the problem of redemptive truth: from nietzsche to a postmetaphysical culture

HUM 301-RESEARCH THESIS

THE PROBLEM OF REDEMPTIVE TRUTH

FROM NIETZSCHE TO A POST-METAPHYSICAL CULTURE

BY

Abbas Askar 3095037

Supervisor: Dr. F.G. van der Burg

University College Utrecht 29th August 2008

The Problem of Redemptive Truth: From Nietzsche to a Post-Metaphysical Culture

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements i

Abbreviations ii

Introduction 1

Nietzsche and the Project of Self-Creation 5

Richard Rorty and a Post-Metaphysical Culture 16

Conclusion and the Future of Philosophy 33

Bibliography 35


i

Acknowledgements

For offering in-depth discussions, lectures, valuable suggestions and help in

preparing this research thesis, many thanks to my teacher and supervisor, Dr.

Floris van der Burg. I am deeply grateful to my family for their continuing support

and encouragement. I am also greatly indebted to Dr. Thomas Hart, Prof. Dr. Jan

van Ophuijsen and the other lecturers at the humanities department of University

College Utrecht for all the knowledge they have imparted to me. Lastly, I would

like to thank my friends and colleagues for all their suggestions and support.


ii

Abbreviations

Works by Nietzsche GS The Gay Science, translated by Richard Poit. Hackett Publishing Co: 1995

WTP The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufman,

Vintage, New York, 1968.

TI Twilight of the Idols: Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Duncan

Large. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press

Works by Rorty CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, 1989

DRT The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture, 2001

TP Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers, Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998.

ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, Volume 1.

Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1979

Works by Other Authors RR Guignon, Charles, and David. R. Hiley, ed., Richard Rorty Cambridge University

Press, 2003 RHC Robert B. Brandom, ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Other references and sources can be found in the bibliography section. The parenthetical in text

citations for those sources are indicated by the writer’s last name.


1

Introduction

As a child I remember annoying my parents with questions like, ‘why are we here?’,

‘why can’t everything just be blank?’ I think that the fundamental question that underlay

all such ‘annoying’ questions was, ‘why must we be here?’ I believed that perhaps the

answer to my questions could satisfy my desire to know the necessary reason for the

existence of the world in which I found myself ‘thrown’ into. However, I found it very

difficult to devoutly attach myself to any theological reason 1 that could answer a

question like ‘why are we here?’ In fact any reason for our existence and gathering in

this world that justifies and ascribes a particular goal to our existence has always

seemed incoherent and ‘unsatisfying’ to me. This is primarily because such reasons

make use of transcendental axioms—absolute assumptions that are entirely unproved

and thus cannot be taken as being self evident. However, the issue that is important

here and that lies in the naivety of my puerile questions is the assumption that there is

indeed a necessary reason for the existence of the world or even the beliefs and values

that individuals uphold. I may understand questions such as ‘why are we here?’ rather

than to be asking, ‘Why must we be here?’ and to be looking for a necessary reason for

our gathering. Or I may understand it to mean, why do we happen to be here? and to be

looking for a reason that is contingent” (Arcilla 201). The thesis of contingency is central

to Richard Rorty’s essays in his prominent book, ‘Contingency, irony, and Solidarity

(1989)’. The idea that solutions to the questions (or any other request for reasons) posed

above are contingent is:

“premised on the failure so far of human beings to identify a convincing,

necessary reason for why things must be the way they are.” In response to that

failure, the thesis holds that we should from now on settle for contingent reasons.

It urges us, in effect, to find in the futile quest to discover apodictic facts about

the universe's essential nature, a quest which has motivated most pursuits in

metaphysics and epistemology, a historical, even historicist lesson. It

recommends that we try to cure ourselves of the desire for such facts, and to

accept that all the reasons we have come up with so far for why things are as

such, and all the reasons we can reasonably hope to come up with, are bound to

beg the question of their own reasons. We should accordingly acknowledge that 1 The answers to my childish questions usually entailed a theological/metaphysical assumption—a god figure who created everything


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the in-principle infinite quest for a reason for that reason can only be concluded

by circular argumentation, arbitrary fiat, or happenstance causes, thus by an

appeal to contingency.” (Arcilla 201)

This paper aims at not only defending the thesis put forward by Rorty but presents a

critique of Western philosophical culture and in particular the appearance reality debate,

based on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. In my opinion, Nietzsche is a pivotal figure

in Western thought and sets the parameters for writers like Rorty. “The case in point for

Nietzsche is the culture of the West, which, with its origins in Judaism and Christianity,

created a human type that ‘needs’ transcendent meaning and absolute conceptions of

value” (Casey 4). After the enlightenment and the decline of Christianity, the

metaphysical presuppositions of the religious thought were secularized and the need for

necessary reason and meaning continued and was “met through the pursuit of ‘truth,’

‘objective reality,’ and the ‘essence’ of existence” (Casey 4-5). Nietzsche’s main

contribution “was to shift the locus of thought about the self from discovering deep truths

about the self to the project of self-creation” (RR 22).

Richard Rorty by demonstrating the ‘sheer contingency of language’ establishes that

truth is not out there, it is in fact the descriptions of the world which are true or false (CIS

5). Like Nietzsche, Rorty believes that “the suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is

out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being

who had a language of his own” (CIS 5). Throughout the 1970s, Rorty published papers,

blended the ideas of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein in a crusade against any

concept of philosophy that gave legitimacy to mainstream philosophical debates about

truth, knowledge, and realism (RR 7). I think it is important to point out here that what

Rorty himself advocates is not that he has discovered. That there is no such thing as

redemptive truth but that it is an unfruitful endeavour to search for it—“to say that we

should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we

have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It is to say that our purposes would be

served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest,

or “true” as a term which repays “analysis.” “The nature of truth” is an unprofitable topic,

resembling in this respect “the nature of man” and “the nature of God” (CIS 8).

Redemptive truth is what Rorty describes as “a set of beliefs which would end, once and

for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves”—when we start capitalizing


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the word “truth” and treat it as “something that is identical either with God or with the

world as God’s project” (CIS 5).

For me, the search for redemptive truth is a problem which needs to be overcome in

order to realise that if we want to make our inquires profitable, the motivation of all

inquiry should not be towards a final goal, such as redemptive truth, but it should come

from the realisation that life presents limitless possibilities. The motivation for our

inquires should be to explore these limitless possibilities of life. This opens the door for a

new culture in which unlike religion and philosophy, the need of a finale is no longer the

driving force for inquiry. This literary, post-metaphysical culture is described by Rorty as

“[a culture]...in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics -

to find an historical, trans-cultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which

everything can fit, independent of one's time and place - has dried up and blown

away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating

their own life-world, rather than as being responsible to God or "the nature of

reality," which tells them what kind it is” (O’Shea 59)

The pragmatist strand of Rorty’s thought paves the way for his concepts of solidarity and

loyalty. By heightening our sense of our contingency we will recognise that, like truth, we

and our community are made, not discovered. A post-metaphysical, literary culture as

proposed by Rorty, emphasises the need for solidarity instead of getting things right.

However, at the same time, the existentialist strand of Rorty’s beliefs proposes greater

freedom at a personal level and recognises that there is no “common human nature” that

necessarily binds us to fellow humans. The upshot of accepting Rorty’s brand of

pragmatism and recognizing the contingency of the community will be greater freedom,

on the one hand, and increasing solidarity, on the other (RR 24). The desire for solidarity

seeks only an ethical basis for cooperative inquiry and human community; it replaces the

search for objectivity with the search for solidarity.

In my opinion, overcoming the need for objectivity and redemption from God, truth,

rationality or any other ultimate ground will indeed be beneficial. I think that, Rorty

correctly identifies that intellectuals of the West, since the Renaissance, have

progressed through three stages:

“They have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now

from literature. Monotheistic religion offers hope for redemption through entering


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into a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person. Belief—as in

belief in the articles of a creed—may be only incidental to such a relationship. For

philosophy, however, beliefs are of the essence. Redemption by philosophy is

through the acquisition of a set of beliefs which represent things in the one way

they really are. Literature, finally, offers redemption through making the

acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible. Here again, as

in religion, true belief may be of little importance” (DRT 4)

Literature encompasses both religion and philosophy, but unlike philosophical books and

religious scriptures, it does not specifically rely on getting things right and it does not

proclaim itself to be the truth. Literature such as poetry, novels and drama address

questions such as, “What is it to inhabit a rich twentieth-century democratic society?” It

replaces those unprofitable questions put forth by philosophy like “What is it to be a

human being?” (CIS xiii). Literature provides solutions to human problems and explores

the limitless possibilities which life presents.

