METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 15, Nos. 3 & 4, July/October 1984 0026-1068 $2.00

COERCION AND THE AUTHORITY OF REASON JOHN CHURCHILL

[. The Platonic Plot Behind the articulation of the problems philosophers work on, there is, in

the history of the discipline, a set of vignettes - scenes from the reflective life of humanity. These vignettes are the context, or the stage-settings, of explicit philosophical problems. But the vignettes themselves have a resilience greater than this or that philosopher’s attempt to shape the scene into a problem and to stipulate how the matter ought to be handled. I have in mind such scenes as the trial and death of Socrates; Descartes, lounging before the fire in his dressing gown musing on the fallibility of the senses; Augustine fretting over his boyhood thievery; and Kant awakening from the dogmatic slumbers of his early rationalism. One such vignette is the locus classicus for the matters I have in mind to discuss, namely, the conversation of Socrates with Thrasy- machus in the Republic, Book I.

As Thrasymachus puts it, in Cornford’s translation: “ ‘Just,’ or ‘right’ means nothing but what is to the interest of the stronger party.” Now in the context of the Republic we may justifiably suspect that this statement, and Socrates’s subsequent inquiry, will pertain to political philosophy and to the question, “What is justice in the state?” But in as much as the pursuit of that question takes us through the education of the philosopher-kings, and up the divided line to the Theory of the Forms, we may also suspect that the conversation bears somehow on epistemological problems, on the nature of philosophical inquiry, and on the question, “What are we entitled to expect from argument?” The response to Thrasymachus leads to the dialectic, to the Forms, and to epistkmk. This pattern reveals the clustering, around Thrasy- machus’s challenge, of issues involving the relationships among argument, knowledge, authority, and force. As a preliminary way of sorting out these issues, I will offer some reflections about the plot in which the conversation of Socrates with Thrasymachus occurs.

Historically and dramatically the background for Thrasymachus’s challenge is the scepticism of the sophists. But what is the connection between sophistical scepticism and the doctrine that justice is the will, or interest, of the stronger? To designate a connection is to designate the function of Thrasymachus as a character in the argumentative plot of the Republic, and, more broadly, to discern the role played by the threat of force in Plato’s argument against scepticism.

In speaking of Thrasymachus as a character and in asking about his “role” I am not merely alluding to the literary structure of the Republic as a dialogue. I am also playing a hunch derived from Hayden White’s arguments in Metahistory and Tropics of Discourse. White argues that the writing of

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history is shaped by implicit techniques of “emplotment”.’ Emplotment is the casting of events into plot structures - comic, tragic, romantic, and ironic. According to White, each method of emplotment employs a character- istic mode of explanation: events are connected organically, mechanically, idiographically, or contextually. Each method implies its characteristic ideology - conservative, radical, anarchist, or liberal. My hunch is that philosophical arguments also are shaped by implicit techniques of emplotment, and that beneath the conversations of the Republic, including the character Thrasymachus, there is a deep plot structure in the argument that culminates in the Theory of the Forms. It is the role of the threat of force in that emplot- ment that 1 am concerned t o sketch.

The question, again, is this: What is the connection between sophistical scepticism and the doctrine that justice is the will of the stronger? Plato gives us, in the opening scene of the Republic, a jocular statement of the problem later t o be developed in earnest between Thrasymachus and Socrates. The conversation is between Socrates, who wishes t o return t o town, and Polemarchus, who, with a troop of friends, insists that Socrates accompany them t o his house. Socrates is the narrator.

Socrates, said Polemarchus, I d o believe you are starting back t o town and

You have guessed right, I answered. Well, he said, you see what a large party we are? I do. Unless you are more than a match for us, then, you must stay here. Isn’t there another alternative? said I; we might convince you that you

How will you convince us, if we refuse t o listen? We cannot, said Glaucon. Well, we shall refuse; make u p your minds t o that.2

At this point Adeimantus breaks in with a description of the festival that convinces Socrates and Glaucon t o go along without coercion, so the threat of force is defused. But in this exchange we see Plato’s foreshadowing of the later encounter between Socrates and Thrasymachus. In this fore- shadowing, we see the outline of the plot: it is t o be a confrontation between coercion and reasoning. Polemarchus threatens coercion; Socrates offers reasoning as an alternative; Polemarchus replies that reasoning cannot stand against force; and Glaucon (not Socrates!) concedes the issue. The amicable conclusion of this exchange cloaks the gravity of Socrates’s question: “Isn’t there another alternative?” But how d o we come t o the point of posing the

‘ S e e , for example, the essay “Interpretation in History”, in Tropics of Discourse, Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978; pp. 51-80. 2?2e Republic ofPlaro, F.M. Cornford, trans., New York, Oxford University Press, 1968;

leaving us.

must let us go.

pp. 2-3.

