BdSpinoza

Hoe Richard Rorty (1931-2007) Spinoza opnam in het postmodernisme

In A Dictionary of Postmodern Terms is te lezen onder 'conversability': "In a recent unpublished paper Rorty hypothesized that the stubbornness shown by Spinoza and Socrates, along with their conversability, might be the reason that we are inclined to see them as wise." [Cf.]

Het paper waarnaar hier verwezen wordt, werd echter al lang geleden gepubliceerd (zie hierna) en, zo ontdekte ik gisteren via de Spinoza-site van Alfredo Lucero-Montaño uit Tijuana in Mexico (die de tekst overnam), werd een uitgebreide summary door Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu op 6 september 2010 op zijn website Mitochondrial Vertigo geplaatst. Kevin (die in het verleden al vaker op dit weblog genoemd werd) had die tekst, die de datum droeg 25 april 2006, en die een samenvatting én gewijzigde versie zou zijn van de rede die Rorty in 1997 op de Spinoza Leerstoel in Amsterdam zou uitspreken, van Rorty zelf gekregen. Deze lezing, getiteld "Is it desirable to love truth?", is samen met de tweede lezing, "Is 'post-modernism' relevant to politics?", uitgegeven onder auspiciën van de (toen) Faculteit Wijsbegeerte Amsterdam als: Richard Rorty, Truth, Politics and 'post-modernism' [Uitgeverij Van Gorcum, 1997 - 52 pp. - books.google]. Kevin voelde zich geroepen de tekst die hij in bezit had gekregen te publiceren - het was er meteen zijn laatste post. Goed dat die tekst daar te lezen is, want books.google laat er niets van zien.

Het is in die lezing dat Rorty Spinoza een beetje zijn kant optrok. Als Spinoza nog relevant voor het moderne denken kan zijn, moet je hem moderniserend lezen, zo lijkt de achterliggende gedachte.

Richard Rorty, de man van de latere 'linguistic turn', had voor zijn doctorsthese diepgaand studie gemaakt van Aristoteles, van de drie 17e eeuwse 'Rationalisten', Descartes, Spinoza en Leibniz, en van de Logisch Empiricisten. Hij neigde in The Concept of Potentiality [Yale University, 1956] naar de laatsten en werd almaar meer de man van filosofie van talen. En hij werd almaar meer pragmatist. We kunnen er uitgebreid over lezen in Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher [ReadHowYouWant.com, 2010 - books.google].

In die lezing, die ik niet uitgebreid ga behandelen, vind ik het opvallendst hoe hij de parallelliteit of liever equivalentie van de attributen leest: als twee talen die elk op geheel eigen wijze (als uitgebreidheid of als denken) de werkelijkheid beschrijven. Rorty leest dat als voorbereiding voor het latere 'alles als taal zien' en van de relativering van 'waarheid', want elke taal heeft z'n eigen waarheid. Hij zegt dan: one can praise Spinoza for his conversability rather than for his desire to transcend finitude [...]"; en verderop "the love of Truth is simply conversability—a tolerant absence of fanaticism, a willingness to hear the other side." ['Conversability' staat voor: geschiktheid te converseren, een conversatie te houden].

Ik haal er nog één citaat uit aan: "The Platonist and Spinozist image of all things coming together in a single vision can be replaced by the image of a maximally free and rich form of human sociability. The unity of mankind, from this perspective, is not a product of human beings’ ability to share a common understanding of a natural order, but rather of their willingness to tolerate, and to try to see the best in, each others’ fantasies."

Goed bedoeld, maar Spinoza zijn er wel de nagels voor uitgetrokken. Interessant en leerzaam is het wel om zo'n tekst te lezen, waarin een geleidelijke transformatie van Spinoza in een favoriete, hier postmoderne, richting plaats heeft.

