ONE STORY OF THE PHILOSOPHY STUDENT

jacob bortner-hart 

Here is one story of the Philosophy student. They come into Philosophy wanting answers. After several years of survey courses touching on the most popular and historically important philosophers, they conclude that there are no answers and leave to pursue Law or Finance. Here is another story of the Philosophy student. They come into Philosophy wanting answers. After several years of survey courses, they feel they have gotten the answers and leave to pursue Law or Finance. And there are those rare few who commit to Graduate School. Either they feel they have gotten the answers, and must share them with the world, or else believe they would discover the answers if only they could dedicate the remainder of their life to study. And besides these students, there are those who don’t particularly care about the answers but commit to a life of scholarship out of a kind of aesthetic reverence for what we call the Western tradition. For now, it does not matter which of these types I am. All I will say is that I decided on Law. 

Actually, to be quite honest, I have found myself in different camps at different points in my life. I spent my early teens a scientistic empiricist uninterested in aesthetics, and my late teens a literary snob uninterested in truth. At age 19 I was fairly certain both that I knew everything and that I needed to become a Professional Philosopher in order to discover what it was that I knew. I was wrong on both counts.

This essay is about a few different things. Some of it is about the disagreement between Wittgensteinians and Platonists. Some of it is about my Personal Intellectual Journey. But a lot of it is just an excuse for me to share my opinions. It is also an essay for my former advisor Marianne Janack, which means that it is partly about Richard Rorty. He is as a good place to start as any other. Rorty is hard to place into any of the above camps. He was a Professional Philosopher, and one who was quite sure of the answers. Yet his answer was often that there are no answers. I am sometimes tempted to place him in the “aesthetic reverence” camp, but for his incredible irreverence. His philosophical positions are similarly hard to categorize. Rorty saw himself as a “pragmatist” in the tradition of James and Dewey. Janack calls Rorty a “positivist,” emphasizing his lineage with logical empiricism. Personally, I like to think of Rorty as a sort of “systematic Wittgensteinian,” a thinker who developed the implications of the anti-metaphysical philosophy of the odd genius Ludwig Wittgenstein so as to make him accessible and palatable to a wider, sometimes popular, audience.

Late in his career, Rorty wrote his moving essay Trotsky and the Wild Orchids which charts his growth away from Socialism and Platonism and toward Pragmatism and Liberalism. By “Platonism,” Rorty means any philosophical system that aims at necessary ahistorical truth, but often his target really is Platonism, the theory that there are abstract or transcendent entities. “I wanted very much to be some kind of Platonist, and from 15 to 20 I did my best,” Rorty writes. But gradually he lost his faith. He came to see that any vision of reality which aims to provide a unified system of objective moral and metaphysical principles, (including Socialism, Marxism and Liberalism) is at best only internally coherent, destined to be superseded with time.

 So, a central question of his work is this: if there are no objective moral principles, might it be that we have no argument to make against the Nazis? The best we can do, Rorty thinks, is to couple compassion with persuasion, to propose incremental steps toward a better world not because that world is in any way objectively sanctioned, but because we make the choice to prefer it to the world preferred by fascists. This move signifies, for Rorty, a sort of emotional and intellectual maturity. Personally, I do not see it this way at all, and I hope to make my reasons clear shortly.

The rejection of necessary ahistorical truth is sometimes called “Postmodernism,” though Rorty is lukewarm about this label, noting its association with relativism, irrationalism, and pessimism. He does however defend some tenets of Postmodernism from its right-wing detractors, even while distancing himself from its left-wing fanatics. As Rorty sees it, the right says that postmodernism is an attack on Classical Liberal values, and that’s bad, while the left says that Postmodernism is an attack on Classical Liberal values, and that’s good. On the other hand, Rorty’s Postmodernism is thoroughly Liberal, in the sense that he prefers justice, progress and equality, while rejecting the idea that these values are in any way objective, or that their application will inevitably lead to Communism. Though he disagrees with the postmodern left that America is an irredeemable “quasi-fascist” country, he makes clear that Fascism is the real threat. The fascists are wrong and dangerous, whereas the leftists are just being silly.

