As Henry notes in his response:
[W]hat philosophy on earth might possibly unite these three? The careful reader will at least be able to discern the outlines of an answer to this question when she finishes reading this book. While this answer is not as much an abstract philosophy, as a carefully elaborated set of political and critical judgments, which are both attractive and useful.
It is right here - this very usefulness that is important (how pragmatic of him to use such a turn of phrase . . .)
I think it important, if for no other reason than clarity, to point out that these three, along with Isaiah Berlin, have been formative for my own thinking as well. Adding Berlin should probably only confuse those who might try to understand, so I am going to try and, briefly, explain what I take from these four men, and what I leave behind, as a way of reconciling what seems irreconcilable.
I'll start with Berlin, my addition to the Trinity named by Scialabba. First and foremost, from Berlin I gained an appreciation for lost narratives, specifically those of the early Romanticist thinker Johann Herder and the Italian historian Giambattista Vico. There are many points with which I disagree with Berlin, not the least of them being his reading of Edmund Burke (and I find it ironic that I find Herder, especially, far more "mystical" in his thinking than Burke; here, I believe, Berlin has it exactly backwards). More importantly, I discovered a way of talking about liberalism and pluralism that is honest, vigorous, and above all, modest in its insistence on refusing to surrender to the complaints of those who denounce such thinking as "relativism". One can appreciate the magnificent variety of choices available to human beings for living a fully human life without losing the capacity for critical judgment about the differences among these various ways of living. Precisely in recognizing the historically conditioned nature of human existence, that it might be otherwise than it is, we are free to be critical without dehumanizing those whose lives are utterly different from our own. The freedom from the burden of the high moral ground offered here is immense.
From Lasch, I came to appreciate the power of cultural criticism from the left that, in many ways, is even more fiercely moral and vigorous than anything on the right. While in many ways Lasch became far more reactionary as he got older (Revolt of the Elites, his last, unfinished work, is far less a book "of the left" than, say, The Culture of Narcissism or even The True and Only Heaven), his point of departure was always an attempt to clarify a vision of American society as not so much decadent as it is spent of those values that, at one time, made it not just vigorous and prosperous, but far less hubristic and unsure of itself. While the criticisms of Lasch offered by Rich Yeselson are spot on, they do not rob Lasch of his importance as a social critic. While Lasch's became less afraid to voice a more retrograde point-of-view, at all times his criticism was based in a fierce moral vision of late capitalism robbing American society of values that made it a good place to live; the values it set forth for alternatives, rather than granting opportunities for an even more thoroughly moral life, eviscerate any possibility for a common, and communal, moral life. Indeed, any moral vocabulary becomes impossible with the increasingly totalitarian insistence of capitalism.
I read somewhere once (I wish I could remember all the references in my head) that most leftists go through a "Chomsky" phase; most are fortunate enough to pass through it and leave it behind. I, therefore, feel myself pretty fortunate. From his earliest political writing - American Power and the New Mandarins - through his many and oddly similar works on American foreign policy under the Bush's and Clinton, Chomsky single point of departure is the difference between the publicly stated goals of American foreign policy and the actual content, not to mention results, of those policies. Like many on the left, what I found initially satisfying about Chomsky was finding someone who could write intelligently about American imperial ambitions without apologizing for them. What I found increasingly frustrating about Chomsky in his later work was the obvious frustration and crankiness of his voice. It seems that nearly forty years shouting in the wilderness has rendered him not only less effective as an American Jeremiah, but bitter that he is far too often dismissed as a crank and even (on occasion by mainstream critics who haven't read his work) a conspiracy monger. My own point of departure for both appreciating Chomsky, and limiting that appreciation, is the inaugural essay in a late-70's collection of his entitled Towards A New Cold War. In introductory remarks, and by way of background, Chomsky discusses a policy white paper issued toward the end of WWII that set forth, in some general terms, how American foreign policy should develop over the ensuing decades that would be, for all intents and purposes, dominated by an America unrestrained by foreign powers of near-equal status. What I found in reading Chomsky's precis of this document, and his explication of the ways it determined American policy was how unremarkable it was. Of course a country emerging not only victorious but comparatively unscathed from a major war is going to move forward to exert all sorts of new power to its advantage. Of course the multiple confluences of interest between the ruling class and the monied class in America, at a time of unrivaled American hegemony, is going to produce not only staggering examples of hubris, but all sorts of clear cases of our policy being determined by the interests of that class with the most invested in the on-going success of our hegemonic policies. This fact, filled in with all sorts of historical detail, isn't about conspiracy, but rather, as I say, shared interest, based on an understanding of foreign policy as forwarding American interests abroad, however these are defined.
Finally we come to Richard Rorty. The most important perspective I gained from reading Rorty is humility. By removing philosophy from its throne as judge and jury over such matters as truth, goodness, and beauty, Rorty frees philosophy from the self-imposed burden of being the final voice on matters for which it is ill-equipped. What I get from his is an almost anti-philosophical humility, a sense of the embededdness of philosophy in history, as thought that is historically conditioned, rooted in specific individuals writing in specific times and circumstances, addressing specific issues, rather than - as one of my professors at the Catholic University of America said of Aristotle - someone writing for the ages. While Rorty disdains any kind of moral judgment; while he dismisses religion despite its refusal to disappear as an agent of historical activity; while he is far less hopeful for the prospects of the American project (despite the title of his last collection of essays being Philosophy and Social Hope); despite these misgivings, I was and am quite pleased to have read Rorty because, by dethroning philosophy as the ultimate determinate of human activity, we are freed from the seeming necessity of giving some kind of trans-historical, and largely fictive, explanation as to why, for example, science works so well, or human communities act the way they do. Rather, we can accept that science works so well because it works, for the most part, the way it is supposed to work. Nothing remarkable about that. As a tool, language is imperfect not because there is something we don't understand about language, but because it is nothing more than sounds we make or marks we make, and those sounds and marks mean different things to different people. Nothing unremarkable about that.
In many ways, what unites these four men for me is a sense that the world they are describing is far less occluded than we would otherwise think it is, or perhaps believe it should be. While there is, certainly, an insistence that their perspective allows an entry to understanding that is superior to others, the end result is one that demystifies the world, renders it intelligible on its own terms without recourse to any kind of a priori metanarrative. It also removes human thought and agency from any kind of central role in the universe, as final arbiter of defining, for all time, what it means to be human, to be American, to be a moral agent or community. One need not insist on the singularity of one's vision, or its groundedness in some occult thing called human nature, in order to give voice to one's passionate belief that ours is a world that could be better than it is. We need not dehumanize those whose vision and beliefs are different from ours precisely because their vision, their belief, is no less human than our own. It is just different. We can reject it, even call it out as a source of misery, without losing a sense of the limit of any moral judgment precisely because our perspective is rooted not in timeless values or eternal truths, but our own perspective, our own sense of shared interest and shared values.
Nothing remarkable about any of this.
