Doing philosophy as a way to individuation: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell in search of a new moral education.

摘要

The purpose of this project is to explore a morally responsible and educationally desirable response to the anti-foundationalism of modern culture. Such a response is needed to organize the morally educational aspects of public schooling within the multicultural and democratic context of the United States. I assume that a convincing response must respect a diversity of mutually incompatible moral outlooks without falling into moral relativism. Richard Rorty's “liberal ironism” and Stanley Cavell's “moral perfectionism” are examined as possible responses that satisfy this assumption.; What makes both Rorty and Cavell relevant to my project is their notion of doing philosophy as a way to individuation, that is, philosophy as a cultivation of a personal way of dealing with human finitude. This notion of philosophy is concerned with our facing the problem of the meaninglessness of the world in an intellectually honest way. What distinguishes Cavell's moral perfectionism as the better alternative is that it shows how we can become liberals for moral reasons, not out of moral weakness. I trace this difference between Rorty and Cavell to their different understandings of modern philosophy as epistemology.; Rorty sees the philosophical problem of modern epistemology as arising from an ill-conceived theory of knowledge, the correspondence theory of knowledge. Cavell sees it as originating in our deep desire to understand the position we are in objectively. While Rorty asks us to dismiss the metaphysical desire (manifested in modern philosophers' obsession with the correspondence theory) as a misguided desire to transcend history, Cavell asks us to embrace this desire for our self-understanding. For Cavell, this desire, if properly guided, can be a moral source within us, which will motivate one to take an ethically asymmetrical attitude: as ideal acceptor in one's relation to others and as ideal confessor in one's relation to oneself. I believe that this ethically asymmetrical attitude enables us to be liberals for moral reasons without falling into moral relativism.