[7.2.6] Pragmatism as Liberation from the Primal Father.

 

Rorty illustrates how pragmatism is a culmination of the historical movement away from self-subordination to a “higher authority” by drawing Freud’s work.

 

Freud hypothesized that contemporary monotheism (belief in one and only one God) developed from earlier stages of culture:

 

·         parricide: “the murder of the primal father by the primal band of brothers” (668).

 

·         totemism: some animal (a totem) is selected as a substitute for the father, to be worshipped and protected but also ceremoniously killed and devoured.

 

·         worship of a mother-goddess: results from “humanization” of the totem.

 

·         polytheism (worship of many gods) of different genders.

 

·         patriarchal monotheism: worship of a single, male god: “the murdered father was restored to his rightful role as one who demanded unconditional obedience, although he was now banished from the earth to the sky.” (669)

 

Rorty continues the history sketched by Freud...

 

·         Platonism: depersonalized monotheism:

 

In this depersonalized form, proper respect for a dehumanized father-figure is shown not by obedience to him but by an attempt to become identical with him. We do this by surrendering

everything in us which separates us from him (such as space, time, and the body). We good sons aim at becoming identical, so to speak, with good, kind, loving, generous aspects of father, while

ignoring the violent and willful aspects. Platonism gives us a way of imitating, so to speak, all that was great and good and admirable in our fathers without having to imitate their unpleasant idiosyncrasies. We wish, by purifying ourselves, to become identical with what father would have been like if he had ever managed to behave decently. The Idea of the Good is the idea of Father, stripped of his more terrifying parts and passions.

... [Platonism] looks to pragmatists like an attempt to snuggle up to something so pure and good as to be not really human, while still being enough like a loving parent so that it can be loved with all one’s heart and soul and strength. Plato’s infatuation with mathematics—the paradigm of something neither willful nor arbitrary nor violent, something which embodies anagke [necessity] with no trace of bia [violence]—gave him the model for this being: the bare outline of the father-figure, so to speak, without any distracting detail. (669)

 

 

Rorty goes on to extend his historical analysis to something more general than Platonism, with its commitment to the Form of the Good, etc. ... His next step is to consider the view that knowledge (in the sense of accurate representation of a mind-independent world) is both possible and important:

 

To devote oneself to getting knowledge as opposed to opinion—to grasping unchanging structure as opposed to awareness of mutable and colorful content—one has to believe that one will be cleansed, purified of guilt and shame, by getting closer to something like Truth or Reality. When opponents of pragmatism say that pragmatists do not believe in truth, they are saying that pragmatists do not grasp the need for such closeness, and therefore do not see the need for purification. They are, their metaphysically-inclined opponents suggest, shameless in their willingness to revel in the mutable and impermanent. Like women and children, they seem to have no super-ego, no conscience, no spirit of seriousness. (670)

 

On Rorty’s view, Dewey’s emphasis on improving the human community through social cooperation is the culmination of this movement. It is the ultimate rejection of the idea that we should look for “salvation” in anything other than humanity itself.

 

[Dewey] would have seen the successive de-centerings performed by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself as helpful in forcing us to stop looking outside the human community for salvation,

and making us instead explore the possibilities offered by social cooperation. In particular, I think that he might have seen modern democratic societies as founded on, as it were, fraternity alone—that is to say, fraternity freed from memory of paternal authority. Only pragmatism, he might have remarked, reaps the full advantage of that primal parricide.

                Only in a democratic society which describes itself in pragmatist terms, one can imagine Dewey saying, is the refusal to countenance any authority save that of consensus reached by free inquiry complete. (671)

 

 

The upshot is the following view of morality: we will have succeeded in overcoming theism/realism when we have “come to treat our collective superego, our collective sense of what counts as a moral abomination, as having no authority separate from that of tradition, and when we treat tradition itself as endlessly malleable and revisable by its inheritors.” (671-72)

 

 

 

Stopping point for Wednesday November 30. No new reading for next time—we will have an important review session (please don’t miss class on Friday!!). Your term paper was due on Monday but I will accept late papers without penalty up until noon on Friday December 2.