Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (133 page)

Rorty’s main aim when discussing politics is to argue that a political system does not need a concept of human nature in order to function. Indeed, Rorty says that this development is crucial to the existence of the bourgeois liberal democracies. He makes it clear that he believes the bourgeois liberal democracies to be the best form of government, and here he differs from many other postmodern scholars. He agrees with Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, and other postmodernists that metanarratives are unhelpful and misleading, but he takes this farther, arguing that the very success of the American Constitution, and of
the parliamentary democracies, stems from their tolerance, and that almost by definition this means that metanarratives about human nature have been eschewed. Rorty follows Dewey in arguing that the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, as for example in the loss of religion, has enabled personal liberation to replace it. As a result, history is made up of countless personal narratives rather than one great narrative. This is much the same as saying that the postmodern sensibility is one endpoint of bourgeois liberal democracy.

On this score, Rorty is somewhat at odds with a figure like Clifford Geertz, whom we shall come to shortly. Geertz, an anthropologist, cultural historian, and philosopher, put forward the argument in several books in the 1970s and 1980s that – to simplify for the moment – we can only ever have ‘local knowledge,’ knowledge grounded in space and time, that other cultures and societies need to be understood in their terms rather than ours. While agreeing with Geertz up to a point, Rorty clearly believes that a bourgeois liberal democracy has something other societies don’t, if only because ‘its sense of its own moral worth is founded on its tolerance of diversity…. Among the enemies it diabolizes are the people who attempt to diminish this capacity, the vicious ethnocentrists.’
¹⁷
Rorty emphasises that the very anthropologists, of which Geertz is such a distinguished example, are part of bourgeois liberal democracy,
and that is the point.
Their actions have drawn to ‘our’ attention the existence of certain people who were ‘outside’ before. This is an example, he says, of the principal moral division in a liberal democracy, epitomised by ‘the agents of love’ and ‘the agents of justice.’
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The agents of love include ethnographers, historians, novelists, muckraking journalists, specialists in particularity rather than specialists in universality like theologians or, yes, the old idea of philosophers. In leaving to one side any overriding conception of human nature, liberal democracies have helped the ‘forgetting’ of philosophy as traditionally understood, i.e., as a
system
of thought: ‘The
défaillance
of modernity strikes me as little more than the loss of… faith in our ability to come up with a single set of criteria which everybody in all times and places can accept, invent a single language-game which can somehow take over all the jobs previously done by all the language-games ever played. But the loss of this theoretical goal merely shows that one of the less important sideshows of Western civilisation – metaphysics – is in the process of closing down. This failure to find a single grand commensurating discourse, in which to write a universal translation manual (thereby doing away with the need to constantly learn new languages) does nothing to cast doubt on the possibility (as opposed to the difficulty) of peaceful social progress. In particular, the failure of metaphysics does not hinder us from making a useful distinction between persuasion and force. We can see the pre-literate native as being persuaded rather than forced to become cosmopolitan just insofar as, having learned to play the language-games of Europe, he decides to abandon the ones he played earlier – without being threatened with loss of food, shelter, or
Lebensraum
if he makes the opposite decision.’
¹⁸

Although he doesn’t develop the point, Rorty uses the words
défaillance
and
progress.
One translation
of défaillance
is extinction. Rorty is, therefore, marrying postmodernism to evolutionary theory, and in two ways. He and other philosophers are concerned partly with whether the nature of science, and the knowledge it produces, is in any sense different in kind from other forms of knowledge, whether and to what extent science itself may be regarded as an example of cultural evolution; and partly with whether postmodernism itself is an ‘evolved’ concept.

Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, likes to give his books arresting titles:
Mortal Questions, What Does It All Mean? The View from Nowhere, The Last Word.
Nagel stands out because, in a postmodern world, he considers traditional problems of philosophy. He uses new, clear language, but they
are
the old problems he is considering. He even uses words like
mind
without hesitation.

