Department of Philosophy

CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Epistemology of Democracy

Here I use the word "epistemology" in the broad sense of the polemicist to counter the claims of Rorty and other postmodernists and Deweyans who deny that there is an attainable, rationally defensible knowledge that underlies democratic society. Specifically, I argue that the institutions of American democracy, including pluralism, presuppose a philosophical realism. Among the truths that this realism defends are the propositions that there is a common human nature and an objective, unchanging standard of human progress. Without that foundation, democracy loses its ability to justify itself rationally; without that ability, it becomes unintelligible to itself; without being intelligible to itself, it loses confidence in its ability to defend itself against anti-democratic philosophies and ideologies; without that confidence, the fatal erosion of democratic institutions is inevitable; therefore, democracy cannot survive unless it acknowledges philosophical realism as its founding rationale.

A postmodernist might well meet this chain of argument with the reply that it rests on the fallacy of appealing to bad consequences and dismiss it with the words, "So much the worse for democracy." Although the argument does appeal to bad consequences, its basis for denominating them "bad" is the claim, which will be argued for later on, that it is just as indefensible for a people to vote their democracy out of existence as it is for a person to sell him- or herself into slavery because a human being is by nature a rational, autonomous being.

This affirmation of our ability to attain a transcultural, ahistorical knowledge is exactly what Rorty and others deny. In the grand tradition of Deweyan pragmatism, they argue that the best that we can reasonably hope for is a public consensus about what is currently the best policy for our society. The trouble with this approach is that it collapses at the very point where it professes to be strongest: its defense of pluralism. A vast distance separates the assertions, "Democratic society derives its unity from the current majority opinion on what its common principles are" and "Democratic society derives its unity from the public affirmation of what its principles are." It is the second assertion, not the first, that furnishes the rationale for pluralism. Because the first is merely intersubjective, it cannot distinguish democracy from slavery. Recall Mustafa Mond's words to Mr. Savage in Huxley's Brave New World: " People [here] are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get." An imprudent but powerful rush of pragmatic fervor could conceivably lead the majority to vote out the democratic constitution in favor of tyranny. You can conceive of a political climate in which the people came to the belief that what is needed to steer the nation through "extraordinary" circumstances is a strong hand at the helm. Hannah Arendt's portrait of Hitler's rise to power with the growing support of the masses offers a brilliant account of how total power in the hands of one man can seem to the public more effective than a weak, vacillating gathering of elected officials.

Then, having swallowed its own tail, majority opinion would be no more. This, to be sure, is a highly improbable outcome; but my point is that it would be a consistent application of majority opinion taken as the founding principle of democracy.

If this proposed turn of events seems too utterly implausible for serious consideration, how about the current state of affairs in Algeria? Several years ago, on the eve of the Algerian national election, it had become clear to the political leaders and everyone else, for that matter, that the fundamentalist Muslim population, which had swelled to majority proportions, intended to repeal the democratic constitution. To avert that outcome, the Algerian government cancelled the election and instituted a state of martial law, which has been in effect ever since.

You could argue that this is quite a different situation. The Muslim fundamentalists have no tradition of democracy whereas the members of the United States, say, have two hundred years of democratic institutions and could plausibly be expected to have too keen an appreciation for it to relinquish it. Be that as it may, the very possibility of the fundamentalists repealing democracy shows that it is, in principle, possible in a political context where majority opinion constitutes the final court of appeal.

The fact that the Algerian government saw fit to suspend democratic processes presumably to protect their democratic government from destruction raises a question that is as interesting as it is crucial: Could such a suspension ever be morally justifiable? If majority opinion is the foundational principle of democracy, the answer is clearly "Yes." If, on the other hand, the foundational principle is human nature, as I argue it is, then the answer is clearly "No." It seems to me that the principle at work here is identical to the one at work in the immorality of anyone selling him- or herself into slavery. Although possessing the capacity to choose a life of bondage, such a life runs counter to the demands of human nature for fulfillment: a being that is rational and autonomous by nature is ipso facto a moral agent and is therefore by nature self-determining. Because human beings are also by nature social beings -- as Aristotle noted, we are social just because we are rational --, it follows that self-determination is exercised within a social context. And because social life inevitably requires a system of laws and leaders, it is more accurate to say that the context in which we exercise our self-determination is socio-political.

