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Knowledge Society Monograph Series

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Conversing with Rorty

Hermeneutically & Dialogically

3D Democratically & Ecologically

Lynne Alexandrova

Conversing with Rorty: Hermeneutically & Dialogically, 3D Democratically & Ecologically 1

Monograph Series

*Work in Progress*

_______________________________________

Conversing with Rorty: Hermeneutically & Dialogically

3D Democratically & Ecologically

Lynne Alexandrova

University of Toronto

Mind & Time Publications

January 2014

2 Lynne Alexandrova

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Monograph Conversing with Rorty: Hermeneutically & Dialogically 3D

Democratically & Ecologically (author: Lynne Alexandrova)

Knowledge Society Monograph Series (Work in Progress) of Mind & Time

Publications, University of Toronto Libraries Journal Publishing Services

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Conversing with Rorty: Hermeneutically & Dialogically 3D

Democratically & Ecologically .……………………………………………………………….. 1

Reproduction I: A Brief Response to Rorty’s (1996) Essay ……….…………… 78

Reproduction II: Rorty’s (1996) Essay ………………………………………..………… 87

4 Lynne Alexandrova

What’s what: The preparation of this work-in-progress manuscript has been as

much an exploration into the discursive problematics of the scholarship under

analysis as a first-hand experience of what it might mean to unpack “hermen-

eutically” a text, or indeed a person/academic author persona. Here, the

interpretee is Rorty’s (1996) three-page essay “Idealizations, Foundations, and

Social Practices”, considered in the context of his lager body of work.

The manuscript may read like more than one, more or less closely related,

articles in the making, with some of the footnotes branching off hyper-textually.

This authenticates the pre-article-draft explorations involved. More pertinently, it

provides bookmarks for anyone, myself not excluded, who might get hooked on

to pursuing further any logical streams that the manuscript reveals, hints at, or

could eventually lead to. As an illustration, consider a couple of top-level queries,

to whose introduction below, and future investigation, I dare lay (expressly

nonexclusive!) claims: (How/why) do systems theory, ecological thinking and

democratic ideals overlap, and what might be the substantive and heuristic

implications? What (communication mode) would it take to make academics’ and

any other shared eco-worlds worthwhile and, for starters, possible?

Keywords: democracy, dialogue, ecology, epistemology, hermeneutics, systems

theory; Buddhism, Christianity, Indigeneity; L. Code, J. Dewey, H.-G. Gadamer, D.

Haraway, M. Heidegger, I. Kant, K. Oliver, G. Vattimo, D. Vokey, L. Wittgenstein

Acknowledgements: Research (and in part its textual presentation) for the

present monograph has been vetted through a course essay and a comp paper. I

am happy to share all remaining leads to follow and knots to untie.

About the Author: Lynne Alexandrova is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto,

with interests in ecological thinking, epistemology, technoscience, and communication, as

related to learning and cognition. She studies relational belief systems, both traditional

and contemporary, and seeks cross-paradigm dialogue. Lynne has presented her research

at a number of conferences across disciplines, as well as organized a few with domestic

and international participation. She has co-authored a family history book, co-edited a

collective volume, and is the founder of Mind & Time e-Publications. She is also the lead

researcher for Mutual Worlds ~ Mutual Cultures experiential research project, through

which she enacts her conceptual explorations. Email: [email protected]


1. Themes and Situatedness of the Study

1.1. The hermeneutic impetus

I first “came at” Rorty’s (1996) text in the shape of what became a brief

“response to an article”, as an assignment for a graduate seminar on

democratic theory and education (see Appendix, Reproduction I). How-

ever, once started, I felt compelled to explore further, in order to “hear”

what he “is saying”. To be able to even take an approximate shot at

Rorty’s own “meaning”, one obviously has to have accumulated some

relatively sizeable mileage analysing his writings, for a better grasp of his

personal intellectual trajectory. His memorable, if at times cavalier,

citations certainly add a novel flavour to one’s earlier impressions of the

authors, and can tantalizingly highlight the insufficiency or lack thereof:

e.g. John Dewey “want[ing] to reconcile Christian ethics with Darwin and

Mendel” (p. 334), George Santayana’s “’supernaturalism’, defined as ‘the

confusion of ideals and power’” (p. 335), Annette Baier’s and other

feminists’ “attempt to substitute the notion of appropriate trust for that

of [Kantian] ‘obligation’ as the central moral concept” (p. 335), John

Rawls’s and Robert Nozick’s principles metonymized as “what we do”, res-

pectively,“in our appellate courts of law” and “our market places”(p. 333).

The “conversation” referenced in my title revealed the historical

bloodlines of “camps” in contemporary (post-)epistemology, and typed

individually and comparatively some key. In the final analysis, Rorty’s es-

say of humble length, written with the freedom from editorial minutiae

that a conference presentation paper would enjoy, yet with the broad

grasp and fluency of a lifelong career’s experience, has given me a strik-

ingly comprehensive discursive lens. Thanks to that, a thematic-analytic

template of sorts has converged for me that has been taking shape for the

past few years, anticipating future long- and short-term research projects.

To illustrate, let me point-click a thematic group “to be addressed

below” and another one, mostly bookmarked “for future investigation”.

On the first count, Rorty’s “post-epistemologism”, or “post-analyticism”,

just like the naturalism/evolutionism of the early pragmatists (notably

John Dewey, whom Rorty holds in highest regard, or William James), is in

6 Lynne Alexandrova

undeniable (if mostly tacit) dialogue with feminist philosophers such as

Lorraine Code and Donna Haraway, from whose writings I had mostly

been learning. Quite rewardingly, to my mind, the parallel between

Rorty’s (disputed) “neopragmatism” and feminist thought persists in 1)

their critical treatment of the undesirable directions into which the

humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment were side-tracked, and 2) their

leftist leanings in the case of social and political theory. Noting differences

has been equally productive, suggesting extensions for both perspectives.

On the second count, Rorty’s half-jokingly acknowledged religious

tone-deafness (2005a) and ethnocentrism (see e.g. reference in Green

2007) have helped me, by way of contrast. I have come to see more clear-

ly the promise of theoretical and hands-on productivity if “we” were to

bring into the philosophic mainstream ecologically and more broadly rel-

ationally beneficial beliefs and practices from multiple traditional cultures,

which have been silenced, distorted, or compromised under a sleuth of

marginalizing labels: “Aboriginal”, “Indigenous”, “Native”, “third-world”,

“developing”, to name just a few. To these latter categories I’d add the

heritage and/or possible revival of ancient and more recent religions,

apart from Christianity to which Rorty (1996, 2005) makes a valiant effort

to relate equitably, despite the incommensurability he multiply owns up

to. Among them are, for example, (Zen) Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Jud-

aism, Taoism, Zoroastrism (see Appendix 3). Extending Rorty’s Gadamer-

ian dialogue with Christianity (Catholicism, in 2005) to other modes of spi-

rituality can contribute to mutual understanding and global balance,

which has been theorized by Vokey (2001) concerning a possible “moral

discourse” across cultures. For this purpose, “legible” contemporary tran-

slations, specifically of the relational aspects, need to be accomplished.

►►◄◄

Rorty’s (1996) loaded three-pager has acted as the hermeneutic trigger of

the work in progress presented here. Since invited readers of earlier

drafts have confirmed that providing a copy has helped them to better

follow a good part of what drives the discussion, included in the Appendix

is the essay’s full-length reproduction (see Reproduction II).


1.2 Rorty (1996), with extensions, in multivariate context

The task of Rorty’s (1996) essay “Idealizations, Foundations, and Social

Practices” is to address the question “Does democracy need foundat-

ions?”1, which he answers in the negative. He is moreover to provide a

solution to the issue of difference, which needs to be accomplished in the

absence of “foundations” that would otherwise take care of justification.

For a principled solution, in lieu of foundations he appoints an

“idealization” of Christian-like love and/or “appropriate” (per Annette

Baier) trust, which envisions the social lubricants that would turn

“exclusivists into … inclusivists, racists into … democrats” (RR1996, p.

335).

My study undertakes to peek behind the veneer of simplicity, even

naiveté, of the proposed solution, and to look for connections between

the 1996 essay and Rorty’s underlying intellectual stance as explicated in

earlier and later writings. The publications consulted for the purpose are:

1) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), where Rorty deconstructs

(specifically the flawed aspects of!) the Cartesian-Kantian-analytic

paradigm predicated on a correspondence theory of truth and the view of

(in his vocabulary) “philosophy-as-epistemology” as the ultimate

knowledge arbiter for all of culture; 2) his article and interview

contributions, along with Gianni Vattimo’s and Santiago Zabala’s, in The

Future of Religion (2005), edited by Zabala, where the three of them

discuss possibilities for compatibility between science and religion in the

current “Age of Interpretation”2, including as related to today’s

(democratic) society.

The 1979 book is helpful in reading Rorty’s 1996 antifoundationalism –

with regard to the rejection of the notion of epistemological

1 This question is the title of the volume section where the essay appears, along with contributions by Amy Gutmann, Robert Dahl, and Benjamin Barber (Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, 1996). These contributions and Benhabib’s own article are referenced in the analysis presented here on selected points. 2 Presumably preceded by the “Age of Reason” (European Enlightenment) and before that the “Age of Religion” (Europe’s Middle Ages).

8 Lynne Alexandrova

“foundations”, which in conjunction with the “mind as a mirror of nature”

paradigm, by his account has held philosophy’s attention for over three

hundred years, and also with regard to the (meta-)theoretical

conceptualization of his love/trust idealization, for which he recruits

Christian symbolism. Illumination on the latter point is also gained from

his 2005 article “Anticlericalism and Atheism” and the 2005 interview with

Vattimo and Zabala “What Is Religion’s Future after Metaphysics?”. In the

discussion of the above I note where Rorty stops short of following

through on changes he initiates with the deconstruction of traditional

epistemology and its constitutive foundations, representations, reason,

a.k.a. rationality. Some extensions and modifications that I consider are

meant to reveal the creative potential of his “conversational” philosophy,

as it may unfold, from my perspective.

“Conversational” philosophy is Rorty’s alternative to “analytic”

philosophy, explicitly so named in 1979 and 2005, with no claims to any

substantive theoretical status. As I understand it, “conversation” is

properly read as a change in disciplinary paradigm that clearly scales up to

a worldview, well beyond academic concerns, and is closely associated to

Gadamer-ian hermeneutics3. Despite Rorty’s statements that his project is

paradigmatically “revolutionary” (in Kuhn’s 1962 sense) hence exclusively

“reactive”, I’d like to think of his variations on hermeneutic “conversat-

ion” as the “constructive”4 complement to his deconstruction of analytic

epistemology’s flaws. I believe that it has enough of a Deweyan

3 See Donald G. Marshall, who writes that the “terms ‘conversation’ and ‘dialogue’ lie at the heart of Hans-Georg Gadamer's description of understanding” (2004, p. 123) – of texts as well as people. Apart from that, Gadamer did analyze Plato’s literal dialogues in developing his version of hermeneutics. 4 In the book Rorty posits several binaries classifying philosophers, of which I only employ members of three: revolutionary(abnormal)/normal (Kuhn), reactive/constructive, edifying/systematic. John Dewey, for example, would be revolutionary (and peripheral, for analytic philosophy), reactive, edifying, Bertrand Russell–constructive, systematic (though he too reacted/rebelled). The specialized meanings Rorty assigns may not sit well with one’s idea of a scholar, nor are the terms of a pair necessarily mutually exclusive as far as a particular philosopher. I propose, I trust, logical departures in some cases.


“disposition to the world” (and to philosophy) on the “creative” side,

distinct from Gadamer’s, to qualify.

In the same vein, I also propose to add a “constructive” sense to the

“reactive” sense in which Rorty applies the qualifier “edifying”, which he

also uses to render German Bildung5 “education”, “(self-)cultivation” in

the context of Gadamerian hermeneutics. This term bears special

hermeneutic significance in 1979, since it types the paradigmatic

rebelliousness of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and John

Dewey, among a number of others. These scholars are featured in the

book as the three most important philosophers of the 20th century, and

they remain Rorty’s beacons in later years (cf. RR2005, p. 30).6 The

influence of these three scholars, as well as that of Jean-Paul Sartre and

Hans-Georg Gadamer can be detected in the 1996 essay as well.

Borrowing William James’s metaphorization of pragmatism

(personified as female) as “democratic” because of “her”, among other

things, high tolerance for a wide range of ideas and styles, including on

the subject of religious faith ([1907] 1973/1978, pp. 43-44), here I adopt in

a literal sense the notion of “meta-theoretical/heuristic democracy”, on a

par with substantive theoretical democracy. To reference the only 1979

“edificator” who is named in the essay, a classic example of the latter is

5 The translations of Bildung (cf. “self-formation”, “education” in RR1979, p. 359) come nowhere close to conveying the pedagogical, and broadly cultural implications of the tradition in Germany, which seems to underwrite Gadamer’s hermeneutics, e.g. as far as the all-round epistemic-experiential view of the person. Bildung shares the Christian pre-history of modern philosophical hermeneutics, which according to Ramberg & Gjesdal (2005) started to converge as of the 17th century, and the entanglement of knowledge with ethics, which made hermeneutics more than the largely epistemological enterprise it was in Chladenius’s theory (ibid.). For a broader historical perspective on Bildung, featuring Johann Gottfried von Herder and G.W.F. Hegel, see Michael Eldridge (n.d.), and for the 19th century in particular, see Walter Horace Bruford (1975). 6 The Deweyan connection scaffolds, at least nominally, Rorty’s link to pragmatism, although in 1979, he applies the label “pragmatic” to Quine and Sellars emphatically in an informal way. His “neo-pragmatism” is considered controversial (see Bjørn Ramberg 2007), and his interpretation of Dewey has attracted criticism (by Judith Green, a.o., as mentioned in Green 2007).

10 Lynne Alexandrova

John Dewey’s “democracy as a way of life” and of education in turn, as I

read him, not merely for and about, but as democracy, e.g. in Democracy

and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1916),

Experience and Education (1938). The emancipation of all types of

knowledge/experience on his holistic view of experience would qualify as

involving heuristic democratization.

So would Rorty’s, let us call it, “conversational antifoundationalism” in

1979. It is concerned with undermining the search for a subset of

“privileged representations” of knowledge (foundations of knowledge)

and the exclusion of others that he sees as inevitable on the view of

knowledge as accuracy of mental/linguistic representation. By extension,

he undertakes to discredit the claims of philosophy(-as-epistemology) to

exclusive access to the criteria at play (foundations of knowledge) and, in

consequence, its status of ultimate epistemic authority (foundation for

other disciplines and the rest of culture). Rorty’s (presumably

antifoundationalist) “idealizations” of a largely “utopian” (democratic)

community in 1996 and 2005 can be seen as the properly theoretical

projections of a democratized inventory of philosophical heuristics, on the

one hand, and as democratizing messages to the wider public, on the

other. My extensions of Rorty’s deconstructions and some further

implications that I consider below would likewise aim to qualify as (meta-

)theoretically democratizing.

This pervasively, ubiquitously democratizing aspect of analysis

presents one sense of democratic “3D(imensionality)”. Additionally, in a

historical-hermeneutic perspective, I propose that triadic cultural symbols

like the French Revolution’s slogan “Liberté, egalité, fraternité!” at the

close of the 18th century and “government of the people, by the people,

for the people” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address less than a century

later can be taken to stand for enduring values of democracy inherited

from Enlightenment humanism. Rorty’s idealizations assign pivotal

significance specifically to the reciprocity features of the democratic ideal

that appear to rise to the surface in the above symbols (cf. fraternité) but


were not prominent in the Ancient Greek model (Plato’s Republic or

Aristotle’s Politics).7

How well staples of democracy like equaIity and justice factor in

authentic human interest and care, and e.g. whether the right to speak

goes with the right to be heard/the duty to listen, to my mind, make all

the genuinely democratic difference in the world. I believe that reciprocity

values need to be nurtured, in fomal educational and broadly social

settings. What shows their special significance today is that they are

becoming, encouragingly so, the point of convergence of an increasing

number of likeminded flows of contemporary thought, which moreover

re-energize centuries-long traditions. For example, Nel Noddings in her

foreword to Charles Bingham & Alexander Sidorkin’s edited volume No

Education without Relation underscores the gratifying ubiquity of

relational views “in law, medicine, social work, nursing, religion,

psychology, feminist studies, peace studies”, whose exploration “ranges

from highly abstract ontological discussions to the ultimately practical

concerns of teaching” (2010, p. viii).

