Solidarity, critique and techno-science: Evaluating Rorty’s pragmatism, Freire’s critical pedagogy and Vattimo’s philosophical hermeneutics

Rorty on contingency and solidarity

With the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1979, Rorty famously and controversially broke with analytic philosophy and the concern in modern philosophy with epistemology. Rorty rejected the attempt to explain how beliefs or statements could ‘mirror’ reality. He then went on, equally controversially, to also reject much of ‘continental philosophy’, especially its development in the broader humanities (see Rorty, 1999, ‘Introduction. Relativism: Finding and Making’), for a discussion of how his critiques were received). Much work in the humanities after the ‘theory turn’, which drew heavily on continental philosophy, was devoted to radical criticism. For Rorty (1991a, 1991b, 1998a, 1999), Foucault and Derrida founded new paradigms that made important points about the problematic nature of treating modernity as an exemplar of human progress based on rationality. However, their followers practiced formulaic versions of post-structuralism, turning critique into a form of ‘methodidolatry’ that created uninsightful ‘deconstructions’ (Rorty, 1998a, 1999). Their followers engaged in activities analogous to Kuhnian ‘normal science’ puzzle-solving, creating explanations that re-confirmed the commitment to the paradigm. Influenced by, amongst others, Dewey, Rorty sought to create a revolutionary paradigm-shift by turning to pragmatism, to argue for reforms in place of radical criticism.

Dewey (1927) wanted to move from the ‘great society’ to the ‘great community’, with democracy becoming an ‘ethical way of life’. This meant that democracy should not be a matter of voting based on self-interest, within a technically and economically efficient society that created great inequalities and had significant political apathy. Instead, it should be a matter of continual active engagement, with people discussing social and political matters as important in themselves and as a means to create a ‘public’ that held political and economic elites to account.

Like Dewey, Rorty is concerned with philosophy being able to improve human life. For Rorty, the pursuit of pure philosophical problems, such as defining truth in terms of beliefs or statements representing reality, entails the attempt to solve a pseudo-problem (1979, 1991b, 1998a). Not only has there been no solution found for two and a half thousand years to the problem of defining truth but, for Rorty, following the later Wittgenstein, such purely philosophical problems arise when ‘language goes on holiday’. Such problems are pseudo-problems that arise when philosophers detach words from their meaning in the prevailing socio-historically contingent language-game, or cultural context, by assuming a privileged position that transcends their socio-historical location. He does not follow Wittgenstein’s view that the task of philosophy is to just be ‘therapeutic’, by removing such misuses of language. The task is also, following Kuhn, to create new ways of seeing the world, which can then be used to develop new reformist ‘rules’ and ways of ‘going on’ within a language-game (Calder, 2006, Rorty, 1979, 1999).

For Rorty (1991b), we should seek ‘toeholds’ instead of ‘skyhooks’. Seeking a skyhook to transcend one’s socio-cultural location to legislate on the truth about politics entails the use of metaphysics to justify or criticise a socio-political order. Plato’s argument for the rule of philosopher kings based on their privileged access to the Forms was a classical example of a metaphysical legislative position. In modern times, Hegel argued that liberalism was justified because it was the culmination of the development of ‘spirit’, or reason in history: liberalism was the telos of history. While Hegel, unlike Plato, did not argue for an authoritarian outcome, his position still entailed totalising metaphysical closure, because selfhood would not be seen in terms of its location in a socio-historically contingent language-game, but as part of a teleological historical process necessitating modern liberalism.

As regards basing critique on metaphysical legislation, Rorty (1998a) rejects Marxist ideology-critique and post-structuralist scepticism. Marxists engaged in ideology-critique to remove ideological distortions and thus unmask the domain of hitherto occluded ultimate reality in the form of the intrinsically exploitative nature of class relations, to assist the arrival of the communist telos. Post-structuralists appealed to ‘discourse’, which was treated as a causal force shaping individuals’ actions, unknown to those individuals, but known to the analyst-critic, who could expose all knowledge-claims as emanating from an underlying power-knowledge nexus. The upshot of this was to unmask a domain of ultimate reality so as to encourage a sceptical approach to all knowledge claims. Whereas Marxist ideology-critique, in the past, entailed an intellectual-political elite assuming control of a state in the name of a science of history, the problem with post-structuralist critique, for Rorty, is that it encouraged a mix of presumed intellectual privilege and disengagement from substantive social and political problems such as poverty. A ‘cultural left’ developed, drawing heavily on post-structuralism, to reject the discourses at work in liberal society but with no engagement with the practicalities of the reforms sought. This helped the rightward movement of politics that occurred with the rise of neoliberalism (Rorty, 1998a, 1998b, 1999).