That is the underlying rationale for universal suffrage. It is not because the majority chooses correctly all the time, perhaps not even most of the time. Rather it is this: as self-determining agents, no human being has the right to control the life of any other human being who is of legal age and rationally competent. This injunction is as valid with regard to the people as a whole as to the individual. Universal suffrage is the only practical mechanism for protecting the people's right of self-determination. It enables them to participate in the decisions that affect their political destiny.

A move, such as the Algerian government's suspension of the national election, could therefore be justifiable to the extent that it was an attempt to protect the foundational principle of democratic government, to wit, the peoples' need and right to be self-determining. Universal suffrage, or majority rule, is then a consequence of that principle; and without it majority rule loses its moral authority.

Deweyans, and surely Rorty, can be counted on to respond that this will not, perhaps even cannot, happen; the American people will not sell their birthright of freedom down the river. Behind this confidence lies a commitment, bordering on the catechetical, to the therapeutic virtues of public discussion. Granted, the public discourse that drives the body politic of democracy is indispensable, especially as a protection against government tyranny. But, as an effective defense of rights and liberties, it presupposes the public possession of a philosophy friendly to democracy. That said, maybe the people won't sell out; but then, again, maybe they will. It is highly unlikely that they would do so knowingly; but not so unlikely that they might do so unknowingly. They might sell off their democratic patrimony slowly and by inches without realizing what the stakes were until it was too late and things had got out of control. Yves Simon observed that, in order for criminals to ascend to political power, it is necessary for respectable men to compromise themselves, at first in relatively small ways and later in large ways:
Not many constituencies would give majorities to candidates proposing abruptly to murder six or seven million persons never declared guilty by any court. During the early phases, in which elections are not yet entirely meaningless, the hope of murderers rests upon the action of moderate and respectable men who never dreamed of sending any women or children to gas chambers but feel obligated to demand quota for the Jews in a number of occupations, their complete exclusion from government positions, etc. A movement aimed at crime would have no success with the people if it were not started under virtuous auspices.

The defect in the principle, "Democracy precedes philosophy" is its erroneous assumption that democratic society cannot afford the luxury of expending its public energies on the search for commonly agreed upon philosophical principles on which to found itself. Behind this defect there are two errors. The first is a misconstrual of the distinctive nature of American democracy. The second is the assumption that one can dispense with philosophical foundations.

With regard to the first error, the distinctive nature of American democracy cannot be ignored: Our Founding Fathers brought to this nation a democracy founded proximately on the natural law and ultimately on God, the law's author. Rorty's construal of democracy belongs to a quite different conception, to wit, Jacobinism: the source of democracy is not God and his universal law but the individual human being and his unaided, natural reason.

With regard to the second error, that philosophical foundations are expendable: This error ties in with the first, the view that philosophical foundations are expendable. Despairing of the human intellect's capacity to arrive at objective truths, truths that are transcultural and ahistorical, he has publicly renounced philosophy in favor of literary criticism and narrative. He accordingly adopts Rawls' principle of "the priority of democracy to philosophy": what makes liberal democracy is majority opinion preceded by open public discussion. Any relevant philosophical input presupposes this public forum. One's own philosophical views are fine as long as one bears in mind that the democratic process will not work without a commitment on everyone's part to compromise those views. Rorty thus agrees with Rawls that figures like Ignatius of Loyola and Nietzsche are poor models for liberal democracy because they refused to relinquish their fundamental principles. Rorty expresses his attitude toward principle thus: "The idea that moral and political controversies should always be 'brought back to first principles' is reasonable if it means merely that we should seek common ground in the hope of attaining agreement."