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question whether reasoning is an alternative to coercion? This is hardly the beginning of the story.

The beginning of the story, recapitulated in Book I of the Republic, is the sophistical destruction of reason. With fitting irony, Socrates plays the sophist in these passages. He entertains the definitions of justice offered by Cephalus and Polemarchus, showing each untenable. He concludes his criticism of Polemarchus with the words: “Now that we have disposed of that definition of justice, can anyone suggest another?”‘ While the dramatic form of the Republic requires us t o see Socrates here in the ultimately constructive role of clearing away error t o make room for the truth about justice, the deep emplotment shows us that Socrates himself is setting the stage for Thrasy- machus’s agitated intervention. Superficially, Thrasymachus’s definition of justice is another in the series begun by Cephalus and Polemarchus. But in the structure of the deeper plot it is a confrontation that Socrates himself has precipitated. Thrasymachus breaks in with scorn, “like a wild beast”, saying, “If you really want t o know what justice means, stop asking questions and scoring off the answers you get.”4 He goes on with a frustrated expostulation against Socrates’s techniques of argument, sly counter-examples, and sophistry. When Socrates, still playing the sophist, repeatedly refuses to offer his own definition of justice, Thrasymachus at last states his doctrine. That doctrine, of course, does not involve asking questions and scoring off the answers; its assertion is not grounded in argument. It springs from a frustrated abandon- ment of argument. But why is argument abandoned in frustration? Because, as Socrates has begun t o show in his voracious appetite for new definitions t o devour, argument does not resolve such questions. A skilled sophist can pick any definition t o pieces, or so it seems t o Thrasymachus.

Thus the stage-settings for the confrontation between Socrates and Thrasy- machus are the presumptions, created by Socrates’s own displays of sophistry, that rational argument leads t o scepticism, and that scepticism creates a void into which coercion, perhaps goaded by a combination of frustration and cynicism, will step. The problem set for Socrates, which will call on him to perform a dramatic reversal from sophist t o constructive dialectician, is this: How can rational argument produce something other than sophistical scepti- cism, evading the nihilistic conclusion that offers coercion its entree? I take it that this is the question that the Theory of the Forms, finally, is designed to answer. It is Socrates’s question to Polemarchus in the opening scene: “Isn’t there another alternative? We might convince you . . .?”

In the emplotment of this argument in Plato’s Republic it is the idea that sophism leads t o scepticism and that scepticism leads to coercion that lends urgency to the quest for an objective criterion of truth. If argument fails to approach an end, nothing is ever settled. Thus no position is demonstrated t o be any better or worse than any other, and the relativist cannot be answered.

’Ibid., p.14. 41bid., p. 15.

COERCION AND THE AUTHORITY OF REASON 175 In this sorry state of affairs it makes no sense t o question the will of the stronger, since reasoning has been dismissed as leading only t o scepticism. Thus the only recourse for opposition to prevailing opinion is violence (real or threatened), and deliberation about truth is replaced by struggle for power. If argument fails to approach an end, might is right; and truth does stem from the authority of power. In that case the claim t o know can rest only on forcible authority. The network of relationships among argument, knowledge, authority, and force is resolved by dismissing argument and grounding the other two in force. This is Thrasymachus’s reading of the situation in the Republic, Book I .

Recognizing this emplotment, we can see that the role played by the Theory of the Forms must be t o provide an objective criterion of knowledge which will rearrange that network of relationships. By giving an objective aim for argument, now to be dignified as the dialectic, the Forms stand as the end (teleologically as well as practically) which argument can approach. Once we have apprehended the Forms, it is possible t o settle something by reasoning, and the sophist’s slide t o scepticism is blocked. The Forms, standing as the objective criterion of truth, show that argument can be an alternative t o coercion. The Platonic ploy is to emplot the situation so that without the Forms, there can be no such alternative. We must have epistemological realism grounded in objective metaphysics, or no alternative can be offered t o naked power.