I, like Rorty and Nietzsche, believe that traditional philosophy’s search for final

accounts of knowledge, if achieved, would result in the “freezing-over” of culture and the

“dehumanization of human beings” (PMN 377). The quest of philosophy reflects our

“craving for metaphysical comfort, as Nietzsche had put it—the desire to bring inquiry to

an end in order to escape our contingency. By contrast, Rorty’s antifoundationalism aims

at heightening our sense of contingency in order to avoid dehumanization and the

freezing over of culture. Anti-foundationalism aims at expanding possibilities for self-

description, thus rehumanizing humans by affirming freedom and opening up

possibilities through greater tolerance” (RR 22). By abandoning the search of the final

accounts of knowledge, man can realise the potential and the freedom to envisage and

explore new avenues, and create new vocabularies by critically evaluating his beliefs

and values.


5

Nietzsche and the Project of Self-Creation

The philosophical workhorse of Western metaphysics is the distinction between

appearance and reality (Kolenda 1). The distinction was introduced by the pre-Socratics,

was made prominent by Parmenides and was the centrepiece of Plato’s theory of

knowledge. According to Plato, “the world is but a highly imperfect copy of the World of

Forms, eternally existing beyond time and space and only dimly accessible to properly

prepared philosophical minds through a special activity Socrates called anamnesis or

recollection” (Kolenda 1). Platonic realism postulated the prospect of encountering reality

‘wordlessly,’ by an act of intellectual seeing. Since the ‘true nature’ of reality was

encountered in the ‘mind’s eye, it is not surprising that inspired by Platonic realism,

modern rationalistic philosophy could easily convert into the form of idealism (Kolenda

1). Central to the history of Western thought since the time Plato employed the notion to

consider the things the way they appear as “something [that is] derivative, secondary,

and inferior [and ‘the way things really are’] as “original, primary, and superior” (Guignon

and Pereboom 90). This idea of the appearance and reality has not only been very

influential in the development of western philosophy but also has had a profound effect

on the way humans lead the life. For it leads humans to believe that their present life is

“currently wedged in a veil of mere appearance, out of touch with reality, and our task

[as humans] is to extricate ourselves from this illusion and distortion in order to get in

touch with what is real” (Guignon and Pereboom 90).

Nietzsche in his work ‘The Gay Science’ (1882) recognised this possibility of being

able to extricate ourselves from our own existence to arrive at a ‘true reality’ as a cause

of the illness of mankind (Guignon and Pereboom 90). In the preface to ‘The Gay

Science’, Nietzsche identifies this idea of “fantasizing for a better future” (Guignon and

Pereboom 90) or finding the redemptive truth (which is the cornerstone of philosophical

and even religious thought) as a sickness. He writes:

“Every philosophy that puts peace higher than war, every ethics with a negative

appraisal of the concept of happiness, every metaphysics and physics that

knows of a finale, a final state of any sort, every predominantly aesthetic or

religious longing for an elsewhere, a beyond, an outside, an above, allows one to

ask whether it was not sickness that inspired the philosopher.” (GS 2)


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The sickness here lies in our thinking that the present human reality is part of this

greater cosmological reality and we define our place in it by presenting a “presupposed

teleological picture of our history” (Guignon and Pereboom 90) instead of seeing history

as being arbitrary. The sickness makes us think that there is indeed something like the

truth that exists out there. Furthermore, it creates a negative attitude in the sense that it

makes us detest our current human reality and glorifies our potentiality by establishing

‘goals’ which mankind ought to be striving for in order to arrive at the true reality. This

‘sickness’ is not only deeply ingrained in western thought but is much more of a global

phenomenon. In most monotheistic religious expression, the ‘teleological narrative’ is

used to show that the present reality is a test in which mankind is at loss unless it

accepts the ‘goals of existence’ given by the creator and behave in the way which

religion prescribes in order to make this world a lot ‘better and a happier place’ (a world

which is truly in accordance with some presupposed cosmological order) and as a

reward for accepting the will of the creator, man is promised eternal bliss in the hereafter

(conversely, refusing to do so would result in eternal suffering). Such expression of the

teleological narratives “always make a negative judgment about life, because they

assume that there is something bad or lacking in our ordinary existence that needs to be

rectified by discipline and sacrifice. All notions such as "progress," "improvement,"

"betterment," "development," and "goals" presuppose this essentially negative

assessment of life as it is in the here and now” (Guignon and Pereboom 91). Nietzsche

in ‘The Gay Science’ specifically attacks such negative presupposed ideas and the

‘teleological narratives’ which indoctrinate that by achieving the ‘goals of existence’,

mankind will be able to arrive at the true reality, which for Nietzsche means an end to all

critical inquiry and culture (Guignon and Pereboom 92). Furthermore, he propounds that

his science which he believes is content with the way reality is as it appears to us and

argues against the creation of arbitrary existence which one assumes to be ‘better’ then

the present existence.

The critique of the traditional idea of Western thought and religion which strives for

‘betterment’ or ‘improvement of the world’ fails to see that it is acknowledging those

metaphors, standards and values which have been passed down by the ‘teleological

narrative’ embedded in our historical culture as being objective universals which are

independent of human sentiment and societal practices. As a result what has happened

is that these standards, values and ideals have assumed the status of absolutes which


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are regarded as “timeless, unchanging, objective bases for assessment and aspiration”

(Guignon and Pereboom 93). For Nietzsche the existence of these absolutes is a direct

consequence of the ‘teleological narrative’ so much so that these absolutes are not even

questioned anymore. Nietzsche does away with the idea of the existence of such

absolutes by demonstrating the rise of scepticism in the West and how the scientific

methodology has led us to doubt the existence of an absolute god, an idea that has

been around for over five thousand years now. Guignon and Pereboom write on this

very point illustrated by Nietzsche

“At this stage in the history of scepticism in the West it has become increasingly

difficult to believe in a transcendent ground for 'values and belief. God, reason,

the cosmos, providence, divine rights, the noumenal realm, Geist, humanity,

history – all these conceptions of the ultimate foundation for our beliefs and

practices have been publicised for what they are: human constructs, expressions

of our own hopes and needs, with no basis in a transcendent reality beyond our

ways of thinking and acting. The "self-grounding grounds" that traditionally were

used to legitimate beliefs and institutions now appear as products of .our own

"craving for metaphysical comfort," as symptoms of our wishful thinking rather

than as foundation stones of reality” (93).

The important idea that needs to be highlighted here is that all these absolute ideas are

merely nothing more than constructs, which do not derive from higher grounds but are

bounded by human constructs. It is the denial of such absolute unquestionable values,

ideals, absolutes (which are merely human constructs) which will eventually lead to

nihilism. For as soon as we begin to doubt the existence of these absolutes we

immediately begin to realise that the ‘teleological narrative’ which assumes a higher

realm of existence falls apart and one realises that there is no goal of existence, and life

and all that was valued becomes meaningless. Due to the rise of this sceptical attitude

and more importantly the failure to realise that all our values and beliefs are merely

human constructs (which have no superior reality), sooner or later lead us to doubt and

reject all that we value which will consequently result in complete nihilism. In other

words, it is this unannounced secularization of values and beliefs (realisation that they

are temporal and not timeless absolutes) which for Nietzsche in due course is inevitable

unless we realise that all such values and beliefs are constructs of the apparent reality.

Nietzsche writes in the ‘Twilight of the Idols’ that “... 'Reason' is what causes us to falsify

the evidence of the senses. If the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they


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do not lie ... But Heraclitus will always be right that Being is an empty fiction. The

'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real world' has just been lied on ...” (TI 17).

Nietzsche is of the opinion that the pre-Platonic Greeks took the world as it

presented itself and this was their true greatness for they were able to embrace life on its

“own terms, with its ceaseless ebb and flow, its risks and uncertainties, and they did so

with neither nostalgia for a Garden that never was nor fantasies about a future that can

never be” (Guignon and Pereboom 92). Viewing history as being arbitrary and fearlessly

accepting all aspects of life without pondering over what it installs for humankind is for

Nietzsche the life embracing/affirming attitude, which is opposite to the ‘teleological

story lines’ that construct these apparently idealistic fantasies of what ought to be

(Guignon and Pereboom 92). In ‘Twilight of the Idols’, Nietzsche goes on to briefly (in

one page) yet brilliantly describe “How the ‘Real World’ Finally Became Fable” (20). In

the very last phase of this journey of the ‘idea of the real world’, Nietzsche writes:

“6. The real world-we have done away with it: what world was left? The apparent

one, perhaps? ... But no! With the real world we have also done away with the

apparent one!