Even granting Shusterman's explanation of Rorty's view as the attempt to justify liberal democracy in the postmodern era, in which the enlightenment confidence in the objectivity of reason has been docked, the fact remains that what Rorty offers us contradicts the confidence in the our ability to rationally justify ultimate principles that is expressed in our nation's founding documents. The Declaration of Independence, after all, calls these principles "self-evident."

Rorty's view of human reason as entrapped by ethnocentrism is the logical product of Jacobinism's attempt to ground democracy in the natural reason of the individual. This view was the child of rationalism and rationalism, in its modern Western form, was the child of Descartes. As Maritain saw, Descartes' celebration of individual human reason, with its "spark of the Divine," as capable, if only it adopted his method, of arriving at the loftiest truths, planted the philosophical seeds of subjectivism. By starting with the cogito rather than the res, Descartes made mind, not things, the measure of knowledge. What the individual understood was the truth; but since there were many individual minds, we were finally faced with many truths. And since these many truths were often mutually contradictory, it was inevitable that reason should come to be regarded as suspect.

In contrast, the Declaration of Independence starts with things. It bases its claim that all human beings possess the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on human nature, a nature created by God. Not to put too fine a point on matters, the measure of knowledge transcends the individual human mind and yet remains "self-evident."

Aristotle said it best: to say there is no philosophy is to philosophize." Postmodernists like Rorty, along with Deweyans in general, embrace that principle as a consequence of their prior embrace of philosophical relativism. Because our philosophical claims are culturally and historically bound, there is no "God's eye view" from which we can view reality. Our picture of ourselves and nature is irredeemably ethnocentric. Transcultural and ahistorical knowledge about human nature and progress, if there be such, exceeds our intellectual grasp. That is the philosophical conclusion that undergirds the principle, "Democracy precedes philosophy." Therefore the principle is false.

Rorty's own discourse would be incoherent did it not presuppose a philosophical catbird seat that rises above the clamor and distractions of our respective ethnocentricities. What audience, after all, does he imagine to be the recipient of the announcement that our respective ethnocentrisms make it impossible for us to attain an objective knowledge of the world, what he, following Hillary Putnam, calls "a God's-eye view of things"? Only the members his own ethnic group? That won't work, and for two reasons.

The first is that if, as Rorty insists, the foundational principle of democracy is public consensus and, by his own admission, consensus of differing ethnocentric outlooks, then he presupposes a transethnocentric discourse. At the very least, that would mean that we are not entirely imprisoned by our respective ethnocentrisms. Might one not answer this by contending that objective knowledge escapes our capacities nevertheless because the transethnocentric discourse needed for public consensus is not absolutely transethnocentric? That it is only relatively so, for it simply allows us all to rise to another, broader level of contextually conditioned discourse? And since it, too, is contextual, objective knowledge still exceeds our intellectual grasp? That won't work for the simple reason that there would then be no way of justifying the claim that our knowledge is contextual. In the face of diverse criteria of meaning and evidence, each criterion furnishes the basis for its own intellectual context. But if there is no single, uniform criterion of meaning and evidence, how are we to determine that our knowledge is contextual rather than objective? We could do so if that context allowed us to peer over its edge, so to speak, and glimpse another, higher, broader yet, context. But to be able to do that is, by the very act, to be in that context already, at least to the extent that we can recognize it as a context. For that implies a criterion of meaning common to both contexts.

Permit me to return to the problematic of founding democracy on majority opinion. I have already noted that Rorty and the Deweyans would doubtless suppose that the American people would not be so pragmatically imprudent as to repudiate the democratic constitution. But how many Deweyans, including Rorty, would agree that the people have the moral right to do so? Would Rorty support the proposition, "If the American people wish to use their freedom to vote out democratic government in favor of another form of civil polity, so be it; it is, after all, the public opinion"? I think it eminently plausible that many of them would reply affirmatively, but only in the abstract. They would doubtless hasten to qualify the affirmation with the assurance that the American people would never do that or make some other statement to the effect that such would be catastrophic. But why would they think that? Are they expressing a mere preference? Or are they relying on the pragmatic view that so far democracy has produced the most desirable overall results? Who decides what is desirable here? It cannot mean what is desirable for human nature since, according to Rorty, we cannot know what that nature is. Nor, for the same reason, can it mean that it is desirable because it promises the best chances for realizing human progress or the public welfare. Rorty has ruled out human progress if by that term is meant a transcultural, ahistorical concept. This is consistent with his nominalism; for if you cannot know human nature apart from the ethnocentric framing of it, how can you know anything but the ethnocentric framing of human progress? If the public opinion is to vote out the Constitution, what higher court of appeal can there be? None. Why? Because "Democracy precedes philosophy."