Latter-day Platonists typically argue in this way when they insist that we must choose between a realist epistemology and the starkest sort of scepticism, and when they go on t o insist that scepticism inevitably degenerates into corrupt argument and political (that is to say, coercive) methods of reaching decisions. When realism and the modern analogues t o the Forms are questioned, the ghost of Thrasyniachus is adduced, as if the nasty consequences of scepticism were proof against it.

It is a common complaint against Plato t o remark that Socrates really never answers Thrasymachus’s challenge, as if a demonstration were required t o assure that reason can defeat coercion on coercion’s own ground. But I think the emplotment shows us that Plato’s aim is more modest. He does not attempt t o show that the dialectic is stronger than brute force. If he thought he had succeeded in that aim, he would have had n o need t o provide a political structure with philosopher-kings at the top. Their arguments would prevail in any case. Rather, his aim is t o show how argument can be objectively grounded dialectic rather than mere sophistry, and so, how it can simply offer an alternative to Thrasymachus’s slide from relativism to scepticism, and through frustration, t o force.

I have argued that the conversation between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Plato’s Republic manifests an emplotment of argument in whlch the spectre of coercion looms as the only alternative t o the theory of the Forms. According t o this emplotnient, without a compelling confrontation with truth, the dialectic remains open-ended, and if the dialectic remains open-ended, it will,

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in fact, be closed by Thrasymachus or his followers. Oddly, though, the search for the compelling confrontation requires that the dialectic model itself after Thrasymachus’s tactics. In order to provide an alternative to scepticism, the dialectic must proceed from authority. It is not enough to say that it must proceed toward its ground. It must already be authorized by the dialec- tician’s approach to the Forms, or there is no guarantee that its processes approach them. The sophistical Socrates of theRepublic, Book I, must give way to the Platonic Socrates of the Meno and of the later books of the Republic.

But the aim of the Platonic Socrates is the intellectual parallel to the aim of Thrasymachus: to control the argument with an appeal to authority. It must be granted that the authority of the Platonic Socrates is the authority of reason rather than the authority of coercion. But in what does the authority of reason consist? The emplotment against Thrasymachus requires that it be the authority to assure that the dialectic is not open-ended - the authority to control argument by designating the end which it approaches. My suggestion is that this notion of the authority of reason is a reflection of the authority of Thrasymachus, and that it is not only authoritative, but authoritarian. If reason is not only authoritative but authoritarian, we have a new problem: How can we insure that the kind of authoritarian power represented by Thrasymachus be exercised only by those who also possess the kind of authoritarian power possessed by the Platonic philosopher? Thus the project of educating and installing the philosopher-kings is the over-all plot of the Republic.

This scene in the Republic provides one of the recurrent images in the folklore of the discipline. I have attempted to work out its emplotment of argument, knowledge, force, and authority because this emplotment has provided the dramatic structure within which philosophers have worked on these problems. This plot has many variations, but in each there is some version of Thrasymachus’s threat, and in each there is some version of the Forms - objective referents whose presence elevates argument from sophistry and turns it into the approach to truth. This plot has its comic versions em- ploying an organic explanation such as Plato’s account of the native kinship of the soul with the Forms, and Descartes’s account of the natural light of reason. These are “comic” in the classical sense: they lead to happy endings in which we know reality. There are also tragic versions employing mechanistic explana- tions such as the logic of the sophists, the formal arguments of Sextus Empiricus, and the association of ideas in Hume. The comic versions are realist, and as we should expect from White’s analysis of historians, they are ideologically conservative. The tragic versions are sceptical, and again as we should expect, ideologically radical. Hume, however, again following White’s patterns, turns into an ironic liberal using a contextual explanation (human nature) to escape from the unmitigated scepticism of his ancient paradigms.