Putting the adopted approach of “pervasive democratization” in cross-

theoretical perspective, it is in the spirit of “ecological thinking”, which in

the socio-political context has been treated as best realized precisely in

democratic principles – see Lorraine Code’s book Ecological Thinking: The

7 If the triads are treated as semantically hardwired in “democracy”, given its etymology [Gk “people”, “the many” + “rule”], it signifies “governance that is best for, wanted by, the many”, which would make it its own justification. On a “Heideggerian” generous departure from the Greek use (The Politics mentions only a couple of cases of economic equity in a democracy, e.g. Aphytis and the Spartan colony Tarentum, Bk. 6, Ch. 4), “the many” can be upgraded to “all”, democratically, making Rorty’s 2005 model (see p. 36 below) a democracy, not a utopia transcending it.

Rorty seems to reject the dichotomy of the many over the few of the Greek democracies. For him “democracy only works if you spread the wealth around – if you eliminate the gap between the rich and the poor”, which “has been happening in certain small Northern European countries like Holland and Norway”, and happened in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, although since the first oil crisis in 1973 it “ha[s] become a more divided and a more selfish country” (Rorty in Rorty et al. 2005, p. 73).


Politics of Epistemic Location (2006). Moreover, Code’s career-long

epistemological project, by remapping theory-internal hierarchies

problematized as reflecting imaginaries of power and oppression,

encompasses heuristic democratization as well. Substantive and heuristic

democratization go hand in hand in feminist epistemology and the

feminist tradition as a whole, as they do in other social justice

approaches, e.g. critical and post-colonial theories.

Ecological thinking, I would say, is latent in Dewey’s “evolutionary”

view of humans, and organisms in general, as “continuous with nature”,

of human and environment as “interdependent” ([1916] 2009, pp. 218,

162), and can be seen as logically connected with his life-long democratic

commitments. Importantly, the view of humans as an integral part of all

existence is at the core of millennial wisdom across cultures.8 These

teachings, I believe, invite and deserve authentic exploration, precisely

with a view to broader social democratization for sustainability attuned to

our planet, with ourselves as wiser participants in its multilayered

ecosystem.

Thinking of interdependence and relationality as typing “systems-

theoretic” worldviews and approaches in general, a subset can be

delineated of those tending toward mutuality and reciprocity (see Ervin

Laszlo’s 1996, a.o.) in contrast to others foregrounding the power

dialectics of the system (see discussion of Niklas Luhmann’s model by

Jean-Francois Lyotard [1979] 1984, e.g. pp. 61-62). Which is not to say

either that members of the former subset do not take into account power

asymmetries or that members of the latter take no interest in mutuality. I

conceive of the former subset as comprising some if not all

democratic/ecological thinking approaches similar to Code’s, along with

some coherentist-type models in epistemol-ogy, where I’d place Rortian

(allegedly post-epistemological) “conversation”; also hermeneutic

8 See Richard Atleo (2007 & 2011) and Scott Pratt (2002) for first nations traditions; Daniel Vokey (2001) for Mahayana Buddhism; Claudia Eppert (2010), Mary Jo Hinsdale (2012), and Donald Nelson (2012) for Theravada Buddhism and “mindfulness”; George Sefa Dei, ed. (2011) for African and other worldviews.


understanding and the hermeneutic circle9 in the theory of interpretation;

Daniel Vokey’s “wider reflective equilibrium” in moral philosophy (at the

interface with political philosophy10), in my reading conditioning and in

turn being conditioned by pluralistic discourse.

This, let us call it taxonomic, conceptualization is reflected in the

present study’s subtitle, “…Hermeneutically & Dialogically, (3D)

Democratically & Ecologically”, which bears obvious linguistic signs of my

“conversation” with Rorty’s texts consulted here, with the addition of the

ecological (as systems-theoretic) view. The research questions I formulate

and explore below are ultimately about what would be worth preserving

from our earlier theories of the ideal(ized) and the real(ized), and likewise

from our histories, lived and imagined.

The answers feed into the overarching hypothesis of my current

research, namely the existence of a universal of “mutual subjectivity”11,

which having been multiply coded in tradit-ional teachings and theories

alike has, I believe, powerful “edifying” (in the proposed extended sense

of the Rortian term) implications for the longer-term ecological-

evolutionary embedded-ness of our species. Let me, then, launch in this

context the discursive journey with the words of Kurt Hahn, founder of

the OutBound movement: “There is more to us than we know. If we can

be made to see it, perhaps for the rest of our lives we will be unwilling to

settle for less” (quoted after OutBound website).

9 In its more traditional meaning of whole/part interpretive interdependence and the Heideggerian/ Gadamerian “prior hermeneutical situatedness” of what is interpreted (see Jeff Malpas 2009, n.p.). 10 Note that Vokey has in mind agreement at the level of community of inquiry, whereas John Rawls only scales up from “narrow reflective equilibrium” concerning one’s own beliefs about democratic institute-ions to “wide reflective equilibrium”, where one also takes into account existing political theories (see Leif Wenar 2012, 2.4). Hence Vokey’s qualifier in the comparative degree “wider”. 11 I adopt Mary Jo Hinsdale’s (2012) label “mutual subjectivity” for subjectivity per Kelly Oliver’s (2001) theory of “witnessing” predicated on committed engagement with the other.


2. Idealizations in Lieu of Foundations

True to its title “Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices”, Rorty

starts his 1996 essay by introducing the concept of “idealizations” in

contrast to “foundations”. Thus a logical meta-theoretical question, which

encompasses substantive theoretical implications, would be how much of

a difference the introduction of idealizations makes, in view of how he

defines and then applies the heuristic.

Idealizations are conceived of as “mak[ing] our practices more

coherent” (RR1996, p. 333). One key, even defining, advantage that Rorty

emphasizes is that for that purpose they draw on current social practices.

Thus it is worth considering how actual, or concrete “certain components”

of said practices can be, once they get “pumped up” (per Daniel Dennett’s

visualization) by “principles” that “concentrate intuitions” in order to sort

through best and less than best practices and decide what could and what

could not make existing nonideal12 democracies “more coherent”.

Foundations, in turn, purport to be the arbiter of whether to “engag[e] in

our present practices at all” by referencing “something that exists

independently of those practices” such as (an a priori abstraction of!)

“human nature”, and what I see as aspects of it, “rationality” and

“morality”, the latter also being the theory of moderating “human nature”

(RR1996, p. 333). But isn’t Rorty’s love-and-trust idealization predicated

precisely on generic aspects of “humanity” while it aims to succeed

where, according to Rorty, Kant’s categorical imperative is in error –

positing “unconditionality” (in the sense of universality)? Since

idealizations are introduced in contradistinction with the foundationalist

penchant for universalization and abstraction, let us consider a

comparison along these lines.

Idealizations are clearly assigned future reference, and to that extent

are undeniably hypothetical. This can be inferred from the description of

the competing “idealizations of practices in the liberal democracies” of

political philosophers John Rawls and Robert Nozick as concerned with

12 I use Gutmann’s (1996) term “nonideal (vs. ideal) democracy” to vary Rorty’s “(social) practice”.


“the utopian future of our community” (RR1996, p. 333). By contrast,

“foundations”, as inherited by mainstream analytic philosophy-as-

epistemology from the Cartesian-Kantian model, are atemporal and

ahistoric, transcendent and universal. In other words, if the former

envision what is to be, the latter presume to achieve validity for all

cultures for all of history. So, can idealizations be deprived of a degree of

generality?

Tellingly, Rorty refers to both heurisitcs as “principles” (RR1996, p.

333). It seems, therefore, that idealizations, no less than foundations,

target abstract generalizations, thus the difference would be not so much

in their heuristic status as in their particular conceptual modes. That is,

Rorty opposes to Kant’s rationally deduced but noncognitively and

transcendentally based “categorical imperative” (RR1979, p. 383) his own

idealization of Christian-like love, backed up by “appropriate” trust (in

Annette Baier’s sense, RR1996, p. 335), which is presumably historically-

culturally in addition to noncognitively based. However, Rorty’s ultimate

intent does not appear to be to restrict the love/trust solution for

democratic inclusivity to cultural or other particulars, when he projects a

much broader vision of a “utopian” future, “any millennium now”, with

love as “pretty much the only law” (RR2005, p. 40).

The key paradigmatic difference that underlies foundations is what

Rorty calls “the Cartesian-Kantian problematic”, which involves the quest

for “a permanent, neutral framework [or, foundations] for inquiry, and

thus for all of culture” (RR1979, p. 8; cf. e.g. pp. 179, 211). Given his own

training in analytic epistemology, Rorty diagnoses it as steeped in a mind-

to-reality “correspondence”13 theory of knowledge and, as he argues, a

13 Hence the mind as a “mirror of nature” (thus the “essence of man” as “glassy”), and the attribution of the paradigmatic problem to “mirror-imagery/-metaphors”, which Rorty tracks since the emergence of a “theory of knowledge” (epistemology) in the 17th century. Nevertheless, he acknowledges the origins of modelling knowing on visual perception, and the associated “ocular” metaphors back in Antiquity, with Plato (RR1979, pp. 156ff). Seeing would have literally been a simile for knowing at the time, since what came to be called “external reality” accessible through authoritative “scientific observation” (largely indebted to Locke’s empiricism) was considered unreliable “appearances”, not a “source” of


misguided belief that perfecting representations of such correspondences

– whether the earlier mental ones since Locke and Descartes, or their

linguistic sequel at the analytic stage – can be equated with improving

knowledge. Because he sees as problematic the very possibility of

accessing “reality” (presumably directly through the senses and indirectly

through the mind, according to the traditional understanding, RR1979, p.

253), the quest for ever more accurate representations of it (thus truths

about it) is futile and the assumption of foundations for such a quest an

illusion.

Before proceeding with the analysis of Rorty’s antifoundationalism in

the context of the love/trust idealization, I sketch some relevant premises

of the mirror-imagery paradigm, paired up with their “conversational”

philosophy alternatives.

2.1 The “mirror-imagery” paradigm and the “conversational”

antidote

“Neo-Kantian consensus” is the label for what Rorty sees as a 20th century

tacit agreement between the mainstream descendants of Anglo-Saxon

logical empiricism and the more idealistically/transcendentally-minded

Continental philosophy. Different though their historical roots may be,14

they agree concerning the role of “philosophy-as-epistemology” as the

ultimate knowledge-claim arbiter for other disciplines and the rest of

culture. They also converge on the assumption that scientific knowledge is

the norm for “true” knowledge, which determines the direction of

philosophy’s guidance. Any other knowledge and experience is demoted

or excluded by “confrontation and commensuration”. The C&C motto

recurs in the 1979 book as an apt embodiment of the key defects,

knowledge or “evidence”. Real existences/essences, in an ideal realm, were to be accessed by “reason”. 14 Empiricism and rationalism were literally at war in the 17th century over the foundations of knowledge, which continued for the next couple of centuries. See Daniel Vokey for a succinct account (2001, p. 94ff). Note also Dewey’s ([1919?] 1984a,b) attempt to combine the best of both in his “experimental method”, “experimentalism” becoming one of the labels for his own brand of pragmatism.


according to Rorty, of the analytic mindset and the mirror-imagery

paradigm of which it is the latest version at the time.

Confrontation etymologically invokes the image of a knower standing

face to face with the object (to be) known. It thus visualizes the dimension

of representation based on “correspondence” between subject (mind) or

proposition (language) and object (reality). Commensuration projects the

dimension of justification. It is assumed that it is possible to deduce a set

of justificatory criteria that would be the same for all rational knowers and

that said criteria can in turn be uniformly applied in all relevant situations

by all knowers. This would allow to separate the “necessary” from the

“contingent” truth-claims, thereby determining a set of “privileged

representations”, which logically results in certain types of knowledge

(and by extension the humans that embody these) getting selected as

valid as opposed to others. One cannot but appreciate the added bonus of

“confrontation” conveying the tensions created along both dimensions.

On the side of representation the image is created of “man” opposed to

nature, which e.g. feminists theorists have worked to deconstruct at least

since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 (see also Haraway 1991,2003;

Code 2006). On the side of commensuration epistemological asymmetries

correlate with invidious social asymmetries in the wider society.

By presumably effecting a shift from representation to language – or

more properly, from a representational to a nonrepresentational view of

language – “conversation” (drawing on Gadamerian dialogue and

understanding) disrupts the subject-object relation of confrontation. By

moving away from universalizing justificatory criteria and toward a

coherentist alternative, “social justification” (notion of the

“epistemological behaviourism” of Sellars and Quine) dissolves

commensuration. Conversation, then, is expected to mediate social

justification while having to remain non-representational, hence non-

referential.

What heuristic structure does the above reveal? The traditional

epistemological problematic around the issue of permanent, neutral

“foundations”, which Rorty presents as definitive of the (Cartesian-

Kantian-based) theory of knowledge, can be understood to span two


distinct levels: 1) epistemology-internal: foundations-of knowledge and of

a theory of it, and 2) philosophy/epistemology-external: foundations-for

any theoretical or practical endeavour beyond (philosophy-as-

)epistemology. If I am on the right track about the underlying semantic

grid (since the dawn of epistemology in the 17th century per Rorty’s

chronology), foundations-of can be taken to vacillate between 1a) source

of knowledge, e.g. rationalism’s “clear and distinct ideas” (Rene

Descartes) or empiricism’s senses a.k.a. sensory intuitions/impressions

(John Locke/David Hume), and 1b) (criteria for) justification of knowledge-

claims.15 By contrast, foundations-for are more straightforwardly aligned

with (criteria for) knowledge/truth justification.

If, as discussed above, the search for 1a) is futile/impossible, and

therefore 1b), geared toward it, is an illusion/pretence, then 2), which

derives from 1b), would also be invalidated. The question is, if

conversation and its coherentist “social justification” (following Quine and

Sellars) step in for 1), would that rescue 2), i.e. philosophy’s ability, hence

right and responsibility, to provide guidance for the rest of culture? Just as

interestingly, if “conversation” mediating knowledge making/justification

is, following Rorty, non-representational, thus non-referential, how would

people be saying anything while conversing, and knowing anything, to

start with? Deferring the latter question concerning foundations-of to my

15 Importantly for the empirical lineage of analytic philosophy, what Rorty calls Locke’s “confusion of [rational] justification and [causal] explanation” would have been a major breakthrough, for some, that shifted “reality” from the world of ideas in Antiquity to an “external” world, knowledge of which is best (even only) accessible to science. That, presumably, created a theory of knowledge by giving it a problem to occupy itself with (RR1979, pp. 139-147). Comparing Rorty (1979) and Rorty (2005), I detect an ambivalence as to whether he questions access to that reality by philosophy or by science to start with.

If in 1979 he is taken to question specifically philosophy’s ability to formulate a framework even prior to science, but not the latter’s empirical-epistemic capacities, it makes sense to argue in 2005 for science to keep truth and the public sphere, leaving to religion the private sphere and adopting Vattimo’s “identifying Christ neither with truth nor with power but with love alone” (RR2005, p. 36).


“about”-realm hypothesis in Appendix I, next I focus on foundations-for as

more directly pertaining to Rorty’s 1996 research question.

The 1996 essay tackles the issue of foundations-for democracy scaling

it to the level of interpersonal relations that the Kantian categorical

imperative operates at, rather than in view of e.g. institutions and

governance, as Seyla Benhabib’s and Amy Gutmann’s articles or Robert

Dahl’s and Benjamin Barber’s in the same volume do, presenting the

philosophical and political scientific sides of the matter. Rorty basically

lumps the political with the moral, I’d say without discussion specific to

the political aspects of democracy.