I thus return to the ultimately decisive reason why voting democracy out of existence is unjustifiable: it offends human nature. Rorty and the Deweyans have got it all backwards. In the first instance, democracy does not rest on freedom but on human nature. The essential components of that nature are rationality and autonomy. Thus, given what men and women are by nature, they ought to live in freedom and democratic government provides the only suitable context for that life. I mention this again because it is the foundation of the public consensus. What Rorty seems not to recognize is that the public consensus is not the same as majority opinion. The latter has time and place; it is an event in the here and now. What constitutes majority opinion today can repudiate the majority opinion of yesterday, just as today's can be repudiated by tomorrow's public opinion. Not so public consensus. This distinction has been incisively handled by writers like John Courtney Murray and Walter Lippmann. Murray points out that the public conversation that follows from the democratic commitment to pluralism presupposes a common foundation, a unity of philosophical outlook on the earlier mentioned basic conceptions: human nature and progress, etc. In a nutshell, the unifying doctrine is the natural law theory. Otherwise arguments about the body politic, which arguments compose the public conversation, cannot be constructive. For then there would be no philosophical coin of the realm for the meaningful exchange of ideas.

Lippmann's approach is somewhat Platonic, but one need not be a Platonist to validate its fundamental philosophical realism. The opening words of the Constitution, "We the people of the United States...do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America," imply an authority that transcends the temporality and contingency of majority opinion. To whom, after all, did the "people" here refer? About forty men wrote and signed the document. Article VII in it instructed that "...if and when conventions in nine states had ratified it, then for those nine states the People of the United States would have ordained and established the Constitution. In this context a majority of the delegates elected to nine state conventions were deemed to be entitled to act as The People of the United States."

A huge difference separates The People as voters and The People "as the corporate nation." Only a nominalism which denies the existence of universals, even in things (in rem), would identify the two. The theory of natural law, expressing itself as it does, through human nature, is the constant that transcends the vicissitudes and whim of the voting public. And, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the transcendence and permanence of the People "as the corporate nation" is secured by the ultimate transcendence and permanence of God. Consider the following text again:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

These word proclaim that governments do not make rights and have no power to abolish them. Rather they exist in order to provide the socio-political conditions for their exercise.

I should add that the permanence of the People as a corporate reality and of the "self-evident" truths are not inimical to the growth of our knowledge of them. Throughout the history of the West, mankind has attained a progressively deeper knowledge of the significance of the natural law and its principles. Maritain's distinction between the ontological and gnoseological aspects of the natural law is a propos to the discussion. The former term refers what the natural law really is, as expressed in the essence man. That never changes. The latter term refers to our knowledge of the natural law at any particular historical moment. That is always liable to change. As we understand human nature and its finalities more perfectly, we understand more clearly what the principles of natural law mean. For example, felicitous social and historical experiences in the West made possible a fuller understanding of the essential principle of justice, "Pay each his or her due." Woman suffrage occurred in the light of the realization that it was a violation of that principle to keep the female portion of society in a perpetual state of childhood by denying them the right to participate in the electoral process.