11. The Authoritarian Plot of Modern Epistemology Hume stands as the crucial figure in the epistemological project, regardless

COERCION AND THE AUTHORITY OF REASON 177 of the perspective from which you approach his work. First, Russell in taking up Locke’s aims, writes in his History of Western Philosophy:

He (Hume) represents . . . a dead end , . . T o refute him has been, ever since he wrote, a favorite pastime among metaphysicians. For my part, I find none of their refutations convincing; nevertheless, I cannot but hope that something less sceptical than Hume’s system may be discoverable.’

And later:

It is therefore important t o discover whether there is any answer t o Hume within the framework of a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is n o intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is t o be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority, or rather - since we must not assume democracy - on the ground that the government does not agree with him, This is a desperate point of view, and it must be hoped that there is some way of escaping from it.6

These last lines of Russell’s show how closely the modern empiricist emplot- ment of these issues resembles Plato’s. Thrasymachus appears in Russell’s plot in the form of the coercive power of government to define truth - a power against which we can argue only if something other than human opinion stands as a foundation for the argument. Russell, like Plato, construes the issues in such a way that it is impossible t o argue against political force - whether the tyranny of the majority or the dictates of an autocrat - unless some non-human constraint governs the beginning points of inquiry, and provides a foundation for knowledge. Russell depicts Hume as usheringin - the efforts of Kant notwithstanding ~ the age of unreason that stretches from Rousseau t o Hitler and t o the present day. Thus an epistemological response t o Humean scepticism is the central, if not the only, agenda of modern philosophy.

Second, if one takes the Kantian perspective, again it is Hume whose position must be refuted. The genius of the Kantian ploy is to acknowledge the finality of Hume’s arguments, regarding them as dispositive of the attempt t o find universal and necessary structures of rationality in the contents of experience, while a t the same time launching the search for those structures not among the contents but in the conditions of experience. The Kantian emplotment is to claim that unless such conditions are specified, experience is simply a Humean procession of one thing after another, unconnected and unintelligible, as unsynthesized and indeed unsynthesizable manifold. Without the provision of such universal and necessary structures, rationality has n o standing. If we are not insane, we are n o better off than if we were. Or if ’History of Western Philosophy, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1945; p. 659. 61bid., p. 613.

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we are better off with sanity, that fact is inexplicable. We must say, with Hume, that:

Here, then, is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and through the powers and forces, by which the former is governed, be wholly unknown to us; yet our thoughts and conception have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature.

That is, we must simply shrug and accommodate ourselves to the fact that the expectations of our daily lives, as well as the conclusions of the most rigorous sciences, seem on the whole to correspond to the pattern of events in nature, while admitting that there is no discoverable reason why they should. We have no grounds for our confidence in knowledge. Hence there is no rational basis for argument against the most eccentric expectations and conclusions, or for that matter, against the most cynical or violent political stipulations. Nothing but the common sentiment of humanity stands between us and the descendents of Thrasymachus. Again, as in the empiricist emplotment, there is no rational defense against the tyranny of the majority or against the dictates of the cynical autocrat. This, too, appears to be a desperate position, and our only hope of having anything to say against the threat of coercion appears to rest on the discovery of rational constraints, not relative to the human condition, governing the possibilities of knowledge. Latter-day Kantians may appeal to language-games, forms of social organization, or like Kant himself, to the universal and necessary forms of reason. In each case the aim is to provide a priori constraints on the forms of possible knowledge in order to stay off the slippery slope that leads from relativism to scepticism to coercion.

Third, the attempt to discuss the standing of reason without appeal to non-human constraints must also begin with Hume’s appeal to human nature, and must attempt to show how, even though Hume is correct in his demonstration that the structures of rationality rest on nothing more than the consensus of human beings engaged in common projects, this fact does not entail the conclusions that we must end our philosophizing with ironic astonishment at the harmony of thought and reality, and that we are simply defenseless against the most insane or the most coercive proposals about what is known and knowable. To see Hume’s conclusions as a beginning of further inquiry, rather than as a dead-end to be avoided if possible, is to search for a way to introduce another plot-structure - an alternative to the emplotment by the Platonists and empiricists. In this alternative emplotment, scepticism will not appear as the harbinger of coercion, so the slippery slope from relativism to coercion will not appear so slippery after all. The aim of conversion will be the continuance of .conversation, not its closure by the compelling and coercive impact of the .confrontation with truth! Thus the provision of foundations - non-human constraints on the forms of possible ’An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in lRe English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, E.A. Burtt, ed., New York, The Modern Library, 1967; p. 617.