Ik vind het wel aardig om tot slot de eerste alinea's te citeren van een boekbespreking door Rorty in de London Review of Books van 31 oktober 2002. Het is misschien het laatste wat Rorty over Spinoza schreef:

"‘Spinozist’ used to be what ‘Postmodernist’ is now, the worst thing one intellectual could call another. For reasons explained in Jonathan Israel’s fascinating The Radical Enlightenment, there was, in 1680, a simple litmus test for intellectual and moral responsibility. You failed this test if you believed, as Spinoza did, that motion is intrinsic to matter, for that would imply that God didn’t have to give it a nudge. From there it is a short step to Spinoza’s conclusion that ‘God’s decrees and commandments, and consequently God’s Providence are, in truth, nothing but Nature’s order.’

In those days, if you defended the absurdly counter-intuitive claim that matter could move all by itself, it was clear you could hardly be expected to have any moral scruples or intellectual conscience. You were frivolously dissolving the social glue that held Christendom together. You represented the same sort of danger to moral and intellectual virtue as Arians had posed, in the days of St Augustine, by arguing that although Christ was certainly of a similar substance to the Father, he could hardly be the same substance.

Nietzsche said that ‘we simply lack any organ for knowledge, for “truth”: we “know” (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the interests of the human herd.’ If you cite this sort of passage from Nietzsche (or similar ones in William James or John Dewey) in order to argue that what we call ‘the search for objective truth’ is not a matter of getting your beliefs to correspond better and better to the way things really are, but of attaining intersubjective agreement, or of attempting to cope better with the world round about us, you are likely to find yourself described as a danger to the health of society: philosophers sympathetic to this line of thought now find themselves called Postmodernists, and are viewed with the same hostility as Spinozists were three hundred years ago. If you agree with Dewey that the search for truth is just a particular species of the search for happiness, you will be accused of asserting something so counter-intuitive that only a lack of intellectual responsibility can account for your behaviour.

Most non-philosophers would regard the choice between correspondence-to-reality and pragmatist ways of describing the search for truth as a scholastic quibble of the kind that only a professor of philosophy could be foolish enough to get excited about. A few centuries back, the same sort of people were equally dismissive of controversies concerning the relation between matter and motion. But reading books like Israel’s helps us remember that those who grow passionate on one or the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of truth, we must answer only to our fellow human beings, or also to something non-human, such as the Way Things Really Are In Themselves.

Nietzsche thought the latter notion was a surrogate for God, and that we would be stronger, freer, better human beings if we could bring ourselves to dispense with all such surrogates: to stop wanting to have ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ on our side. Only then, he thought, will humankind ‘be delivered from revenge’. He hoped that his books would help ‘to erect a new image and ideal of the free spirit’. Spinoza might have used the same words to describe his aim in writing the Theological-Political Treatise and the Ethics.

Contemporary philosophers who invoke Nietzsche, James, Dewey, Donald Davidson and Jürgen Habermas in order to strengthen their criticisms of the correspondence theory of truth typically share Nietzsche’s hope. They believe that the institutions and practices their critics see as threatened will in fact be strengthened by adopting pragmatist philosophical views. Analogously, Christians who hid their copies of Spinoza’s writings under their beds, and who were inspired by them to dream of a secularised culture and a politically liberal society, believed that the true message of Christ would be better understood once the distinction between God and Nature had been collapsed. The persecuted Arians thought of themselves as making a last brave stand against irrationalist mystery-mongerers (such as Augustine) and their rigid orthodoxies."

Hierna ging hij over op bespreking van het boek Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy by Bernard Williams. Princeton, 328 pp, £19.95, October 2002, ISBN 0 691 10276 7 [Cf. LRB]

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Foto van zijn Obituary op Stanford  

Ik wijs nog even op de reactie op die bespreking dat Rorty 2x ten onrechte een strijd van Augustinus met de Arianen vermeldde - bedoeld werd wellicht zijn strijd met de Manicheeërs, Donatisten of de Pelagianen

spinoza | 26-02-2014 | 13:34 | Link | Reacties (2)