But to insist that a set of absolute truths, necessarily accompanied by a theory of epistemological objectivity, is the indispensable foundation of democracy is to raise a question that goes to the very heart of democratic theory: How do we reconcile unity and plurality? On the one hand, the democratic commitment to the consequences of personal freedom, to wit, freedom of conscience, religion, and speech, invites the defense of pluralism. As John Courtney Murray has pointed out, the commitment to pluralism is more than a commitment to tolerate other views: it acknowledges "...the coexistence within the one political community of groups who hold divergent and incompatible views with regard to religious questions -- those ultimate questions that concern the nature and destiny of man within a universe that stands under the reign of God. Pluralism therefore implies disagreement and dissension within the community." On the other hand, there can be no political community without unity. Indeed, the colliding viewpoints that comprise pluralism pose a problem just because they exist in a community. You cannot have a community, however, without commonly held views regarding fundamental propositions. The rise of liberal democracy has increased the tension between the respective demands of unity and pluralism almost to the breaking point. Russell Hittinger has traced the change in our conception of rights from that of the people's claims against the government to that of the contemporary personal claim to a kind of aesthetic self-creation called the "right to privacy." Shusterman's assessment, noted above, of Rorty as attempting to justify liberal democracy in the postmodern era is, accordingly, on target.

A crucial common proposition in the democratic mix of pluralism and unity is that there is a common human nature. That is the foundation, the rational justification, of human rights and, specifically, natural rights. Because there is such a thing as human nature, there are certain ways in which we must behave, regarding others as well as ourselves. That ontology is the source of democratic pluralism. Rorty's proposal for a pragmatic resolution by appeal to public consensus of all disputes regarding principles and philosophies is the only way of answering the question for a philosophical relativist who, a fortiori, denies that we can obtain an objective knowledge of human nature or of anything else for that matter.

None of which is meant to gainsay the necessity of being practical in the formation of public policy and law. Politics is the art of the possible. Little is to be gained and much is to be risked by making policies and laws that go against the people's grain. This injunction is crucial in a pluralistic society such as that of the United States. When the Founding Fathers set forth the proclamations on freedom of religion and speech, they doubtless had little if any premonition that their conception of a pluralistic society would burst at its seams under the pressure of a range of diverse philosophical, religious, and cultural expressions that would be competing for recognition. Their concrete experiences of religious diversity consisted of denominations, sects and cults that celebrated various interpretations and emphases of doctrines recognizably Judeo-Christian in origin. Even the rationalistic natural religion ascribed to Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson was unmistakably the product of the Judeo-Christian civilzation. Conversely, the contemporary American scene displays a new diversity, one that confers a dramatically different reference and hence meaning on the term "pluralism" as well as a more urgent need to formulate a common theological and philosophical viewpoint that can serve as a foundation for a democratic community. Non-Christian religions, a secular philosophy that repudiates the need for any advertence to God and personal immortality, the postmodernist challenge to the Enlightenment philosophy embraced by the framers of American democracy a demand for a multicultural curriculum in the schools, and a revisitation of the question "Who is an American?" all come together, with the mounting force of a river fed by tributaries, to collide with the traditional understanding of the public philosophy.

The decriers of the traditional public philosophy have encapsulated their rejection in the claim that that philosophy, along with rationale for the traditional school curricula, is the product of "dead, white European males." But this is only a war cry. I tender this observation not to minimize the significance of war but rather to point out that, like all slogans, war cries take for granted the righteousness of the cause. Instead of seeking to win adherents by rational argument, they seek to move to action those who have already signed on. The best tradition of intellectuals is found in those who love of truth. In the words of Socrates, "Let the argument lead were it may and we shall follow." This love begets a love of rational justification and a corresponding disdain for fallacious argumentation.

Let us address the charge that the public philosophy and the curricular rationale for our schools are products of "dead, white European males." So? What follows from that? That they are false? Unduly narrow? Intellectually imperious? Hardly. If offered as the reason for rejection, the appeal to "dead, white European males," constitutes a fallacious argument by reason of irrelevance. It is a genetic fallacy, a variant of the ad hominem fallacy: explaining the social, economic, political or cultural conditions under which a theory or argument sprung forth no more addresses its validity than does the appeal to the peculiar psychology or motivation of the one advancing it. You say that my position is "racist," "homophobic," "culturally imperialistic," "mean-spirited," "hate-filled"? Let me grant any or all of these accusations. Neither singly nor all together do they constitute an answer to it. My argument stands or falls only on the strength of the reasons advanced on its behalf. I can be any or all of the things of which you accuse me and my argument can still be valid and true; I can, on the other hand, be a champion of civil rights, altruistic, charitable, and open-minded and my argument can still be invalid and false.