Rorty’s (1992) post-metaphysical justification of liberal democracy argues that it avoids the worst type of harm possible and encouraged human flourishing. The worst type of harm possible is that of ‘humiliation’, which means having an identity imposed upon one. Theocratic, fascist and communist states are taken to commit this form of harm. This is the worst form of harm for Rorty because selfhood is contingent upon its location in a particular socio-historical context and open to creative reworking. Therefore, to have an identity imposed by the state in the name of its possession of the truth, is to have what it is to be a properly human flourishing being, negated. By contrast, liberal democratic societies allow the freedom for what Rorty (1991b, 1992) terms ‘ironists’ or ‘poets’ to flourish. These are people who recognise the contingent nature of their ‘final vocabulary’, meaning their most fundamental beliefs and values, and who thus avoid any attempt dogmatically to impose their beliefs on others, seeking instead creative reworkings of their contingent selfhood. They seek to see the world in new ways, reworking the rules of the language-game.

Rorty (1979, 1992, 1998b, 1999) sees social and political progress as based on increasing solidarity. This requires that two criteria are met. First, there has to be the recognition of contingency, to remove metaphysical legislation and the risk of humiliating others or the withdrawal into totalising critique detached from substantive problems. Second, the important potential of the humanities, especially literature, to make people critical of the prevailing ‘socially acceptable sadisms’ and to promote new ‘rules’ within the liberal language-game has to be recognised (Rorty, 1999). These new rules would make the concern with improving how we live together as important as the technical-scientific manipulation of the world. Solidarity would motivate the public to seek toeholds by engaging in substantive problems, such as reducing poverty.

There are three problems with Rorty’s work to discuss here. First, Rorty seeks a transcendent/skyhook position to hold, implicitly, that the truth about reality is that it is contingent and this entails metaphysical legislation on the nature of reality. A perspectival view would be that what people can know about reality is contingent on them selecting or making one interpretation amongst other possible interpretations and that some of these interpretations seek to define reality in terms of contingency and others in terms of necessity. This though is different from just defining reality in terms of contingency. Rorty (1998b) then uses the metaphysic of contingency to legislate that only ‘campaigns’ focused on discrete problems, or toeholds, are legitimate, because ‘movements’ seeking broader radical social and political change would be based on metaphysical legislation by an elite claiming to have a skyhook.

Second, the harm of humiliation can arise with contingency. We can distinguish between a positive and a negative form of contingency. A positive contingency arises when the recognition of contingency entails a sense of solidarity and dialogic political change that eschews monologic authority claims, with no recourse to metaphysics. A negative contingency would entail people reacting to monologic authority claims that required them to adapt to changing demands. An example is provided by the neoliberal state which seeks to ‘nudge’ people continually to adapt to ‘objective’ market forces by consuming the right ‘human capital’ to be employed, as market contingencies change (Davies, 2014). Such adaptation entails humiliation, because the state seeks to impose the identity of the homo economicus self-interested agent upon people and preclude other interpretations of selfhood, such as the ironist seeking democratic solidarity with others (Brown, 2015). Humiliation stems from having an identity imposed by a monologic authority. That authority may engage in legislation based on totalising metaphysics or on a metaphysics of contingency that selfhood has to adapt to.

Third, while Rorty is correct to emphasise the importance of the humanities, he only focused on what is termed here as the content and not the form of education. Freire discusses the dialogic form of education and how this can lead people to avoid accepting monologic authority claims emanating from negative contingency under capitalism, or metaphysical legislation by a Leninist vanguard party claiming to have a science of history.

Freire on authority and critique

Freire (1970) sought to develop a radical education to bring about socialism. He argues that a party can help facilitate radical political change but it cannot act as a metaphysical legislator. For Freire, someone is not liberated by passively accepting the authority of another, but is liberated by recognising that their nature is one of ‘becoming’. In Rortian terms, a liberated person is someone who avoids humiliation, by deciding on their political final vocabulary, and who seeks solidarity with others, albeit to develop a movement for radical change rather than a campaign seeking toeholds.

