Rorty, Liberal Democracy, and Religious Certainty

Neil Gascoigne

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030254544
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This book asks whether there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates, and if there are, by whom they are to be identified. Its starting point is the work of Richard Rorty, whose pragmatic pluralism leads him to argue for a politically motivated anticlericalism rather than an epistemologically driven atheism. Rather than defend Rorty's position directly, Gascoigne argues for an epistemological stance he calls 'Pragmatist Fideism'.

The starting point for this exercise in what Rorty calls 'Cultural Politics' is an acknowledgement that one must appeal to both secularists and those with religious commitments. In recent years 'reformed' epistemologists have aimed to establish a parity of epistemic esteem between religious and perceptual beliefs by exploiting an analogy in respect of their mutual vulnerability to sceptical challenges. Through an examination of this analogy, and in light of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, this book argues that understood correctly the 'parity' argument in fact lends epistemological support to the argument that religious considerations should not be raised in public debate. The political price paid—paying the price of politics—is worth it: the religious thinker is provided with a good reason for maintaining that their practices and beliefs are not undermined by other forms of religious life.

© The Author(s) 2019

Neil GascoigneRorty, Liberal Democracy, and Religious Certaintyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25454-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Pragmatist Fideism as Cultural Politics

Neil Gascoigne¹

(1)

Department of Philosophy, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, UK

Neil Gascoigne

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter introduces the problem of whether religious beliefs should be acknowledged as potentially rational contributions to discussions of public concern and proposes that to be a useful intervention in this debate any philosophical contribution must satisfy two considerations: (i) be neutral respecting the cognitive status of religious commitments, and (ii) address what is introduced as the Diversity and Exclusivism Dilemma. The concept of “Pragmatist Fideism” is submitted as the name for this proposed intervention and its meaning explained.

Keywords

IdentityDemocracy Diversity and Exclusivism Dilemma PluralismPragmatist FideismScepticism

End Abstract

1 Religion, Identity and Truth

One of the many problems confronting modern democracies is how to respond to shifting patterns of religious association in political decision-making. If religious convictions ¹ are understood by those who hold them not as strictly “private” affairs but as claims made as to how things really are and how as a result one should act, their expression in fora can’t be dismissed as irrelevant or vulgar interjections. One question this provokes is pressing enough: are there any limits to the sorts of religious considerations that can be raised in public debates? Specifically, in light of the diversity of oftentimes incompatible commitments, how—and by whom—are those limits to be identified? This short book aims to answer that question by arguing for a position it calls Pragmatist Fideism (PF).

Emphasising at the outset the importance of the “by whom” aspect of the question is an acknowledgement that to constitute a contribution to the political issue the standpoint from which it is addressed must appeal alike to the secular and the religious. This studied neutrality requires at the very least that we reject orthodox theological and atheist perspectives, and for much the same reasons: the shared dogmatic assumption that one way of describing (at least some stretch of) reality has precedence (cognitively or revelationally) over others. In the case of theology that discourse converges around the commitments and practices that constitute the exclusive content of the favoured religion. For the more combative forms of “new” atheism it appears in the form of a methodological austerity that judges human practices by an epistemic standard imputed to the natural sciences. On the one hand, delineating the distinction between the secular and the religious by promoting a dualism of the cognitively respectable and disreputable strikes those with religious convictions as patronizing and question-begging. It also threatens to denude even the secular by aggregating under the “disreputable” banner values and practices we take to be central to human life. On the other hand, attempts to draw a line between the authentically revealed and the culturally contingent strike those with different convictions as arbitrary and imperialistic. And while the very diversity of religious belief (broadly construed) is evidence enough to atheists that such discourses lack objectivity, the latitudinarian impulse to find some “universal” core to religious practices threatens to deprive them of the very content and texture that gives shape to the lives of countless millions.

