PHILOSOPHY
Meetings chaired by Victor Suchar unless otherwise stated

RICHARD RORTY'S "THE DECLINE OF REDEMPTIVE TRUTH AND THE RISE OF THE LITERARY CULTURE"

Tony Rawson, Member, on 4 November 2003

The first point examined was Rorty's definition of an intellectual as some one who yearns to achieve 'Bloomian autonomy'.
Harold Bloom asserts in his book "How to read and Why?" that only deep and constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.
The autonomous self referred to, is similar to what Heidegger called 'the hope for authenticity' - the hope to be one's own person rather than the creation of one's education and environment.
In Nietzschean terms to become who you are, is not to ask, "What is truth?" but rather to ask, "What sorts of people are there in the world and how do they fare?"
Rorty views the self as having no essence and as evolving dependent on contingency.
Following this definition of an intellectual, these are some of Rorty's definitions of the word 'Truth'. Firstly, the word 'true' when it is used to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Rorty makes clear that he is not criticising this kind of truth when he writes, "Nobody is worries about the nominalisation of the word 'true'. Everybody knows that the difference between true and false beliefs is as important as that between nourishing and poisonous foods".
Secondly, Rorty speaks of 'Public truth' - that helps us to achieve our aims in medicine and technology and, thirdly, of 'Private truth' - that helps us to expand ourselves.
To Rorty, it is crucial to be able to separate these two types of truth, to be able to separate the sort of thing we do to expand ourselves from the sort of thing we do to achieve commonsensical purposes.
Fourthly, Rorty speaks of redemptive truth, the truth that brings a feeling of self-fulfilment. This is the sort of truth that Rorty regards as suspect and potentially harmful.
He expresses it in this way "I shall use the term redemptive truth for a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves. Redemptive truth would not consist of theories about how things interact causally, but instead would fulfil the need that religion and philosophy has attempted to satisfy. This is the need to fit everything - every thing, person, event, idea and poem - into a single context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined and unique."
Moving on, to Rorty's version of the history of Western philosophy he says that intellectuals in the West have, since the Renaissance, passed through three stages. In addition, that these three stages have been moving us ever closer to self-reliance.
Stage one: Redemption by religion. The hope for redemption through entering 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.
Rorty sees the transition from a religious culture to a philosophical culture beginning 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". In other words, one should ask not whether one's actions were pleasing to the Gods, but rather which gods held the correct views about what ought to be done.
Stage two: Redemption by Philosophy. This being through the acquisition of a set of beliefs that represent things as they really are. To agree with Socrates that there is a set of beliefs which is both susceptible of rational justification and such as to take rightful precedence over every other consideration in determining what to do with ones life.
Rorty would also claim that it is a mistake to look to science for redemption. That science has a function in improving our lives by providing us with better technology and that other than this, science books should be read as narrative along with all other works.
Stage three: Redemption by Literature. For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. The literary culture is always in search of novelty rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.
In Rorty's words, "the sort of person that I am calling a literary intellectual thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living. For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human.
For the religious idea that a certain book or tradition might connect you up with a supremely powerful or supremely loveable non-human person, the literary intellectual substitutes the Bloomian thought that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become - the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save one another".
Tony Rawson
Recommended Reading
Richard Rorty "Contingency, Irony and Solidarity" Cambridge University Press and "Redemption from Egotism".