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knowledge - will not be cast as the exclusive alternative to submission to the threats of Thrasymachus.

But how does Thrasymachus fit into the alternative emplotment? How can an alternative way of scripting these issues deal with the spectre of having nothing to say against cynical coercion, or the threat of having nothing to say to justify rationality against insanity? Here it is important to remember the modesty even of the Platonist’s goals. The aim of the Platonic Socrates is merely to show how something can be said, not to show how reason is, after all, more powerful than coercion, as if reason could defeat coercion on its own grounds. In a similar way, no one really supposes that reason ought to be able to demonstrate the superiority of sanity to insanity in a forum in which insanity dictates the criteria of success. Here it is important to see just what truth is supposed to signify. Presumably it signifies the requirement for an authorization of rationality. But an authorization recognizable by whom? And recognized by whom? Does reason require an authorization that will somehow compel1 the coercive cynic, the madman, and the democratic relativist to acknowledge it? But what possible authority could do that? Thrasymachus, the madman, and the Athenian assembly are always free to reject whatever foundation the Platonist presents. Hitler’s rise to power would not have been prevented by a successful grounding of the categorical imperative in the objective nature of the rational moral consciousness.

So if we dispose of the notion that rationality could have an authorization that would be coercive in that sense, we dispose at the same time of the notion that it ought to have such a compelling authorization. But if rationality cannot have such a compelling authorization - an authorization so great that it compells even the coercive, the insane, and the democratic - why are these threats trotted out as if they were to be answered? Or are they trotted out simply to show the bottom of the slippery slope on which the failure to provide an authorization of rationality places us? Now what sort of authori- zation can keep us off the slippery slope to madness and coercion? The answer has been this: an authorization that grounds knowledge and the discourse about knowledge in some transcendent constraints independent of human nature and human interests. But if we acknowledge that providing even this does not guarantee the triumph of reason, why are we given to believe that the search for this is the only alternative to chaos and corruption? Why suppose that Socrates can have something to say against Thrasymachus only if he has the Theory of the Forms to back him up? We see that the Theory of the Forms is powerless if Thrasymachus is serious in pressing his challenge. Thus the appeal to a transcendent criterion to authorize rationality is a move prompted by a dramatic challenge which cannot be answered even if the appeal is successful. So the emplotment which relies on this threat by making it the pivotal point in an appeal to the transcendant authorization of reason, introduces a red herring (an insoluble diversionary problem) and then presents a solution (the Theory of the Forms, the primitive ideas of experience, the structures of the understanding) as if it somehow bore on the insoluble

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problem. Thrasymachus is the red herring. His challenge is an insoluble problem functioning as a diversion. As long as we focus on the notion that an authorization of reason is supposed to answer his threat, we will continue to conclude that n o such authorization is possible. Then what problem does the transcendent authorization of rationality answer?

1 think this question is settled by noticing, first, that the problem is one that arises only when rational discourse is already under way, when it is not actually already threatened by a Thrasymachus. a madman, a tyrant, or a democracy. The problem that arises when rational discourse is already under way is this: Will it ever end? Now we can return t o Thrasyniachus in a new light. Given that Thrasymachus’s threat of coercion is unanswerable, and that we will misconstrue the wish for an authorization of reason as long as we entertain the notion that it ought t o be answered, we can now focus on the move just previous: the bit where Thrasymachus turns to blustering about coercion. What moves Thrasymachus t o anger and then t o force is the prospect of Socrates’s endless haggling about definitions. The occasion of the resort to threats of coercion is the interminability of argument. Here, and not in the threat of violence itself, is the crucial turn in the Platonic plot. If argument goes on forever, nothing is ever settled. The fact that this prospect opens the door t o Thrasymachus’s threats is a dramatic opening Plato exploits to full effect. But to say that the endlessness of argument opens the door to violence is not to say that if argument is endless then violence is inevitable. But only if it is true that if argument is endless then violence is inevitable, is it true that the avoidance of violence depends on providing an end for argument. And only if it is true that providing an end for arguments depends on finding the Theory of the Forms is it true that having something t o say t o Thrasyniachus depends on finding the Theory of the Forms. Thus the real pivot in the Platonic argument is the prospect of endless argument. But this is merely t o make explicit what the dramatic form of Thrasymachus’s entree into the discussion of the Republic, Book I, signifies.