In sorting through the similarities and differences between

foundations and idealizations, based on the essay, I would tend to agree

with the overall tendency Benhabib recapitulates. She observes that the

antifoundationalist position is to “either posit or take for granted precisely

those moral and political norms of citizens’ equality, freedom, and

democratic legitimacy [cf. Rorty’s “human nature”, “rationality”, and

“morality”] for the justification of which what are dubbed

‘foundationalist’ models were developed in the first place” (1996b, p. 71,

italics added). Benjamin Barber’s (1996) expulsion of epistemological

foundations from the allegedly incommensurably practical domain of

politics and the alternative he offers make a fitting illustration of

Benhabib’s diagnosis – in my reading of both scholars. Not surprisingly,

though, both converge on a deliberative model16 of democracy, which,

one would think, entails sufficiently similar substantive premises. I’d say

that at least in some cases, where the parties converge ideologically, the

specific contexts they research and the problems they choose to tackle

may necessitate their customized heuristic sets. This by no means

excludes (nor does it impose) alignments of the (anti)foundationalism

contrast with a robust ideological contrast.

16 Note that the lead article in Benabib’s anthology was written by Jürgen Habermas, a foremost theoretician of political deliberation, who argues there for a procedural-deliberative model.


Below I will argue that one need not reject all aspects and modes of

“foundations”, and that some are not only compatible with but may be

necessary for Rorty’s own love/trust idealization. Along these lines,

allegedly foundationalist notions like “essence” and “human nature”,

“rationality” and related cognitive notions, are shown to have advantages,

conditional on the content imparted to them. Subsection 2.2 addresses

the issue of philosophical/ epistemological foundations as guidance for

other disciplines and the rest of culture, taking into account Rorty’s 1979

deconstruction of analytic philosophy’s “neo-Kantian” epistemological

foundations and the conversational philosophy alternative. This is in

preparation for the discussion of “human nature” and the cognitive

cluster in subsection 2.3, thus the foundations issue in some of its more

particular aspects.

2.2 Philosophical foundations and edification

Far from paradoxically, the question of philosophy’s/epistemology’s

ability, right, and responsibility to provide guidance for other disciplines

and for all of culture can be answered in Rorty’s own words. In Philosophy

and the Mirror of Nature Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and

John Dewey are said to have developed “edifying” philosophies on

account of aiming “to help their readers and society as a whole to break

free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes rather than to provide

‘grounding’ for the institutions and customs of the present” (RR1979, pp.

11-12). As already mentioned, they are recognized above all others

specifically for revealing crucial conceptual flaws in the mirror-imagery

paradigm. I’d say that “breaking free” from what is “outworn” in “the

present” bears the overtones of an anticipated social change, in addition

to paradigmatic shift. I see both as applicable to Dewey.

It is not the case, then, that the vision of philosophy-as-epistemology

as providing public guidance is in and of itself erroneous. Otherwise, the

introduction of “edifying”, which types paradigmatically rebellious

philosophies – Sellars’s, Quine’s and Sartre’s, in addition to the above –

would be a contradiction in terms. The legitimacy of guidance, therefore,


is a matter of what a philosopher has to offer. As already indicated, I’d

insist on an amendment to the Rortian terminologization of “edifying”.

Namely, that pace Rorty (e.g. RR1979, p. 378), the term be allowed, and in

fact encouraged, to stand for constructing in addition to deconstructing.

He explains that he restricts “constructing” to the context of Kuhnian

“normal science” only (RR1979, e.g., p. 360), where he places Kant and

Russell. However, I see no reason for the reduction of the pre-theoretic

semantics of the word, especially where paradigm shift is concerned. For,

if a change stops at “leaving unfilled” the vacated place of e.g.

epistemology (an intent Rorty attributes to hermeneutics, RR1979, p.

316), wouldn’t giving up all of earlier experience be a loss as much as a

gain? This did not happen with epistemology, which has persisted –

reformed and enriched – in the work of e.g. epistemologist Lorraine Code

and philosopher of science Donna Haraway, and a good number of their

likeminded colleagues in the feminist tradition, over the past few

decades.

Stepping up the discussion to the level of creativity, which Rorty in all

evidence cherished, as in the case of poetry (see e.g. Judith Green’s 2007

memorial article), is it desirable, if at all possible, to curb the creative

impulse of (if I may) “human nature”? Dewey, if anyone – whom Rorty

looked up to because he “vainly hoped to shatter” per Dewey’s own idiom

“the crust of philosophical convention” (RR1979, pp. 13, 379) – would be

a prime example of an “edificator” who would have wanted to see new

philosophical questions17 growing through the cracks and turning the

ruins into philosophically sustaining and sustainable projects. With the

hope for a better future, not unlike Rorty (1996, 2005) himself. In support

of my proposal, the coda of the Introduction to the 1979 book states that

John Dewey “wrote his polemics against traditional mirror-imagery out of

a vision of a new kind of society”, where “the arts and sciences” would be,

quoting Dewey, “the unforced flowers of life” (RR1979, p. 13). Rorty’s own

17 I am referring to “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy” (1917), where Dewey diagnoses the regurgitation of the same old questions as a significant part of the malady. As to his cure, there is the evidence of seventy years of publishing to document his relentless crust-breaking and cultivating spirit.


2005 idealization to be discussed further below presents a similarly poetic

vision of a future, guided first and foremost by Christian(-like) love, which

I see as archetypal reciprocity.

If I intuit correctly that Dewey’s life-long engagement with (in my

gloss) education-as-democracy-as-a-way-of-life has contributed – over

and above Gadamerian Bildung – to Rorty’s (what amounts to) advocacy

for philosophic “edification”, then I’d urge that Dewey be given a

“constructive”, in addition to a “reactive” say in the history of democratic

edification.18 I’d also depart from Rorty’s presentation of Dewey’s own

idealization: “In his ideal society culture is no longer dominated by the

ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement” (ibid.,

italics added). In anticipation of my advocacy for discernment regarding

Rorty’s 1996 seemingly wholesale rejection of the cognitive cluster of

notions, I’d say at this point that Dewey’s holistic view of experience

would favour precisely cooperation of the human faculties (as would

Gadamer’s). Taking into account that he held “science” in high regard

(James 1907), which Rorty explicitly sets aside, Dewey’s holism would be

compatible with some modes of “objectivity”, including on Rorty’s own

1979 epistemological behaviouristic and hermeneutic terms (see

subsection 3.3).

As far as philosophic guidance that Rorty himself values, in the 1996

essay the influence of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which needs no

explicit attribution, is felt through the priority given to historicity and

through the key role assigned to “our ability to use language” (RR1996, p.

334), respectively. These aspects and their extensions, crucial from Rorty’s

“revolutionary” perspective, are multiply referenced in the 1979 book as

the two scholars’ respective defining contributions to the paradigm shift

underway. In the essay, they link more or less straightforwardly to the

conceptual problem with universalizing, ahistorical foundations, on the

one hand, and to “conversation” (as language ability) that can act as the

antidote, on the other.

18 I believe that many who knew Rorty may see him as dually “edifying” as well (see Judith Green 2007).


Dewey, the only one of the three explicitly named in the essay is styled

“antifoundationalist Darwinian” and put in charge of “wanting to

reconcile Christian ethics19 with Darwin and Mendel” (RR1996, p. 334).

This interfaces only nominally with Rorty’s ensuing argument based on

biological evolution. Perhaps, knowing Dewey’s educative commitments,

a more likely link can be imagined reaching into the general vicinity of

(outlawed) “human nature” and to Dewey’s Aristotelian belief in its

intrinsic goodness, as opposed to what Darwin’s name, quite

erroneously20, has come to signify and justify.

The 1996 evolutionary argument mirrors the 1979 questions around

the ability of the natural/exact sciences to “ground” either epistemology

or morality, thus the entitlement of epistemology (as philosophy of

science), and general philosophy, to, one could say, a patent on

foundations-for. Asking such questions, in Rorty’s idiom, “makes no

sense”, since e.g. knowing about the structure of the brain gives no clue

to our humanity, and neither does familiarity with the physics of the

natural world translate into moral directives. The bottom line is that there

are no grounds for moral judgement that can be read in nature, this time

around by (evolutionary) biology.

19 This can be read as paraphrasing “familiar moral intuitions” in the previous sentence. As a rule, Dewey does not treat of religious matters. His only book on the subject is A Common Faith, where he promotes, in Rorty’s turn of phrase, a “kind of vague romantic pantheism” (cited after Rorty et al. 2005, p. 78). 20 The two occurrences of “survival of the fittest” in The Descent of Man (1871), published after The Origin of Species (1859), are in the context of disclaimers. Once Darwin makes an admission in view of work by Nageli on plants and “remarks” by Professor Broca, a.o., on animals: “in the earlier editions of my Origin of Species I perhaps attributed too much to the action of natural selection or the survival of the fittest”. In the second instance, he says regarding noble qualities like self-sacrifice on the battlefield that “it hardly seems probable that the number of men gifted with such virtues, or that the standard of their excellence, could be increased through natural selection, that is, by the survival of the fittest”. Humans are weaker than other animals and we compensate for that with “intellectual powers, through which we advance technologically, and “social qualities” leading us to give/receive aid.


Rorty argues that asking for a foundational reason to decide about the

“worthiness” of one species as opposed to another, just like that of the

language/cultural values of one community as opposed to another is a

“pointless” demand “from a Darwininan point of view” (RR1996, p. 334).

The conclusion is that “[w]orthiness does not come into it, because there

is no standpoint outside of the accidents of evolution from which to judge

worth” (RR1996, p. 334). But is there no way to locate said standpoint in

the “right” place?

The evolutionary argument is supposed to disqualify (moral)

philosophy as a guide in democratic practice. But isn’t this simply saying

that science (hence epistemology as philosophy of science) cannot do

what it is (moral) philosophy’s job to do, rather than disqualifying

philosophy? I would say that it is somewhat out of moral philosophy’s way

to look for “grounding” in physical laws if human relations are its

(primary) subject. But, then, this would simply mean that the justification

is to be sought in the social sphere.

However, I would question the view that moral issues are outside the

purview of epistemology – on the understanding that it need not be

restricted to “philosophy of (exact) science”, it should be able to reach

into the social sphere. One “exception” would be the case of ecological-

evolutionary ethics (inviting rather than excluding overlaps with

epistemology), whose proper subject would be issues around

consequences of human-nonhuman interaction, thus within the scope of

various stripes of “natural” laws. As an illustration, there is the question of

humans geoengineering and minestripping the planet, hence bearing

responsibility for any detrimental geophysical changes (see Alexandrova

2012 for the human factor in climate change). Added to the above are

concerns around how bodies “work” (human or otherwise) with and

without bioengineering – you could say via “unnatural” versus “natural

selection”, via “forced” versus “random” variation, respectively (see ibid.

regarding problems of biotechnology/-ies). Similarly, it would be precisely

the way the bodies and minds of differently abled people function that

would justify corresponding democratic measures, from the intimately

personal to the public-institutional level.


Rorty’s negative answer above may be one way of saying that moral

questions are either not knowledge at all, or not the kind of knowledge

that complies with epistemology’s standard of apodicticity – knowledge

that is self-evident, as with geometric “truths”, or can be proven beyond

doubt, as with mathematical “truths”. It would take the kind of heuristic

democratization I propose to welcome into the realm of epistemology

“underprivileged” in addition to “privileged” representations. This is a

step Rorty is unwilling to take, which, however, has been the productive

project of feminist epistemology for the past few decades and a number

of other social justice-oriented theories, as previously mentioned.

As to “standpoint from which to judge about moral worth”, if it cannot

be located in an external/transcendental/supernaturalist realm out of

human reach, then one is best advised to search precisely within “the

accidents of” human history, culture, or, for that matter, evolution. Donna

Haraway’s “viral” notion of “situatedness” fits the bill – as she argues in

her 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges”, it grants “the privilege of partial

perspective”.

I believe this goes in the direction of what Rorty calls the

“epistemological behaviourism” of Quine and Sellars – dubbed “heretical

followers” of the “logic as the essence of philosophy” advocate Bertrand

Russell (RR1979, p. 167), which makes them “edifying” philosophers. With

“social justification”, the search for knowledge by way of improving (the

earlier mental, at the analytic stage linguistic) representations, evaluating

necessary versus contingent truth-claims, and similar are superseded by

“coherence” among knowers. Seeing the latter as “conversation” adds a

hermeneutic touch to epistemological behaviourism. “Social justification”

makes a natural partner for “situatedness”. If the former is to replace the

apodicticity of traditional epistemology’s knowledge-claims validation, the

latter is well able to name the socio-historical, embodiedness,

psychological, etc. context.

“Coherence” is agreement between subjects if thinking of the mind,

between propositions if thinking in terms of language regarding

knowledge-claims. The relation is not that of subject (or proposition) to

object (in reality) but one between subjects (or propositions). Since in


order to shatter the mirror-metaphor paradigm, sustained by the

“confrontation and commensuration” analytic motto, Rorty reprieves the

knowing subject from the necessity to achieve accurate correspondences

with an object (to be) known, and instead orients the search for

justification among other subjects, by the looks of it, deliberative

democracy is being advocated for knowledge-making. Following the

argument to its logical conclusion, if justification is grounded in the social

context, one would be justified to conclude that the interpersonal

relation, and the inter-propositional relation by association, would be

what is “foundational” for the “conversational” philosophy model.21

Looking to the 1996 paragraph on language, even without seeing the

word “conversation”, one can recognize the philosophy to which Rorty

subscribes through it. It would appear that just like conversation puts all

kinds of knowledge and experience on a par, in the spirit of hermeneutics,

so would it treat of the humans who embody these various

knowledges/experiences, and likewise of the embedding communities.

This brings us to the claim that if reason becomes “the name for our

ability to use language”, rather than “a judge of truth” it is no longer

necessary, or even possible, to weigh how “rational” or how “true to

human nature” “one language of moral and political deliberation” is as

opposed to another (RR1996, p. 334). Or likewise, as already discussed,

how “worthy” (for evolutionary survival) a human community or some

other animal species may be relative to another. This line of reasoning

brings together the “foundationalist” trio of human nature, rationality and

morality that the essay puts on trial.

On my reading, once “language”-mode kicks in, there should be no

interpretation of “rational”, “true to human nature”, or “worthy” that

could legitimately be presented as universally valid if at the same time,

these are interpreted according to a particular (cultural) standard. The

familiar conjecture follows that the latter scenario may lead to/correlate

21 Just as the correspondence model is threatened by the trap of fixity and overcorrection, so should the coherence counterpart guard against falling for conformity. Either path can lead to “methodological monism”, which Feyerabend (1975/2010) has demonstrated precludes scientific progress.


with invidious asymmetries. As I will argue below, there has to be a side

to/mode of all of the above presumably problematic notions, different

than the “supernaturalistic” kind discredited by George Santayana

(RR1996, p. 335). In other words, there may be ways for them to be

beneficial to a theory (at the heuristic level), and to a community (at the

substantive theoretical level, and even better, in social practice).

Continuing with the linguistic-evolutionary argument, if my reasoning

is on the right track, all that is needed may be a typo-level adjustment to

Rorty’s otherwise puzzling conclusion. I propose to read the problematic

sentence in question with the addition of “single”: “We antifoundat-

ionalists think that once we give up on the answer ‘God wills that we love

each other’ there is no [single] good answer to the question about the

worth of inclusivity and love” (RR1979, p. 334). By Rorty’s lights, admitting

multiple points of view would help “to keep the conversation going”

rather than closing it down. To continue the conversation, in various

paraphrases, is his recurring invitation in 1979, which seems to be

addressed to both colleagues and the public at large.22

Within “the accidents of evolution”, Darwin’s own “good answer” in

The Descent of Man (1871) (see footnote 20) would be that social instincts

(including the instinct for sympathy) has given humans more sophisticated

abilities (i.e. of modes of reciprocity), allowing us to survive. He writes:

…possessing great size, strength, and ferocity [as with gorillas] … would

most effectually have checked the acquirement of the higher mental

qualities, such as sympathy and the love of his [man’s] fellows. Hence it

might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from

some comparatively weak creature.

The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons,

&c., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers,

through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, &c., though still

remaining in a barbarous state, and, secondly, by his social qualities which

22 The continuity trope certainly reminds one of the “infinite conversation” of Maurice Blanchot, who rejects “dialogue” as restrictive, and is seen as Gadamer’s opponent (see Marshall 2004, pp.135-140).


lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-men… (Charles Darwin

1871, The Descent of Man, The Online Literature Library, n.p.)