I have called Rorty a “systematic Wittgensteinianism,” which in some ways is just another name for Postmodernism. Wittgenstein’s primary thesis is that language derives its meaning not from any connection between words and the world, nor from any ethereal essence of words themselves, but merely through the ways that words are used in social and cultural practice. And here I think there is a lot of room for misunderstanding, for while there is a hint of relativism in Wittgenstein’s thesis, it is not the one that opponents often imagine. 

The point the postmodernist can make is not that words only have meaning relative to a cultural context, and so truth is relative, but rather that if we stop trying to use words to describe the fundamental nature of reality, the sort of reality that could sustain a universal ahistorical truth, we will naturally be inclined to turn our attention toward their function in social practice, and so might end up discovering something more useful. It is not that the arguments of philosophers like Wittgenstein and Rorty imply the conclusions of so-called relativists such as Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn, but rather that if we choose to adopt the perspective of the former we will become more interested in the arguments of the latter.

I think that this is the most charitable interpretation I can give of Richard Rorty, for I should admit that, contra Rorty, I am both a Platonist and a Socialist, and am even willing to grant that these positions are sufficiently thematically linked so as to partly stand or fall together. As I said earlier, this essay is partly about my Personal Journey. 

Where to pick up? I suppose I should say that while I tried for many youthful years to be an empiricist, and for several more to be a systematic Wittgensteinian, I could never quite make it work. I remember my first exposure to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as a Sophomore, finding it both profoundly mundane and thrillingly alien. I was asked to read Wittgenstein in conjunction with thinkers like Foucault, and to try to understand “morality,” “authority,” and even “truth” as Wittgensteinian “language-games.” My interest in the work, however, went further. I knew that the point of the Investigations was not one about power or relativism, but about language itself. A couple of years later, I read Rorty, who argued that the Investigations brought traditional philosophy to an end by showing the inability of language to capture ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual concepts, and by aphoristically satirizing its attempts to do so. I disagreed. 

I felt that what the Investigations brought to an end was not philosophy per se, but a particular type of linguistic philosophy, a type of philosophy that viewed thought and language as inextricably linked. I reasoned: if language cannot adequately capture our concepts, too bad for language. “Pure thought” must be something else entirely. I am not sure if this is quite my view anymore, but it does not matter. The point is that it was the Investigations that led me away from empiricism and toward speculative philosophy, to a belief in “intuition” and to a certain kind of Platonism.

Here is one way of arriving at moral and metaphysical knowledge that tends to irritate empiricists and Wittgensteinians alike, but sidesteps the worry about objectivity and “mere internal coherence”: Decide what knowledge we have, and then interpret it. This is the approach taken by many who still think that there is a place for traditional philosophy in a wider leftist project, including my other former advisor Russell Marcus. It is also (sometimes) the approach taken by the great activist Noam Chomsky, who is living proof that it is possible to hate America and love Western philosophy at the same time. On this approach, fears about a lack of objectivity in philosophy arise only out of old foundationalist and empiricist prejudices. 

Our fear that the statement “Nazism is wrong'' isn't really true can arise only if we assume that all of our beliefs have to be assimilated to sense experience (or indubitable self-evident axioms), or if we believe that we must fully work out our metaphysics prior to any investigation of the world. In this way, knowledge of “what there is and what it is like” is not a matter of deciding on a philosophical framework and then deducing all true claims from that framework, but of employing a method whereby framework and claim reciprocally support one another. Some call this method “reflective equilibrium,” but I don’t care if you call it that. 

I think that the intuitiveness of the claim “Nazism is wrong” supports a general moral realism, and moral realism explains how Nazism can be wrong. Something like this approach is probably what licenses Chomsky to say that basic moral principles such as freedom and equality both explain and are supported by our observations about human nature. For Chomsky, as for many socialists like myself, the contention that participatory democracy should be expanded within the political sphere, and extended to the economic sphere, is not an arbitrary preference at all, but arises from the need to make our social practices fully consistent with our best moral theories.