(Noon; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; pinnacle of

humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)*” (TI 20).

What Nietzsche signifies here is that the idea of this fable of the ‘real world’ has had

such a profound influence on our lives, culture and the world (as it is out here or the

reality as perhaps for him the pre-Platonic Greeks had) that even when we do away with

the idea of the real word (which he calls an ‘end’ of the longest error) then we also do

away with the apparent one; for all life loses its meaning and we are left immersed in

nihilism. Nietzsche believes that in response to nihilism, there “will be an attempt to find

a new absolute-a new god-term in science or history or art-to fill the hole left by the

collapse of absolutes” (Guignon and Pereboom 94). However, all such attempts at ‘filling

the hole left by the collapse of absolutes’ will again eventually result in nihilism. For we

are mistaken even if we think we can carefully discern and come up with supposedly

scientific systems to replace the absolute. This is a futile attempt for as I have previously

discussed ‘reality’ is as it is to us, and is “largely a product of our own modes of

apprehension and interpretation” (Guignon and Pereboom 94). We assert upon the

world what we want to ascertain (which is very much arbitrary and cannot be taken as an

independent reality). However, what happens is that statements concerning the way we


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think reality is, are taken to be beyond criticism much in the same way the existence of

god was seen as being beyond criticism for people during the middle ages. The problem

here lies in not realizing this notion that all that we know of the world is through our

existence and it cannot be taken as something which is beyond criticism or an actual

reality. Therefore, from denying the existence of any absolutes, it follows that there are

no ultimate basis for anything that we ascribe to the world and thus it cannot be beyond

criticism.

Clearly for Nietzsche reality is nothing more than what an individual takes it to be

and using this assumption he derives the solution to the nihilism which is an inevitability

due to the dichotomy caused by this fallacious belief in absolutes and superior reality. By

doing away with all the absolutes one has to conclude that all values, morality and

‘scientific’ systems are “social constructs invented by people to try to satisfy their

"craving for metaphysical comfort." They are products of dogmatic systems of belief that

are no longer tenable in the modern world” (Guignon and Pereboom 99) and are

“ultimately matters of choice and preference” (Guignon and Pereboom 95). The idea of

choice and its importance in Sartre’s project is discussed later in the paper. Morality and

values are thus nothing more than the expressions of the way a community wants to

function. However, these expressions have taken the status of those timeless absolutes

with the supposed purpose of ‘preserving the herd mentality’. It is because we mistake

these humanly constructed expressions for absolutes as we witness the

institutionalization of hypocrisy in religion, ideologies etc.

The point I am emphasizing here with respect to institutionalised hypocrisy is the

conflict which arises by falsely creating absolutes, such as morality and value systems

and then by devising a ‘great purpose’ which is the ‘goal of our existence’, instead of just

accepting the freedom that is present there in the reality as it appears to us, (reality, free

from all absolutes). Because of having uncritical belief in the former and denial of the

latter, we see that a growing number of people are not sincere to their absolute beliefs or

values that they uphold. I, therefore think that Nietzsche is right in pointing out that

upholding absolutes will lead to nihilism since this institutionalised hypocrisy will

eventually create cynicism and doubt that will lead to scepticism (which is responsible for

the denial of the existence of God in the twentieth century) and then eventually nihilism.


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Nietzsche uses an interesting thought experiment by applying the doctrine of the

"eternal recurrence of the same" to life as it is dictated by any sense of teleology

(Guignon and Pereboom 97). If one is stuck in a loop where every minute detail of his

life is repeated over and over again then what use is the idea of having teleological

sense in life? Guignon and Pereboom point out that “what gives our lives

cumulativeness and direction is precisely the feeling that we are accomplishing

something that things are adding up for us as a whole” (97). Nietzsche’s thought

experiment simply weakens this ‘feeling of any accomplishment’, as one is stuck in a

loop. Thus, there is no cumulativeness. From the very same doctrine, Nietzsche derives

his solution to nihilism. If one knows that every detail of his life would be repeated for an

infinite number of times, then he would ascribe a certain weight to his existence and this

would force him to embrace and affirm his life (similar to the way pre-Platonic Greeks

viewed reality). All his actions and all that he does in his life with this new optimism, as

Guignon and Pereboom see it as “to affirm your own life in all its details is also to affirm

everything that has happened and ever will happen in the universe – the important and

the trivial, the good and the bad, everything!” (98). The existentialism evident here is in

the realisation that if one truly affirms life the way Nietzsche suggests, then one frees

himself from negativity (such as regret or the desire for better alternatives) which entails

from having a teleological view of life. Through embracing and accepting one’s existence

as it is, one frees oneself from the need of envisioning as being part of a grand scheme

in which one’s existence has a particular goal. For Nietzsche, central to ‘annihilating

nihilism’ is the idea of the will to power. An individual has to will to make his life his own,

instead of someone else defining his life for him. This is expressed by Nietzsche in the

Antichrist when he writes that

“The man of faith, the 'believer' of every sort is necessarily a dependent man-

such as cannot out of himself posit ends at all. The 'believer' does not belong to

himself; he can be only a means, he has to be used, he needs someone who will

use him” (§ 54)

Therefore, it is important to extricate oneself from the tradition and be critical of all

values and beliefs. It is only through this extrication that one can free oneself from the

herd mentality (which can be seen as having the teleological view based on some

absolute) and by affirming one’s own context and judgment and embracing the fact that

the individual alone is responsible for his/her reality. It is specifically important to point

out the ‘context and judgments’ that I have just mentioned as these play an important


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role in the way an individual sees human reality. These are the prejudices which are at

play during interpretation and judgment (which are also central to Gadamer’s

hermeneutics). One can be critically aware of these prejudices that arise through the

historical culture but cannot completely do away with them when interpreting (though as

Gadamer suggests they can be transformed through a fusion of horizon). The idea of

human reality is in some sense similar to the anthropic principle in physics which states

‘that we see the universe as it is, had it been different from what we see it as then we

would not exist to observe it’. One can never be certain of the existence of some

independent reality, we would have to assume that there is some form of being existing

in such a reality and observing it, but for us, as we exist in this universe, reality is simply

what appears to be in the universe as it for us (the ones observing it). In ‘Twilight of the

Idols’, Nietzsche sums up his critique of the appearance-reality distinction in four

propositions:

”First Proposition. The reasons which have been given for designating 'this' world

as apparent, actually account for its reality – any other kind of reality is absolutely

unprovable.

Second Proposition. The characteristics which have been given to the 'true

Being' of things are the characteristics of non-Being, of nothingness— the 'real

world' has been constructed from the contradiction of the actual world: an

apparent world, indeed, to the extent that it is merely a moral-optical illusion.

Third Proposition. Concocting stories* about a world 'other' than this one is utterly

senseless, unless we have within us a powerful instinct to slander, belittle, cast

suspicion on life: in which case we are avenging ourselves on life with the

phantasmagoria of 'another', 'better' life.

Fourth Proposition. Dividing the world into a 'real' one and an 'apparent' one,

whether in the manner of Christianity, or of Kant (a crafty Christian, when all's

said and done), is but a suggestion of decadence – a symptom of declining life ...

The fact that the artist values appearance more highly than reality is no objection

to this proposition. For 'appearance' here means reality once more, only

selected, strengthened, corrected ... The tragic artist is no pessimist-- on the

contrary, he says yes to all that is questionable and even terrible; he is

Dionysian* ...” (TI 19)


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The first three propositions point at the absurdity of thinking that the world that is out

there is only an apparent one and to think that reality is something different from the

appearance is simply a useless thing to stay. As Nietzsche points out in the last

proposition that there can be no escape from the world around us and that a tragic artist

understands this and thus accepts all the possibilities of life. Nietzsche in his early work

‘The Birth of Tragedy’ proposed that “at its deepest level, art is a tension or agon (the

Greek word for a contest or struggle) between the opposing forces of the Dionysian and

the Apollonian” (Guignon and Pereboom 88). Nietzsche suggested that “tragedy

originated in the droning music, frenzied dancing, and ecstatic choral chanting of

Dionysian worship” (Guignon and Pereboom 87). The Dionysian worshippers

acknowledged the totality of nature and openly embraced even the most terrible things in

life.

The importance of the life of the self is highlighted by both Sartre and Heidegger

and I think this is precisely what separates existential thought from the type of

phenomenological method propounded by Husserl, through which one could understand

the essence by bracketing off all objective reality, except that it is not really possible to

bracket off one’s life and therefore it is the methodology which is inquiring and

determining the essence of an object instead of the object elucidating its own essence

by dominating the method which studies it.