If Darwin’s own evolutionary counterargument to Roty’s holds, then there

would be scientific justification for a cooperative, sympathetic side to

“human nature”.23 Added to the above is the biomorphological “given” of

the so-called “mirror neurons”, conducting sympathy/empathy in humans

and a limited number of other species. Perhaps, then, as Dacher Keltner

puts it, there are “deep” reasons for why humans have learnt cooperation

(see his interview, Shadyac 2010).

What guidance does antifoundationalist (of which “conversation” is a

breed) as opposed to foundationalist philosophy have to offer as far as

conditions for agreement and acceptance of “people very different from

ourselves” (RR1996, p. 335)? As Rorty types the two parties, in order to

convince exclusivists to become inclusivists, and racists to become

democrats, found-ationalists assume they need to “find premises they

share” with them; antifoundationalists, by contrast, need to get rid of the

idea that “democracy would somehow be enfeebled” unless such shared

premises exist (RR1996, p. 335). When Rorty makes the “shared premises”

distinction in 1996, it is easy to recognize the 1979 argument about

suspending judgement in the face of (Kuhnian) incommensurable

difference, and “continuing the conversation”.

In the book, where cultural norms differ, e.g. regarding “social

organization, sexual practices, or conversational manners” Rorty

conjectures that most likely one would not have enough background to

decide whether to “insist on someone’s moral obligation to hold a view”

or not, whether “to break off a conversation or a personal relationship” or

not (RR1979, p. 372). I would agree that one would not be able to count

on “general principles” in the a priori universalizing, potentially

23 However, it would not be specific to humans, as the same applies for other social animals. A number of studies address reciprocity in nonhuman species, from insects to primates: Lee Dugatkin’s (1999) Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees: The Nature of Cooperation in Animals and Humans, Joan Roughgarden’s (2009) The Genial Gene, Wrangham et al.’s (1996) Chimpanzee Cultures.


exclusionary, way he means it, but would also add that a generalization is

unreliable, and downright harmful to the extent that it threatens e.g. a

person’s or a community’s eudaimonia in any form or degree. A

generalization based on “conversation” can be expected to be beneficial

precisely thanks to employing equitable “social justification”, whether in

the mode of (if I may, rational) deliberation or more informally.

As Rorty urges, “…the hope of agreement is never lost so long as the

conversation lasts. This hope is not a hope for the discovery of

antecedently existing common ground, but simply hope for agreement,

or, at least, exciting and fruitful disagreement” (RR1979, p. 318, italics in

original). Once again, “antecedent” and “common”, to my mind, would be

detrimental just in case they are in any form or degree hegemonic/

oppressive, or lean in that direction. In all evidence, then, conversational

effort in cases of incommensurable scholarly paradigms, or indeed

worldviews, would embody the hope of keeping tensions at the level of

(per Mouffe’s 2002 terminology) “agonism” between “adversaries” and

preventing their escalation to “antagonism” between “enemies”. If one

were to go for more than what I’d call “the bare minimum of

conversational ethics”, then one would be willing to go – hermeneutically

– as far as adopting another’s “jargon”, or even point of view, with the

intention of reaching understanding. On some level, then, Rorty’s

adoption of Christian rhetoric is his “anticlericalist” (an amendment to his

earlier “atheistic”, see Rorty 2005) way of relating to a Christian believer.

Setting aside the possibility that the antifoundationalist way may be

non-interference no matter what, judging by Rorty’s principled stance

against foundationalism itself, when the situation calls for civic

engagement, the antifoundationalist would respond accordingly. This is

what I read in his, let us call it “civic responsibility thesis” from the 2005

interview with Vattimo, conducted by Zabala. To the question about the

single most important duty today he replies:

I think the answer … is “Our only duty is to our fellow citizens. You may

conceive your fellow citizens as the other Italians, your fellow Europeans,

or your fellow humans. But, whatever the boundaries of one’s sense of


responsibility, this sense of civic responsibility is possible even if you have

never heard either of reason or of religious faith. Civic responsibility

existed in Athens before Plato invented the thing we now call reason.

(Richard Rorty, Atheism and Anticlericalism, 2005, p. 74)

For one thing, the “civic responsibility thesis” above is a straightforward

resolution of any ambiguity created by the conclusion of the linguistic-

evolutionary argument in 1996. Rorty seems to have a “good answer” to

moral questions if God is not there to mandate Christian love among

humans, and it is not in need of scientific backing. For another, Rorty

seems to match the high level of generality of the categorical imperative

and his Christian symbolism idealizations. His justification based on

historical record would work just in case the capabilities for civic

responsibility that he claims for Athenians are transferable and equally

applicable to our species in the 21st century. In other words, if there is

continuity in what humans are like.

Assuming that Athenians could reason even before the “invention” of

reason, it just may be that, theorizations about it aside, the faculty that

does the job is able to function in modes acceptable to Rorty. This brings

us to the issue of human nature and the cognitive cluster of notions

discussed in the upcoming subsection. In terms of the topic of the current

one, if philosophy is to edify the public, these allegedly problematic

notions may have a central role to play in moral guidance. I will develop

their analysis with a view to edification that is in principle uplifting and, if

need be, critical as well.

The present subsection has shown that, rather than recalling

philosophy from its position as a public guide, it may instead be fruitful to

reconsider which way it should be lead-ing. My intent has been to project

possibilities that Rorty’s own hermeneutically inclined conversational

philosophy seems well able to explore. I turn next to human nature and

the cognitive cluster (reason, knowledge, and their kin), which the 1996

essay charges with foundationalist leanings, in agreement with the 1979

book. My self-assigned task is to show that discernment in their treatment

may reveal productive potential, including for Rorty’s own idealizations.


2.3 “Human nature” and the cognitive cluster

As already mentioned, the 1996 idealization can be read as a correction to

Kant’s “categorical imperative”. That is, as aiming to complete the Kantian

project of “undermining knowledge to make room for moral faith”

(RR1996, p. 335) by effecting a shift from the cognitive to the non-

cognitive members of the Kantian trichotomy cognition – morality –

aesthetics. Rorty, moreover, attempts to leverage precisely off the

purported clean break with the intention (alternatively to Kant) of

blocking what amounts to “the philosophical urge” targeted by the book

(RR1979, p. 179). This is basically the (largely European) penchant for

universal(ist), transcendental(ist), and thereby uniquely philosophical

understanding, which ultimately comes with the agency awarded to

autonomous reason.

It is for this reason that the 1996 essay excommunicates the cluster of

cognitive notions, inviting in their stead “love” and “trust”. The question

thus arises of what Rorty is counting on when he empowers the latter

notions to act in effect as necessary and sufficient conditions that can

sustain the inclusivity of a democratic community. The affective/moral

and the cognitive clusters of notions bring up the problem of “human

nature”, whose aspects/manifestations they are, and the question of

whether to keep, reject or revise it/them. The current subsection focusses

on human nature and notions of cognition, only minimally discussing love

and trust where comparisons are useful. The latter are the subject of the

upcoming section 3 on the 1996 and 2005 idealizations.

One major antifoundational(ist) point on which Rorty’s views in 1979

converge with Gadamer’s hermeneutics and Sartre’s existentialism is the

resolute denial of “the essence of man as a knower of essences”. The

phrase indicates, first, that we have an “essence” a.k.a. a “nature”, and

second, that it consists in knowing essences, or as the 1996 essay puts it,

that we “know” by “ris[ing] above the contingencies of culture and

history” (RR1996, p. 335). On the first count, the objection targets the a

priori/immutable and transcendental/universal status of foundational

essences as such, on the second count the objection is to extolling


humans as having God-like powers to achieve knowledge of the order of

essences, as defined.

The latter point resurfaces in the 1996 essay by reference to George

Santayana’s criticism of the assumption of “supernaturalism”, which

amounts to (likely by Rortian synthesis) “the confusion of ideals and

power” (RR1996, pp. 334-335, cf. Santayana 1920). As I read it, this means

mistaking for actual the imagined powers of (in the case at hand) human

knowledge. But is the assumption of the power and reach of love and

trust it would take to curb intolerance for difference any less ambitious?

Leaving the answer for the next section, more pertinent for the subject of

the current one is the question of whether, in the context of the 1996

love/trust idealization, the cognitive could be compatible with the

noncognitive and in what way. This is in effect the same as asking whether

the cognitive should, or even could, be reduced only to the kind that is

discredited in Rorty’s 1979 analysis. That kind of reason, dubbed in the

essay “source or judge of truth” (RR1996, p. 334), and its kin, are pretty

much intrinsically incompatible with notions of reciprocity.

On the heuristic status of essences a.k.a. natures, Rorty concurs with

Sartre’s aphoristic statement that man’s essence is that he (being a

project in development) has no essence and further insists that nothing

else should be thought of as having an essence (RR1979, p. 361 and pp.

361-362, fn. 7).24 This chimes with his 1996 claim that “[h]umanity no

more has a nature, or rationality a structure, independent of the accidents

of history than life has a nature independent of the accidents of biological

evolution (RR1996, p. 334, italics added). Interestingly enough, adding the

qualifications that I have italicized to the initially quoted Sartrian

wholesale deletion of natures/essences opens up “democratizing”

interpretive opportunities that I propose are fully worth considering –

conceptually and edificationally. As with foundations in the preceding

subsection 2.1, it may well be that natures/essences are not flawed by

24 On the subject of a priori’s in general, Rorty disapproves of Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world precisely “because it describes people in some way ‘prior’ to that offered by science” (RR1979, p. 382).


virtue of their heuristic status, and that depending on what gets assigned

the role – not excluding the (near-)universal scale – it would merit

approval or be subject to rejection based on its substantive contribution.

It would be an uplifting way of thinking of our species as capable, “by

nature”, of something like Christian(-like) love, a.k.a. “lovingkindness” –

which commonly translates New Testament agape and Theravada

Buddhist metta25. This is in stark contrast to how Darwin’s theory has

come to be interpreted, albeit erroneously so, but nevertheless with

palpable social repercussions. Judging by Darwin’s own work discussed

above, there would have been enough on the side of cooperation, in

addition to competition, for our and other animal species to survive,

setting aside factors other than interpersonal relations. As Tzvetan

Todorov’s (1996) study of the Nazi camps and Gulag shows, when

morality and survival are pitted against each other, contrary to common

asssumptions, the former is not necessarily or always obliterated.

Ergo, antagonism is not inevitable, and neither is competition the

default mode on which humans operate, or Mouffe’s adversarial agonism

the temperature at which we (if lucky) tend to simmer. If I may offer an

edificational projection, in face of “difference”, an authentically Christian-

Buddhist-Aboriginal... (call it ABC-) makeover of the “official story” of

“what humans are like”, appropriately scaled to situations and individuals,

may have a good chance of being pedagogically productive and, not to

forget, therapeutic – for the world as well as for ourselves as part of it.

Some thoughts in this respect are offered in the final section.

Further, given that the love/trust idealization is presented as

antifoundationalist, if it follows that the solution is anti-essentialist, it isn’t

clear how it would hold up, even in theory. The idealization, predicated on

specific qualities, seems to face a problem if – as a matter of

antifoundationalist principle – no human quality, capacity, inclination, etc.

25 For metta and the other three brahma-viharas “divine abodes” – karuna (compassion), muditta (sympathetic joy) and upekkha (equanimity) – including implications for education, see e.g. Claudia Eppert (2010), Mary Jo Hinsdale (2012). Importantly, as Hinsdale stresses, the four abodes function in an interdependent and thereby mutually enriching way.


is allowed to stand out in the intended generic typological way. In other

words, how would love and/or trust qualify to do the job of protecting-

respecting difference, and by the looks of it do so by besting any other

candidate, starting with reason/knowledge? It would appear that for the

idealization to pan out on Rorty’s terms, a heuristic such as

“essence”/”nature”, and a specific choice of values pertaining to it (love

and/or trust), may be up for exoneration and perhaps for reinstatement in

full regalia, in view of what it/they would be scaffolding (democratic

cohesion).

But are love/trust – now legitimated as human nature – so much

better in the role of insurance policy for the right kind of (civic/private

interpersonal) behaviour than the Enlightenment, and even much earlier

Platonic-Aristotelian choice of reason/rationality in matters of judge-

ment? What about (self-)governance? Would a “deliberative” model – to

which Rorty appears to subscribe (like Benhabib, Gutmann, Barber, and

Dahl in the Democracy and Difference volume) – run on love and trust, but

be harmed by reason/knowledge?

When it comes to the cluster of cognitive notions, if Rorty is to align

with, and act on, the Gadamerian credo, one would expect that scientific

knowledge (traditionally awarded the status of privileged representation)

and apodictic reason (the faculty that mediates it) would be treated as no

more or less “worthy” (borrowing Rorty’s 1996 test-word) than any other

knowledge(-claims) or kinds of experience. In addition to considerations

of equality, if equity is brought in as well, they would be just as worthy as

any other faculty and artefact to be employed precisely for what they are

good at/for. Taking into account the hermeneutic-democratic argument

and juxtaposing it with Gutmann’s summation of the Aristotelian

understanding of rationality as a condition for democracy (AG1996, p.

343), I arrive at the proposal that a democratic community may not be at

a disadvantage because of reason and knowledge per se. The community

would likely lose if deprived of lovingkindness and trust, and it may be

seriously harmed if reason and knowledge are informed by e.g. social

Darwinism rather than lovingkindness and trust. However, would it lose if


lovingkindness and trust inform rather than replace reason and

knowledge?

As it is, the 1996 essay seems to banish cognitive notions from the

conversation stage altogether, at best allowing their appearance in a

negative light, so that it is doubtful that they could speak up, and be

heard. Rorty’s outlined plan of action is that “antifoundationalists should

try to substitute the idea that what makes us special is our ability to feel

for, cherish, and trust people very different from ourselves” for “the Greek

idea”, already referred to above, “that what makes us clever, language

using animals is our ability to know, conceived of as our ability to rise

above the contingencies of culture and history” (RR1996, p. 335, italics

added).

As the above quotes indicate, the essay’s offer is for a clean break from

the cognitive and an unambiguous commitment to the non-cognitive

terms of Kant’s trichotomy cognition – morality – aesthetics. Taking into

account specifically the text marked by italics, it would be more accurate

to say that to the degree to which the universalizing/ed kind of reason and

knowledge suppress historicity and cultural-social particularity, perhaps in

a potentially hegem-onic manner, they would match the above case of

reason/knowledge devoid of lovingkindness and trust, and harmful to a

community. But, there would have to be other kinds of cognitive modes

and entities that Rorty as a deliberative democrat and academic would

welcome. Wouldn’t these, especially if morals-emotions of reciprocity and

care are on their side, make an otherwise probably unattainable

democratic model seem like less of a “utopian” abstraction?

Moving next to Rorty’s adoption of Christian rhetoric, why would

someone who is, by his own confession “religiously unmusical”, per Max

Weber’s idiom (RR2005, p. 30), venture into a vocabulary with whose

conceptual import he may not be entirely at home? Obviously, Christian

symbolism has the function of reinforcing the “non-cognitive for

cognitive” substitution plan above by paraphrasing the initial formulation:

once the text says “…we [antifoundationalists] have to persuade people to

desert Athens [reason/rationality] for Jerusalem [faith]”, and a second

time it quotes a Christian God who, according to Kierkegaard and “pace


Hegel … wants lovers rather than knowers” (RR1996, p. 335). This brings

the idealization pretty close to the way its foundationalist predecessor

was fashioned – in Rorty’s paraphrase, Kant “undermine[d] knowledge to

make room for moral faith” (RR1996, p. 335).26

Unless one keeps track of the critical qualifiers, either helpfully overt,

as with some of the italicized text above, or unspoken and thus at best

deduced by approximation, the picture may veer toward a complete

reversal of reason/knowledge-dominated dichotomies rather than their

purported deconstruction, although one might expect the latter, given the

openly expressed hermeneutic allegiances in Rorty (1979)27 and Rorty et

al. (2005). In fact, the 2005 interview shows Rorty drawing a parallel that,

coming from a left-oriented intellectual reads like the highest praise that

hermeneutics can get: “I think the hermeneutical or Gadamerian attitude

is in the intellectual world what democracy is in the political world” (Rorty

et al. 2005, p. 74). In turn, both democracy and hermeneutics receive a

lovingkindness upgrade with the sentence that follows: “The two can be

viewed as alternative appropriations of the Christian message that love is

the only law” (ibid.). In 2005 too, reason is in disfavour, although science

is afforded claims to truth and sovereignty over the public sphere, which

religion has given up.

