>> So, today we, we draw towards the end of

the course.
it seems like just a little while ago we
were talking about Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Immanuel Kant.
But today we are moving on to three
American thinkers.
We have not said much about American
thinkers in this class, except for
Emerson and Judith Butler.
But today we're going to be talking about
Richard Rorty and Cornell West and
Anthony Appiah.
three more or less contemporary
intellectuals.
Richard Rorty died a few years ago.
Cornell West and Anthony Appiah, still
very productive scholars and still
putting out work in cultural criticism
and philosophy and related domains on a
regular basis.
We ended last time talking about Zizek
and talking about how he approached what
he called sometimes postmodern authority
or postmodern desire.
And when I've talked about Zizek in class
I I always get questions along the lines
of: So, what has he expect people to do
with the insights that he he says he's
giving us into how the contemporary world
works?
And, Zizek does not recommend anything in
particular.
I think that should be clear from the
reading and from the film clips that
we've, I, I've asked you to look at.
And there are quite a lot of videos about
Zizek on, on, available online now.
And you can get a sense of his style of
philosophizing.
And his style of philosophizing is to
play the role of really of a
psychoanalyst of asking us what we think
we're doing when we do x.
What you, do we really think is going on
when we do y or do z.
Because his approach is less to find a
path that we could agree with, then to
show how our easy agreement be that about
democracy, about diversity, or about
egalitarianism.
That those kinds of commonsensical
agreements mask desires that are twisted.
That are bound up with repression and
with diversions and with assumptions
about meaning and, and direction that are
unfounded.
And when we discover those things it's
really up to us what we're doing, what

we're, what we, how we might react to our

discovery of the relation of our desires
to the world.
And Zizek leaves us in that space, where,
we understand better the confusion of our
own desires.
What, what Freud called the ambivalence
of our situation as desiring human
beings.
And when we confront that that's where
Zizek leaves us, in a way.
leaves us with an acknowledgement of our
contradictory our conflicted place in the
world.
Richard Rorty has a very different
approach when you look at the these,
these film clips.
You'll see where Zizek is animated and
he's provocative and he's he's, he's he's
stirring things up.
Richard Rorty who I think I've told you
already was my teacher at in graduate
school, at Princeton.
Richard Rorty is he's, he's sitting back
in his chair.
He's talking rather laconically about the
truth isn't that important.
[LAUGH] And so it's a very different
affect.
A different, a different presentation of
emotion because what he really wants to
do in his work is to deflate the
pretensions of philosophy in critical
theory.
>> The, the idea is, I mean the Greek
idea is that, at a certain point in the
process of inquiry, you've come to rest
because you've reached the goal.
And the pragmatists are saying, we
haven't the slightest idea what it would
be like to reach the goal.
And the idea that the aim of inquiry is,
you know, conformity to, correspondence
to reality, or seeing the face of God.
Or substituting facts for interpretations
is one that we just can't make any use
of.
All we really know about is how to
exchange justifications of our beliefs
and desires with other human beings.
And as far as we can see, that will be
what human life will be like forever.
So, pragmatists regard the Platonist
attempt to get away from time into
eternity or to get away from conversation
into certainty as a product of an age of
human history where life on earth was so
desperate and it seemed so unlikely that
life could ever be better that people
took refuge in another world.

Pragmatism comes along with things like

the French Revolution, industrial
technology, all the things that made the
19th century believe in progress.
when you think that the aim of life is to
make things better for our descendants,
rather than to reach outside of history
and time, it alters your sense of what
philosophy is good for.
In, in, in the Platonist and theistic
epoch the point of philosophy was to get
you out of this mess and to a better
place.
And.
>> God?
>> God, the realm of Platonic ideas of
the,the contemplative life, something
like that.
And the reaction against this Greek
Christian pursuit of blessedness through
union with the natural order is to say
there isn't any natural order.
But there is the possibility of a better
life for our great, great, great
grandchildren.
That's enough to give you, you know, all
the meaning or inspiration or whatever
you could use.
Hans Blumenberg had a remark that
impressed me enormously.
He said, At some point, we stopped hoping
for immortality and in place started
hoping for our great-great-grandchildren.
You know, this was a sort of turn in, in
the culture of the west, and, you know, I
really believe that.
I mean, I, I think it had to do with
simple improvement in material
conditions.
You know, when we got a comfortable
bourgeois existence for, you know, large
numbers of people.
The bourgeois was able to think not about
escape from the world and pie in the sky,
but about creating a future, mortal
future world for future mortals.
This seem to may have been, yeah, a great
improvement.
>> The text I have assigned for this
class, a small thing called Postmodern
Bourgeois Liberalism is a it's an, he
thinks of it as an, as a contradiction in
terms.
That is he, he wants to show that the
postmodern response to the death of
philosophy or the, the realization that
epistemology isn't necessary or
significant.
That the postmodern response to that
isn't radicalism.

