Truth, Justice and the American Way

American philosopher Richard Rorty has a paper on his web site (at Stanford University) titled The decline of redemptive truth and the rise of literary culture. This is brilliant article expressing simply and clearly a view of truth and enquiry which I find refreshing and well, encouraging. Questions like "Does truth exist?" he says seem fatuous and pointless. He points out that the question isn't asking if there are true things or not, but rather the question is shorthand for "do you think that there is a natural terminus to enquiry, a way things really are, and that understanding what that way is will tell us what to do with ourselves?"

He does not believe there is, and instead puts the idea that inquiry is another name for problem solving and that it will never come to an end. His thesis in the paper is that "Western intellectual life may usefully be thought of first as progress from� religion to philosophy, and then from philosophy to literature."

One conclusion he draws toward the end is "that the only point of getting rid of the priests and the kings, of setting up democratic governments, of taking from each according to her abilities and giving to each according to her needs, and of thereby creating the Good Global Society, is to make it possible for people to lead the sort of lives they prefer, as long as their doing so does not diminish the opportunities of other humans to do the same thing."

He sums up by saying "in utopia the intellectuals will have given up the idea that there is a standard against which the products of the human imagination can be measured other than their social utility, as this utility is judged by a maximally free, leisured and tolerant global community.� They will have stopped thinking that the human imagination is getting somewhere, that there is one far off cultural event toward which all cultural creation moves. They will have given up the identification of redemption with the attainment of perfection. They will have taken fully to heart the maxim that it is the journey that matters. "

In these days when the most powerful country on the planet seems all too willing to lead us devastating war and conflict, and where we all seem so eager to follow, and where so many people are calling on "moral clarity" to justify creating even more misery on certain parts of the world they don't approve of, it is heartening to see not everyone is fooled.

Pity no-one is listening.