In
Mortal Questions
(1979) and
The View from Nowhere
(1986) Nagel’s main focus is the objectivity-subjectivity divide, how it relates to the concept of the self, and to consciousness.
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Nagel is one of those philosophers, like Robert Nozick and unlike John Rawls, who takes the world as he find it: ‘I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true: on the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it is false.’
²⁰
Nagel’s view is that there
are
such things as mental states, the most important of which is experience of the world. He doubts whether the physical sciences will ever be able to explain what experience of the world is, or the sense of self, and asks therefore whether we can ever have a concept of ‘reality’ that is anywhere near complete. Aren’t we better off accepting these limitations, and shouldn’t we just get on trying to understand experience and subjectivity in other ways? There is no law that says that philosophy shouldn’t be useful. But Nagel shares with Lyotard, Rorty, and others a fascination with what science has done to us, in the sense of whether the knowledge that science produces is or is not some kind of special knowledge, more ‘objective’ than other kinds. His approach might be termed ‘taking intuition seriously.’ ‘Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality,’
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he writes; and, ‘The difference between mental and physical is far greater than the difference between electrical and mechanical.’
²²
Just as the world of physics, and the way we understand objectivity, was changed by James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein, so, Nagel believes, we may one day have a psychological Maxwell and Einstein who will change our understanding of reality in equally fundamental ways, though at the moment we are nowhere near it. Not only is Nagel dismissive of the kind of objectivity provided by physics, he is also sceptical of the claims of evolutionary theory. Darwinian theory ‘may explain why creatures with vision or reason survive, but it does not explain how vision or reasoning are possible. These require not diachronic [historical] but timeless explanation…. The possibility of minds capable of forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality
is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn’t explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.’
²³

Nagel does not have an alternative explanation to, say, evolutionary theory, but he says he doesn’t need one to cast doubt on the grand claims that are being made for evolution. That is Nagel’s charm and, maybe, his force: he is not afraid to tell us what he doesn’t know, or even that some of his views may be absurd. His aim is to use language, and reason, to think in ways that haven’t been done before. In his view, his intuition (as well as his powers of observation) tell him that the world is a big, complex place. Any one solution is extremely likely to be wrong, and it is intellectually lazy not to explore all possibilities. ‘The capacity to imagine new forms of hidden order, and to understand new conceptions created by others, seems to be innate. Just as matter can be arranged to embody a conscious, thinking organism, so some of these organisms can rearrange themselves to embody more and more thorough and objective mental representations of the world that contains them, and this possibility too must exist in advance.’
²⁴
Nagel describes this view as rational but anti-empiricist.
²⁵
Since agreement is only possible to us through language, Nagel says, echoing Wittgenstein, there may well be things about our world – in fact, there probably are – that we cannot conceive. We are almost certainly limited by our biological capacity in this respect. In time that may change, but this also should change our view of what objectivity and reality are. ‘Realism is most compelling when we are forced to recognise the existence of something which we cannot describe or know fully, because it lies beyond the reach of language, proof, evidence, or empirical understanding.’
²⁶
So for Nagel we may some day be able to conceive what things were like before the Big Bang.
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For Nagel, ethics are just as objective as anything science has to offer, and the subjective experience of the world easily the most fascinating ‘problem,’ which science is nowhere near answering. The objective fact of our subjective lives is a conundrum that we don’t even have the language or the right approach for. Empirical science as we know it is nowhere near an answer. Nagel’s books are difficult, in the sense that one feels he is on the edge of language all the time, questioning our assumptions, throwing up new possibilities, rearranging (as Wittgenstein counselled) the familiar in new and exciting ways. One is reminded of Lionel Trilling’s hope for fiction, that it would/should seek to remain outside any consensus and continually suggest new – and hitherto unimaginable – possibilities. And so Nagel is difficult, but exhilarating.

