get to make sense. Torn from this context and as it were paraded in public they do not fare so well. The deeper question here is whether religious claims are those non-theoretical claims that make up most talk or parts of a distinctive style of reasoning. Romantic util = One who "will probably drop the idea of diverse immortal persons, . . . but she will retain the idea that there are diverse, conflicting , but equally valuable forms of human life." R cites James and Nietzsche and Mill all arguing for "a plurality of norms." N talks about the virtue of Greek polytheism: It gave people "the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes." Rorty's definition of polytheism: 473 " you think that there is no possible or actual object of knowledge that would permit you commensurate and rank all human needs." Isaiah Berlin believed that there are "incommensurable human values", which R takes to mean that we need not want to make all human values fit together, nor need we think that all human beings have to live one sort of life for that to be a good life. Different people can be genuinely and blamelessly committed to very different ways of life. Ok - let's remark on all of this. Rorty is here enacting a very American and very Enlightenment ideal, namely that individual human beings have both the right and even the responsibility to devise their own values and needs and to live lives that answer those needs and values as fully as they can just so long as their pursuit does not, in one of R's phrases, "run athwart" anyone else's beliefs and especially if it does not run athwart any publicly decided projects, be those scientific or moral or by extension political. Here things get a little dicey. If our strong poet genuinely believes that she lives in a universe with a single personal and demanding God who has imposed a moral code that ranks human responsibilities, and if she believes further that this moral code is the single right one for all human beings, then it might be naive on R's part to imagine that this person will forebear trying to make her moral and political agenda into public policy. Interestingly, if she does do this and manages to persuade a majority of voters, for example, that legalizing gay marriage is wrong, she might even overturn laws and change the public world, posing her ranking of moral values on the public space of law. For R, she has, on one level, every right to do this because in a democracy people get to campaign and lobby and blog for their opinions, and to convince other people to make their private visions public policy. On another hand however R must also object to such campaigning because he is committed to sharp distinctions between private visions, which he identifies with poetry and links to individual self-development, and conclusions, or truths, arrived at through public discussion and that uses public tests for justifiability, none of which includes the idea that there is a superior, non-human being is telling us what is right and wrong. So R suffers from a conundrum: he believes deeply in democracy, believes that democracy's point is to promote the well-being of all its members, and also believes that people know that they want. But at the same time this opens the door for people to do untoward things, especially to institutionalize laws and practices that run directly counter to the idea that R holds as centrally important - that human values should be decided by humans and that they may harmlessly vary and even contradict each other. But what if humans in a democratic decide that they are not source of values and that therefore variations in vision, values and practice are harmful, because they offend God? Something to think on ... FIVE MARKS OF R'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 1. If beliefs are habits of action they do not all have to cohere in a single pattern. "the purposes served by action may blamelessly vary, so may he habits we develop to serve these purposes." 2. We collapse the distinction between the cognitive and the non-cognitive, that is we stop talking about so-called "serious" beliefs based on how things really are like religion and science and start to see poetry for example as as worthy to express an "ultimate concern" (Tillich) as any other belief or practice. 3. New distinction between projects of social cooperation and projects of individual self-development. Modern science vs. Romantic art. Rorty seems to want to relocate religion outside the realm of the social. He wants to sever religion from SCIENCE, i.e., from all attempts to predict and control, and from MORALS, the attempt to rank human needs. 4. We have to give up the idea that we have a natural love for Truth. We do, says R, love intersubjective agreement, we love to gain mastery over ranges of data and we love to win arguments but we do not love something called "Truth." W/ R means is that the inability to prove a religious claim true is irrelevant so long as it does what it needs to do, and also as long as what we claim does not intrude on social projects. 5. We have to start thinking that being a believer is not to make an alliance with Power that alleviates our greater responsibility to form viable communities with ur fellow citizens. R thinks that rel fundamentalists do not sihn vs. reason but vs. liberty because they try to argue that their alliance with God gives them the authority to control the lives of other people. What do these five marks mean? They follow a pattern: The first thing and the thing that will continue through this section is that for Rorty religious claims do not seem to have assertive value as claims about how the world is. If a belief is a "habit of action" then what we mean is that religious beliefs are ways we act, not things we assert. "I believe in Jesus" under this description means, "I will do this and this, then this.", rather than "There is a Savior and I can prove it to you.", although this seems to be exactly what certain intense people with well-thumbed Bibles seem to want to tell me. Their habit of action seems to be to go around with their Bibles and harass me. Or, the Pope is in the habit (while in his habit - terrible pun!) of traveling to foreign countries and making what sound like uninformed and potentially pernicious claims about the relationship between AIDS and condom use. When he does this, according to R or Peirce, what he is doing in particular - the specific pronouncement on condom use - is an instance of a general tendency to (i) make moral pronouncements and (ii) to make them in the context of expressing what he considers to be central Catholic beliefs. In a sense when he does this he is just doing his job as pope. Popes believe, or ought to believe, or must pretend to believe, that they are Christ's "vicar" or special ambassadors, on earth. As such it must be their habit of action to be vicar, that is, to say and do pope-like things. Popes may also, incidentally, believe as the current Pope believes, that domestic cats are Good Things, because he keeps cats in his papal apartment, he has a long history of cat companions, and he sometimes travels with his cats. But this habit of action and this belief are not connected to his being pope. As pope he will almost certainly never make any cat pronouncements. In addition he is on record as believing that Darwin told the truth. He is not a creationist and he has said so many times, although he does not thereby exclude the possibility for Intelligent Design, although as a Catholic he has a perfect right to do so. This also means, crucially, that an individual can believe religious things as one set of habits of action, science-y things as another habit of action and cat things as third without the habits being incompatible because habits of action are not claims that exclude each other. This is subtle. Rorty means that if we believe what appear to be different and non-compatible things we can do so because habits of action can "blamelessly vary", or, the purposes as well as the enactments of action can so vary. So if I say the Rosary to make myself feel more at home in the universe and then calibrate the seismograph to register earth tremors there is nothing in the calibrating that clashes with the praying, even though the claim that God controls the world and the claim that seismic tremors are entirely natural might seem to be incompatible. The second feature is the idea that we need to collapse the distinction between the cognitive and the non-cognitive, that is between claims whose truth is a function of their being claims based on thought, that is on rational judgment, and noncognitive claims or those made purely on the basis of faith or feeling. The idea behind the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction is that there really is something separate and distinct between reason and feeling -- Rorty is denying this, to claim that what distinguishes one claim from another is not some inherent rationality or provability but whether the claim(feature 3) is public or private, and this seems to be a function of whether we choose that our projects, our habits of action, be one or the other. But is there anything in the projects that requires or suggests that they be public or private? This remains uncear and needs further investigation. His real point here is to argue that poets have the same status as scientists, not because they know what scientists know or know things in the same way but because they know different things in different ways. But Rorty never clarifies further and I think he should. Hacking is right, I think, to write about "styles of reasoning" for science because he seems to mean that there are different kinds of organized undertakings having to do with truth and that the rules according to which a claim gets to be candidate for truth or falsehood in one style can be quite different from the rules in another style. R's distinction between public and private truth-telling or belief does not make clear that both religious belief and poetry, as well as science, might be bound by rules that determine what claims get to be candidates for truth and falsehood, and then the question becomes one of great historical interest: if religion proposes its own style then why do certain people choose it, why have the educated rejected the style much more frequently than the less educated, and can there be any direct or indirect clash between styles of reasoning? We will examine all this presently.

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