Freire argues that an hierarchical approach to education, which he termed the ‘banking approach’, entails an authority figure ‘depositing’ facts into learners, with this creating a passive acceptance of authority and the view that reality was constituted by fragmented facts, with one’s task being to adapt to these facts. In contrast, his ‘critical pedagogy’ approach stresses the need for education to be a critical-dialogic process, between the teacher and the learners, so that authority was never unquestioned and learners saw themselves as active facilitators of their own learning alongside the teacher. We need to move from a negative contingency and the humiliation of being defined by a monologic authority source as an adapter to the changing demands of capitalism, to a positive contingency, with dialogic solidarity entailing radical critique.

Freire (1970) argues that critical thought has to move from the part to the whole and back again, so that ‘coded situations’ can become ‘decoded’. Critical pedagogy is meant to enable people to decode the previously hidden nature of capitalism’s intrinsically exploitative essence. Freire sees the point of critical education as transforming the working class from an uncritical class-in-itself to a class-conscious ‘class-for-itself’ engaging in critique to facilitate the transition from capitalism to socialism by a mass movement. However, Freire combines a metaphysic of contingency, stemming from his definition of selfhood as becoming, with the view that contingent selves in dialogue will all arrive at the same metaphysical decoding of a domain of ultimate reality. This is analogous to Rousseau’s (1762) argument that the majority forcing an individual to obey the General Will are forcing the individual to be free. While Freire is correct to emphasise the importance of the form of education, and seeking radical change from a movement based on solidarity between ordinary people, in place of being led by a vanguard party, we can say that Being, which Freire terms ‘becoming’, and Rorty terms the contingency of selfhood (embodied by ironists and poets), needs to be detached from metaphysics (including a metaphysics of contingency). Vattimo seeks to develop a post-metaphysical radical critique, based on arguing that contemporary techno-science can liberate our Being from systems of metaphysical closure that entail the violence of humiliation and which are used to support unjust economic inequality in capitalism.

Vattimo on ontology, techno-science and critique

Vattimo’s philosophical hermeneutics does not reject philosophical problems but foregrounds the importance of the philosophical problem concerning how we interpret Being. As Zabala puts it, the ‘real task’ of both Ancient and Modern philosophy ‘has been to raise the question of the meaning of Being’ (2009, p. 1).

Vattimo initially argued that a progressive left politics should abandon the goal of increasing equality and focus instead on decreasing violence, because the former was seen to be based on a metaphysical appeal to a fixed human essence that is being harmed (2004, p. 98). Vattimo does not talk of ‘humiliation’, but implicit in his work is the agreement with Rorty that metaphysics is intrinsically violent because it ultimately entails an elite forcing people to adapt to an identity imposed upon them. Metaphysical positions detached from overtly political issues still have political implications because, as discussed below, they serve to undermine the notion that reality is understood via interpretations, which can be radically changed. Hermeneutics can help reduce such violence by developing the recognition that we can understand ourselves—our Being—and that of others without recourse to metaphysics and so it can undermine appeals to metaphysical positions for any form of legislation seeking closure on Being.

The undermining of metaphysics, for Vattimo, arises from what Nietzsche termed the ‘death of God’, meaning the decline in people believing in religion and a metaphysical omnipotent legislator, along with developments in techno-science and modern consumerism. D’Isanto argues that for Nietzsche the death of God could result in either a ‘reactive nihilism’ of pessimism and resentment, or an ‘active nihilism’ which celebrates the freedom for self-creation (1999, p. 3). D’Isanto (1999, p. 3) argues that Vattimo developed Nietzsche’s active nihilism and linked it to his reading of Heidegger.

For Heidegger, ‘the last phase of metaphysics […] assumes the guise of technology [and entails] the effective rationalization of the world through the reduction of all beings to a system of causes and effects controlled by man [sic]’ (Vattimo, 2004, p. 13). However:

both Heidegger and Adorno never escaped from a vision of technology dominated by the model of the motor and mechanical energy, so for them modern technology could do nothing except bring about a society subordinated to a central power dispatching commands to a purely passive periphery, whether these commands were mechanical impulses, political propaganda, or commercial advertising (Vattimo, 2004, pp. 14-15).