Jean Paul Sartre’s ‘Existentialism and Humanism’ also builds on the idea that

there are no absolutes and reaffirms the philosophical basis of existentialist thought by

emphasizing that human existence is prior to all essences. Sartre writes that “Man

simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills,

and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap

towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the

first principle of existentialism.” (68). Sartre establishes this first principle by recognizing

the weight of existence which was also discussed above in Nietzsche’s use of the

doctrine of the "eternal recurrence of the same". Furthermore, Sartre here also puts the

freedom and responsibility of what the man becomes entirely on man himself. Sartre

uses this idea to show existentialism is humanism by expanding the implication of the

choice onto entire human reality. Sartre writes in ‘Existentialism and Humanism’:


13

“…when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is

responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

The word 'subjectivism' is to be understood in two senses, and our adversaries

play upon only one of them. Subjectivism means, on the one hand, the freedom

of the individual subject and, on the other, that man cannot pass beyond human

subjectivity. It is the latter which is the deeper meaning of existentialism. When

we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose

himself; but by that, we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all

men. (68)

Sartre’s denial of the existence of anything such as ‘human nature’ which defines

who we are, certainly leaves no room for any abrogation of responsibility. Just as

Nietzsche by thoroughly criticizing the ‘teleological narratives’ and pointing out the

nihilism which it leads to, gives man the opportunity to embrace his life and reality in its

entirety. Furthermore, Sartre’s humanistic turn and expansion of the scope of ones

choice on to the whole humankind is also reflected in Nietzsche’s doctrine of the “eternal

recurrence of the same", in which when one realises that there is no goal to life and that

everything he does will be repeated over and over again, would always be aware that

every choice he makes will directly influence the universe and by affirming and accepting

his life, he would also affirm everything that happens in the universe and he would be

aware of this idea when he makes his choices.

Coming back to Nietzsche, what one needs to understand from his writings is the

important aspect of critically looking at the values and beliefs that arise from man-made

‘absolutes’. Nietzsche believes that it is important for man to have an attitude which is

critical of the world around him yet embraces life for all that it brings. Through critical

creativity and a positive struggle in life one can avoid the nihilism evident for Nietzsche

in any teleological approach to life. Guignon and Pereboom write in the introduction to

Existentialism: Basic Writings that “This emphasis on the individual's own responsibility

is perhaps the most valuable and enduring contribution of existentialism to philosophy.”

(xxxviii). Sartre is the philosopher who particularly points out this idea of the individual’s

freedom to choose. Like Nietzsche, Sartre too believes that there are no absolutes.

Quoting Dostoievsky in Humanism and existentialism, he writes:


14

“Dostoievsky once wrote 'If God did not exist, everything would be permitted'; and that,

for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not

exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon

either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse” (70).

The deepest meaning of Nietzsche’s famous parable on the death of God is freedom of

the most unlimited kind, “and as awareness of this opportunity grows, so does the

strength necessary for responding to it” (Casey 28). God here is not merely the

metaphysical underpinning of the Christian cosmology. He is the very notion of a basis,

an external authority, on which opinions are founded – the very notion of a horizon

against which everything can be seen and judged (Gemes 50). As Dostoievesky pointed

out, that if God does not exist then man cannot abrogate his responsibility to create

himself. Nietzsche believed that:

“the primary function of the invocation of God is the provision of a means of

escaping responsibility. For the Christian, the world including himself, is a

product of the will of God. Truth, reality, is founded in God for the world is God's

world. Typically, atheists who, having rejected God as the basis of all values and

belief, supply a new basis. For instance, positivists take experience to be the

ultimate justifier of our beliefs. Utilitarians and Socialists take the summum

bonum as the grounding for all actions. Nietzsche rejects these new gods as

further attempts to evade responsibility for one's beliefs and actions” (Gemes 50)

As discussed earlier, the desire to substitute God will, as Nietzsche prophesised

lead to nihilism, like one cannot talk much about God neither can he talk much about

Truth. Gemes points out that when people talk about their beliefs and value, they often

“[claim to] believe what [they] believe because it is the truth [, not] because [they] wish to

believe but because that is ‘how things are’ even though [they] might wish them to be

otherwise” (50-51).

It was suggested in the introduction to this paper, that if we want to make our

inquiries more profitable then we need to realise the contingency of our own beliefs and

values. I think Nietzsche presents the first step towards realizing the contingency and

that is to understand that man is indeed the one who creates his beliefs and values. As

Nietzsche observes in the ‘The Will to Power,’ "one positively wants to repudiate one's

own authority and assign it to circumstances" (WTP 422). So in order to become Gods,

is in part, to forgo the balm of deferred responsibility (Gemes 50). Once man realises


15

this then it allows him to choose and self create himself with limitless freedom. Nietzsche

illustrates this point in his criticism of any need for redemptive truth or getting things

‘right’ in ‘The Will to Power,’ he writes that “a powerful seduction fights on our behalf, the

most powerful that there has ever been—the seduction of truth-"Truth"? Who has forced

this word on me? But I repudiate it; but I disdain this proud word: no, we do not need

even this: we shall conquer and come to power even without truth” (WTP 749).

The need for redemptive truth is embedded in the history of Western

philosophical thought. Thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre and Heidegger point out that

attempt to find something which is not made by human beings but to which human

beings have a special privileged relation (not shared by the animals) is a “futile passion,

a foredoomed attempt to become a for-itself-in-itself” (DRT 10). Nietzsche, through his

critique of Truth and any foundation or ultimate grounds for beliefs emphasises the

contingency of the self. As Rorty points out that “the historicist turn has helped free us

gradually but steadily, from theology and metaphysics—from the temptation to look for

an escape from time and chance. It has helped us substitute Freedom for Truth as the

goal of thinking and of social progress” (CIS xiii). In the next section, I will take on

another approach to show the contingency of our beliefs and values by elaborating on

Rorty’s arguments against the concept of truth existing out there in the world.

Furthermore, I shall discuss the consequences of realizing this contingency and I shall

put forward the view that “the only source of redemption is the human imagination, and

that this fact should occasion pride rather than despair” (DRT 10).


16

Richard Rorty and a Post-Metaphysical Culture

Richard Rorty in his book ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ challenged a

conception of philosophy that was almost unanimously accepted by mainstream

analytical philosophers in the 1970s. “This conception of philosophy, inherited from

Descartes and given its clearest formulation by Kant, holds that before philosophers

began to speculate about what is and what ought to be, they should first get clear about

what they can know and what they cannot know” (RR 7). From this standard conception

of philosophy, it follows that all areas of philosophy should accede to epistemological

judgements about the limits of knowledge. Central to traditional epistemology is

“representationalism,” “the view that we are, at the most basic level, minds containing

beliefs of various sorts, and that our first task is to make sure our beliefs accurately

represent reality as it is in itself” (RR 7). The epistemological project of determining

which representations are accurate and which are not are seen as having broad

implications for culture as a whole. Philosophy has aimed to be “a general theory of

representation, a theory which will divide up culture into areas which represent reality

well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretence of dong so)” (PMN

3).

Epistemology-centred philosophy thus assumes that the primary goal of

philosophers is to find a set of representations that are known in such a way “as to be

beyond the pale of doubt” and “once such privileged representations are identified, they

can serve as the basis for the foundationalist project of justifying believes that make a

claim to being knowledge” (RR 8). Certain representations are taken to be inherently and

automatically accurate because, ‘there are beliefs based solely on the meanings of the

terms they contain, analytic sentences such as ‘A doe is a female deer’ and there are

beliefs that immediately register the deliverances of sensory experience. The ideal of

foundationalism is to ground our entire system of beliefs on the basis of such bedrock

representations” (RR 8).

In ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,’ Rorty looked at core assumptions about

foundationalism and representationalism. It is widely accepted in Anglo-American

analytic schools of philosophy “that the world consists of natural items and that our task


17

is to achieve a correct mapping of these types – a grasp of how the world is ‘carved up

at its joints.’ This approach assumes a sharp distinction between the world of facts, on

the one hand, and our minds and their representations, on the other” (RR 8).

Furthermore, it also assumes that natural science alone is properly equipped to know

reality as it is in itself – since it succeeds in identifying facts and is the only form of

inquiry that achieves true knowledge. Therefore, “all other purported forms of knowledge

(moral reflection, literary criticism...) can only hope to approximate the ideal of

knowledge achieved by natural science” (RR 8). Rorty feels that the “entire conception of

our epistemic situation is shot through with conceptual logjams and insoluble puzzles.

