Professor Richard Rorty is a leading postmodern philosopher. He recently responded to a few of our queries about the central tenets of the Christian faith and postmodern philosophy.
MR: How would you define truth in contrast to the ways we have usually thought about it?RR: I think that it is a mistake to try to define the word "true." We call beliefs true if we think ourselves justified in holding them. Justification is relative to particular audiences and circumstances. There is no such thing as absolute, unchallengeable justification (though, of course, there is such a thing as absolute, unshakable conviction). But since truth is an absolute notion (we don't say "true for you, but not for me" or "true then, but not now"), you cannot define truth in terms of justification. Nor can you define it any other useful way, as far as I can see. If one says, for example, "true beliefs are beliefs that correspond to the way things really are," this is entirely unhelpful, since we have no test for how things really are apart from the test of whether we are justified (by our current lights, given our present circumstances, to certain audiences) in describing them in a certain way. The very absoluteness of truth makes it an indefinable and unanalyzable notion.
MR: You've made some intriguing comments about Christian theologians and churches selling out robust versions of Christianity in exchange for cultural clout. Do you find, as an outsider looking in, that this contributes ironically to its irrelevance?RR: No, I'm delighted that liberal theologians do their best to do what Pio Nono said shouldn't be done-try to accommodate Christianity to modern science, modern culture, and democratic society. If I were a fundamentalist Christian, I'd be appalled by the wishy-washiness of their version of the Christian faith. But since I am a non-believer who is frightened of the barbarity of many fundamentalist Christians (e.g., their homophobia), I welcome theological liberalism. Maybe liberal theologians will eventually produce a version of Christianity so wishy-washy that nobody will be interested in being a Christian any more. If so, something will have been lost, but probably more will have been gained.
MR: What is a neo-pragmatist account of evil and sin?RR: There is none. Evil, as Dewey said, is just a rejected good. The notion of sin is one no pragmatist has any use for, since it suggests that even if we do our honest best we are still in "Dutch" with a superhuman power. Pragmatists typically want to stick to this-worldly choices, and try to ignore the question of other-worldly judgment.
MR: How does such an account take seriously the depth of human malice in, say, modern slavery or the Holocaust? Were the victims really victims?RR: Sure, they were victims. There is a lot of sadism and malice in all of us, waiting to be released when the social bond is loosened. I don't think the presence of such sadism and malice requires any deep explanations, any more than does the presence of kindness and decency. We know what empirical conditions are likely to bring out either, and that is all there is to know about either.
MR: Of course, Christians don’t (or shouldn’t) pretend to know why certain horrible evils befall them and others, but it is at least their hope that a good God will not allow evil to have the last word, given the resurrection of Christ and the future restoration of God s creation in him.RR: The only analogue of redemption people like me can offer is a manmade social utopia, in which social conditions are such that kindness is a lot more frequent than malice.
