Anti-Climacus

A NOTE ON RICHARD RORTY: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity baffles me, especially its fixation on being a good, 20th-century liberal citizen. The strength of his objection to universality appears to be that he thinks it's finally untenable as a philosophical position (where the force of the objection is how the argument seems to him). One need not be a believer to reject that--any liberal cosmopolitan has to do the same. To the extent that he describes the worries of a liberal who is trying to create a useful vocabulary for morality--well, that's not me. And insofar as he tries to describe the position of a believer (especially a Christian), what he calls the 'metaphysician,' he conflates the Platonic, the Kantian and the Christian. That's fine for his historical description, but it seems as though "no, I think that's wrong" does most of the work in resisting him.

I also, incidentally, think that Christianity (in the New Testament, at the very least) recognizes that redescription is a method that will be deployed against it, and the consistent answer it gives is that the moral status of actions in no way depends on what we think of them (and we have reason to believe our descriptions of our own actions will be self-deluding, at least sometimes).

And this passage:

"Ironists read literary critics, and take them as moral advisers, simply because such critics have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They read more books and are thus in a better position to not get trapped within the vocabulary of a single book." (80-81)

reminds me very much of this:

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?
Tom Townsend: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.

...a position Metropolitan wants us to regard as faintly ridiculous.