Although Kimball’s post ranges over much, I will focus on what I take to be one of its central themes: the extent to which we construct or discover the truths of our moral and natural worlds. The persistence of subjectivity, as Pippen calls it, is a defining characteristic of much of current thought. Rorty and Derrida argue that language go all the way down such that the mind and the world are constructed linguistic artifacts. As Kimball notes, this surfeit of subjective hubris can devolve into quarrelsomeness or what he terms criticismism. Today, some philosophers brag about being the hired guns of the argumentation game where they can hire themselves out and critique any point of view…for a fee, of course.
Yet, not all modernists are constructionists (truth makers), some are truth seekers: structuralists, Heidegger, reductive natural scientists, Platonists, and many post-structuralists view human comportment as a mere dependent variable where we are the constructs of deep binary systems, Cartesian linguistics, Natural Law, the laws of nature, discursive power regimes, or events of Being. The Truth is “out there”, so to speak, and our job is to discover it by reason, revelation, scientific method, or any other means at our disposal. .
So, we have two polar contending worldviews: subjectivism where the truth is constructed and objectivism where the truth is discovered. Strong arguments can be marshaled against both sides. The ambit of subjectivism has steadily ceded territory to the onslaught of objectivist (not to mention reductivist) natural, social and, of late, neuro sciences over the years such that it is in near full retreat into its last redoubt: the freedom of the will, the mysterious works of genius which will defy, untill the end of scientific time, all incursions because it is not of the phenomenal world and thus not subject to the Scylla of Necessity and Causation.
And on the other pole, there is the Charybdis of objective truth which somehow must overcome the subjectivist arguments that our knowledge of the truth is mediated by language and its discursive formations and is further limited by the emerging views that our claims about the moral and natural universes are also mediated by emotively charged neural images, per Damasio and others, which further weakens the quest for the unmediated and pure real that “resides behind” the phenomenal. Perhaps, in this mess we are reduced along with Heidegger to a quietism that enjoys the event of being eventing itself or that revels in the emanations from the Archon.
In an ascent that extends, in part, from Vico, to Schelling, through Heidegger and Kolakowski up to present day poetasters, what we may be witnessing here is the Abendland, the evening time, of both the absolute subjective and objective points of view. As a way station, we may want to consider a solution along the lines proposed by Gadamer, where there is truth but it resides in a tradition that fuses with the prejudices of an interpreting subject into a horizon of a new interpretation that, as in Kierkegaard, is a never ending process. Truth in this approach is understood as a hermeneutic of a tradition. In current day “analytic” philosophy it is similar to epistemic contextualism that “defeats” skepticism by reducing the scope of truth claims to defensible positions or to what I am calling here interpretations within a tradition.
Tradition here embraces all those factors that objectivists point to when they claim that there is no Man, no Humanism, just the ineluctable march of natural, biological and cultural law. And tradition likewise can be seen to include those subjective factors in which, through a process of reproducing a tradition, we appropriate it and reproduce it albeit imperfectly. In short, the appropriation of a tradition is admixed with the prejudices we bring to and it produces an inerasable remainder that some will call the divine spark of freedom, that je ne sais qua, the new, the different, the never before seen or heard that seems to come from an inner darkness of creativity.
To arrive at this rapprochement between these two traditions requires that both eschew reifying their truth claims into Truth claims, since, in both cases, neither side can and never will marshal arguments or evidence that will apodictically prove their cases. These claims are kin to Adorno’s determinate negations in that they are, upon examination, ideological formations because the linguistic assertions are but shorthand for a much thicker experience. In a reversal of Kantian fate, this approach denies universal and necessary knowledge to make room for the faith of our beliefs. We are faith-based beings seeking understanding. It is a fideism due to the Humean fallibility of all phenomenal inference and the intractable problems associated with making numenal assertions (e.g., the existence of free will) in a phenomenal world.
Some may say that this is no reasonable compromise but a phyrric victory of (a false) skepticism because it sacrifices Truth to mere truth. But I argue that as one approaches the abyss of one’s cherished foundations, be they subjectivist or objectivist, one peers, as Gilgamesh did, into an abyss whose secret darkness is heard in the rustlings of the poetess. In this dark night of unknowingness one hears her repeat Schelling’s surmise, “poetry is the organon of philosophy”.