Clifford Geertz,
at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, shares
very firmly
with other postmodernists like Lyotard the view that the world is ‘a various place’ and that we must confront this uncomfortable truth if we are to have any hope of understanding the ‘conditions’ by which we live. In two books,
The Interpretation of Cultures
(1973) and, even more,
Local Knowledge
(1983), he detailed his view that subjectivity is
the
phenomenon for anthropologists (and others in the human sciences) to tackle.
²⁸
‘The basic unity of mankind,’ according to Geertz, is an empty phrase if we do not take on board that drawing a ‘line between what is natural, universal, and constant in man
and what is conventional, local and variable [is] extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it suggests that to draw such a line is to falsify the human situation, or at least to misrender it seriously.’
²⁹
The hunt for universals began with the Enlightenment, says Geertz, and that aim directed most Western thought, and has been a paradigm of Western science, and the Western notion of ‘truth,’ ever since. Pursuing fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco, Geertz has dedicated his entire career to changing that view, to distinguishing between the
‘thin’
and
‘thick’
interpretations of cultures around the world, where ‘thick’ means to try to understand the signs and symbols and customs of another culture in its own terms, by assuming not, as Lévi-Strauss did, that all human experience across the globe can be reduced to structures, but instead that other cultures are just as ‘deep’ as our own, just as well thought out and rich in meaning, but perhaps ‘strange,’ not easily fitted into our own way of thinking.
³⁰

Geertz’s starting point is palaeontology. It is wrong in his view to assume that the brain of
Homo sapiens
evolved biologically and that cultural evolution followed. Surely, he argues, there would have been a period of overlap. As man developed fire and tools, his brain would have still been evolving – and have evolved to take into account fire and tools. This evolution may well have been slightly different in different parts of the world, so that to talk of one human nature, even biologically speaking, may be misleading. Geertz’s own anthropology therefore involves the meticulous description of certain alien practices among non-Western peoples, where the examples are chosen precisely because they appear strange to ‘us.’ He chooses, for example, a Balinese cockfight (where people gamble with their status in a way literally unthinkable in the West); the way the Balinese give names to people; Renaissance painters in Italy (a sort of historical anthropology, this); and certain aspects of North African law, tribal practices overlaid with Islam.
³¹
In each case his aim is not to show that these processes can be understood as ‘primitive’ versions of customs and practices that exist in the West, but as practices rich in themselves, with no exact counterpart in the West. The Balinese, for example, have five different ways of naming people; some of these are rarely used, but among those that are, are names that convey, all at the same time, the region one is from, the respect one is held in, and one’s relation to certain significant others. In another example, he shows how a Balinese man, whose wife has left him, tries to take (Balinese) law into his own hands, but ends up in a near-psychotic state since his actions cause him to be rejected by his society.
³²
These matters cannot be compared to their Western equivalents, says Geertz, because there
are
no Western equivalents. That is the point.

Cultural resources are, therefore, not so much accessory to thought as ‘ingredient’ to it. For Geertz, an analysis of a Balinese cockfight can be as rich and rewarding about Bali thought and society as, say, an analysis of
King Lear
or
The Waste Land
are about Western thought and society. For him, the old division between sociology and psychology – whereby the sociology of geographically remote societies differed, but the psychology stayed the same – has now broken down.
³³
Geertz’s own summing up of his work is that ‘every people has its own sort of depth.’
³⁴
‘Thinking is a matter of the intentional
manipulation of cultural forms, and outdoor activities like ploughing or peddling are as good examples of it as closet experiences like wishing or regretting,’
³⁵
he writes; and, ‘The hallmark of modern consciousness … is its enormous multiplicity. For our time and forward, the image of a general orientation, perspective,
Weltanschauung,
growing out of humanistic studies (or, for that matter, out of scientific ones) and shaping the direction of culture is a chimera…. Agreement on the foundations of scholarly authority, old books and older manners, has disappeared…. The concept of a “new humanism,” of forging some general “the best that is being thought and said” ideology and working it into the curriculum, [is] not merely implausible but Utopian altogether. Possibly, indeed, a bit worrisome.’
³⁶
Geertz does not see this as a recipe for anarchy; for him, once we accept the ‘depth of the differences’ between peoples and traditions, we can begin to study them and construct a vocabulary in which to publicly formulate them. Life will in future be made up of a variety of vivid vernaculars, rather than ‘forceless generalities.’ This is the way the ‘conversation of mankind’ will continue.
³⁷