Before outlining how PF aims to satisfy this requirement for neutrality it should be observed that as presented our problem looks like but one manifestation of what is today a more familiar concern. To give it a label call it the challenge of identity : how to locate the particular and diverse affiliations that (in part) constitute the meaning and significance of the lives of individuals within the framework of commitments required to pursue shared political ends. For some commentators identity is the defining problem of our political age. Francis Fukuyama, for example, contends that the indictment of the liberal consensus implied by the resurgence of political and religious fundamentalisms (nationalisms; populisms; ISIS; Trump; Brexit et al.) is intelligible only in terms of a “master concept”; namely, the ‘demand for recognition of one’s identity’ (2018, p. 11). For Fukuyama, then, our opening question is itself symptomatic of the failure of liberal democracies to address fully ‘the problem of thymos’ (2018, p. 9); specifically, of isothymia, the perhaps insatiable desire ‘to be recognized as the equal of other people’ (1992, p. 182) that expresses itself as a need to make the particular identifications that constitute religious and other identities.

Of course, one can view identity as a challenge without seeing it as essentially problematical. When Anthony Appiah claims that ‘There’s no dispensing with identities’ (2018, p. 8) it is not because we are perhaps fated never to subsume the partial forms of recognition that underpin identity politics under ‘universal recognition’ (Fukuyama 2018, p. 12). But even a champion of cosmopolitan pluralism like Appiah discerns in the identities that unite a destructively contrary impulse to ‘divide us and set us against one another’ (2018, p. 8). For Appiah, however, the issue is not with the identities per se but rests rather with the assumption that the similarities they impute to classes of people are grounded in essential as opposed to merely nominal differences. To be an essentialist about identity is—to paraphrase the title of his book—to be bound by lies. Liberated from a bad metaphysics, a pluralist conception allows divers identities to take their place amongst the goods of a liberal democratic society.

Unsurprisingly, religion (or creed) is amongst the five modalities of identify-formation that Appiah recognises (the others being nation, race, class, and “culture”). And religion has, for Appiah, its characteristic essentialising lie; namely, that it is ‘in the first instance, a matter of belief’ (p. 31). It’s not immediately evident what Appiah means by this as he scants somewhat the detail. He does not, for example, deny that religion includes belief: ‘Sure, there is a body of belief’ (p. 30). So what that “in the first instance” connotes is a purported failure to see that in the case of religious discourse ‘belief, practice, and community… each interpenetrates the other’ (p. 40). Now, on the face of it this characterisation of the epistemological scene does little to distinguish the religious from any other stretch of discourse; indeed, philosophers of science laboured for much of the latter part of the twentieth century to disabuse us of the notion that, as Appiah says of the “Thirteen Principles of Judaism”, so with the tenets of physics: ‘These abstract beliefs mean very little if you lack a direct relationship to traditions of practice [and] conventions of interpretation’ (p. 31). The “lie” that binds those with religious commitments doesn’t come into focus from this general philosophical standpoint.

Although Appiah doesn’t make it explicit, then, the “lie” to which someone who has a religious identity is prone is that their creed enshrines true beliefs. Discourses trading in true beliefs are presumably those that are, in the first instance, a matter of belief; and these stand in contrast with the sort of second-order, “constructed” facts that involve the “interpenetration” of social factors. That Appiah requires this contrast is unsurprising. If identities are to be sufficiently grounded to be of motivational significance and yet coexist on equal terms with what, from the “essentialising” perspective, would be seen as rival claims to truth they need to refer to a different sort of—non-objective; pluralistic—“reality”. But while this may yet prove a productive way to think about identities that have been shaped and supported by genuinely falsifiable (that is to say, empirical) claims relating to race, nationality and gender it is far less fruitfully applied to those who view their convictions as addressing a higher, rather than a less fulsome, reality. Whether identities are seen—with Appiah—as goods, or—with Fukuyama—as ills, regarding religious commitments as one species of the genus they discern is unlikely to meet the neutrality requirement, ² especially if it presupposes a distinction between a social reality and the really real.

2 Towards Pragmatist Fideism

Returning to the original formulation of our question, it is in response to the neutrality requirement that pragmatism comes in. In part it reflects the fact that the starting point for the development of PF is a number of articles on the role of religion in public life by the American philosopher Richard Rorty. There has been considerable interest in Rorty’s later, less “analytic”, works in particular in recent years and a similar expansion in the number of people interested in pragmatism. For pragmatists of Rorty’s stamp, for whom norms are shaped around social practices and not dictated by a world erroneously thought to be available “in itself”, ³ th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Pragmatist Fideism as Cultural Politics
• 2. Rorty, Religion, and the Public Square
• 3. Presumptions of Innocence
• 4. Living Certainties
• 5. Pragmatist Fideism and Epistemological Peace
• Back Matter