Pace Heidegger, metaphysics is overcome when techno-science transits from the mechanical to contemporary information and communications technology (Vattimo, 2004, p. 15, 1992, p. 8). Vattimo argues that:

What could freedom of information, or even the existence of more than one radio or TV channel, mean in a world where the norm is the exact reproduction of reality, perfect objectivity, the complete identity of map and territory? In actual fact, the increase in possible information on the myriad forms of reality makes it increasingly difficult to conceive of a single reality. […Emancipation can now be] based on oscillation, plurality and, ultimately, on the erosion of the very principle of reality’ (1992, pp. 6–7).

Communications technology results in a ‘Babel-like’ pluralism stemming from the ‘weakening’ of the principle of reality (Vattimo, 1992, 2002, p. 15, p. 80, 2004, p.15, 2012, p. 77). Vattimo also argues that consumerism helped create a recognition of pluralism due to ‘a curiosity about alternative worlds and the tendency towards fantasy, and therefore an intense desire of novelty’ (2002, p. 76).

Following Heidegger, Vattimo distinguished Being from metaphysics, arguing that:

Being is not an object, it is the aperture within which alone man [sic] and the world, subject and object, can enter into relationship. Since the aperture does not confer stability on the object (which arises only within specific apertures), Being should be thought of as ‘Event’: Being ‘is’ not, properly speaking, but rather ‘comes about’, happens (2004, p. 6).

Hermeneutics is the recognition of the event and so is an event itself. Hermeneutics overcomes what Heidegger referred to as ‘the forgetting of Being’ by recognising the ‘thrownness’ of Being, that is, its socio-historical contingency (Vattimo, 1997). Hermeneutics avoids metaphysical legislation on the ultimate nature of reality, because it is an interpretation that arises from an event and thus does not seek to posit an ‘objective’ description. Vattimo’s philosophical hermeneutics addresses a philosophical problem by recognising that the answer entails a contingent interpretation of our Being, rather than any attempt to transcend our socio-historically contingent location to arrive at an ‘objective’ answer.

Rather than just argue against the violence of metaphysics, Vattimo and Zabala (2014) turn to the problem of unjust economic inequality. Instead of seeing metaphysics as causing oppression through the violence of humiliation, it is now argued that ‘the need for dominion often results in metaphysical thought. Metaphysics is an aspect and consequence of dominion, not its cause’ (Vattimo & Zabala, 2014, p. 12). They argue that analytic philosophical positions, such as Searle’s metaphysical realism (Searle, 1995), underwrite the notion that there are neutral and objective descriptions and thus contribute to a closure on the horizon of interpretations possible, which undermines the scope for developing radical new interpretations that challenge the status quo (Vattimo & Zabala, 2014, pp. 28–36). Searle’s metaphysical realism has conservative political implications because of the closure on the horizon of interpretations entailed.

Vattimo and Zabala (2014) argue that the global north has ‘framed democracies’ that preclude radical critique from conventional media channels, which serves to protect political and economic vested interests in the status quo. We can say that political debate excludes voices that challenge the neoliberal mainstream, which seeks to redefine socio-economic problems, such as poverty, as individual problems, stemming from a failure to adapt to markets, rather than a failure of markets to provide economic security. (See also Herman and Chomsky (1988) on the limiting of political dialogue in the mainstream media.)

By contrast, some states in South America, such as Venezuela, attempted to enhance democracy by decentralising some decision making and using the natural resources to tackle poverty (Vattimo & Zabala, 2014, pp. 121 – 131). ‘[W]eak communism was chosen because of the overwhelming poverty that dominates the region after decades of neoliberal impositions’ (Vattimo & Zabala, 2014, p. 130). Weak communism is not metaphysical, unlike Soviet or Chinese (‘strong’) communism, because it is based not on scientific descriptions of historical forces determining the course of history, but interpretations, seeking contingent solutions to contingent problems (Vattimo & Zabala, 2014, p. 140; 2012, pp. 148–152).

Four problems with philosophical hermeneutics will now be considered. First, applying the form—content distinction to Vattimo we can say that he is focused on the content, with his argument that a pluralistic content in the media creates a sense of contingency. Vattimo’s argument presents the audience as adapting to the monologic authority of the messages. Here too a negative contingency would arise because there would be no basis for any meaningful connection to others. A negative contingency is more likely to result in reactive nihilism with people feeling pessimistic and resentful, as there is no positive vision of the future to engage with. Consumerism is only likely to increase this form of nihilism, as resentment is felt towards those who consume items deemed to have a higher status. Moreover, the argument for the Babel-like pluralistic content created by the media ends up being contradicted by the argument that in the framed democracies of the global north there is framed dialogue that excludes dissenting voices. On the one hand, contemporary techno-science, in the form of the contemporary media, creates a recognition of radical pluralism, with a Babel-like diversity undermining any notion of a single definition of reality being possible and instead multiple-perspectives existing. On the other hand, the media only allow a dialogue to occur based on a narrow horizon of difference, with the mainstream media thus serving to reinforce the notion that the status quo is a reality that should be taken for granted. Individuals and policies are critically discussed but more fundamental questions about the distribution of wealth, the long history of racist discrimination in capitalist societies, etc., are removed from consideration.

