Order Ethics or Moral Surplus by Luetge Christoph

Author:Luetge, Christoph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

With regard to language, Rorty interprets the evolution of philosophy since idealism as an increasing recognition of the “self-createdness” of truth by and for human beings. Truth is “made”—just as art is “made”—and should not be understood as an imitation of nature. The analytical philosophy of language since Wittgenstein also ultimately deconstructed language as a tool. It showed both its uses and its limitations. It also demonstrated that there is no one adequate language that can be determined to be better than all other languages for describing our world—hence, the fundamental thesis about the contingency of language. However, Rorty goes a step further by dispensing with the requisite clear goals of language identified in the analytical tradition (for instance: communication, justification, argumentation, explanation). If one follows Rorty, language is totally contingent: it is basically “spontaneous,” developing without clear aims and objectives (and is thus analogous, implicitly not explicitly, to the unintended consequences of purposive behavior analyzed by economics).

The contingency of the self is related to psychology and morality. In this regard, Rorty calls upon Freud, among others. This understanding of the self as heteronomous, but in no way self-positing in the sense of idealist thought is nothing new. Nonetheless, Rorty particularly stresses Freud’s anti-reductionist perspective. To the extent that Freud elevates narratives—and what is especially relevant to Rorty’s analysis, narratives about cruelty—to the level of theory and devotes considerable space to them, he represents for Rorty the antipode of a Hobbesian (and thus also an ultimately economic) point of view. This latter approach is reductionist (see, for instance, Rorty 1989, 31): it reduces human beings (although Rorty does not say explicitly how) and does not (as I further interpret Rorty) seem to take the contingency of the self seriously. It rather once again attempts to attribute this self to a different constitutive element. Rorty, however, finds that it would be more appropriate to examine the complexity of the self and its narratives in a Freudian or related manner. This is the path that Rorty wants to take himself.

The contingency of a liberal polity is finally the decisive concept in this instance, for it suggests that calling upon shared values to stabilize a democratic society is futile (Rorty 1989, 51f. and 54ff.). Whoever argues in favor of a liberal polity today[137] can neither rely on truth, nor rationality, nor a sense of moral obligation. All of these “values” have become contingent and enervated. Rorty turns to, among others, Isaiah Berlin and his theory—roughly stated—of the necessary (recognition of and) education in contingency.[138] According to this theory, the continuation of liberal polities primarily depends on their members learning to recognize irresolvable interpersonal conflicts about fundamental values for what they are, and (possibly despite this) to specifically not allow their behavior in response to be determined by metaphysical beliefs suggesting the compatibility of these values.

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