From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 01 2004 - 03:10:21 BST
Hey Sam,
Matt had said:
Let me first say how pleasurable this conversation has been. You're one of my favorite interlocuters, and I must thank you for wading through my obtuse, soapboxing when it occurs.
Sam said:
Amen to that. Nice to know that civilised and informed discussion is possible in this forum ;o)
Matt:
Wait, Amen-to-good-conversation or Amen-to-having-to-wade-through-my-pontificating?
Again, another great post, and I think we might be getting to the nitty-gritty, though my position hasn't changed yet, I just also still need some refinement of language.
Sam said:
I think that you deny God-talk a place in both arenas, and whilst I'm happy to natter about the former, I think you have something of a case there. (Your point about laws being framed in secular terms was a strong one, which I may come back to; it's basically institutionalising the difference between morality and law? I'm not wholly persuaded, but I don't think it's as important to debate this as the second).
Matt:
Okay, so we can agree that we should keep God-talk out of the Senate, which I take to be the secularization of "political discourse within a Millsian framework."
You might already see where I'm about to go with this, but here it is: this is the only point I want or need. The position on liberalism I have been defending has only demanded this point. To see this, I think we simply need to concentrate on the liberal right to free speech. There is a whole lot of other speech other than talk on the Senate floor. It is the free speech in all of these other areas that can allow sudden Dynamic advances in terminology, or values, or thought. People have mistook me for making
strong demarcations between our different ways of talking, that we can't let them infect each other. But this has it backwards. Of course they might infect each other. And this isn't necessarily bad. My point about infection is that it isn't necessarily _good_ to have them infect each other either. This was my point about the vocabularies of physics and ethics.
Because I insist that Dynamic changes in our vocabulary can permeate throughout our web of beliefs, though perhaps originating from only one strand of it, this is how I can maintain a hardline secularization of political discourse (the lowest common denominator of language we can all agree to use to debate policy) while not worrying about how this discourse is going to change. As long as we have the political institution of free speech and we continue the cultural conversation, and in fact proliferate the
number of conversations occuring, I think cultural change and the goals we want and desire will work themselves out without the gov't stepping in.
In fact, the gov't needs to stay out of the way so that we can deliberate on all these different cultural ideas and beliefs, seeing which ones are of high quality, and then infecting as many people with these high quality beliefs, all behind the gov't's back, so that one day the gov't will be enacting policies on behalf of our new high quality beliefs. What the gov't cannot due is force these beliefs on us. We must decide on them for ourselves, in a condition as much like Habermas' "undistorted communication
in an ideal speech situation" as possible. What liberalism says is that as long as the gov't stays out of the way, and we keep the conversations going, higher and higher quality beliefs will be generated in the only way we know how: in open-ended, continually revised, undistorted cultural deliberation. Because I view political discourse as technocratic, being about getting things done, this is the way we can make sense of Jefferson's separation between church and sta
te.
What a lot of flak I've been getting from people like David and Matt has turned out to be, I think, are lamentations on the _state_ of our current cultural conversations, i.e. they are abomidable. This I can agree with. I can agree that the gov't could do more to encourage better and more cultural conversations. But what the gov't cannot do is get involved in them, and this is the only point I (so far) wanted to debate. And I think we can safely say that we agree on this point (maybe all of us). But you,
Sam, have raised a separate point that might be worth discussing: does all changes in framework have to be by God-talk?
On your side point about morality and law, I think you are right, I don't think its a problem, and I don't think we can move back to the old way of doing things. Here's the short of it: I think the secularization of law effectively kills morality in the political arena. It makes whatever we used to call morality solely an individual, self-perfection type of thing. Both MacIntyre (in most of his corpus) and Jeffrey Stout (in his excellent The Flight from Authority) effectively chart the demise of what we used
to call morality: MacIntyre laments this and urges us to go back (his Thomism) and Stout and Rorty basically say that the bonuses of secularization (with all the attendent negatives) outweigh the bonuses of a full-blooded notion of morality (with all the attendent negatives).
There are other ways in which pragmatists deal with the slippery notion of "morality," but I think this gets at the way in which you were construing it. I think we _are_ deflating morality, I don't think this is a problem because I think the advantages of pluralism outweigh the advantages of morality, and even if we did want to restore the term "virtue" to the way it was used 600 years ago, I don't think we'd be able to do it. History has marched on and the conditions that made it possible have been replaced
by other conditions, conditions I think it near impossible to reverse.