Second, talking of technology per se creating a change in Being entails a materialist metaphysic and technological determinism. Technology is located within a socio-historical context and this is presently defined by a technocratic form of neoliberalism. After neoliberalism was initially presented as an alternative normative choice to socialism, it then became legitimised as a form of technocracy, whereby individuals had to adapt to the contingency of changing ‘objective’ market forces (Davies, 2014). Within this culture of technocracy, defined by a negative form of contingency, there has been a technological development which intensifies the expectation of adaptation, which is the rise of self-quantifying technology that people use to improve their happiness ‘performance’. Employers increasingly expect workers to be genuinely happy, to motivate others and be more productive (Davies, 2015; Lupton, 2016). We need to understand the political culture technology is embedded within to understand how people come to interpret their existence and its technological mediation.

Third, weak communism would entail a left-wing framed democracy, where the state seeking toeholds set the terms of reference for grass roots engagement, using state monologic authority to limit the direction of dialogue. The state would end up imposing an identity on the citizens as responsible for helping the state reform capitalism, thus humiliating them. Underpinning this approach to politics is a tacit commitment to a metaphysic which holds that there is no alternative to capitalist ‘objective’ market forces. Unlike neoliberalism, there is a commitment to use politics to reform markets with ‘weak communism’. This ends up being very similar to the post-war corporatism that saw the state engage in a dialogue with organised capital and organised labour, with the capitalist economy being treated as subject to technocratic, scientific regulation, rather than critique. However, as Habermas (1973) argues, states seeking to use politics to correct market failures run the risk of a ‘legitimation crisis’ as the state is blamed for the destabilising tendencies of capitalism. Reactive nihilism could follow on from the negative contingency ultimately entailed here as citizen-adaptors to the state’s toehold-seeking project find themselves bereft of any positive interpretations for the future. Fourth, whereas Rorty and Freire, in different ways, argue for solidarity to avoid humiliation, Vattimo does not address solidarity. Instead, he relies on a state-centred technocratic politics of managing capitalism and technological changes helping to instigate a post-metaphysical conception of Being.

Here we can argue that radical critique of neoliberal technocracy and the unjust distribution of resources under capitalism more generally can be based on a movement rather than parties, as Freire argued. The movement would need to stem from and embrace the condition of positive contingency. A general education based on a critical dialogic form, including a humanities content, will help create a positive contingency. Such an education, in contrast to the neoliberal marketisation of education, would not seek ‘satisfied customers’ of ‘human capital’, but what Collini (2012) called ‘dissatisfaction’, meaning people who had, in Rortian terms, their final vocabulary challenged. Dissatisfaction arises from the shock of realising that a final vocabulary is contingent. From that initial shock can come dialogue, solidarity and radical critique freed from metaphysical legislation, with movements driving radical change. A more engaged and dialogic political culture could also re-interpret the uses of technology in new and more critical ways. This would entail criticising the limiting of dissenting voices in the media and the use of self-quantifying technology.

Conclusion

Vattimo and Zabala are correct to hold that philosophical problems are not redundant and that the philosophical question of interpreting Being is of vital importance, as regards how philosophical reflection and its political implications are approached. Explicit and implicit engagements with this problem may have lasted centuries, but this is not to dismiss this as a pseudo-problem, because its resolution has to occur within an interpretive event at the end of metaphysics, rather than a description. Heidegger saw techno-science as the final phase of metaphysical domination, but rather than ‘correct’ this by arguing that contemporary techno-science is, of itself, liberating, any form of technology has to be understood in terms of the context. Radical critique allows us to see the world in revolutionary new ways and this stems from a non-dogmatic approach to our final vocabulary and solidarity with others. These can be developed from a dialogic form of education more than the pluralistic content of the media, especially in framed democracies, where technology is used to create a Babel that is more of dialects than languages.