It seems logical that the democratizing project Rorty initiates by

dethroning apodictic reason and the privileged representations for which

it is responsible will see its natural extension in recruiting the two for

“conversation”. However, to qualify, they would have to be in a mode that

is at a minimum compatible with and ideally conducive to emotions of

26 Kant himself was nowhere close to being a (deeply) religious person. Which is probably why “spiritual” is not a term on a par with the members of his staple trichotomy. “Moral faith” can claim belonging to the morality-term. 27 Diplomatically, Rorty disclaims promoting hermeneutics as epistemology’s heir (RR1979, p. 315), having devoted separate chapters to denying the vacant throne to empirical psychology and philosophy of language. However, he rejects the latter two nominations on principled grounds, for “taking philosophy to be, paradigmatically, the study of representing” (ibid., p. 164). Hermeneutics, on the other hand, is in the driver’s seat in the “Philosophy without Mirrors” chapter, side by side with epistemological behaviourism and existentialism.


reciprocity, and in turn, conducted by them. In fact, this is how I read the

suggestion Rorty himself makes in the 1996 essay. Let us recall that he

urges that reason be used “not as the name for a source or judge of truth

but as the name for our ability to use language” (RR1996, p. 334), where,

in the “ability to use language”, one can read “conversation” although the

term does not figure in the essay. With conversation comes the

hermeneutic kind of relationality, whose mission is to understand, for the

purpose tuning into a text’s, or likewise another person’s situatedness as

fully as possible. Perhaps because Rorty gives his full attention to driving

across the point of lovingkindness and trust, the few pages that the essay

spans show no obvious signs that he acts on the proposal… Except, he

does not seem to go any easier on the cognitive cluster earlier in 1979, or

show appreciation for what aspects/modes of it are not discredited (other

than Rorty himself using reason[ing] to argue for his cause).

That being said, what if one were to bring to the rescue the

hermeneutic-epistemological behaviouristic treatment of “objectivity”,

whereby it is licensed provisionally (RR1979, p. 360ff)? Since objectivity is

a concept bound to the paradigmatic rationality which is on trial in the

book as well as in the essay, it seems that it can be counted on to

facilitate, by association, the cognitive cluster’s admission into the domain

of “epistemological behaviourism”. By analogy, then, reason and its kin

could be given free rein, with conditions attached. That is, as long as these

do not trespass on the forbidden grounds of, for example, inequitably

universalizing foundations or invidiously elected representations, they

would remain unimpeded.

This line of reasoning makes me question what Rorty describes in 1979

as the “usual” scenario of strictly differential assignment of episteme to

epistemology, which “takes care of the serious and important ‘cognitive’

part, in which we meet our obligations to rationality”, and phronesis to

hermeneutics, which “is charged with everything else”; further, episteme

is scientific and requires a logos “given by the discovery of a method of

commensuration”, in turn, phronesis is, apparently, all that is not


episteme (RR1979, pp. 319-320).28 This picture, in its most generous

interpretation, creates an ambivalence as to whether episteme and

epistemology are to stay on, aloof and equal vis a vis the other pair, or

whether they should leave the conversation altogether with the dismissal

of analytic epistemology from the Kantian position of supreme arbiter. To

state the obvious, segregation is not much closer to democratization than

exclusion because, more likely than not, it does not allow “to keep the

conversation going” – as per the ethics of conversational philosophy at its

bare minimum. To repeat from an earlier quote, for Rorty, the “hope of

agreement is never lost so long as the conversation lasts” (RR1979, p.

318). Love of wisdom (a.k.a. philosophy, in conversation-mode) itself is

“the practical wisdom [phronesis] necessary to participate in a

conversation” (ibid., p. 372).

As already indicated, my intent is to encourage a post-analytic type of

epistemology – a project which has been successfully pursued, as multiply

noted above. To my mind, phronesis has an important role to play in

expanding epistemology’s mandate. It has been and continues to be

employed – not under the Greek label – but, from the literature I am

familiar with, by expanding the meaning of “cognition”/“knowledge” and

coordinating pertinent adjustments in the network of notions that convey

“all that is not episteme” in addition to episteme.

Thinking of Rorty’s “heroes”, the above venue would be a natural

extension of Dewey’s all-round, one could say “epistemic-phronetic”, view

of experience, with a matching view of education, resulting in a vision of a

society that I dare qualify as “epistemological democracy”29. Despite his

28 Phronesis (roughly corresponding to “practical wisdom”) and episteme are in a heuristic set of five “virtues of thought” – not all of which are employed at full throttle in hermeneutics, understandably so. The other three are sophia (wisdom, dealing with the first causes aitia, principles of things archai), technê (craft, art), and nous (insight, intuition, intelligence – knowledge of indemonstrable first premises of sciences). These are discussed in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Posterior Analytics (see e.g. Cohen 2012; Smith 2011; Parry 2007). 29 This is not to say that Dewey uses “epistemology” or “reason/rationality” the way I propose, and do. The former is an outcast for him as well (Dewey [1917]


reservations, to say the least, in regards to traditional epistemology (see

e.g. Dewey 1917), Dewey as a rule did give a central place to science and

knowing, and by extension education. What is more, he did so within a

model of “knowledge as action” (see Biesta & Burbules 2003). Knowledge

in such a mode may range from the case of affecting by observing at the

nano-physical level (Dewey 1929 on the philosophical implications of

Heisenberg’s 1927 indeterminacy a.k.a. uncertainly principle) to multiple

variations around experimental knowing and pragmatic theory-practice

connections at the macrophysical level. An example of the latter is the (in

a sense) “knowing by doing” model developed at the Laboratory School in

Chicago (1896-1904), headed by Alice Chapman, Dewey’s wife, with his

committed involvement.30

Further, the notion of “edification” with its strong hermeneutic

connections, in my understanding, would more likely make conversational

philosophy receptive to traditionally marginalized knowledges in addition

to geometric and mathematical truths – importantly, on their respective

validation terms – rather than letting conversation turn away from

“knowledge” per se, or “reason/rationality”, for that matter. After all,

Gadamer’s substitution of Bildung for “knowledge” as the “goal of

thinking” (RR1979, p. 359), is likely meant to liberate knowing, allowing it

to change and vary, rather than pulling the plug on it. To illustrate, Rorty

references the beginning of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, where it says

that for one to be considered properly gebildet “educated”, it takes much

more than “know[ing] the normal results of the Naturwissenschaften

[natural sciences] of the day” (ibid., p. 362), obviously appropriately

1980). In The Quest for Certainty lectures he switches from “reason” to “intelligence” (Dewey [1929] 1988, e.g. pp. 156-177). Which is why, let us recall, he is one of three major paradigmatic-rebel figures of Rorty’s. 30 The educational challenges Dewey strove to overcome persist today, calling for likeminded solutions. Aligning themselves with the philosophies of Paulo Freire and Maxine Green, John Portelli & Ann Vibert deconstruct educational standardization, proposing instead a “curriculum of life” (2005, pp.78-79). They basically show how imposing “standards” is a replay of epistemological “commensuration” and how mistaking measuring for improved quality mimics the obsession with scientistic representational“accuracy”.


curricularized. Hermeneutics’ emphatic humanitarian orientation, of

course, was not innovative, let alone “revolutionary” as it may appear to

be from today’s point of view, but being true to the history of European

education, i.e. conservative, in fact.31

Rorty recognizes that Gadamer worked hard at “breaking down the

distinctions which Kant made among cognition, morality, and aesthetic

judgement” (RR1979, p. 364) and refers the reader to Gadamer’s Truth

and Method polemic against Kant’s “subjectivization of the aesthetic” in

his Third Critique (cited after RR1979, p. 364, fn. 11). The Gadamerian

project, to my mind, in no way implies that any of the three notions loses

its individuality. I’d say that the cognitive and the noncognitive, and

whatever concrete manifestations of theirs are being studied should be

treated as a continuum, even an integration, because, after all, they

coexist in the same mind-body. If ideal humans are to approach their

nonideal counterparts, and the latters’ engagement in actual “social

practices”, theorizations in terms of “wholeness” would be preferable. In

other words, when deploying any heuristic as per their specific

characteristics, it would be “hermeneutical” (and democratic-ecological)

to underscore its nonmodularity, as I am doing with the cognitive cluster

in relation to love/trust, and even link it to as many of its kin as any

unavoidably limited research project would allow.

To conclude, it “makes sense” to think of the right kind of

rationality/knowledge, as “human nature” and as productively

complementary to love/trust. This, to my mind, is the hermeneutic–

epistemological behaviouristic–conversational way to go about cognition,

for deeper humanitarian reasons, rather than in the supernaturalistic

sense discredited by Santayana, i.e. in the foundationalist mode

deconstructed by Rorty. I would think that conversational philosophy,

thanks to its declared allegiances, is fully authorized to make democratic

31 In the Middle Ages, for example, education commenced with the Trivium [3: grammar, logic/dialectic, and rhetoric] and moved on to the Quadrivium [4: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music] at a later stage. It took until the industrial revolution for the sciences to be licensed as university disciplines.


use of both cognitive and noncognitive heuristics, and by its edificatonal

mandate to bring out the substantive creative potential of both.

The next section turns directly to examining the 1996 essay’s love,

compared to lovingkindness, and trust (un)constrained by appropriate-

ness. The analysis speaks to Rorty’s increased fluency in Christian rhetoric

from 1996 to 2005 and the bridge between the 1996/2005 lovingkindness

and his 2005 reason- and religion-free “civic responsibility” thesis. It also

speaks to what is worth changing and preserving when outgrowing an

earlier paradigm.

3. Love’s Labours Sustained

How, then, is Rorty’s 1996 idealization sustained in terms of love,

potentially as lovingkindness, and trust, which is appropriate? For starters,

democracy as defined in 1996 entails inclusivity: “To ask for a foundation

of democracy is, typically, to ask for a reason why we should be inclusive

in our moral and political concerns rather than exclusive…” (RR1996, p.

334, italics added). Thinking about the conditions for democracy as such

outside the idealization, however, although democracy entails inclusivity,

the opposite is not true, since inclusivity may not necessarily determine

democracy but only conditions it, implies but does not entail it. Therefore,

neither would love or trust, if conceived of as ingredients of inclusivity.

Whatever the set/sub-set relations between love/trust and inclusivity may

be, inclusivity is certainly not all there is to democracy, nor are love or

trust. (Then again, could it be that all we need is loviningkindness?)

Further, recapitulating my earlier argument, love and/or trust in the

role of “answers” to the problem of difference would have to have the

power that would be, in effect, all the reasons a community may need in

order to be truly inclusive, and thereby democratic. To the extent that

love and trust appear to have the function of necessary and sufficient

conditions for inclusivity, they show undeniable “foundational” markings

that the idealization would have to ratify.

Moving beyond the background preliminaries above, I first discuss

what difference lovingkindness makes for love and appropriateness for


trust, then show that the appropriateness condition on trust, which would

by association affect love as well, may put under question the substantive

import of Rorty’s 1996 and 2005 idealizations. I consider instead an

“unconditionality criterion”, which is better met by the 2005 edition of

Christian love. I then juxtapose the Christian-symbolism idealizations and

the 2005 reason- and religion-free “civic responsibility” thesis and the

nonfoundational argument Rorty sketches in its support, which yields my

proposal for a “mutual subjectivity” universal, in the noblest U-sense.

To place the love qualified as “Christian(-like)” within the system of

cross-theoretical heuristics, in its relatedness and inclusivity import it is

akin to “hermeneutic”, “democratic”, “ecological”, all of which, each with

its own specific meanings and uses, appear to sail well in Rortian

“conversational” waters. It is distinguished by a particular mode of

spirituality, embodied by New Testament agape and comparable to

Theravada Buddhist metta, both of which are commonly rendered into

English as “lovingkindness”. The Kantian trichotomy cognition – morality –

aesthetics does not include spirituality as a member and neither do

Rorty’s idealizations address it per se. The Christian symbolism of the

idealizations can thus best be seen as poetic rather than theological.

Juxtaposing with it reason- and religion-free “civic responsibility”, I’d like

to believe, will bring into sharper relief the likelihood of the hypothesized

“mutual subjectivity” universal.

3.1 Lovingkindness & eros. Appropriate vs unconditional trust

I proposed above to think of the love-and-trust idealization as a

(putatively antifoundationalist) corrective to the categorical imperative

(CI) and to map it onto the Kantian trichotomy. I further noted Rorty’s

effort to exclude the cognition term in favour of the morality (or ethics)

and aesthetics (e.g. emotions) terms of the trichotomy, and argued for the

possibility of a “reformed” version of the former, making it eligible to join

the other two. For the purposes of the current section, it is worth taking a

closer look at the mappings.


For starters, if love can be unambiguously interpreted as loving-

kindness, the counterpart of New Testament agape, and is thereby un-

interchangeable with eros (Gk, romantic love), then the 1996 love, just

like trust, is morality-weighted. It would thus lean toward Kantian “good

will”, more so than eros would. The latter, being mostly emotion, is closer

to the aesthetic that Kant, let us recall, sets out to “subjectivize”, i.e., push

it as far away from (objective) reason as possible, to which Gadamer

objects (cited after RR1979, p. 364, fn. 11).

I’d further propose that, seen in this light, love and trust, while

weighted on the side of the moral, are not out of reach of either the

aesthetic/emotional or even the cognitive/intellectual. Like Buddhist

metta (Hinsdale 2012), agape is subject to human will, and can thus be

consciously cultivated, hence Christ’s recurring injunction (see Matthew

7:12, Luke 6:31, New Testament) for his disciples, and all of humanity, to

love each other (which could hardly apply to unruly emotions, i.e. eros).

Appropriateness predicated of trust would similarly enhance the cognitive

element, at least to a degree reining in the emotional. For the case of

experientially/rationally confirmed (as per Baier) trust, rather than the

kind that is unquestioned as with child and mother, believer and God, I

introduce the compound term “appropriate-trust”. Thus, if loving-

kindness, agape, metta are consciously-purposefully unconditional,

appropriate-trust would be consciously-purposefully conditional, with

unqualified love and trust in between.

In fact, precisely because lovingkindness and appropriate-trust

interface the moral with what can be described as “intellectually

coloured” emotions (cf. the textbook example of Aristotelian “moral

anger” for such a hybrid), they can be thought of as particularly

hermeneutically endowed. They represent a felicitous site for Gadamer’s

key project of combining, in my understanding, without homogenizing,

the three terms of the Kantian trichotomy. Since lovingkindness and

appropriate-trust hybridize the emotional with the moral-intellectual,

they also support the integrative approach I brought up above. They can

no doubt assist in dissolving the triadic opposition posited by Kant by

replacing a potentially confrontational, or at least strictly modular,


contrast among the terms of the trichotomy with (democratic-ecological)

integration, for which hermeneutic understanding (and any whole-human

approach) aims.

This reading of love and trust, I would think, reprieves Rorty from the

putative 1996 antifoundationalist obligation to strive to delete the

cognitive in his idealization without a trace. And to start with, from the

closely related assumption that the meaning of knowledge and

rationality/reason (just as with foundations and representations or

essence/nature above) should, or even could be reduced, in any

experiential or theoretical sense, to whatever aspect of these terms may

have been augmented, out of proportion, in the name of, if not by,

analytic philosophy and its Cartesian-Kantian progenitors. This cross-

modal line of logic is pursued, for example, by Martha Nussbaum in her

collection of essays Love’s Knowledge, where at the cusp of the literary

and the philosophical she advocates “a conception of ethical

understanding that involves emotions as well as intellectual activity (1990,

p. ix, italics added). Her project can in effect be read as a re-

contextualized restatement of Gadamer’s.