But on to the core of our current discussion: do we need God-talk to assess the Millsian framework?
Sam said:
My point (again): "it is at least _prima facie_ plausible that there will come a time when the Dynamic evolution of [Millsian liberalism] requires a reconsideration of its basic tenets" - in other words, it is at least hypothetically possible that the framework of Millsian liberalism can be improved, or will need to be improved, at some point in the future. Now I don't see how that can be done unless there is some reference made to the quality of the static patterns - or how far they express Quality as such.
Matt:
So, the point on which we agree is that the Millsian framework of liberalism might be changed and improved. I doubt it, you think (hope) so. The genius of the liberal system is that, though I think all of our problems can be solved in the liberal framework, others who don't think so are free to disagree and attempt to come up with a new system. I can think about what I want to think about (feeding people and reading good books) and others can think about what they want to think about (feeding people and
coming up with a replacement for liberalism). And if, after deliberating over the new system outside of the Senate floor and assessing whether it's a high quality endeavor, those of us who never thought liberalism would be replaced (by something better, that is) can joyfully freeload because after all: its about high quality, not about being able to predict the future or not.
Your point is that you don't see how such an improvement over liberalism can be done "unless there is some reference made to the quality of the static patterns." Neither do I, but I don't see why "reference made to the quality of static patterns" is equated to God-talk. If it has something to do with _your_ add-on, "how far [these static patterns] express Quality as such," then I suddenly see why you would call it God-talk and I think it distastefully unpragmatic and have no idea, based on all the pragmatist
arguments I've been rolling out for almost two years, why we need it. Having that add-on, as opposed to simply talking about which static patterns are highest in quality, is exactly what Lyotard means by a metanarraive, as opposed to just a narrative. It means there being something "as such" which stands behind all the other, lesser somethings. Pragmatists (and post-moderns in the limited Lyotardian sense of "incredulity towards metanarratives") think all we need ar
e these lesser somethings, that in fact, there's not even a reason to call them lesser because its narratives all the way down, there being nothing to compare narratives to in the rarified air of philosophy.
Sam said:
To go back to my original request, I want to know how you can express a conversation that allows development to the static patterns of Millsian liberalism without invoking some framework that is larger than the system under discussion. Whether this counts as a 'meta-narrative' in an illegitimate sense we can then perhaps have a debate about, but I don't think it has to. I just think that the ultimate justification for the Millsian framework has to lie outside of itself - it can't haul itself up by its own
bootstraps - because if the basic tenets are up for discussion, then the bootstraps have become the issue.
Matt:
Yes, I do think what you are talking about, if it's a notion of something "as such," is just such a metanarrative. The whole idea of looking for ultimate justification, the fear of a bootstrap problem, is a response to Cartesian Anxiety, trying to put your back up against something hard that won't move, something I think post-Wittgensteinians should give up on. We can try and create things that are broader than political liberalism. That's what Marx did in his hypostatization of History. Does this broader
narrative have to be reified? No. But neither do I think, then, that its really broader in the requisite sense. I think it would simply be a narrative of post-liberalism against which we can compare the narrative of liberalism. All we have is competing narratives. There is no neutral framework sitting behind these narratives with which we can assess them.
The fear of trying to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, and failing, is the fear pragmatists are trying to alleviate us from. Rorty's notion of a final vocabulary is his notion of there being a constellation of words and concepts that, from which, we can spiral out our beliefs. But these words at the "bottom" of our web of beliefs and desires cannot be argued for except in terms of themselves, all argumentation about these "roots" end up being circular and question-begging to anyone else who does not
have those same vocables. It is not that our final vocabulary can never change; it is only that we cannot argue except in terms of them. Old, Platonic-Kantian philosophy, the kind that thinks there is a neutral framework sitting behind all of our current frameworks, thinks that there are only two ways in which to change our beliefs: inference and perception. Perception is the simple bumping into our environment that causes us to believe that a tiger is about to have
us for lunch. The other is what is done internally between our beliefs, as we work out the consequences of those beliefs. Kantian philosophy presumes a neutral framework where if we just keep reasoning about things, working out the consequences and inferences of our beliefs, we will eventually reach the end point, a final framework that is the best.
Pragmatist philosophy, however, doesn't believe that the "space of reasons" is fixed, that if Plato had just been given enough time in a vacuum, he could have worked his way from Socrates to Aquinas to Descartes to Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Derrida to Rorty and beyond. We think that our conceptual space can be enlarged by metaphor. We think you can create _actual_ new beliefs by using a word in a way that is at first completely meaningless, but eventually through consistent use, gains
intelligibility and a language game of its own.