The prime offender in this circle of problems is the uncritical assumption that

representationalism gives us the right picture of our basic predicament. In order to

circumvent these puzzles, Rorty suggests that we need to replace “the notion of

knowledge as the assemblage of representations” with “a pragmatist conception of

knowledge” (PMN 11) that focuses on what humans do in coping with the world rather

than on what they find through theorizing” (RR 8).

Rorty terms his brand of pragmatism as ‘behaviourism,’ (terms the pragmatist’s

conception of knowledge ‘epistemological behaviourism’) because it rejects the idea that

“experiences play a crucial role in making sense of our claims to knowledge and

proposes instead that we see knowledge as based on social practices” (RR 9). In

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ Rorty takes three philosophers as role models for

his critique of traditional philosophy – Wittgenstein, Dewey and Heidegger. However, the

arguments that he uses to support his view are taken from the analytic philosophers

Quine and Sellars.

From Quine’s famous paper ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (1953), Rorty takes the

critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, the distinction between sentences that are

true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words they contain and others that are

known through experience. “The upshot of this argument is that any statement can be

revised when it is found to be inconsistent with a large enough batch of our beliefs.

Although we are inclined to suppose that such sentences as “A doe is a female deer” are

analytic – that is, true by virtue of the concepts they contain – Quine’s argument

suggests that the apparent infallibility of such sentences results more from their central

position in our web of beliefs than from anything having to do with the meanings of


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concepts” (RR 9). There will be a willingness to abandon such beliefs given that there is

sufficient pressure from other areas of our web of beliefs. “What this shows is that no

beliefs have the status of being privileged representations solely because they are

analytic or conceptually true. Instead, our beliefs form a holistic web in which the truth of

any particular belief is established on the basis of its coherence with the whole set of

beliefs” (RR 9). From this critique of the idea that certain “sentences are true only by

virtue of the meanings of their terms, Quine calls into question the usefulness of the very

idea of meanings – understood as mental items – in determining reference or the

correctness of belief. “Quine’s rejection of “the idea idea” – the idea that ideas mediate

between us and things – is one key building block in Rorty’s attempt to show that the

mental has no crucial role to play in making sense of our capacities as knowers” (RR 9).

The ‘second building block” (RR 9) of Rorty’s epistemological behaviourism is Wilfrid

Sellars’s attack on ‘the Myth of the Given’ in his essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of

Mind.’ Sellars in this essay, questions the “traditional empiricist assumption that our

ability to use language and our knowledge of the world must be grounded in immediate

sensory experiences, in raw feels and preconceptual sensations are just “given” in the

course of our transactions with objects” (RR 9). Challenging this assumption, Sellars

claims that all awareness is actually a linguistic affair. He argues this claim by drawing a

distinction between “(1) awareness as discriminative behaviour (the raw ability of

sentient creatures to register inputs from the environment, a capacity common to

humans and amoebas) and (2) awareness that involves the ability of sapient beings to

perceive something as such and such). The first type of awareness is simply a matter of

causal interaction with the world – being affected by pain, for example or responding

differentially to stimuli in one’s environment” (RR 10).

Sellars argues that while such episodes and states do occur, they can have “no role

to play in grounding knowledge. This is so because knowledge, that is, justified true

belief, always has a propositional structure – it is belief that such and such is the case.

Moreover, the only way a proposition can be justified is by means of inferences from

other propositions – in Rorty’s word, “there is no such thing as justification which is not a

relation between propositions” (PMN 183)” (RR 10). From this argumentation, it follows

that only the second type of awareness can be used to justify knowledge claims.

Therefore, “it is not the raw stimulus in the perceptual field that is relevant to knowledge,


19

but the awareness that “this is red,” which contributes to the formation of justified true

belief” (RR 10).

Empiricism tried to sow that all concepts arise from particular instance of sensory

experience but “Sellars, like Wittgenstein before him, argues that one must already

possess a fairly wide range of concepts before one can have sensory experience in the

epistemically relevant sense” (RR 10). In order for something to serve as a basis for

knowledge, it is important to know what sort of thing it is, “and that means being able to

experience the thing under a description –to see that that it is F but not-G, not –H, and

so on” (RR 10). We “have the ability to notice a sort of thing” only if we already “have the

concept of that sort of thing” (Sellars 5). For Sellars, having a concept is being able to

use a word, therefore having a concept involves being a participant in a linguistic

community in “which justifying claims is carried out. Awareness in the relevant sense

always presupposes the ability to abide by the norms that govern the shared space of

reasons of a linguistic community” (RR 10). Rorty thus writes that justification is always

“a matter of social practice” (PMN 186). Sellars sum this up saying, “The essential point

is that in characterizing an episode or state [of observing] as that of knowing…, we are

placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one

says” (Sellars 76) (RR 10).

What Rorty interprets from Selllars is that justifying knowledge claims “is not a

matter of special relation between ideas (words and objects, but of conversation, of

social practice” (PMN 170). So “forming beliefs, determining what we know, defending

our claims – these are all matters of interacting with others in a linguistic community

where the members exchange justifications of assertions with one another. There is no

basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will

let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims, and reasons. And

this means that justification reaches bedrock when it has reached the actual practices of

a particular community” (RR 11). As Rorty writes in his essay ‘Objectivity, Relativism,

and Truth,’ “reference to the practices of real life people is all the philosophical

justification anybody could want for anything” (ORT 157). What “Quinean holism and

Sellarsian antifoundationalism tell us that, in the search for grounds for beliefs, there is

no exit from the beliefs and reasons we currently accept as a community (RR 11). The

conclusion to draw is that “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we


20

already accept, and that there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so

as to find some test other than coherence” (PMN 178).

Guignon and Hiley write that “Rorty is the first to admit that this conception of the

public space of reason entails a thoroughgoing ethnocentrism, the claim that the project

of grounding knowledge claims is circumscribed by the practices of a particular cultural

group at a particular point in history” (11). Similar to the problem with the

phenomenological method that I discussed in the previous section, humans have no way

to step outside themselves to look at the “unprocessed causal inputs as they are prior to

processing in order to compare them to the way they come out after they have been

processed. There is simply no way to gain access to reality as it is in itself in order to

ground our ways of talking in the “things themselves,” no way to “distinguish the role of

our describing activity, our use of words, and the role of the rest of the universe in

accounting for the truth of our beliefs” (TP 87) (RR 12). If there is no “independent test of

the accuracy of our beliefs, and if there is no way to compare belief and object to see if

they correspond, we have nowhere to turn for justifications than to the ongoing practice

of reason-giving and deliberation” (RR 12). Objects and their causal powers thus

become explanatorily useless and they can play no role in justifying belief. The

justification for our beliefs can only come through other beliefs (TP 141).

The picture of our situation as knowers presented by pragmatists “leads to a radical

overhaul our ordinary ways of thinking about truth. Traditionally, truth has been

conceived as a matter of correspondence between beliefs in our mind and facts out

there in the world, between a sentence and “a chunk of reality which is somehow

isomorphic to that sentence” (ORT 137) (RR 12). This traditional picture of truth,

problematically assumes that we can pick out and identify “facts”, “items that have

objective existence independent of us and our beliefs, in order to establish that there is

relationship between them and our beliefs. Yet the only way to pick out and identify a

fact is by means of the vocabulary in which we formulate our beliefs. In this sense, facts

are artefacts our language, not tings that have an independent existence distinct from us

and our beliefs” (RR 12-13). This argument does not deny that there are in fact objects

out there in the world that have causal powers. But there is no way that “these objects“

congeal into sentence-shaped facts except through our use of language to describe and

talk about them” (RR 13). Once we let go of the concepts of facts then beliefs can no


21

longer be seen as “intentional relation to reality, but instead as tools for coping with

things, means of adaptation to the environment we have picked up over the course of

our evolution” (RR 13).

In the first essay of ‘Contingency, irony, and solidarity’ entitled ‘the contingency of

language’, Rorty, drawing from the influence of Wittgenstein and Davidson points out the

impossibility of “[stepping out] of the various vocabularies that we have employed in

order to find a meta-vocabulary which somehow takes into account of all possible

vocabularies, all possible ways of judging and feeling” (CIS xvi). While emphasizing the

contingency of language, Rorty highlights that these are human beings who assert an

intrinsic nature to things existing in the world. Rorty writes that “Truth cannot be out there

– cannot exist independently of the human mind – because sentences cannot so exist,

or be out there. The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only

descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its own – unaided by the

describing activities of human beings – cannot” (CIS 5). The world itself does not speak,

only humans do, the world only causes us to hold beliefs when we have programmed

ourselves with a language (CIS 6). What needs to be realised is that truth is not

something which is discovered or beyond reality but in fact truths are made with our

languages and the way we use them.