Now, is it true that if argument is endless then violence is inevitable? And is it true that providing an end for argument depends on finding a Theory of the Forms? 1 cannot undertake now t o explore these questions, on which the whole Platonic project rests, but let me first note the sense of “authorization” that emerges from this understanding of the epistemological project. The function of the authorization of rationality is t o enable argument t o stipulate an end for argument.

But surely, the point is not to find a way t o silence Thrasyniachus once he has interrupted and threatened coercion. It is t o find a way to prevent him from getting frustrated and angry. The Platonic way t o d o this is to promise him that the argument will not go on aimlessly forever, but has an end, namely, the compelling transcendent truths toward which this and all arguments tend. We give Thrasymachus the metaphysical comfort o f believing that arguments converge on reality. This is the Platonists’ ploy. However, this is the onry alternative t o violence, only if there is some necessary connection between

COERCION AND THE AUTHORITY OF REASON 181 the endlessness of argument and the turn to coercion. But t o borrow Socrates’s response to Polemarchus, isn’t there an alternative? Isn’t there an alternative which does not envisage the underwriting of human inquiry with metaphysical or epistemological guarantees and which does not therefore focus our attention or insoluble problems about the foundations of knowledge? Isn’t there an alternative which puts aside the fruitless pursuit of foundations in favor of more productive problems?

111. Summary and Conclusion The Platonic argument is that without foundations, there is n o alternative

t o Thrasymachus. Thus there must be foundations, or Thrasymachus goes unanswered. If we are given this structure we then must commit ourselves to finding foundations or we must admit that Thrasymachus is right after all. In Russell’s version of the argument we must find some systematic epistemology to answer Hume, or else admit that nothing more than the forms of human life define the difference between sanity and insanity. As the modern epistemo- logical tradition has held that the latter outcome amounts t o a collapse of reason, the modern goal has been to say what it is, independent of human speech, human action, and human projects, that guarantees the authority of reason. Now in response to the Platonic eniplotment of these issues, my aim is to suggest that there is an alternative to Thrasymachus notwithstanding the absence of objective foundations for human knowledge. I d o not say “despite” their absence. It is a part of my argument to claim that the provision of compelling foundations is an argumentative analogue t o Thrasymachus’s physical coercion, and that therefore it is not that we have an alternative to Thrasymachus even though we have no foundations but that we have an alternative because there are no compelling confrontations with intellectual objects that force the conclusion of argument. In response t o the empiricist emplotment, my aim is to say that the wish for transcendent guarantee of rationality - the notion of something independent of human speech, human action, and human projects, the guarantees the standing of reason - amounts essentially to a wish for knowledge that is not merely human, and that our rationality is precisely human rationality t o the extent that we forego that wish and acknowledge that the web of human speech, action, and projects is in fact all that prevents the collapse of reason. Rorty has put it in this way:

Since Kant, philosophers have hoped that it (the wish to evade the contingency of the starting points, or foundations of human knowledge) might be fulfilled by finding the a priori structure of any possible inquiry, or language, or form of social life. If we give up this hope, we shall lose what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort”, but we may gain a renewed sense of community . . . James, in arguing against realists and idealists that “the trail of the human serpent is over all”, was reminding us that our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects, not in our obedience to permanent non-human constraints.’

‘Presidential Address, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 5 3 , 1979-80.