Rorty is right in calling attention to the ethnocentrism that makes up our lives and shapes our view of things, but only up to a point. Because all our knowledge comes to us by means of sense perception, it follows that what concepts we have depend on what sensorial experiences we have had. There are many things of which we are ignorant just because we have not experienced them, directly or indirectly, which is to say, by our personal confrontation of them or by reports and descriptions of them.

For example, as a sailor in the United States Navy, I would walk patrol in Keelung, Taiwan, with Frank Chi, a master sergeant in the Taiwanese Army. We would frequently pass the long evenings of making our rounds by exchanging accounts of our respective cultures. How much did we each really understand about the other's culture? No doubt, the concepts I formed of China from what Frank Chi told me were sifted through the cultural presuppositions of my Western and American heritage, leading me to impose meanings on his descriptions that were, I am sure, frequently different from those he wished to impart. Born and raised in San Francisco, the first-generation son of blue-collar Irish, Catholic parents, I never experienced and thus could not have conceived the world into which he was born and raised, pre-Communist Shanghai.

Not to put too fine a point on the topic, we surely do not conceive the body politic the way the Athenians of Socrates' day conceived the polis or conceive the relation of God to the universe as an inhabitant of thirteenth century Europe did.

These limitations occur within the polarity of intellect and imagination, concept and image. My images originate in what I have directly experienced and in the personal and cultural environments that have conditioned me to associate particular experiences with particular images. Yet, although anachronistic from a sartorial aspect, Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle in Renaissance attire does not allow provincialism to overwhelm the universality of the artist's conception of a great genius engaged in inquiry.

Our difficulty in overcoming spatio-temporal conditioning originates in the fact that we are not pure intellects but rather materially embodied intellects that must gain their concepts by abstraction from repeated contact with individual, material things. That in itself is a significant limitation, but we can go further and say that one aspect of the world defies all our attempts at direct knowledge: we cannot obtain a direct knowledge of the subjective experiences of others. For example, to know your pain, I would have to experience it, but that I cannot do. The sight of your suffering might well cause me pain, but that is my pain, not yours. To experience your pain, I would have to be you; but then I would be suffering my pain, not anyone else's. Even our own previous subjective experiences become increasingly opaque to us because, with the passage of time, we find it increasingly hard to enter into our former states of mind. Such experiences must be lived to be known.

If our experiences were subjective, they would in principle resist universalization and thus would not be rationally accessible. There is no rational justification to which I can appeal to persuade a person who does not like the taste of chocolate pecan pie that it tastes good: one either likes the taste of it or one does not. The reason is that the warrant for assenting to the proposition, "Chocolate pecan pie tastes good" is not in the pie (the object of contention) but in the response of the individual person's taste buds (the subject) to it.

In contrast, what is rational cannot at the same time be subjective, for a rationally grounded proposition is, by virtue of its rationality, based on publicly accessible evidence, which a subjectively grounded proposition is not. A rationally justifiable proposition is derived from evidence, from data available to the intellect. That makes the proposition, in principle, universalizable and thus objective. Take, for example, the proposition, "2+2=4." A child has it drummed into his head and accordingly holds it to be true without understanding why; he has simply been conditioned to believe that it is so. But his particular history regarding that proposition has nothing to do with its de jure rationality. "2" is a sign for a pair of single units and "4" a sign for a quartet of single units; so 1+1(2) equals 1+1+1+1(4). The proposition is universalizable and objective since, whenever two pairs of single units are added together, the conclusion must be "4," assuming, of course, that the signs, "2," "+," "=," and "4," retain their conventional meanings. The warrant for assent to the proposition, "2+2=4," is in the proposition itself (the object of inquiry), not in any individual's (the subject's) response to it. The fact that whole populations of people can, and do, experience the same response to an object does not establish a basis in objectivity. Suppose the inhabitants of a nation held that the proposition "2+2=4" were false. If the signs that compose that proposition retained their standard meanings, it would be true despite the collective belief. Their collective, negative response could not be based on the proposition's content; it would instead have its basis in some extrinsic force, such as ideology or brainwashing.