Truth and falsity are not out there in the world and without human propositions they

are irrelevant. “Since truth is a property of sentences, since sentences are dependent for

their existence upon vocabularies, and since vocabularies are made by human beings,

so are truths” (CIS 21). However, “within particular language game or practice, we can

speak of letting the world determine what is right or wrong. Given the game of checkers,

for example, the position of the pieces on the board can justify us in saying, “Red wins.”

But the idea that reality determines correctness seems to fail when we speak of

vocabularies as wholes. When it comes to questions about vocabularies as wholes, our

concern should be achieving solidarity with others in our community, not with getting

reality right” (RR 14). Rorty believes that “we need to make a distinction between the

claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the

world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most

things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental

states. To say that the truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no


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sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that

human languages are human creations” (CIS 5). If languages are indeed contingent in

their origins then all our "intellectual and moral progress [is nothing more than] a history

of increasingly useful metaphors rather than [an] increase of understanding how things

really are" (CIS 9).

Central to Rorty’s version of pragmatism is the concept of a “vocabulary” or

“language,” “a concept which he draws partly from Wittgenstein and partly from Quine

and Davidson” (RR 14). This concept can be best understood as a development of

Thomas Kuhn’s conception of “normal discourse” in the ‘The Structure of Scientific

Revolution.’ Kuhn defined ‘paradigms’ as ‘disciplinary matrix’ which include

“standardised and widely accepted texts and formulations; a tacitly agreed-upon sense

of what is real; agreement about what questions are worth asking, what answers make

sense, and what criteria of assessment are to be used; and a background of shared

practices and skills that have become second nature for a particular group” (RR 14-15)

(Rouse 30-36). “For Kuhn, science is normal as long as the vast majority of researchers

in that field are in agreement about a disciplinary matrix. Science becomes revolutionary

when conditions arise in which researchers are no longer in agreement about an older

disciplinary matrix and are chaotically shopping around for a new paradigm” (RR 15).

Rorty generalises and expands Kuhn’s model of the ‘disciplinary’ matrix “to embrace

human creations in all areas of culture, including poetry, morality, religious belief, pop

culture, and so on” (RR 15). As discussed above, Rorty’s view is that language is

contingent. Concerning this point, Guignon and Hiley remark that:

“The fact that we speak one way rather than another is determined by historical

events that could have been different, events that have no bearing on whether a

way of speaking is more in touch with reality of objectively better than any other. For

example, 500 years ago people were worried about the question of

consubstantiation in the Holy Eucharist. Today, not many people worry about this.

Does this mean that we have gotten closer to the issues and questions that are

rooted in the things themselves? On Rorty’s view, the answer is “No.” All that

happened is that one of way of talking has replaced another. Perhaps in 500 years

all our talk about quarks and punctuated equilibrium will seem as quaint as talk

about consubstantiation seems to us today. Will that mean our successors are

closer to the truth than we were? Once again, the answer is “No.” All it will mean,


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Rorty thinks, is that our contemporary scientific language game has been replaced

by another, not because of insight into the way the world is, but rather in the same

sort of way that dinosaurs came to be replaced by mammals. Change just happens

[and it is contingent]” (RR 15)

Language and vocabularies should not be seen as ways to map the world, they

should be thought of as tools that “may prove useful for some purposes and not for

others” (RR 15). Rorty emphasises on the contributions of Davidson and Wittgenstein in

showing precisely this point. Rorty writes that

“Davidson does not view language as a medium for either expression or

representation. So he is able to set aside the idea that both the self and reality

have intrinsic natures which are out there waiting to be known…In avoiding both

reductionism and expansionism, Davidson resembles Wittgenstein. Both

philosophers treat alternative vocabularies as more like alternative tools than like

bits of a jigsaw puzzle. To treat them as pieces of a puzzle is to assume that all

vocabularies are dispensable, or reducible to other vocabularies, or capable of

being united with all other vocabularies in one grand unified super vocabulary. If

we avoid this assumption, we shall not be inclined to ask questions like “What is

the place of consciousness in a world of molecules?” “Are colours made more

mind dependent than weights?” “What is the place of value in a world of

fact?”…We should not even try to answer questions for doing so leads either to

the evident failures of reductionism or to the short-lived success of

expansionism” (CIS 11-12)

It is interesting to point out that for Rorty (unlike pragmatists like Dewey), even

science has no “privileged status among language games, it is just one of the tools

among many others, with no special access to reality (RR 15-16). Rorty writes that

science is “one more human activity, rather than…the place at which human beings

encounter a ‘hard,’ nonhuman reality” (CIS 4). Like I discussed before, Rorty would like

us to let go of ideas such as ‘hard facts,’ he is of the view that “the reputed hardness of

facts [is] an artifact produced by our choice of language game” (ORT 80). The “strong”

conclusion Rorty draws from his conceptions of the contingency of language is that “No

area of culture and no period of history gets reality more right than any other. The

difference between areas and epochs is their relative efficiency at accomplishing various


24

purposes. There is no such thing as Reality to be gotten right – only snow, fog, Olympian

deities, relative aesthetic worth, the elementary particles, human rights, the divine right

of kinds, the Trinity, and the like”(RHC 375). The only way that one can speak of

progress “in knowledge…, is to consider cases where the individuals produce radically

new metaphors, ways of speaking that do not fit into any existing language game and so

produce a sort of revolutionary discourse for a period of time” (RR 16).

Rorty reckons that about two hundred years ago, the idea that truth was made

rather than found began to take hold of the imagination of European intellectuals. (CIS

3). The revolutionaries and poets at the end of eighteenth century had begun to see that

“anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or

useless, by being redescribed” (CIS 7). It is because of this gradual realisation that the

literary culture has arisen and has sidelined philosophy, Rorty mentions in an interview

that “Philosophy in the English-speaking world is simply not a big deal to most

intellectuals, and the reason is that the weight of nonscientific culture has been thrown

over to literature” (O’Shea 61). Rorty sketches an account of intellectual and moral

progress which fits in with Davidson’s account of language. Rorty writes that

“To see the history of language, and thus of the arts, the sciences, and the

moral sense, as the history of metaphor is to drop the picture of the human mind, or

human languages, becoming better and better suited to the purposes for which God

or Nature designed them, for example, able to express more and more meaning or

to represent more and more facts. The idea that language has a purpose goes once

the idea of language as medium goes. A culture which renounced both ideas would

be the triumph of those tendencies in modern thought which began two hundred

years ago, the tendencies common to German idealism, Romantic poetry and

utopian idealism” (CIS 16)

The critique of the idea of redemptive truth is important in Rorty’s project for it is still

central to the inquiries of an epistemologically centred philosophical tradition. Towards

the end of the first essay in ‘Contingency, irony, and solidarity’, Rorty bluntly summarises

how historically, the contingent truth is thought of something which actually is part of

some greater reality. Rorty writes that “…once upon a time we felt a need to worship

something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we

tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by


25

science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to

substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep

spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one ore quasi divinity” (CIS 22). According to Rorty,

the ironist thinkers like Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Davidson, suggest “we try to get

to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi

divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a

product of time and chance” (CIS 22). In the second chapter of ‘Contingency, irony, and

solidarity’ entitled, ‘The Contingency of Selfhood,’ Rorty draws on Nietzsche in “trying to

get us to see that our own identity as humans, our deepest self-understanding, has been

shaped by accidental historical and cultural factors that have no binding significance on

us. Rorty’s hope,… is that recognizing this will open us to a way of living that sloughs off

the shackles of older traditions and makes possible a freer, more play form of life” (RR

21).

In the introduction to this paper, I put forth that there is both an existential and

pragmatic strand to “Rorty’s way of working out the consequences of

antifoundationalism. The existential strand of Rorty’s thoughts follows from his critique of

the Cartesian picture of the self. In Part I of the ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,’

Rorty argued that the Cartesian tradition conflates ancient concerns about reason,

personhood, and moral agency with the specifically modern concern about the nature of

consciousness and what distinguishes us from the brutes” (RR 21). Rorty shows that

there is nothing about the Cartesian conception of mental that is necessary or intuitive.

“The idea of the mental is thus merely a part of the language game that we happen to be

playing today, and once we realise that the Cartesian metaphor of the mirror of nature

and the view of knowledge proper to it are optional, we realise that knowledge is not the

sort of thing that presents a problem that a foundational theory of knowledge must solve.