But is the love Rorty advocates in 1996 the kind that is – with or

without religious commitment – coextensive with, or at least of the same

consequence as Christian love? I’d say that the agape/eros ambivalence of

the English word, as much as any accumulated cultural-historical baggage,

may be standing in the way of a properly “agapic” conceptualization. No

wonder, then, that Rorty is prepared to take it back, allowing that

“nowadays we [may] find the term ‘love’ too contaminated or too quaint”

(RR1996, p. 335). His back-up option is Annette Baier’s “appropriate

trust”, toward which he steers the discussion in the conclusion of the

essay. But what does this contribute to or take away from his idealization,

and can the latter, in consequence, keep its assigned goal (to be a

guarantee for inclusivity) in full view? It can be expected that

“appropriateness” diagnostics by certain modes of rationality would

probably undermine rather than strengthen trust, deconstructing the

idealization as a result.


Before proceeding with the aspects of special interest here, an

important note is due to the specifically emotional side of love and trust.

The potential turbulences of eros aside, the two notions hold the joys and

vulnerabilities that the unpredictability and unmanageability of their

nonrational and/or nonconscious components are bound to bring as a

matter of course. Baier writes insightfully about trust – and could easily be

talking about love – “trusting is rarely begun by making up one's mind to

trust, and often it has no definite initiation of any sort but grows up slowly

and imperceptibly … Trust can come with no beginnings, with gradual as

well as sudden beginnings, and with various degrees of self-

consciousness, voluntariness, and expressness” (1986, p. 240). To use a

Buddhist notion that rings true in the affective context, to my heart-mind,

this applies to giving and accepting trust and love alike.

In sum, lovingkindness through intent and appropriate-trust through

discernment, may be better able to consciously steer toward a heart-mind

mode of inclusivity and reciprocity. Eros, by comparison, may rise one to

the heights of interpersonal attunement just as it can result in devastating

discord. Overall, the emotional, one would think, can be an undesirable

drawback for certain types of rational judgement (regarding

appropriateness) just as it can be beneficial protection from others.

The next section considers appropriateness in comparison to uncondit-

ionality. Here is a visualization of the distribution of the notions at play

along the (un)conditional and the (not) conscious/purposeful axes:

[conscious/purposeful]

[uncond] lovingkindness appropriate-trust [cond]

love trust

[not conscious/purposeful]

Fig. 1 Representation of Love//Lovingkindness and Appropriate-trust/Trust


Is the conscious-purposeful conditionality of appropriate-trust a match

for the conscious-purposeful unconditionality of lovingkindness, with the

intended “guaranteed” result?

3.2 Poetic unconditionality in lieu of rational appropriateness?

In this subsection I will focus on the argument that if love/trust are to

have the axiomatic, a.k.a. foundational, powers which the essay seems to

grant them, the idealization – on its utopian terms – would need to make

full use of the potential of Christian symbolism. I identify the crucial

ingredient as “unconditionality” in loving/trusting another, which, to

make it clear from the start, is receptive and welcoming rather than

potentially hegemonic, or pretentious, e.g. like the kind allegedly

sustaining the (problematic per Rorty) universality of the categorical

imperative (CI) (RR1996, p. 335). I argue that an “unconditionality

criterion” ensures the upgrade from the 1996 love with its “appropriate

trust” disclaimer to the 2005 love “as the only law”.

From Rorty’s perspective, Baier’s and other feminists’ theorization of

appropriate trust as “the central moral concept” seems to be “the most

promising contemporary antifoundationalist initiative” (RR1996, p. 335).

This is so apparently because “appropriate trust” is a move away from

Kantian “moral obligation”, i.e. the CI as the most fundamental moral

concept. But does/should trust replace obligation/duty? And does the

move from Kantian moral obligation to appropriate trust constitute the

paradigmatic shift Rorty takes it to be?

Needless to say, duty/obligation are no less relational, in the sense of

other-oriented, than trust. Trust, however, seems to act as a conduit for

positive expectations with respect to someone else or something else in

contrast to (varying degrees of) sacrifice of one’s joys/pleasures that

duty/obligation imply. I’d propose that a sacrifice – positive expectations

shift, depending on how either term plays out, could make for a desirable

change in social psychology. That is, looking at it “edificationally”, one

might say that “uplift” is preferable to “moralize”. Differences in relative

attractiveness notwithstanding, it may be that since trust and duty/


obligation are sufficiently distinct, the question of choice between the two

is irrelevant. Each or the two in equitable combination are likely

more/most suitable for different occasions, while both apply to all

humans in particular ways as per individual situatednesses and on

concrete occasions. The interesting moment for the current discussion is

when trust is affected by the “appropriateness” criterion. While the

antifoundationalism of Baier’s analysis is in theory scaffolded by her

feminist allegiances, does she significantly depart from the Kantian mode

and status of reason?

According to Baier’s strong version (the way I read her), which I

labelled “appropriate-trust”, unconscious trust that happens to be “safe”

to give/accept is excluded. Therefore, here I will focus on the involvement

of reason in assessing appropriateness. Autonomous reason, needless to

say, is a pivotal factor for Kant’s moral philosophy, and as discussed

above, paradigmatically foundational. Notwithstanding the connotations

of reliability and protection of appropriateness, as an assessment criterion

it may be afflicted precisely by the presumably problematic Kantian slant

of reason (cf. “as the name for a source or judge of truth”, RR1996, p.

334). That is, by the kind of rationality which antifoundationalism,

particularly as presented and enacted in the 1996 essay, takes on as its

primary target, along with the rest of the cognitive cluster. Therefore, in

view of the discussion in subsection 2.3, the expectation would be that,

depending on what mode of reason is involved, “appropriateness” may

act as rationally justified self-protection, or it may undermine or prevent a

trust relationship quite unnecessarily, and unfairly.

What is interesting as far as the purported paradigm shift is that when

setting up trust as her research topic in a 1986 article, Baier emphasizes

the lack of literature on the subject in moral philosophy: “[b]ut we, or at

least I, search in vain for any general account of the morality of trust

relationships” (AB1986, p. 232). She finds no theorizations other than

about legal and prisoner’s dilemma32 contexts. Obviously, both of these

are biased toward precautionary clauses, and both may feature

32 See e.g. Steven Kuhn (2007).


conspicuously worst-case scenarios. In actuality, they may be equally

suitable for the study of “appropriate trust” and “appropriate distrust”.

The launching site for Baier’s trust theorizations is therefore far from

neutral. Her own 1986 and 1991 analyses33 with which I am familiar

proceed by detailed, methodical evaluation of contexts in and conditions

under which trust is, can or should be given and received, or not. Even to

the point of positing a test by which, in order to prove trust’s

appropriateness, the one who gives it and the one who receives it have to

share their respective motifs, and nevertheless be able to keep the trust

relationship subsequently. Later, Baier cancels the test, explaining: “my

erstwhile ‘test’ for trust did take self-understanding too much on trust”

(AB1991, p. 154, fn. 43). On some level, she has followed, and proven

wrong, the Cartesian assumption that, in Rorty’s paraphrase, it should be

“easiest for the human mind to know itself” (RR1979, p. 253)34, that is in

contrast to knowing an external, separate and independent world.

One might conjecture that the introduction of trust does amount to,

paraphrasing Dewey’s idiom, making a dent in the crust of moral

philosophy’s convention by inviting the private that the family stands for

to take over from the public and universal that the impersonal categorical

imperative represents. The trust-climate in moral philosophy, steeped in

legal and prisoner’s dilemma theorizations, would have been in a telling

relation of correlation with the current broader cultural imaginaries,

“scientifically” picturing humans as necessarily competitive, or in Rorty’s

1996 turn of phrase, Darwinian “clever, language-using animals”. Given

the local disciplinary and broader social embeddedness, it is

understandable that whatever uplifting credits trust may be gaining, the

appropriateness criterion may in effect be overruling.

Yet Baier’s express intention is social-psychological amelioration. As

she truthfully notes, “[t]here are few fates worse than sustained, self-

33 Baier’s 1986 article “Trust and Antitrust” and her two 1991 Tanner Series lectures “Trust and Its Vulnerabilities” and “Sustaining Trust”. 34 But see some thoughts on mind (in)accessibility in footnote 42; cf. Judith Butler (2005) on the “opaqueness” of the self, incorporating Levinasian analysis.


protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one’s human

environment” (AB1991, p. 129). Therefore, an appropriate-trust project

involves centrally the conceptualization of the proverbial fine line

between rational judgement that is (commendably) discerning and its

counterpart that is (self-righteously, or self-defensively) judgemental. A

genuine, principled inquiry can devolve into the “quest for certainty” that

Dewey problematized in his 1929 lectures. It is thus logical to ask whether

the 1996 project is best sustained by the contingencies of an

appropriateness criterion. As an alternative I explore “unconditionality”,

in two senses.

According to Rorty, “Baier suggests that it is in the family, and in

particular the child’s trust in its mother, that all our moral ladders start”

(RR1996, p. 335). Juxtaposing a child’s trust in his/her mother with the

previously revoked Christian love, it seems that he is searching for love

and trust unconditionally given, and one would assume, accepted

likewise. In other words, for symbols of unquestionable guarantees of

inclusivity/reciprocity. In the papers by Baier I’ve looked at, the child’s

trust in her/his mother is not the model she is after. Since such trust is

unconscious, instinctual, it is a pre-analytic given and practically set aside

when it comes to rationalized appropriateness. Furthermore, if Rorty’s

intent in choosing, following Baier, the family “as our model for moral and

political community rather than the schoolroom, the law court, or the

marketplace” (RR1996, p. 335) is to avoid abstract universalization, it does

not serve its purpose. The ideal of the (loving) family, albeit private rather

than public, does get universalized, thereby excluding those who have

never known the experience – not unlike the discredited contrast of

“(under)privileged representations” in traditional epistemology.

Moreover, it appears that if Rorty were to adopt the appropriateness

criterion and the family as his moral paragon, he would be in breach of his

declared antifoundationalist allegiances on two counts. He would need to

admit reason in the former case as well as universalizing generality in the

latter. Alternatively, if he were to fully implement his Christian symbolism,

he would need to employ unconditionality in two senses, at the

interpersonal level but also with respect to historical-cultural


paticularities. In other words, just like lovingkindness, trust would have

broad applicability, not being beholden to (possibly divisive) contingencies

of place and time (unconditionality as noble universality) and one would

not hesitate to trust/accept trust from another (interpersonal

unconditionality). Rorty’s 2005 “poetic” idealization can be read to entail

such interpersonal trust(worthiness) through love as the only (a.k.a.

universal) law:

My sense of the holy, insofar as I have it, is bound up with the hope that

some day, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a

global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a

society communication would be domination-free, class and caste would

be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic

convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free

agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate.

(Atheism and Anticlericalism 2005, p. 40)

The text seems to envision a society where the questions of whether to

love one’s neighbour as oneself or whether to turn the other cheek

wouldn’t even arise – if love is the only law you don’t face the dilemma of

striking back or bracing up for hurt. Riding with Christian rhetoric, Rorty

says that the coming about of such a future is “a mystery”, like that of the

Incarnation, which “concerns the coming into existence of [paraphrasing

from 1 Corinthians 13] a love that is kind, patient and endures all things”

(RR2005, p. 40). Rorty’s Christian poetics has shed the problem-atic

agape/eros ambivalence of the 1996 love and is now clothed in the

straightforward fluency of lovingkindness. The latter is in no need of

scaffolding and in no danger of being undermined by it. But what is the

edifying import of this evolving Christian symbolism?

I believe that Rorty’s idealizations, the 1996 one more timidly, and the

2005 with a lot more confidence, are saying something important. I

propose to view lovingkindness as manifesting a sort of “mutual

subjectivity” universal, which Rorty distils as the interpersonal ingredient

that is most needed in maintaining the cohesion of a human (democratic)


community. While its heuristic packaging varies from one paradigm and

culture to another, such archetypal reciprocity, to be discussed in the

concluding section, has been recorded throughout history and across

cultures. If Darwin is correct in attributing to evolution the instinct for

sympathy and the more general social instinct discussed above, to which I

added the biomorphological reality of mirror neurons, then the hypo-

thesis also receives scientific support.

Rorty seems to have fulfilled his conversational ethics extended clause

of adopting the jargon of an interlocutor, in this case of those who are

(reversing Max Weber’s metaphor) “religiously musical”, unlike himself.

To be able to appreciate, in addition, the spiritual dimension that Christian

symbolism invokes but Rorty skirts around, let us consider a comparison

of the Christian point of view and the Rortian love idealizations in the

1996 and 2005 articles, and the “civic responsibility” thesis that is

emphatically not “guided” by reason or religion in the 2005 interview.

As a point of reference, here is a quote by George Santayana who,

despite adamantly denouncing “supernaturalism”, saw reason to claim in

his essay “Glimpses of Perfection” that:

No atheism is so terrible as the absence of an ultimate ideal, nor could

any failure of power be more contrary to human nature than the failure

of moral imagination, or more incompatible with healthy life… That man

is unhappy indeed, who in all his life has had no glimpse of perfection,

who in the ecstasy of love, or in the delight of contemplation, has never

been able to say: It is attained.

(Santayana 1920, Little Essays, p. 124)

In my reading, the difference Rorty (1996) would be assuming between

Santayana’s supernaturalism (cf. Rorty’s 1979 philosophical urge) and

ideals – call them “flights of the imagination/the spirit”, or “transcend-

ental yearnings” – may be comparable, in some sense, to the key

distinction between the problematic aspects of Cartesian-Kantian-analytic

foundations and what is principled, foundational, hence conceptually

necessary, for which I argued above.


3.3 Lovingkindness, civic responsibility and the spirit’s flight

Poetically, Rorty’s idealizations sing of salvation from (the discredited

mode of) reason by love/trust. This, on some level, is the story of sin and

redemption the Bible tells (see Appendix II for a thought experiment).

Salvation as healing of mutual subjectivity discord in Rorty’s case concerns

human others, and in the Biblical case, a divine Other originally, but in the

long run human others too. Against this background, how does

(non)theistic (in)commensurability play out and what are the implications

for the “missing” spiritual dimension of the idealizations?

Rorty’s 2005 hermeneutic conversation with Vattimo and Zabala

concerns “the new climate of philosophical opinion [in which] philosophy

professors are no longer expected to provide answers to a question that

exercised both Kant and Hegel: How can the worldview of natural science

be fitted together with the complex of religious and moral ideas that were

central to European civilization?” (RR2005, p. 32). I take Rorty’s Christian

love idealizations and the reason- and religion-free “civic responsibility

thesis” to comprise two premises: 1) human reciprocity and 2a)

symbolically invoked relation or 2b) disowned relation to a spiritual

domain. He converges with Christianity on 1) but maintains

incommensurability regarding 2). Yet, the question arises of whether he is

immune to a “flight of the spirit” – which I will claim reveals a nobler side

to the “philosophical urge” he denounces (RR1979, p.179).

In all evidence, in 2005 the incommensurability with epistemological

foundationalism remains, while that with “post-metaphysical” Christian-

ity, as advocated by Vattimo e.g. in Credere di credere (translated Belief,

1999), recedes. That is, as long as religion stays private, leaves (one might

say, ironically) “beliefs” to science, and proceeds with preaching the

Christian message of love as the only law. Rorty is not prepared to allow

public religion, because he necessarily links it to undesirable political

consequences. He identifies himself as an “anticlericalist” rather than an

“atheist”, basically aligning his position with William James’s (1896, 1907)

as far as “the right to believe”.


Although Rortian lovingkindness is not shown to cross ethnic-cultural

boundaries,35 it does facilitate conversation across the Christian

religiosity/nonreligiosity boundary, while preserving – even if partially –

the paradigmatic theology/(post)epistemology dichotomy. Consider the

coda of his 2005 article:

… 1 Corinthians 13 is an equally useful text for both religious people like

Vattimo… and for nonreligious people like myself… The difference

between these two sorts of people is that between unjustifiable gratitude

and unjustifiable hope. This is not a matter of conflicting beliefs about

what really exists and what does not.