If you have this conception of belief change (perception, inference, _and_ metaphor), then you might end up having a belief in your web that makes no immediate sense, yet you find you want to keep it. Getting it to jive with your other beliefs would then involve inference, playing your beliefs off of each other until you've arrived at a collection of beliefs that you think are better than your old beliefs. It is this playing off of old beliefs on new beliefs that can get your final vocabulary to change. Your
final vocabulary cannot really be erased completely and replaced by something else all at once. It can only really be replaced slowly, one piece at a time. A kind of reformist politics of the soul, what Sellars meant by saying that you can change all of your beliefs, just not all at once.
(I said to Matt earlier that people like Kant and Nietzsche wished for a Total Revolution of the Soul. What pragmatism teaches us is that this isn't going to happen all at once, but the goal of self-perfection, of the strong poet is that, at the end of your life, at the end of a long series of belief reformations, you are not the sum of your contingent parts, the beliefs you inheirited. You are instead a collection of new beliefs that you created, being able to say with Zarathustra "Thus I willed it.")
So, in summary: we agree that God should stay out of the Senate. However, we disagree as to whether liberalism or any other system of belief can justify itself to itself, that it doesn't, in fact, need be justified by something outside of itself. But it is just this urge to ground liberalism in something outside of itself that I criticized as a remnant of Enlightenment philosophy, a piece I think we can now safely jettison. We are always in a language-game. This game can change and it is through change that
new lifeforms are born. But what we can't do is check our current language-game against some other metalanguage-game. We can only try and create new language-games that will replace the old ones.
On John Gray, I've heard of him for some reason, though I can't say why or from where. I think the snippet you've quoted is exactly right, and I agree with the Hobbesian part. It chimes beautifully with Rorty's idea of liberalism as proliferating as many forms of cultural life as possible. However, I do think the dichotomy affects your argument, or at least, I can use it against you ;-) I see the difference between the Kantian, rational consensus tradition and the Hobbesian, peaceful coexistence tradition as
exactly the difference between a combined Enlightenment political and philosophical project and an Enlightenment political project sans philosophy. Your leaning towards Hobbes points to agreement with me, but your expression of a bootstrap problem points to Kantianism. The point on Hobbes I see as just the point we both seem to agree on: a secular political sphere, a separation of church and state. However, from the very beginning you hinted at reservations ("I th
ink you have something of a case there," rather than "You're absolutely right!") and possible change. This is what leads you to say, "there will come a time when 'peaceful co-existence' maintains less Quality than an alternative." However, I don't see how we can move to from Hobbesianism to anything but Kantianism.
I read you here as saying that Hobbes is all we can hope for right now, but Kant is where we want to be. As Hobbesian through and through, I don't see this at all. The Kantian tradition says that consensus is _fated_ to occur. The Hobbesian tradition doesn't think anything is fated to occur. We just might end up all in a consensus at the end of time, within the liberal, Hobbesian system. But we see no reason to say that it was fate that it was so. To want to move to Kant from Hobbes is to desire us
agreeing on more than peaceful coexistence. This I think bad (from a gov't dictating standpoint) and, actually, undesirable. It would be BORING if everybody agreed on everything. There would be no philosophy. Philosophy only occurs when there is cultural change. If it stopped, we'd no longer have to try and get our new beliefs to fit in with our old ones. The only thing the Hobbesian tradition desires commensuration on is the desire for peaceful coexistence. As I said
several posts earlier, above and beyond that, you can choose your own beliefs. The ironist in me says, the more vivid and polychromatic, the better.
One last thing before I forget (I gotta' go, so I can't edit this in earlier). You might ask: so how does God fit into our belief change? If God-talk isn't a useful notion, it denoting a foundation we're never going to find, then what happens to God? This goes back to my assertion from some time ago that mysticism is coextensive with poetry. This assertion went over like a freakin' lead balloon the first time and I haven't been able to develop and make it sound good yet. I take mystics to be like poets,
saying completely odd-ball, crazy things that make no sense, until we latch onto them and start making sense of them. In Jesus' day, the notion of a cosmopolitain community sounded insane, but it was a metaphor that has gradually become intelligible and is the guiding utopia of our time. So, I take mystics to be fonts of metaphors, the same as poets. That mystics believe they are expressing the Will of God or the Ultimate Reality I take to be a belief they can have an
d I don't have to have to still get some use out of their metaphors.
Matt
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