Knowledge is simply “successful coping” or “what society allows us to get away with

saying,” or “What inquiry, for the moment is, is leaving alone” (RR 21). Rorty is able to

undermine the central motivation for epistemology-centred philosophy, “the kind of

philosophy that extends from Plato through Descartes and Kant”, by realizing that there

is something optional about it, that is the “need to liberate ourselves from the enslaving

shadows and appearances of the cave, the need to ground our knowledge and discover

truth in order to be fully human” (RR 23). Rorty allows us to see the “idea of knowing as

one among various human activities and social practices, characterised by the entire


26

contingency, fallibility, and finitude as the rest of life… [Rorty] disconnects Cartesian

Issues about irreducibility of mental representations from concerns about the self,

autonomy and moral agency. No single description can capture the whole truth about

human beings (RR 23). Rorty believes that both Nietzsche and Freud have “ended all

attempts to discover human nature or a substantial centre to the self, and have hereby

undermined any notion that there is something about human being that is either realised

through self-discovery or waiting to be developed through establishing the right sorts of

social institutions” (RR 23). Rorty’s antifoundationalism approach is ironic in the sense

that it does acknowledge that people do have beliefs and values but there are no bases

for those beliefs and values. Rorty’s pragmatism thus copes with this irony by

emphasizing the need for solidarity in public life while at the same time, the existentialist

strand of his philosophy allows a great deal of freedom in ones private sphere. Rorty

does not see any need “for any overarching standpoint that incorporates both [spheres

of life]” (RR 25).

The brand of pragmatism put forth by Rorty also has certain political consequences

which are increasingly prominent in Rorty’s critique of philosophical liberalism and his

prise for liberal democracy. Rorty criticises the need for philosophical liberalism to

“ground values of liberal culture such as justice and equality in a metaphysical

conception of reason and human nature” (RR 24). For instance, Michael Sandel, has

given John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice a Kantian reading. “Sandel criticises Rawls’s

theory of justice as fairness because he thinks it cannot be supported by the conception

of the individual antecedent to society that he sees as presupposed by Rawls’s theory.

By contrast, Rorty reads Rawls as a pragmatist rather than as a philosophical liberal. To

say that Rawls is a pragmatist is to say that he is working out his conception of justice as

fairness from within the background of our democratic social practices and institutions

rather than trying to ground it in something outside our practices” (RR 24). This is why

when Rorty defines liberalism in terms of reducing cruelty, he does not attempt to

answer the question “Why is cruelty a bad thing?” He believes that there is no

noncircular answer to this or to any other moral question. If we accept Rorty’s ideas

claiming that language, selfhood, and community are contingent then the most important

consequence is that we cannot justify what we believe in or what we value in a way

which is noncircular.


27

There is simply no transcendent justification for what we believe and value. The

‘self-grounding grounds’ that are traditionally used to legitimatise our beliefs and

institutions will then appear to us as what they really are,— as Nietzsche had described

them as products of our own ‘craving for metaphysical comfort’, as symptoms of our

wishful thinking rather than as foundation stones of reality’ (Guignon and Pereboom 93).

I think it is precisely this realisation— that all our beliefs and values are human

constructs which distinguishes Rorty’s ironist intellectual from everybody else. As Rorty

points out the ironist intellectual realises that there is no order “beyond time and space

which determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of

responsibilities” (CIS xv). As Rorty points out then it becomes irrelevant to ask questions

like ‘Why not be cruel?’, or “How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and

when to devote yourself to private projects of self creation?”, “Is it right to deliver n

innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m x n other innocents? If so, what are

the correct values of n and m?” (CIS xv). Rorty writes that people who think that there

are indeed “well-grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question – algorithms for

resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, in his heart, a theologian or a

metaphysician” (CIS xv).

In my view, it is very important to note that Rorty points out that there is no reason to

believe that there is an order which dictates the teleological picture of life. As long as we

do not realise the contingency of our language, our conscience and our community, we

will still treat our values and beliefs as if they are justified by something that is a quasi

divinity. By accepting Rorty’s claim, we can do away with all justifications and conclude

that all values, morality and ‘scientific’ systems are social constructs that are invented or

rather imposed upon the world by people through language in an attempt to satisfy their

own craving for metaphysical or theological comfort. As Nietzsche described them, they

are mere products of dogmatic systems of belief that are no longer tenable in the

modern world” and are ultimately matters of choice and preference.

One of the points of concern for me here is that when people take their final

vocabularies 2as having a superiority over someone else’s final vocabulary. It is the

failure to see the contingency of our final vocabularies which results in this attitude, and

what follows easily from such a blind attitude is the idea or rather the need to force upon 2 Words which human beings employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives (Rorty 73)


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one’s own final vocabulary onto another person’s vocabulary. For me, this idea is at the

root of all conflicts which have bred hatred, violence and destruction. The second main

point of concern for me (which is closely related to the first point of concern) is a problem

that also arises from the failure to see our final vocabularies and our society as a

historical contingency. The failure to see the contingency makes us uncritical of the final

vocabularies that are passed onto us. Therefore the expressions that we use to justify

our beliefs take the status of those timeless absolutes. Like I discussed in the previous

section of this paper, it is because we mistake these contingent expressions constructed

by humans for absolutes that we witness the institutionalization of hypocrisy in religion,

ideologies and moral systems. By uncritically following our final vocabularies we fail to

realise or understand exactly what it is that we value, thus we see a growing number of

people that are not sincere to their absolute beliefs or values that they uphold.

Uncritically following final vocabularies will eventually lead to the unannounced

secularization of values and beliefs. For the hypocrisy within the institutions that uphold

those values will eventually result in cynicism and the hollowness of our contingent

beliefs will become more apparent As Rorty points out that the heroes of his liberal

society; the strong poet and the utopian revolutionary alienate themselves by “protesting

in the name of society itself against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to

its own self-image” (CIS 60). If we are to see ourselves as the historical contingencies

that we are then we will indeed, critically look at all the beliefs and values that are

passed onto us. The first condition for Rorty’s ‘ironist’ is someone who “has radical and

continuing doubts about the final vocabulary [they] currently use” (CIS 73). He further

goes on to add that these ‘ironists’ realise that “anything can be made to look good or

bad by [simply redescribing it] (CIS 73) and also understand that “the terms in which

they describe themselves are subject to change, [they are] always aware of the

contingency the fragility of their own final vocabularies” (CIS 74).

So if we are to realise the contingency of our own final vocabulary then we will not

think of our beliefs and values as being superior or better than those that are central to

someone else’s final vocabulary. I, therefore, think that Rorty’s ironist would be far more

tolerant (will be more accepting of people with different final vocabularies) and will not

impose his final vocabularies onto others for he himself is in constant doubt of his own

set of beliefs. Secondly, by being aware that our final vocabularies have no non circular


29

justification, we will be in the position of being able to constantly re-evaluate and be

critical of our social values, beliefs and institutions which govern us. So instead of blindly

following the beliefs and values we have, what we need to do is compare different

values. Rorty rightly points out through his description of the strong poet; we need to re-

contextualise what we uphold by using new vocabularies. Thus we will be able to

propagate our intellectual culture and develop new vocabularies with changing times

instead of clinging onto final vocabularies and the traditional epistemology-centred

philosophy which will result in the freezing over of our intellectual culture.

Rorty’s views have come under substantial criticism. “The common thread of the

criticism is that his critique of the epistemology-centred philosophy, his rejection of the

idea that liberal democracy is in need of justification, and his notions of loyalty and

solidarity, taken together, undercut the possibility of meaningful criticism of the practices

of one’s culture” (RR 27). “Part of what arouses…outrage among philosophers [(who are

critical of Rorty)] is [his] willingness to throw out the entire philosophical tradition that

defines the work of mainstream philosophy today” (RR 30).

I think most of such criticism against Rorty is based on other philosopher’s

unwillingness to let go of the idea of redemptive truth. I shall go on to show how stale

philosophy has actually become under the pretence of being inherently foundationalist

and essentialist. Against the charges of relativism, Rorty uses Davidson’s influential

essay ‘On the Very Idea of Conceptual Schemes’ to show that the “idea of conceptual

scheme, as conceived by philosophers who think such notion implies conceptual

relativism or global scepticism, is unintelligible. [Davidson] does this by trying to show

that we have no way to individuate or identify schemes in a way that enables us to speak

of different schemes. If we can “find no intelligible basis on which it can be said that

schemes are different,” Davidson says, then we have no criteria of identity for such

things, and the notion is, strictly speaking, meaningless” (Davidson 198) (RR 17).