Of course, one worry about this approach is that it might license too much. Marcus enjoys math, so he adamantly applies it in service of mathematical platonism, and I imagine would cautiously apply it to the subjects of morality and semantics. But he draws the line at theology. As far as I can tell, this line is arbitrary. 

It seems to me that once we have given up on assimilating all beliefs to empirical data, nothing stops us from saying, for instance, that our intuition that nature is a wholly contingent reality supports a belief in God, and that God explains the existence of contingent reality. For it is not even the case that reflective equilibrium is a wholly anti-foundationalist approach. It rests on the primary datum of phenomenological consciousness, and always and only to that datum is it accountable. So what stops us from using it to justify realism about all facets of the human experience, including the speculative and the spiritual?

I might be saying that we should all engage in speculative philosophy, and I might not. I really haven’t decided yet. Regardless, the point is that Wittgensteinianism and Platonism are two very different stories we can tell about the nature and purpose of philosophy, and the conflict between them appears both emblematic and intractable. Though Wittgensteinians tried to put an end to the conflict with their assertion that language cannot capture metaphysical reality, the trouble is that this assertion is at least as contentious as any metaphysical claim. The Wittgensteinians say: “End the squabble! Do the mature thing, stop obsessing over answerable questions, and come join us!” The Platonists say: “What are you talking about? Why don’t you do the mature thing and join us?” Things can easily get heated. Sometimes, questions of “philosophical temperament” get raised: accusations of having the “wrong” philosophical temperament. But accusations of intellectual immaturity and petulance notwithstanding, neither side is ever persuaded. 

Personally, I like to think of myself as an advocate for the traditional conception of philosophy as a discipline concerned with discovering universal ahistorical truth. Still, who wouldn’t want to make philosophy more useful, more socially engaged, more human? I suppose only those who think that the stronger arguments exist on the other side. So I suppose that, unlike Rorty, I disagree with the postmodern left not because I think they are politically silly (for they are quite serious), but because I think they are wrong about the technical details Additionally, while I agree with Rorty that the conflict between socialists and progressives is less important than the one between progressives and reactionaries, I am not comfortable saying that the latter is more important to think about. The threat of Fascism and the social illness it reveals is deeply pressing, but I think best answered on the practical side by activists, and on the theoretical side by psychoanalysts rather than philosophers. Unlike Rorty, I have never once been plagued by the worry that I might have no argument to make against the Nazi, but I often worry that I do not have an argument strong enough to convince the Liberal.

Earlier I mentioned that I agree with Rorty that Platonism and Socialism are in a sense bound together, and I suppose I might as well end by explaining that comment. I think that to believe in either requires a certain level of commitment on the part of the individual, a willingness to believe in something they cannot find in mere ordinary experience, but which completes and explains certain rational intuitions they have about the nature of the world and their role within it. Rorty thinks that the abandonment of ahistorical truths is a sign of maturity, while I think that the opposite is the case. As I see it, there is hardly a greater sign of emotional and intellectual maturity than the willingness to accept something outside of contingent historical circumstances to which we are by our rational nature accountable, and which the many refuse to acknowledge. I realize that this claim comes dangerously close to “higher power” discourse, but while I do not think that belief in God is irresponsible or unwarranted, it is not what I am interested in here. 

All I mean to say is that there is value in a certain kind of affirmation, the sort of affirmation that is not treated lightly, which does not devolve into the sort of “consolation spirituality” advocated for by litterateurs like Iris Murdoch and David Foster Wallace, who suggest that if we pretend hard enough, and go around as if we believed in a higher power, it might be just as good as the real thing. Affirmation worth its salt must be rationally and realistically grounded, not ironic or conciliatory. Anything else is not truly affirmative.

I have no further points to make. Remember when I said that this essay was mostly an excuse for me to share my opinions? And I really have no great lesson or revelation to report concerning my decision not to pursue a career in Philosophy either. I just thought it would be a bad career move. However, from my brief overview of the most historically important philosophers, I am pretty sure I have at least some of the answers. I hope I have made my positions clear, and I hope that you agree with them. If you do not, then all I can say is: please, try to look at it this way.