But it actually may be a commitment to

the the best aspects of our contemporary
situation and, and it doesn't necessarily
demand revolutionary response.
In fact, the response can be liberal in
in the mainstream sense of that word.
So Rorty in this text I've, I've assigned
in the class, talks about a three
cornered debate, remember that?
A three cornered debate.
the first piece is those who want to
provide foundations to support our
institutions.
The, the second is those who want to show
that the foundations are weak and, and so
that we can change those institutions.
And the third are those who don't think
there are foundations, but the
institutions are okay.
And, and for Rorty those are the three
positions.
the first, let's support what's going on
with buttress those foundations.
And the second to say, ah-hah, there are
no foundations.
This agrees with Zizek, and to some
extent with Judith Butler response.
There are no foundations.
You see, these institutions are shaky,
these institutions are, are, we can make
them fall.
And the third which is Rorty's is there
are no foundations and that's okay
because institutions are great.
They can be a little better, we can
tinker with them, we can make them
better, but they've never needed
foundations.
[LAUGH] So, in some ways Rorty's is the
most radical philosophically that say
these foundations were never necessary,
we used to think they were.
We used to think they were but now we can
see the foundations aren't necessary but
that doesn't mean we have to change the
game that we're playing.
And here I use the word game to harken
back to Vickenstein.
Because remember that Vickenstein talked
the rules of the games are within the
game itself.
They they don't get established outside
the game.
And so for Rorty, when you realize that
there's no foundation to the game, it
doesn't mean you stop playing.
If you think the game is helping you cope
with reality.
If you think the game is bringing you
pleasure and satisfaction.

If you think the game is good for the

people playing, you continue to play.
and you have to answer those questions
within the vocabulary of the game itself.
so he said, he knows that this most
postmodern bourgeois liberalism sounds,
like an oxymoron, like a contradiction in
terms.
I have this quotation for you.
I hope thereby to suggest, Rority writes,
how such liberals might convince our
society that loyalty to itself is
morality enough.
That's the key for him.
Loyalty to itself is morality enough, and
that such loyalty is no longer needs an
ahistorical backdrop.
I think they should try to clear
themselves of charges irresponsibility by
convincing our society that it need be
responsible only to its own traditions.
And not to the moral law as well.
And so for Rorty again there are no
foundations, but that doesn't mean things
are about to fall down.
Because they've actually never been
necessary those foundations.
Rationality for Rorty as he says a little
later in the piece, is a product of
participation in a community.
Rational behavior is just adaptive
behavior.
That, that's really key for Rorty.
It doesn't conform to some external
ahistorical standard.
Rational behavior, which is I think from
page 333, is just adaptive behavior.
The kind of thing others like us would do
in similar circumstances.
So, rationality is always dependent on
the group you're in.
As he says in that same page,
irrationality in both physics and ethics
is a matter of behavior that leads one to
abandon or be stripped of membership in a
community.
Irrationality is a decision made by a
community about someone's abborant
behavior.
Not a violation of epistimology.
So, no vocabularies are privileged
against other vocabularies from Rorty's
perspective.
>> I think it was unfortunate that
pragmatism became thought of as a theory
or definitional truth.
I think it would have been better if the
pragmatists had said.
We can tell you about justification, but
we can't tell you about truth.

There's nothing to be said about it.

[SOUND] That is, we know how we justify
beliefs.
We know that the adjective true is the
word we apply to the beliefs that we've
justified.
We know that a belief can be true without
being justified.
That's about all we know about truth.
And, you know?
Justification is relative to an audience,
and to a range of truth candidates.
Truth isn't relative to anything.
Just because it isn't relative to
anything, there's nothing to be said
about it.
And t-, truth, with a capital T, is sort
of like God.
you know?
There's not much you can say about God.
That's why theologians talk about
ineffability.
Contemporary pragmatists tend to say the
word true is indefinable, but none the
worse for that, we know how to use it, we
don't have to define it.
>> if you define that in the Nietzsche
term there are no fixed interpretations.
>> Yes, that, that gives us the general
pragmatist idea that no description, or
if you like, no interpretation is close
to reality than any other.
Some of them are more useful for some
purposes than others.
But that's about all you can say.
A Nietzschian perspective is which says,
you know, you can't rise above
interpretations and get the facts.
Or dig down below interpretations and get
the facts.
It's substantially the same thing, as I
meant before, when I said that
pragmatists try to get rid of the
reality-appearance distinction.
>> So he says that, what he wants to
have happen, is to have art and
literature become the backup for our
moral decisions, rather than the
philosophical search for foundations.
The moral justification of institutions
and practices of one's groups is mostly a
matter of historical narratives rather
than philosophical meta-narratives.
Now what does he mean by philosophical
meta-narratives?
He means that we should stop chasing a, a
framework that is supposed to give
support to all other stories.
That's what it means by a meta-narrative.
A narrative, a story, a big story.

[LAUGH] It's supposed to support all

those small ones.
There is no big story for Rorty and the,
the second part of that is and that's
okay.
[LAUGH] You know there is no "big other"
to use Zizek's term.
And that's okay, we never actually needed
one.
And now the charge that you'd expect
people to make against him in this
circumstances is a, a, is a charge that
he's being relativist.
Right?
That he's being a relativist because he's
somehow not giving us criteria according
to which we can choose among competing
vocabularies.
But Rorty's point is relativism only
makes sense if you think there's a place
from outside of these vocabularies to
judge them.
In another words, if you think you can
somehow step out of history to make a
judgment about the various groups.
If you could step out of history, and you
couldn't decide which group you should
join, then you would be in this
relativist position.
But for Rorty, no one is ever outside of
a vocabulary making a decision.
You're always already within a language
game.
You're always already within a community.
And so, there is no perspective from
which you could be a relativist.
Relativism as a charge, depends on a
notion of a God's eye view which is
always unavailable to us.