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A more prosaic answer to the question, “What guarantees the standing of reason?” might be simply this: “Nothing guarantees it”. But rather than shrugging hopelessly that nothing more than forms of human life defines the difference between sanity and insanity, a good argument and a bad one, sense and nonsense, we are free now to acknowledge responsibility for those differences. Hume, in seeing that nothing beyond the human grounds rationality, was nearer truth than those who saw his conclusions as a form of intellectual bankruptcy. The search for the transcendent guarantee is indeed bankrupt, and has been from the start. The close resemblance among the arguments of the sophists, of the ancient sceptics such as Sextus Empiricus, of David Hume, and of the later Wittgenstein shows that the conclusive refutations of Platonism and of its modern descendants have been in hand from the beginning. But the sceptic was domesticated as someone to be answered, an interlocutor to be refuted, a threat to be neutralized. And the presence of the sceptic as interlocutor - whether in Plato’s presentation of Thrasymachus or in Kant’s references to Hume or in the reactionary use of Kuhn as sceptical foil for the realist hero - has been used to emplot intel- lectually coercive realism as the only alternative to chaos. Hume saw us being saved from chaos by the only happy accidents of human nature. Denied the residual rationalism (which even Hume did not escape) of a doctrine of human nature, we can now see ourselves as saved from chaos - if at all - not by a “given” human nature or by a transcendentally guaranteed reason, but by our common struggle against nonsense, insanity, and bad argument. If we can come to see ourselves as committed to frankly human projects of making sense, we will not be strung out between coercive realism and the slippery slope from relativism to scepticism to cynical coercion. There is, of course, no guarantee that we are - ultimately - saved from chaos. But there is an alternative. Rather, there are may alternatives - many conversational projects in which human beings are attempting to salvage order and sense from the Jamesian blooming buzzing confusion. We cannot ask, as it were, on the front end, for assurances that these attempts are fated for success or for assurances that they are all commensurable - all fitting pieces in one giant picture-puzzle called “The Nature of Reality”. Perhaps they are not so fated, and perhaps there is not one such picture-puzzle. But why should we expect assurances that they are, or that there is?

I am suggesting, following Rorty, that the alternative to the Platonic emplotment is a plot in which confrontation with objects constituting a non-human reality is replaced as the crucial action by on-going conversation with our fellow human interlocutors. Returning briefly to Hayden White’s patterns of emplotment, we can recall that the comic happy ending of Platonic thought correlates with an insistence on organic connections (the soul and the Forms, or the mind and the logical structure of reality, are akin), and with a conservative ideology. This alternative emplotment, by contrast, is clearly contextualist in its relations of ideas. White’s patterns suggest that it will tend toward irony, and that its ideological ramifications will tend toward the

COERCION AND THE AUTHORITY OF REASON 183 liberal. This replacement entails that the goal of confrontation - knowledge of compelling truth - is to be replaced by the goal of knowledge that certain propositions are sustainable in argument. The compelling experience gives way to the persuasive argument. The notion of justification shifts away from the search for a transcendent ground for discourse toward the acknowledge- ment that justification, as a matter of fact, is always within an on-going discourse; propositions are justified not by objects, but by other propositions. So we seek - not unshakeable foundations - but airtight arguments. Our intuitions, our bedrock, our undeniable truths of reason, signify not the contact of our intellects with a coercive reality, but the boundaries of our discourse. In principle, the conversation can go on forever. As a matter of fact, it will end when for a time we are satisfied - when we all agree that further pursuit, further questions, would for the time being, be needless, absurd. When do we ever find an occasion to assert that “This is one hand, and this is another?” Perhaps when teaching someone how to speak English.’ But the absurdity of doubting that “This is one hand and this is another” does not show that its truth - or any truth - provides a non-contingent starting point for the rest of the things I want to say about the world. Rorty has pointed out that the reflective mind has a basic choice: Whether to accept the contingency of all starting points, admitting the humanness of our knowing, or to continue to rail against it seeking to transform human known into non-human, mechanically guaranteed representation.’ Powerful forces, some of which may indeed ultimately be identical with certain kinds of religious sensibilities, drive us toward the latter search. That way appears to offer certainty, security, and release from the human condition. But admitting the contingency of starting points leaves us with the prospect of endless argument: endless humanness. We can keep Thrasymachus in the conversation, on these grounds, only if the Socratic virtues can be embraced as free-standing human projects, independent of the guarantee of success. Rorty is issuing a call toward a new ethics of argument centered in loyalty to our conversational partners, forgoing the Platonic comfort that comes with an assurance of success - of agreement, of consensus, of commensurability, of a common language, of a universal rationality. Reason, too, is a human project: it is - astonishingly - a moral virtue.

This hard doctrine has been expressed well by Stanley Cavell:

We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest

’See Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1969; passim. ‘oThis is Rorty’s argument in the Presidential Address, op. ci t . , p. 7 2 6 .