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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2015
There are two very different sets of questions that thoughtful intellectuals ask. On the one hand, we ask those questions like whether there is a God, how many gods there are, who or what God is, and where God exists. On the other hand, we ask those questions like whether women are essentially subordinate to men, whether blacks are by nature inferior to whites, and whether the poor are necessarily secondary to the rich. Despite some strong protests from religious fundamentalists, slowly but constantly, as a society, we are becoming more and more used to thinking that universally agreed answers to the first set of questions are unlikely, unnecessary, and perhaps undesirable. For different people may, and indeed should be allowed and even encouraged to, have their own opinions about, and ways of living with their understanding of God. By contrast, despite some persistent dissents by cultural and moral relativists, gradually but steadily, we are becoming more and more convinced that consensus must be sought on the second set of questions. For we cannot imagine a well ordered society that allows people who have conflicting political convictions (those who believe in human equality and those who don't, for example) to freely exercise their respective ideals. In short, despite some resistance that cannot be ignored, with difficulty, we are eventually coming to realize that religious plurality and political solidarity must co-exist. The question is how.
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80. After Philosophy and Science have been subsequently seen as reliable substitutes for religion to be the foundation of a society, Rorty notes, now the American cultural left, influenced by Paul de Man, is proposing literature, understood as ever-renewed understanding or naming, as such a foundation. For just as we were told about fifty years “that life and politics would become better if only we could adopt the attitude and the habits of natural scientist[,] [we] are now being told the same sort of thing about the attitude and habits of the literary critic.” Rorty, Richard, De Man and the American Cultural Left in his 2 Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers 129 (Cambridge U Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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104. This is a confusion also made by some religious communitarians, but in an opposite way. From the view that one's religious conviction is related to the public life, they conclude that religious conviction must be shareable with all.
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107. Rorty answers this question in a comment on an earlier version of this essay by saying that “decisions [are] yet made without a self making them.” The self that Rorty has in mind seems to be a Rawlsian one: a substance with attributes. The self I have in mind in posing the question, however, is a Rortian one: a web of beliefs.
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109. In this sense, Joan C. Williams is right that “if our goals are egalitarian, making progress on race, class, and gender inequalities is necessarily part of our personal projects of self creation.” Williams, Joan C., Rorty, Radicalism, Romanticism: The Politics of the Gaze in Brint, and Weaver, , eds, Pragmatism in Law and Society at 155, 173 (cited in note 18)Google Scholar.
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