(Atheism and Anticlericalism 2005, p. 40, italics added)

In this quote, Rorty accepts the unconditional Christian love per 1

Corinthians 13, like Vattimo, which means that the (non)theological

parties converge on human reciprocity that is the heart of the love

idealizations. However, both the Christian gratitude (I am assuming, for

redemption by Christ’s sacrifice) and Rorty’s own utopian hope “for a

better future” are qualified as “unjustifiable” – which would not be the

Christian attitude regarding the former. The very last sentence is a

reaffirmation of the “post-metaphysical” thesis of the whole book – the

irrelevance of asking whether God is “real” – on which the compatibility of

science and religion in today’s Age of Interpretation apparently hinges. By

that token, science would not claim that the Christian gratitude is

“unjustified” but would settle for “unjustifiable”. As to religion, Vattimo

“identif[ies] Christ neither with truth nor with power but with love alone”

(RR2005, p. 36), which Rorty takes to mean that the very notion of a

sublime kind of “real” is superseded by the overarching message of

Christianity – love for and among people. This is not a compromise, it fits

his 1979 agnosticism, whereby knowledge as accuracy of mind-world

35 If love as the only law is a possible utopian future, expected “any millennium now”, a conversation with Islam does not figure in the short-term forecast (Rorty et al. 2005, pp.72, 73), and neither does coexistence of multiple faiths, even as a utopia. On Rorty’s “ethnocentrism” see e.g. Ramberg (2007).


correspondences (representations) is doubtful because access to “reality”

by correspondence is problematic.

Is the adopted public science of truth/private religion of love segreg-

ation resolving or avoiding the problem of incommensurability? I cannot

help but note that stopping at that is still very far from going all the

imaginable, utopian way to democratic inclusivity. Still, I find it

philosophically significant that Rorty sees Christianity and democracy as

having human relationality in common.36 To Nietzsche’s aphorism about

democracy being Christianity naturalized, brought up by Zabala, Rorty

promptly responds that Nietzsche meant it as an insult but it should be

taken as a compliment (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 75).

Even though he sees democracy as an “appropriation of the Christian

message that love is the only law” (Rorty et al. 2005, p. 74), Rorty does

remain an unbeliever as far as a personal God. What I labelled above his

“civic responsibility thesis”, repeated here, summarily dismisses reason,

as do the love idealizations, but this time around religious symbolism as

well,

I think the answer [about our duty today] is “Our only duty is to our fellow

citizens”. You may conceive your fellow citizens as the other Italians, your

fellow Europeans, or your fellow humans. But, whatever the boundaries of

one’s sense of responsibility, this sense of civic responsibility is possible

even if you have never heard either of reason or of religious faith. Civic

responsibility existed in Athens before Plato invented the thing we now

call reason. (Atheism and Anticlericalism 2005, p. 74)

Rorty goes with antifoundationalist justification “by historical experience”.

His hint at a historical argument is akin to Amy Gutmann’s (1996) neither

foundationalist nor antifoundationalist defence of democracy. She

justifies democracy with empirical evidence that people prefer nonideal

democracies over their nonideal alternatives (e.g. a “case study” of post-

36 Recognition of a similarity between democracy and Christianity is not uncommon among leftist intellectuals, including on political-economic matters. See footnote 7 about Rorty and economic equity.


Soviet Lithuania voting for democracy) as well as the aphoristic

recapitulation of such evidence attributed to Winston Churchill, in her

paraphrase “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the

others” (AG1996, p. 341). To my ear Rorty’s antifoundationalist argument

also has the cadence of Richard Atleo’s “Our stories are true!” in

reference to Aboriginal Nuu-chah-nuulth oral history and myth (RA2007,

p. 139ff).37

The transcendental dimension aside, against the background of the

utopia of love as the only law, which is to happen “any millennium now”

Rorty’s prompt reliance on “civic responsibility” in the matter of “today’s

single most important duty” that goes back to the pre-dawn of philosophy

is in actuality a paraphrase of the former. I propose that coming at

reciprocity from two sufficiently different directions, utopian loving-

kindness and sober civic responsibility, Rorty helps to better triangulate

the axiomatic “mutual subjectivity” universal proposed above that, in one

way or another, more or less explicitly and visibly, to varying degrees

successfully, has persisted throughout history and across cultures.

Recapitulating Rortian dialectics, to avoid the categorical imperative’s

ahistoricity, he steers toward Christian love that is unconditional, and

while refusing to invoke the personal God of Christianity, he projects a

bridge of human-nature continuity with regard to civic responsibility from

pre-Platonic Antiquity to today. Ultimately, he is looking to overcome

what separates and opposes humans (cf. the 1979 social justification in

lieu of commensuration), and in his own way has dealt with the rift

between humans and our world (cf. the 1979 conversation in lieu of

representational confrontation). Whether by reference to Antiquity, or a

utopian future, I would claim, Rorty searches for something reminiscent of

transcendence.

37 Atleo’s reasoning boils down to saying that practices that have sustained his people for centuries obviously “work”, and are thereby their own proof. Similar law-like treatment of “paradigms of experience” is noted for the Balinese – see Bateson (1991, p. 87).


Let us recall that in looking for possibilities to extend Rorty’s

paradigmatic rebellion beyond the reactive and into the constructive, I

considered uses of the “foundational” that are compatible with (my

reading of) the intended substantive theoretical import of Rorty’s love

idealizations. Having argued for reinterpretation of allegedly found-

ationalist concepts like human nature and essence, reason/rationality and

related cognitive notions, with the question of Rortian-style trans-

cendence I’ve come back full circle to the role of philosophy as guidance.

Yet again in the spirit of heuristic exoneration/democratization, I

propose that there is a noble, humane side to the “philosophical urge”,

since the flight of the spirit, I believe, is behind paradigmatic revolutions

and social change. It underlies shifts in consciousness – which is what

someone “religiously unmusical” listened for in Christian symbols, while

denying anything that is divorced from actual social practices; or heard in

conversational mediation while rejecting (linguistic) representation and a

separate, independent reality. With Judith Green’s (2007) poetic image of

Richard Rorty,

… writing and watching the sky for really large birds until the

very end. In fact, in his last weeks, Rorty is said to have sighted a

California condor – a huge, broad-winged, high-flying bird that

was almost extinct once…

I transition to the final section, which, more than anything, is meant to

keep the discussion open.

4. Mutual Subjectivity in Humankind’s Edification – (To be)

Continued

Still dialoguing with Rorty, this section’s title mirrors his concluding 1979

section “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind” in the chapter

“Philosophy Without Mirrors”, which in turn invokes Michael Oakshott’s

famous pamphlet The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind. My

edits, I trust, are self-explanatory. Here I present cross-cultural support,


which would be “anifoundationalist” in Rorty’s terms and “foundational”

on mine, for the hypothesized “mutual subjectivity universal”. It can be

found in linguistic tokens of cultural symbols and injunctions, whose

lessons are about fairness and dignity in togetherness.

I’d propose to put forward archetypal38 reciprocity as a common

denominator for Rorty’s idealizations and Kant’s categorical imperative;

for the French Revolution’s “Liberté, egalité, fraternité!” and “government

of the people, by the people, for the people” of the Gettysburg Address;

for injunctions formulated by various religions and teachings that are

renditions of the idea of treating an other well. Appendix III contains

quotes from thirteen sources in the last category. Of these I list three, to

illustrate reciprocity among us humans and with the planet we share, and

to represent streams of thought with more of a secular/non-religious as

well as with religious/spiritual orientation:

Confucianism: One word which sums up the basis of all good conduct… loving kindness. Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself.

Confucius, Analects 15.23

Jainism: One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated.

Mahavira, Sutrakritanga

Native Spirituality: We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive.

Chief Dan George

Regarding traditional concepts/practices to the same effect, Richard Atleo

(2004, 2011) has written specifically about the Nuu-chah-nulth39 nation’s

38 Bracketing this topic for future research, I am inclined to identify reciprocity with Jung’s “sage/wise old man” archetype, though it may in fact be “distributed” among more than one of his posited archetypes (“collective consciousness” psychic patterns that are innate and universal). In any case, I take the “linguistic tokens” here to be commensurate with Jungian “myth”, “fairy tale”, “universal literature”, and similar, which in his system exhibit archetypal features. 39 People at the Longhouse at the University of Victoria, BC have helpfully explained that the term “Nootka”, which survives in geographical names (e.g. on


principle/worldview of tsawalk “unity”, which in my understanding stands

for “metaphysical unity as interdependence” that yields law-like

reciprocity. Researching the belief systems of first nations, Scott L. Pratt

has identified four principles of “Native pragmatism” – interaction,

pluralism, community and growth – of which the first three are obviously

linguistically coded for mutuality and reciprocity.

In a similar vein, there are the largely self-explanatory notions of

Buddhism: Mahayana Buddhist “Buddha nature”, a.k.a. “unconditional

awareness/wakefulness” that teaches to listen, feel and let be (Daniel

Vokey 2001, p. 218); the four Theravada Buddhist brahma-viharas "divine

abodes" of metta "lovingkindness", karuna "compassion", muditta

"sympathetic joy", and upekkha "equanimity" (Claudia Eppert 2010, Mary

Jo Hinsdale 2012); and vipassana, i.e., meditation cultivating

“mindfulness” (Nelson 2012).

On the subject of integrating the traditional and the contemporary – in

line with which I suggested above (p. 23) an “edifying” Christian-Buddhist-

Aboriginal… makeover of social imaginaries – the Environmental School

Project of Simon Fraser University is exploring options to bring aspects of

Indigenous style education into the K12 system (see Blenkinsop et al.

2012). Doing similar research on “mindfulness” meditation, Donald Nelson

(2012) argues for the critical importance of its authentic cross-cultural

translation, including in the educational context.

What is of the utmost importance is that in the process of such an

intellectual-spiritual exchange “developed”, “civilized” nations would be

learning from historically colonized peoples (see Indigenous philosophies

in Dei, ed. 2011). This can create venues for long-overdue recognition of

what a multiply compromised host/guest relationship has been

demeaning and destroy-ing – to the detriment of both/all sides involved.

Restoring the dignity of the Indigenous cultural heritage on this continent,

Scott Pratt has argued that his above-mentioned four philosophical

principles are at the root of a “properly American” philosophy. He thereby

Vancouver Island, BC), is a European settlers’ pigeonization and is unacceptable

to the Nuu-chah-nulth people.


reassigns the honour previously bestowed on American pragmatism,

which, as he shows, started in the late 19th century, imbued with the very

same principles. His “Native pragmatism” rectifies history.

Out of the above cursory review of “data”, and the preceding analysis,

I piece together

a circle of multicultural scope,

of memorable histories,

and of hope for humanity

to have the right answers

when time calls for them…

I also visualize, in a cyclic format, a sort of hermeneutic interdependency

of what I have explored here as constitutive of mutual subjectivity at the

individual and broader social levels, as well as in diachronic perspective:

Hermeneutically: At the stroke of 12:00 of history

Liberté Of the people

Dialogically: Pluralistic discourse

Egalité By the people see Appendix III

Democratically: On millennial wisdom

Fraternité For the people

Ecologically: Re the “mutual subjectivity” universal

Fig. 2 Visualization: Hermeneutics of “mutual subjectivity”


When

do

we

continue

the conversation?

. . .


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Appendix I: The “About”-Realm Hypothesis

Rorty (1979) argues for language to be reprieved from representation,

and thereby from referentiality – I’d emphasize, in their discredited uses.

The predicament I see is, simply put, What would a “language game” be

like once its “rules” are being followed, yet it is deprived of what – to

avoid “reference” and “meaning” – I will term its “aboutness”, i.e., what is

being said? Taking advantage of Rorty’s admission, made in passing, that

he does not reject representation wholesale, I would like to propose that

his social agreement/coherence-mediated and mediating “conversation”

is eligible to fill the position precisely qua representation. Whatever

mediates it thereby represents.

My justification is by analogy: if coherence – the way I see it,

agreement by negotiation and approximation (probabilistic), not by

commensuration and confrontation (apodictic) – “works” for a theory of

truth/knowledge (not Rorty’s because he is consistent and denies these

two along with representation and reference), then it can also serve a

theory of representation/referentiality, whether mental or linguistic. For

why would an “object” (to be) known be assumed to “impose” belief on

the knower (per [neo-]Kantian “confrontation”, as modelled and

discredited in the book) in “conversation”-mode as well, when according

to “social justification” knowers themselves do not “impose on” but

negotiate with each other?

So what might a putative linguistic representation be like when it is

free from the constraints of precise equivalence and mandatory

matching? Here is a partial, in two senses, hypothesis:

Suppose, with the degree of certainty of Deweyan “warranted

assertibility”, that what is not given to us humans is “direct” access to

“reality”, since not only the mind (according to the traditional view, e.g.

RR1979, p. 253) but also the senses and the brain mediate experience – or

at least do so at the conscious level. Suppose further that what is

discredited is the notion of reality/the world as “external to and

independent from” the human mind-body – which is what Dewey in his

lecture “The Naturalization of Intelligence” (1929) argued against, in


consequence of Heisenberg’s (1927) indetermin-acy a.k.a. uncertainty

principle.40

Conversation happens over and above as well as by way of

communicational exchange, i.e. Rortian betweenness. Thatt is, treating it

from a fuller ecological/systems-theoretic perspective41, it obtains not just

between/among subjects but also unavoidably about our world and

ourselves as part of it. In fact, for Rorty’s 1979 conversational

“betweenness” to happen at all, human knowers would have to have

access to a kind of about-realm sufficiently equitably (and/or equally) to

motivate them to converse-agree-disagree based on “aboutness”.

Therefore, on the one hand, conversation takes place socially

between subjects/propositions, and on the other hand, also (quasi-

)”referentially”, about an [in]animate object, another human subject, not

forgetting the self,42 and whatever else language has words and sentences

for. Importantly, said realm is neither separate nor independent from

human minds, hearts, or bodies, but on the contrary, there is an ongoing,

mutually constitutive relation.

40 In fact, even prior to the insights of quantum physics, Dewey had suggested, at least as early as Democracy and Education (1916), that an organism is continuous with its environment, the two being in a relation of mutual construction. Hence the multiple modes of his understanding of knowledge as action. 41 I use the comparative expression “fuller … view” because Rorty does subscribe to a degree/kind of “holism”, since he praises both epistemological behaviourism and hermeneutics for such an approach. 42 Note, curiously, that modelling knowing as “visual confrontation” between knower and known as distinct terms would by definition preclude self-knowledge, and the requirement of “correspondence” would cancel knowing altogether because there would be no matching as such that can take place. Perhaps, then, one’s mind, being one’s own would not be the easiest to know, as 17th century assumptions would have it. If so, would this be evidence against or in favour of the imagery on trial?

Furthermore, doesn’t Levinasian responsibility, and by extension Kelly Oliver’s (2001) “mutual subjectivity”, bring up an image of being unable to see oneself in one’s own “mirror”, therefore searching instead the “mirrors” of others for a reflection of oneself? Let us recall that in “mirror neurons” the mirror metaphor has to do with empathy. Also, Rorty himself agrees with Gadamer that acculturation necessarily starts with a kind of copying of existing knowledge before one starts revising it.


In other words, my hypothesis makes explicit what Rorty’s model has to

have implicitly. As a rather preliminary approximation at this point, I

would submit for consideration the possibility of recruiting the Piercean

“commens” (a kind of semiotic “common ground” for interlocutors, see

Letters to Lady Ashby, cited after Commens website) as a candidate for

the hypothesized about-realm. Furthermore, setting aside the linear view

of (a) following sign(s) (re-)interpreting (a) preceding sign(s) (e.g. as per

Peirce’s ever-evolving “semeiotic” model at one of its stages),

I’d visualize multiple, mutually (re)interpreting connections between and

among signs, as part of the ecosystem of human mind-heart-bodies that

mediate signs and act themselves as a subset of signs.


Appendix II: Fall by Knowledge of Good versus Evil

Poetically, Rorty’s idealizations sing of salvation from reason by love/trust.

This, on some level, is the story of sin and redemption the Bible tells.

Salvation as healing of interpersonal rifts in the Rortian case concerns

human others, in the Biblical case, a divine Other originally, but in the long

run human others too (using the Levinasian O/other distinction, at one

stage of his system). The original “self” would be Eve, then Adam,

followed by all generations after them.

What if the question about theistic/nontheistic incommensurability is

not whether, using a favourite phrase of Rorty’s, it “makes sense” to love

one’s enemy as oneself or whether to turn the other cheek (bluntly put,

whether being a loving Christian is a realistic human goal). Suppose the

question is, What would it take to create a community such that the

occasions of doubt about unconditional love or being hurt do not even

arise?

