Richard Rorty
Esta
es una versión abreviada y revisada, en 2006, de la primera de dos conferencias
sobre Spinoza que Richard Rorty dictara en la Universidad de Ámsterdam en 1997.
La versión completa se publicó bajo el título ‘Is it desirable
to love truth?’ junto con la segunda
conferencia ‘Is ‘post-modernism’ relevant to politics?’ en Truth, politics and ‘post-modernism’ (Ámsterdam, 1997).
If one thinks of philosophy
as the love of wisdom, of wisdom as the grasp of truth, and of truth as the
accurate representation of an order that exists independently of human language
and human history, then may well doubt whether philosophy is possible.
Important twentieth-century intellectual movements
have denied the existence of such an order. I shall use the term “pragmatism”
to characterize this denial, because the alternative—“post-modernism”—has been
damaged by profligate overuse.
The quarrel between the pragmatists
and their predecessors that has emerged over the last hundred years is
something new. It gradually took shape as a result of attempts to resolve an
older quarrel—the one that Plato said was between the gods and the giants (that
is, between philosophers like Plato himself and materialists like Democritus).
That quarrel was about what the natural order is like, not about whether there
is such a thing. In what follows, I shall argue that Spinoza’s attempt to
overcome Cartesian dualism is the
beginning of a train of thought that eventually leads to pragmatism, and thus
to the replacement of the old quarrel by a new one.
Plato believed that grasping the
natural order of things can bring about blessedness—a kind of happiness of
which the animals are incapable, and which results from the realization that
something central to human beings is also central to the universe. Blessedness, in
this sense, consists in the realization that the intrinsic nature of the
universe is on our side.
The materialists also believe that
wisdom consists in the grasping of the natural order of things, but they think
that no comfort can be derived from contemplating this order. We can derive
practical, utilitarian profit from grasping the natural order, but we cannot
find consolation in doing so. Mechanistic materialism’s picture of the universe gives us only the sort
of cold intellectual satisfaction experienced by Euclid—the kind produced by
having successfully brought order to a confusing variety of apparently
unrelated items. It cannot produce a sense of harmony between human aspirations
and non-human things.
This quarrel was renewed in early modern philosophy when mechanistic accounts of the
natural order triumphed over Aristotelian hylomorphic and teleological
accounts. In this period, it is exemplified by the opposition between Hobbes
and Spinoza. Both men tried to come to terms with an account of the natural
order which seems to leaves no place for the kind of happiness that Plato
believed human beings might come to have.
Hobbes’s solution was that human
beings must use artifice to do what nature cannot do: they must construct a
second, political, order, in order to become less fearful and less miserable.
Politics, rather than philosophical contemplation, is our only recourse. But
Spinoza thought that the new, mechanistic, account of the natural order could
be reconciled with Plato’s ambition—the attainment of blessedness through
increased knowledge.