Relativism “in the pernicious sense, for example, is the view that there are as many

meanings of the word “true” as there are procedures at different times and places

conclusion that every belief is as good as every other belief. Rorty claims that relativism

in this sense is either self-refuting or a view that no one holds. He claims not to be a

relativist in this pernicious sense, because he is loyal to the beliefs and practices we

actually share at this time. Relativism in the innocuous sense, in contrast, is the view


30

that there is nothing philosophical to be said about our beliefs ad practices, In other

worlds relativism in the innocuous sense is simply pragmatism” (RR 27).

Before I go on to discuss Rorty’s views on the post-metaphysical, literary culture, I

think it will be a good idea to look at the way Rorty summarises how the need for

redemption leads to the shift from religion to philosophy and then literature. Rorty writes

that

“the transition from religion to philosophy began with the revival of Platonism in

the Renaissance, the period in which humanists began asking the same

questions about Christian monotheism that Socrates had asked about Hesiod’s

pantheon. Socrates had suggested to Euthyphro that the real question was not

whether one’s actions were pleasing to the gods, but rather which gods held the

correct views about what actions ought to be done. When that latter question was

once again taken seriously, the road lay open to Kant’s conclusion that even the

Holy One of the Gospels must be judged in the light of one’s own conscience.

The transition from a philosophical to a literary culture began shortly after Kant,

about the time that Hegel warned us that philosophy paints its gray on gray only

when a form of life has grown old. That remark helped the generation of

Kierkegaard and Marx [to] realise that philosophy was never going to fill the

redemptive role that Hegel himself had claimed for it. Hegel’s supremely

ambitious claims for philosophy almost instantly flip-flopped into their dialectical

opposite. His System was no sooner published than it began to be treated as a

self-consuming artifact, the reductio ad absurdum of a form of intellectual life that

suddenly seemed to be on its last legs. Since Hegel’s time, the intellectuals have

been losing faith in philosophy, in the idea that redemption can come in the form

of true beliefs. In the literary culture which has been emerging during the last two

hundred years, the question “Is it true?” has yielded pride of place to the question

“What’s new?” (DRT 4-5)

The literary, post-metaphysical culture finds “redemption in neither a non-

cognitive relation to a non-human person [or] in a cognitive relation to propositions, but

in non-cognitive relations to other human beings, relations mediated by human artifacts

such as books and buildings, paintings and songs. These artifacts provide glimpses of

alternative ways of being human. This sort of culture drops a presupposition common to


31

religion and philosophy—that redemption must come from one’s relation to something

that is not just one more human creation” (DRT 7). According to Rorty, “Kierkegaard

correctly pointed out that philosophy began to set up itself up as a rival to religion when

Socrates suggested that our self-knowledge was knowledge of God—that we had no

need of help from a non-human person, because the truth was already within us. But

literature began to set itself up as a rival to philosophy when people like Cervantes and

Shakespeare began to suspect that human beings were, and ought to be, so diverse

that there is no point in pretending that they all carry a single truth deep in their bosoms”

(DRT 7).

If someone believes that there is indeed redemptive truth out there, then they

take philosophy as their guide of life. Since the “premise of philosophy is that there is a

way things really are—way humanity and the rest of the universe are and always will be,

independent of any merely contingent human needs and interests. Knowledge of this

way is redemptive. It can therefore replace religion. The striving for Truth can take place

of the search for God” (DRT 8). Inspired by both Nietzsche and Rorty, I have shown the

danger of holding on to the idea that there is indeed something like ‘Truth’ out there in

the world. If we want to prevent nihilism and the ‘freezing-over’ of our intellectual culture

then we need to accept that philosophy has indeed failed to live up to its premise.

Literature, which is today’s high culture treats books “as human attempts to meet human

needs, rather than as acknowledgements of the power of a being that is what it is apart

from any such needs. God and Truth, are, respectively the religious and the

philosophical names for that sort of being” (DRT 4).

In the previous section, I mentioned how thinkers like Sartre see the quest for

knowledge of quasi-divinity as being a futile passion but I would agree with Rorty and

see philosophy “as one our greatest imaginative achievements, on a par with the

invention of the gods” (DRT 10). Both religion and philosophy “are relatively primitive, yet

glorious, literary genres. They are genres in which it is now becoming increasingly

difficult to write, but the genres which are replacing them might never have emerged had

they not been read as swerves away from religion, and later as swerves away from

philosophy” (DRT 11). However, at the same time it has to be understood that literature

is not going in any particular direction and we should not hope that it will one day supply

us with the redemptive truth. Rorty suggests that literary culture should be seen as a


32

self-consuming artifact and perhaps the last of its kind” (DRT 27). In Rorty’s 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” (DRT 28).


33

Conclusion and the Future of Philosophy

In the introduction to this paper, my main point of contention with the traditional

epistemology-centred philosophies’ search for final accounts was that if, achieved, it

would result in the “freezing-over” of culture and the “dehumanisation of human beings”

(PMN 377). Both Nietzsche and Rorty manage to show that final accounts of knowledge

are not grounded in absolutes and there is no such thing as truth out there that is waiting

to be discovered. The tradition of philosophy in the West began to set itself up as a rival

to religion. It replaced the belief in God for the search of Truth and it assumed that as

humans; we have a privileged access to this truth. Philosophy came to base itself on the

ideal of redemptive truth. This was defined as something that is the “reality behind the

appearance, the one true description of what is going on, the final secret” (DRT 3). “The

idea of redemptive truth requires the conviction that a set of beliefs which can be justified

to all human beings will also fill all the needs of all human beings” (DRT 10). Rorty’s

antifoundationalism and critique of the epistemology-centred philosophy rejects the idea

that such a truth exists out there in the world. By highlighting the contingency of

language, self and the community, Rorty propounds that truth is made in our language, it

is not something which is discovered. As Rorty points out, the world does not speak,

only humans do. Even though, there are objects with causal powers out there in the

world, there are as such, no sentences which talk about such objects. All descriptions of

the world are made by humans and hence the idea of redemptive truth is nothing more

than a human construct – a product of our own imagination. “The exhibition of

contingency, extending to language, society, and the self, is Rorty's central theme. His

work attempts to cure us of the desire to employ metaphysics to explain away the

chance events that made us who we are; it seeks to give us the courage of our

contingencies” (O’Shea 59). Rorty’s antifoundationalism thus expands the possibilities of

self description seeking to rehumanise humans by affirming freedom and open up

possibilities of greater tolerance.

By doing away with both theological and metaphysical assumptions about the world,

man can truly recognize his freedom to explore his imagination in a post-metaphysical

culture. Just as the enlightenment produced a post-religious secular culture in the West,

a post-metaphysical culture would abandon the need to find redemptive truth through


34

philosophy. Rorty writes that “a post-metaphysical culture seems to me no more

impossible than a post-religious one, and equally desirable” (CIS xvi). The rise of the

literary culture has shown that people have realized that truth is indeed made and not

out there to be discovered. I also believe that in order to make our inquires more useful,

we should not aim for finding answers that supposedly ‘represent the true nature of

things’ but we should aim for redescribing and asking better questions. Philosophers

need to recognize that their discipline was a transition between the religious and the

literary age. Philosophers as Rorty writes can still serve the “the main purpose they've

served in the past [that] has been to get past common sense, past common ways of

speaking, past vocabularies; modifying them in order to take account of new

developments like Enlightenment secularism, democratic governments, Newton,

Copernicus, Darwin, Freud. One thing you can count on philosophy professors doing is

what William James called "weaving the old and the new together," in order to assimilate

weird things like Freudian psychology with moral common sense” (O’Shea 60) .

However, they should at the same time critically look at the underlying assumptions of

the traditional epistemology-centred philosophy and seek to redefine the discipline by

asking better questions.

Rorty’s distinction between the private and the public sphere allows people with

different final vocabularies to be more tolerant towards each other, since in his utopia

there is a heightened sense of contingency. Furthermore, in a post-metaphysical culture

the emphasis would be to explore human imagination and cooperation will be substitute

competition, since the concept of getting ‘things right’ or to ‘conform with the true nature

of reality’ will be absolutely unimportant. There will be no finale or the freezing over of

our intellectual culture. In this post-metaphysical culture people “will have stopped

thinking that the human imagination is getting somewhere, that there is one far off

cultural event towards 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” (DRT 28).


35

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the problem of redemptive truth: from nietzsche to a postmetaphysical culture

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