The Experience of Truth by Chiurazzi Gaetano & Robert T. Valgenti

Author:Chiurazzi, Gaetano & Robert T. Valgenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE “ANTICONFORMIST” CHARACTER OF TRUTH

Plato tried to thematize the unbreakable connection between truth and freedom as the constitutive connection of Bildung. Its reference to what we have called “true experience” is probably a protest against the pragmatical behavior of the sophists, for whom truth is reduced once and for all to the incomparable power of language, able on its own to produce admirable effects. Hermeneutics for Rorty is ultimately reduced to this, and the edification for which it advocates appears completely unchained from every truth; it is an inventive, creative, even self-creative act. Edification is a hermeneutic activity that consists in finding new, better, and more interesting ways of speaking so that we are able to reconceive ourselves and thus help us to become “new beings,”27 “happier, freer and more flexible,”28 through the adoption of new vocabularies. As Watson, champion of behaviorism, said, by influencing behavior it is possible to train for anything. Edification thus appears as a purely behavioral rather than an experiential fact, to the point of assuming a particularly manipulative character.

In this view, hermeneutics is “abnormal science”—revolutionary, to use an expression from Thomas Kuhn—but in a merely aesthetic sense because it invents new languages and thus is able to bring about new behaviors. But this is certainly not the direction in which the Gadamerian defense of the truth-bearing character of the human sciences, and of art in particular, was going; rather, it was responding to the same demand of the scientific revolutions which, according to Kuhn, are not born arbitrarily, but due to internal ruptures in the science, that is, in the moment when a demand for truth exceeds, in a manner of speaking, the being-true of the prevailing paradigm.

This experience of rupture, which requires a different articulation of sense, is what we have defined as “hermeneutic falsificationism,” and for which is central the experience of nonfulfillment, of the interruption of the reference described by Heidegger in Being and Time: when something no longer functions I am immediately aware that it is other than what it was, and that therefore in general the being of the entity is not the same as the entity. What role does “nonfunctioning”—or in pragmatic terms, falsity—play in Rorty? For him—as affirmed in a debate with Umberto Eco—to use a screwdriver to scratch one’s ears,29 despite its evident misuse, would indicate a new invention, like the introduction of a new word in an old lexicon. For Heidegger, on the other hand, this is exactly the type of phenomenon in which the ontological difference stands forth. Such an interruption of functionality is an event, something that, far from depending on subjective will (Rorty would say “on private being”), places subjectivism itself under consideration when it acquires an objective dimension, in the sense of it being independent from me. Such an event is “revolutionary,” in the sense that it requires a conversion of one’s glance that includes oneself and the world, what Kuhn would call a paradigm shift, which not only redefines one’s self in a manner not solely private, but also redefines the world in which one exists.

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