Relativism: So What? (Part Three)

[koganbot]

I read an anecdote years ago - think it was from Erik Erikson, probably set in the 1940s. A young man walks into the student rec center, sits down in an armchair, rubs his chin thoughtfully, and says, "Life is strange." A pretty young coed snaps back at him, "Compared to what?"

If "relativism" were the name for a useful attitude rather than a quagmire of inarticulate concerns and projections, that would be the attitude, a way of jogging the intelligence: e.g., when I'm saying something that doesn't seem to be getting across to people, then maybe I need to be precise about what it is that my statement is trying to counter (and by doing so I'll see how to make my idea better); and if other people's words and actions seem inexplicably stupid or strange, maybe I need to ask myself what it is the people are trying to counter or forestall, rather than assuming that they're countering or forestalling what I would be countering and forestalling if I were using their words. I'll point out that this just makes self-conscious what we try to do normally. When we say or do something, we think there's a difference between saying and doing it and not saying or doing it. And when we observe other people we project behind their words and deeds a landscape of reasons and possibilities that sets their behavior off by contrast.

So "relativism" in this sense is the normal state of affairs. There is a line of philosophers who find this state of affairs problematic, but unless I'm dealing with such philosophers I have no reason to assert my "relativism" any more than I need to point out that, like everyone else, I breathe and have a mouth.

So, in order to think that relativism is any kind of a big deal, you have to come up with a different relativism, one that somehow includes this normal relativism but makes it seem threatening or liberating, in any event at odds with the worlds we know rather than a facet of them. You can't do this without making several basic mistakes. You convince yourself that the philosophical ideas that relativism runs counter to are themselves embedded in everyday life, though they're not. You forget that "relative" is itself a relative term. You confuse the meaning of terms; e.g., what I said yesterday: "As a relativist I can say, 'Nothing exists in isolation,' and two minutes later say, 'I grew up in an isolated village,' without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences." So you make the former statement as if it referred to the latter "isolation," to the village's isolation, to the isolation that matters. I don't think it's possible to believe that relativism (or pragmatism or deconstruction) plays a significant role in the world unless you make this sort of mistake.

Future posts will detail the mistakes (so far I've been making assertions rather than arguments). But I'll reiterate that what's at issue here isn't an intellectual mistake, but why smart people make such a mistake. They could just as easily not make the mistake. So what do people gain by making the mistake? The consequences of the mistake don't result from the mistake; rather, the mistake is the result of a desire for such consequences.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Two points stick with me from my previous brain-dump in the comments, since the comment as a whole wasn't totally coherent:

(1) When used as a pejorative, the relativist is the dumbest person in the room. They are said to believe (deeply believe) in ideas like "there are no standards by which anything can be judged," or "there is nothing in the world that I am 'qualified' to judge." It's a shirking of the responsibility to judge something, and not only do very few people practically hold this belief outside of being a dick in the classroom (as piratemoggy brought up at one point) but anyone who DID hold this value would necessarily be worthless in a conversation, and aren't worth attacking. The shirking of judgment isn't just absurd, it's IMPOSSIBLE. We judge constantly -- it's part of our thought processes at the most basic level. This is what makes music criticism an interesting if frustrating place to watch arguments happen, because people judge the shit out of something instinctively and rationalize that judgment after the fact. A court case wouldn't work music criticism-style, going with your gut and trying to rationalize or justify, and with great conviction, AFTER making your decision. Music criticism shouldn't work this way, either.

(2) Most value systems are arbitrary IF by arbitrary we mean "there isn't a universal principle that makes this value system 'work.'" But as you've pointed out so far, there's no reason why we NEED a value system to work universally. If it were a point possible to make, and I'm not sure it is, it'd be a moot point anyway. That I don't think that capital punishment should exist in any circumstance or for any reason does not point to an underlying law, something approaching natural law, maybe, that says it is wrong -- in practice, there is no possible human circumstance I can think of in which it could be justified. Doubt this is at all a radical position, since we make such judgment calls constantly -- the problem is when this becomes a rhetorical rather than practical issue, because rhetorically it isn't very satisfying. It's a bit like saying "I call 'em like I see 'em."

[koganbot]

I think that what I'll be doing for the next few posts, if I ever get a chance to make them (right now I'm dicking around on the U. of Connecticut's eMacs, which are a pain in the ass), is to work out what thoughtful, or at least smart, people get out of the discussion. E.g., Leonard in the comments to my first post thinking it's important that we recognize that our ideas aren't universal, and Hazel thinking that everyone must be at least something of a positivist because people just aren't capable of believeing they're not right. (Typing Leonard's and Hazel's ideas from memory because I don't want to screw with trying to open a new window while on a machine I don't understand.) So those would be two non-idiot's positions.

Which doesn't mean I don't want to figure out what's going on with the stupid/lazy people's attack on relativism, but first I'm interested in how the issue manages to ensnare non-idiots.