Let us then ride with Biblical rhetoric for a reading of the (Platonic-

)Cartesian-Kantian-analytic paradigm – in all fairness, not its achieve-

ments, as there are those, but the dangers it may pose, just like any other

human epistemic-cognitive attempt. Starting with the Hebraic pages of

Genesis and moving past Christ’s sacrifice, the single most important

event of the New Testament, to the present day, let us consider – as a

Thought Experiment – how “supernaturalistic” knowledge/rationality

might play out, and what could be the human way out:

It was eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil –

first Eve and then Adam – that brought about their Fall from Grace (God’s

unconditional love). In that instant one may perceive the latent dangers of

the potent temptation to “know/be like God” that created the urge for the

forbidden; also the Good/Evil, Grace/Fall binaries that were unleashed

onto subsequent generations; and, in the final analysis, the finiteness of

mortality that was brought upon the sinning couple for all the lure of

omniscience/omnipotence with which the attainment of God’s knowledge

beckoned.


Fastforward past the sin/redemption threshold on behalf of humanity that

Jesus’ crucifiction/resurrection crossed, were one to deny unconditional

Love as embodied by Christ (as a manifestation of God’s undeserved

kindness), wouldn’t one be denying redemption earned by the costly

sacrifice on the Cross?

Linking this to the “What would it take…?” question, the auxiliary

questions that pop up would revolve around whether the Saviour’s

unconditional Love for us humans, on its own, fulfils the divine purpose,

and what would constitute actually “accepting” that Love.


Appendix III: If we were to do as we’d want to be done to…

The quotes in the original poster designed by Kathy Van Loon are in a

circular arrangement. Here they are listed starting at 12 o’clock (per

original layout) and going clockwise.

Hinduism

This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done

to you

Mahabharata 5:1517

Buddhism

Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful

The Buddha, Udana-Varga 5.8

Confucianism

One word which sums up the basis of all good conduct… loving kindness.

Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself


Taoism

Regard your neighbour`s gain as your own gain, and your neighbour`s loss

as your loss

Lao Tzu, T`ai Shang Kan Ying P`ien, 2213-2218

Sikhism

I am a stranger to no one; and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a

friend to all

Guru Granth Sahib, p.1299

Christianity

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is

the law and the prophets

Jesus, Matthew 7:12, New Testament


Unitarianism

We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all

existence of which we are a part

Unitarian principle

Native Spirituality

We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive

Chief Dan George

Zoroastrianism

Do not do to others whatever is injurious to yourself

Shayast-na-Shayast 13.29

Jainism

One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated


Judaism

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole

Torah; all the rest is commentary

Hillel, Talmud, Shabbat 31a

Islam

Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for

yourself

The Prophet Muhammad, Hadith

Baha`i Faith

Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you,

and desire not for anyone the things you would not desire for yourself

Baha`u`llah, Gleanings


Reproduction I: A Brief Response to Rorty’s Essay

“To ask for a foundation of democracy is, typically, to ask for a reason why we

should be inclusive in our moral and political concerns rather than exclusive… The

problem foundationalists face is how to argue exclusivists into being inclusivists,

racists into being democrats.” Rorty.

Critically discuss the above quote, identifying your position regarding the above

claim, and argue for it. Briefly identify the major implications for education based

on the position you support.

►►◄◄

3D Democracy as Its Own Justification

The text in Rorty’s (1996) essay marked off by the above quote aims to

prove the futility of attempting to define (and rely on) “foundations” of

democracy as conceived by “foundationalists” (an outgrowth of the

familiar “rationalist” tradition), which also appears to be the thesis and

the conclusion of the whole essay. Rorty sees “foundations” as something

that is “outside of social practice”, and therefore something his party of

“antifoundationalists” would not recognise. But is the alternative he offers

radically different, methodologically and/or substantively? Would he be

ok with an exclusivist’s “different premises” or will he act more like a

foundationalist, changing their premises?

In lieu of foundations, Rorty resorts to “ideals/idealizations” (p. 333).

Although he describes these as sampled from social practice, since they

are abstractions they belong to a meta-level “outside of social practice”,

like foundations. The real difference comes from what he does with them.

The meta-category slots (whether they go under “foundations” or

“idealizations”) are the same, but they represent alternate values. As an

example, while rationality/objectivity/universality … /morality… are at the

heart of the foundationalist worldview, they are not welcome in Rorty’s


value system. So he “replaces” them with a belief in “our ability to feel

for, cherish, and trust people very different from ourselves” and the

symbolism of a Kierkegaardian Christian God who “wants lovers rather

than knowers” (p. 335).

For Rorty, then, affectivity (of the relational kind!) is pitted against

reason, which reminds me of a pragmatist predecessor of his, William

James, who similarly chastised the intellectualist/rationalist stance, while

metaphorically speaking of pragmatism as a she (1975, 1978, p. 32 ff).

While I agree with Rorty’ sentiment concerning hard-core rationalism, I’d

say that if he had proposed to combine reasoning and affect, rather than

replacing one with the other, instead of reversing the long-standing

reason/passion dichotomy that he criticises, he would have dissolved it.

His vocabulary aside, reason-ng – mandated by his academic situatedness

– is exactly what he uses when arguing for the switch.

Suppose the way Rorty tackles foundationalism is an indication of how

he himself would “argue exclusivists into being inclusivists, racists into

being democrats…” (p. 334) – and, I’d imagine, any “adversary” per

Mouffe’s “agonism”. He would argue them out of their premises and

would steer them toward his own (contrary to his declaration of anti-

foundationalist tolerance for “different premises”, p. 335). A relational

approach need not be excluded, if circumstances allow it, since by the

looks of it, he is prepared to take chances with the “emotivism”/ ”irration-

alism” (cf. the switch above) that foundationalists would accuse him of.

As far as discursive mode, I’d welcome the reason/affect combination

in counteracting any form of invidious differentials such as racism,

xenophobia, sexism. As to substance, I would see it as democratic civic

duty to be looking for ways to change premises that sustain the above

social asymmetries.

In the case of Rorty’s Darwinian argument, if it would serve to argue

that destroying lives cannot be justified, or to mitigate dogmatic

moralizations, I’d concur with the intent if not the rhetoric. If, however, it

would serve to argue, point-blank, that there are no criteria to distinguish


right from wrong human behaviour, I’d disagree – on democratic grounds.

Above all, I’d object to the statement that “once we give up on the

answer ‘God wills that we love each other’, there is no good answer about

the worth of inclusivity and love” (p. 334).

For one thing, it isn’t clear how democracy would be sustained if

human actors lack the requisite moral(-political) agency. For another, the

statement seems to clash with Rorty’s own appeal for trust in “people

very different from ourselves” and family as “our model for moral and

political community … [the place] where all our moral ladders start” (p.

335). Were he to exclude atheists for practically having no moral values

on their own and theists for having no moral autonomy from a God, he

would be saying democracy cannot happen anywhere in the United

States. In any case, atheism does not entail absence of morality. For com-

parison, even at his most solipsistic, when he declared man to be “doom-

ed to freedom” and all human actions to be “equivalent”, Sartre (1943)

obligated humans, to “be aware” of what they do, and in a sense to be

accountable to themselves, and in his later writings to others as well.

In sum, despite his criticism levelled at foundations, Rorty is counting

on criteria according to which to defend his (on the surface, soft) version

of democracy. He is objecting not so much to the metalevel they create as

to the rationalist repository foundationalism takes them from. While I

don’t always agree with the literal argumentation he recruits, I’d be just

as willing to use “persuasion” when it comes to taking a principled stand –

preferably relationally.

Before turning to education, let me sketch a possible democracy

project, taking up Rorty and Gutmann on their invitation to present

“competing idealizations” (Rorty, p. 335) and explore the “kind of

democracy [that] is most defensible” (Gutmann, p. 337, italics in original).

I forfeit the expected “debate” mode (not only) for lack for space.

Here I aim for a principled ideal, not worrying about going too far from

what is currently possible. Above all, I “imagine all the people” in a self-

governing system which is heterarchical rather than hierarchical. I treat


the vertical structure of nonideal democracies as being at the very bottom

of the problem with the abyss separating (in Gutmann’s terms) ideal from

nonideal democracy, and indeed as antithetical to democracy. A case in

point is the meta-physical conflict between “equality of opportunity” and

– as the colloquial expression has it – some being “more equal” than

others, i.e. placed in clearly more privileged starting positions.

Heterarchy, more likely than not, would condition Reciprocity struct-

urally and, in turn, would be conditioned by it systemically. Let me show,

then, in what way Reciprocity goes hand in hand with Democracy.

I think of democracy as “the rule of, by and for the people” – a

3D(imensional) model. If one were to bring philosophical inquiry to the

colloquial/common sense level, knowing (non-existent? – per Rorty)

“human nature”, wouldn’t “the people” want to rule 1) themselves/one

another and 2) for themselves/one another – axiomatically? [Prepared-

ness is another question.] So isn’t asking for a reason/justification for

democracy the same as posing the rhetorical question of why/if one

would want what one likes? I conclude that the “Why/if?” (=

foundations/reasons/ justifications…) of democracy can be cancelled not

so much because the search for an answer is extremely unproductively

controversial (“dead-end debate” in Gutmann’s terms) but because

democracy is its own justification, already coded in the etymology of the

term, derived from the Greek words for “people” and “governance”.

By the “rule of, by and for the people” definition, democracy is only

functional when fully 3D(imensional). The Of-By-For triad of principles

need to operate together – 1) leadership (governing) 2) duties/resp-

onsibilities (being governed) and 3) rights (being cared for/caring for).

Applied to a community, the three principles collaborate for self- and

mutual governance, i.e. manifesting Reciprocity. In other words, the social

whole – instead of overpowering the parts, as in a Luhmannian-type

system (cited after Lyotard 1984), or being threatened by their centrifugal

pull – is predicated on their responsiveness to each other.

In sum, rather than looking for proverbially hard-to-defend “criteria” of


democracy through, yet outside of, human social practice, democracy

itself can serve as criterion and mode of optimal social practice.

Optimality is guaranteed by continual and concurrent Of-By-For thought

and action entailing Reciprocity. In that model, argumentation cooperates

with relation, the rational with the affective, the analytic with the artistic.

To exemplify, my way of conditioning/arguing for inclusivity can unfold

as follows:

motivational

environment

getting

motivated

to avoid:

debate &

theoretical convolutions

aesthetic/symbolic

conditioning of trust

“categorical imperative”

“Golden Rule” [see APPENDIX]

Reciprocity

Prompt

With Of-By-For always

already together,

wouldn’t an exclusivist,

of whatever breed, need

to learn inclusion

to avoid exclusion?

And, rather than

stark foundations

challenged by

idealizations,

how about colours

bright rainbows, sunflowers?

Let’s do

as we’d

want to be

done

to


EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

Knowing how good pragmatism would be with the 3D vision and multiple

“colours” (if true to itself) my choice would be for pragmatist-style Of-By-

For educational painting to be implemented – across the Boards.

In a richly multicultural context like Canada the question does arise as

to whether “everybody” (most often than not, newcomers) would want

self/mutual governance – or, indeed, knows how to go about it, including

building from scratch or against all odds. My reply to that would be that

“newcomers” come here for a “better” life. If they have objections to the

existing democratic structure, one would have to be discerning as to

whether the reason is the ideal of democracy OR some nonideal version of

it. (After all, “excellent ideas” do get irrevocably compromised because of

inadequate implementation – e.g. nuclear power.)

If I were to approach the question (in my understanding) demo-

cratically then I’d say that the community’s best bet would be to proceed

Dewey-style, adjusting experience based on the ideal, adjusting the

theory in view of practice. No doubt, the classroom is one of many

legitimate test sites, where student and teacher/professor can learn from

each other as they co-construct theory and practice. Thinking of the wider

educational spaces, other actors would include administrators, policy-

makers, and (especially at the earlier stages) parents. Going even wider,

one’s lifetime is an ongoing class, from birth onward.

Dewey-style, again, for democracy as a way of life, education – formal

and informal – can contribute by developing a democratic “disposition”

and (going back to James and Peirce) corresponding “habits”, thereby not

just replicating but also updating the construction of society. And, keeping

the 3D vision.

REFERENCES

Dewey, John ([1938] 1997) Experience and Education. Free Press.

[Originally published in 1938]

Graveline, Fyre Jean (1999) Trickster Teaches: Doing Means Being Done


To. Atlantis 24(1), Fall/Winter 1999. pp. 4-14.

Gutmann, Amy (1996) Democracy, Philosophy, and Justification. In Seyla

Benhabib, ed. Democracy and Difference. Contesting the Boundaries of

the Political, pp. 340-347. Princeton University Press.

I Am: Documentary directed by Tom, Shadyac (2010)

Lyotard, Jean-François ([1979] 1984) The Postmodern Condition. A Report

on Knowledge. Translation from French by Geoff Bennington and Brian

Massumi. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

[Orig. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Les Editions de

Minuit]

Mouffe, Chantal (2002) Politics and Passions: The Stakes of Democracy.

CSD Perspectives. Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of

Westminster, England.

Rorty, Richard (1996) Idealizations, Foundations, and Social Practices. In

Seyla Benhabib, ed. Democracy and Difference. Contesting the

Boundaries of the Political, pp. 333-335. Princeton University Press.

Sartre, Jean-Paul ([1943] 1957) Being and Nothingness. Translation from

French by Hazel E. Barnes. London, UK: Methuen & Co Ltd. [Originally

published as L’Etre et le Néant, by Gallimard, 1943]

Vokey, Daniel (2001) Moral Discourse in a Pluralistic World. Notre Dame,

Indiana: Univ. of Notre Dame Press.

APPENDIX: Reciprocity “Works” Across Time and Cultures

Correlates of the so-called “Golden Rule” – do as you’d want to be done to

[Lynne’s verse-ion] – may prove to be productive teaching material in a

multicultural classroom. I take the Rule’s ubiquity to be geographically and

historically wide-ranging “empirical support” for the reality of human like-

mindedness regarding Reciprocity, and hence for the possibility for which

Daniel Vokey argued strongly in his PhD thesis/book – Moral Discourse in a

Pluralistic World. Its Bible versions, most likely, fed into Kant’s “categorical

imperative”.


Hinduism

This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you

Mahabharata 5:1517

Buddhism

Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful

The Buddha, Udana-Varga 5.8

Confucianism

One word which sums up the basis of all good conduct… loving kindness. Do not

do to others what you do not want done to yourself


Taoism

Regard your neighbour`s gain as your own gain, and your neighbour`s loss as your

loss

Lao Tzu, T`ai Shang Kan Ying P`ien, 2213-218

Sikhism

I am a stranger to no one; and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to

all

Guru Granth Sahib, p.1299

Christianity

In everything, do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law

and the prophets

Jesus, Matthew 7:12

[NOTE: the above quote is from the New Testament, and there is a paraphrase at

Luke 6:31, ibid. Versions figure in the Old Testament, a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, e.g.

in Leviticus 19:18: "'Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your

people, but love your neighbor (fellow, in some translations that keep neighbor

for the New Testament counterparts) as yourself…” Lynne]

Unitarianism

We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of

which we are a part

Unitarian principle


Native Spirituality

We are as much alive as we keep the earth alive

Chief Dan George

Zoroastrianism

Do not do to others whatever is injurious to yourself

Shayast-na-Shayast 13.29

Jainism

One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated


Judaism

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. This is the whole Torah; all

the rest is commentary

Hillel, Talmud, Shabbat 31a

Islam

Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself

The Prophet Muhammad, Hadith

Baha`i Faith

Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you, and

desire not for anyone the things you would not desire for yourself

Baha`u`llah, Gleanings

Texts copied from a poster by Scarborough Missions, Toronto, designed by Kathy Van Loon

© 2000 by Paul McKenna

NOTE: course paper reproduced as submitted/graded, with some minimal form-

atting.


Reproduction II: Rorty’s (1996) Essay

Image 1. Reproduction of the first page of Rorty (1996, p. 333)


Image 2. Reproduction of the second page of Rorty (1996, p. 334)


Image 3. Reproduction of the third page of Rorty (1996, p. 335)

Author's note: The reproduction of Rorty's (1996) 3-page essay (Benhabib, 1996,

pp. 333-335) is for educational purposes and has no commercial implications.

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