In
Plato’s Theaetetus Protagoras
insisted that one should not persuade the other of what is true in
relation to what is false because no one has ever succeeded in doing
so and most of all because truth in itself is not the issue in
political discussions, debates, and deliberations. But there is one
thing that Protagoras wanted to persuade people about, namely
improvement. From the point of view of ancient Greek politics, this
is all that can be done: We can strive to achieve a better situation,
which inevitably will require further improvement. But if nothing but
improvements can be hoped for, then “truth” or the “good”
have no place in this progress because they presuppose final
achievements, accomplishments, and results. The point of Protagoras
is that one should never persuade people of what is good—only of
the need for improvement.
According
to the late American philosopher Richard
Rorty,
while philosophy has anything to do with truth, it has nothing to do
with politics motivated solely by search for improvements, as
Protagoras explained. The metaphysical or Platonic image of
philosophy as a reflection of eternal problems that continuously
assail the human mind is not adequate anymore because there are no
fundamental philosophical essences left after the deconstruction of
metaphysics. If culture is subject to continuous social changes,
philosophy can solve those particular problems by interpreting and
suggesting further developments and applications. This is why, as
Rorty recalls, a philosopher like John Dewey had “abandoned the
idea that one can say how things really are, as opposed to how they
might best be described in order to meet some particular human
need.”(1) Rorty, just as Dewey, was in agreement with the
deconstructors of “metaphysics of presence” that included
Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, because they showed how objectivity
is more a matter of intersubjective consensus among human beings than
an accurate representation of something nonhuman. These
deconstructors of metaphysics freed human beings from disagreement
since they showed that the resolution of disagreement cannot appeal
to the way the world really is since there is no single reality but a
multiplicity of realities that depend on different needs. The
resolution, explains Rorty, can only be “political: one must use
democratic institutions and procedures to conciliate these various
needs, and thereby widen the range of consensus about how things
are.”(2)
It
is in Rorty’s neopragmatic thought that we will find the meaning of
philosophy for politics after the deconstruction of metaphysics
because his analyses are not a part of but, rather, the outcome of
this deconstruction. If the last great deconstructor of metaphysics,
Derrida, showed us how conceptual distinctions such as
objective-subjective, true-false, man-woman, faith-knowledge, are
only the beginnings and the end points of a ladder we must throw
away, Rorty indicated what to do with such ladder. Questioning
whether the justifications these deconstructors use to confirm their
thesis are metaphysical is, on the other hand, a way of falling back
into metaphysics because there is no natural order capable of
justifying their beliefs, nor is there any meta-way beyond
argumentation that may justify justifications. Searching for these
criteria is not very useful for justification in itself because
philosophy has always been characterized by the compromises on
concrete and particular issues, from which it is impossible to deduct
a general verification-rule. After the deconstruction of metaphysics
we may stop asking what is real and what is not since “only if we
drop the whole idea of ‘correspondence with reality’ can we avoid
pseudo-problems.” If reality does not present itself, but it is us
that linguistically give meaning to the world, the
justification of knowledge will not depend on the permanent
conditions of knowledge since justification is a social phenomenon,
rather than a relation between knowledge and reality. Knowledge,
after deconstruction, is not the possession of an essence, but a
right—the right between arguments upon which it is relatively easy
to obtain a non-enforced agreement, in other words, “the ability to
get agreement by using persuasion rather than force.”
Having
said this, it is clear that the so-called “free Socratic exchange
of public opinions” does not rely on the Platonic idea of a
universal possible agreement since truth, understood as a previous
order, is irrelevant for the correct functioning of democracies.
While intellectuals, regardless of their ideological position,
believe that political actions demand nonpolitical (that is,
philosophical) foundations, they will continue to express a desire
for the philosophical authorities these principles depend upon. But
requiring a philosophical or religious prologue to politics means
that “Philosophy” is in itself the search for such an authority,
a research where “reason” has the same function that God once
had, when “philosophy is [really] an attempt to see how ‘things,
in the largest sense of the term, hang together.”(3) Also, what
justifies a conception of justice is not its adequacy to a
philosophical or religious order that is given, but rather its
congruency with that understanding of our traditions which is rooted
in the private and public life we are all immersed in. As Hans-Georg
Gadamer once said “the difficulty lies not in our not knowing the
truth, or the politician not knowing the truth, or his not needing to
know the truth. Here Rorty is correct – anyone who engages in
politics can’t simply desire the true or the good exactly – it’s
undoubtedly correct to say that he orients his own action and conduct
with a view to the pragmatic. One can’t simply dispense with what
the good politician would have or should have been able to
understand, or what he has personally been able to observe in the
practical situation. On the contrary, we see that this farsighted
discernment of the politician is very often what is decisive in life
praxis – much like it is with the businessman.”(4)
Text
by Santiago Zabala.
Santiago
Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Barcelona.
- R. Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1998, 34). (2) R. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 35. (3) R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 114). (4) Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy, (with R. Dottori) New York London: Continuum, 2000, 43.
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