[koganbot]

I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with rationalizing a judgment after the fact, (1) if you come up with good reasons for the judgment, or (2) when you fail to come up with good reasons, you question the judgment. Of course, there's a difference between coming up with good reasons after the fact and knowing what caused you to come up with the judgment in the first place - and the latter knowledge is important too, if you care at all about self-awareness. But if you make a judgment for bad reasons or even for reasons that you yourself can't fathom, but then come up with good reasons for the judgment, then those are good reasons for affirming or maintaining the judgment.

By the way, I think that, to the extent that "relativism" stands for intelligible ideas, at least some of the relativistic ideas are correct but that they often function (among their proponents) as ex post facto reasons for supporting multiculturalism and diversity and that they're bad - and unnecessary - reasons for multiculturalism and diversity, which don't need the support of "relativism." So one of the questions I am posing is what is the social and instutional context in which people feel they need the authority of relativism or pragmatism or deconstruction to bolster policies that would be perfectly good on their own without such support.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Are there forms of deconstruction that "bolster policies that would be perfectly good on their own without such support"? My general understanding of deconstruction theory is that its targets are uniformly problematic policies that need to be dismantled (my usual complaint is that I haven't found many people who feel comfortable...y'know, mantling).

You're right, and my articulation of this idea is off -- rationalizing after the fact is usually unavoidable, and of course there are good and bad ways to rationalize. In music criticism, I guess what I'm referring to are the BAD judgments -- if I like X band and give them the benefit of the doubt when I listen to their new album, and want to find things to like (for instance) isn't in and of itself a problem. (It's in part how I listened to Bittersweet World, the flipside of that being my expectations were also inflated.) But the foundation of that assumption ("I've liked X before and would love to like X again") isn't necessarily problematic to begin with. So maybe the visceral reaction is bringing out lots of problematic assumptions that, without the music, would lie dormant; and maybe sometimes visceral reaction is creating problematic positions that, without the music, wouldn't for practical purposes even exist (a forever-dormant assumption may as well be a nonexistent one).

Though maybe this is still a longwinded way of saying "call 'em like you see 'em" (and if you think you can see 'em but can't prove it, maybe you shouldn't be so vocally willing to call 'em) -- and my usual complaint in regard to "metaethical" conversations I've had with friends is that metaethics wants to call things without having to see them.

[koganbot]

Are there forms of deconstruction that "bolster policies that would be perfectly good on their own without such support"? My general understanding of deconstruction theory is that its targets are uniformly problematic policies that need to be dismantled (my usual complaint is that I haven't found many people who feel comfortable...y'know, mantling).

Off the top of my head, I'd say: democracy, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism. Actually, we could say that deconstruction supposedly bolsters the policy of dismantling problematic policies. Of course, what "deconstruction" means is all over the place. I tend to think of it as "whatever Derrida did or whatever is done by people who think they're modeling themselves on what Derrida did." Specifically, I was thinking of an argument that dubdobdee made in support of the idea that Derrida's concept of iterability had democratic implications. I disagreed with his reasoning (actually thought I demolished it, but he seemed to think I was tearing down something that was different from what he meant, and the conversation didn't progress any further) and said that I thought democracy could take care of itself without iterability on its side.

I won't claim ever to have understood anything I've read by Derrida, which isn't that much anyway, but I'm sure Derrida thought of deconstruction as being more than a mere dismantling. There's maybe a family resemblance to the Hegelian aufhebung, which I also don't understand, but which Mark once defined for me as "Think of Cat's Cradle as a theory of knowledge. Someone lifts the string loops off onto their own fingers: their 'theory' destroys yet preserves yours." So there's construction as well as destruction (hence the name "deconstruction"?), and the practice that's being deconstructed itself provides the tools with which you dismantle and construct. Also, Derrida tended to set to work on writers he liked, such as Rousseau and Leví-Strauss.

What I think of as one strategy of deconstruction is to take a practice that believes itself to be self-sufficient and tease out the parts of the practice where it shows itself to be crucially dependent on something that it had considered in its margins or at its limits or external to it altogether. Where I'm skeptical of this "method" having any utility outside of philosophy is that it really works best only on something that's aspiring to 100% absolute self-sufficiency, and you don't get that outside of philosophy or philosophically inclined theology. But I don't really know how much of what I just said is relevant to what's done under the name of "deconstruction." I borrowed byebyepride's Deconstruction and Democracy through interlibrary loan, but it arrived right at the time the ilX-libel crap was happening, and I wasn't able to renew, so I didn't hardly get more than a couple of chapters into it.

[koganbot]

...to take a practice that believes itself to be self-sufficient and tease out the parts of the practice where it shows itself to be crucially dependent on something that it had considered TO BE in its margins or at its limits or external to it altogether.

[koganbot]

democracy, diversity, multiculturalism, feminism = policies that deconstruction might supposedly provide support for (as opposed to being forms of deconstruction themselves, which is what you might have taken me to mean since the way I wrote this was ambiguous)