The question is whether that which is rationally justifiable is at the same time contextually conditioned to the point that it is not objective in the sense of providing the basis for "a God's-eye view of things," but is instead ethnocentric.

If all our knowledge were reducible to sensations, we would indeed be slaves to our context: historical, cultural, ethnic or subjective. That is why Anaxagoras maintained that in order to know fire, we would have to become fire, stone, stone, etc. But I shall argue in the next chapter that knowledge is not reducible to sensation, that our perceptions of the world convey to us more than mere sensations; they convey the being of things: existence, essence and the principles of being as well. Such knowledge -- what I call "ontological" knowledge -- escapes enslavement to context. No matter how things vary, no matter how often they change from one state to another, they remain ways of being, and what belongs to being as such (being as being) cannot be reduced to the prejudices of context.

The reduction of knowledge to sensation follows from the materialization of the mind, according to which ideas count for little more than bloodless reproductions of images.

The second reason why Rorty's use of ethnocentrism as an epistemological principle won't work is this. Above, my reply to the "priority of democracy to philosophy" consisted of attempts to show that that principle is incompatible with essential tenets of democratic philosophy, such as the theory of natural rights. In what follows, I shall argue that Rorty's ethnocentrism is nothing more than philosophical relativism, of the cultural variety, and accordingly rests upon the latter's dubious and often unverified assumptions about what we can know. I shall proceed by the dialectic of the philosophical catbird seat.

The Dialectic of the Philosophical Catbird Seat

All concepts originate in our perceptions of the sensible world. The objects of these perceptions are concrete, particular things. Granted, these things are contingent, for nothing in their essential being necessitates that they exist. Here two points command attention. First, although their existence is contingent, they are not devoid of necessity. Joe Montana does not, did not, have to exist. But, since he does exist, certain necessities follow. As a member of the human species, he is necessarily rational, autonomous, capable of laughing, learning and teaching. Hence the fact of his existence bespeaks contingent necessities; not absolute necessity, to be sure, but necessity, nonetheless. To know that Joe Montana is a man is to possess certain and necessary knowledge about him: Joe Montana, who exists on June 11, 1996, is necessarily rational, autonomous, and risible.

Second, it was not absolutely necessary that Joe Montana be the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, say, in 1990, since he might never have been born, having been born, he might have chosen never to play football, and having chosen to play football might never have recovered from the back injury he suffered in 1987. But he was born, did choose to play football, did become quarterback for the 49ers, did recover from the back injury, and thus did play quarterback for the 49ers in 1990. Consequently, it will always be true that Joe Montana played quarterback for the 49ers on 25 October, 1990. If Joe Montana was quarterback for the 49ers on 25 October, 1990, it is necessarily true that he played quarterback for the 49ers on 25 October, 1990. Because they are finite, material beings enjoy only a contingent existence; they come into existence and pass out of existence; they exist but do not have to exist. Yet to exist at a given time is to be actually existent at that time; to pass from one state of being to another is actually to have been in those states at the successive moments. For all time, it is necessarily true that they were actually what they were when they were actually what they were.

These observations lead me to conclude that the only plausible meaning that can be assigned to the assertion that our concepts our contingent on our ethnocentric context is this, that they are the human intellect's expression to itself of things that are contingent, not only regarding their existence but also regarding their circumstances. You can, of course, say that any knowledge of contingent things has an object that is changeable and that, therefore, if the object of knowledge is changeable, so must the knowledge of these objects be subject to change. But the answer to this is that since change is the passage of a thing from one actual state at t1 and to a different actual state at t2, and because everything is what it is and not another thing, if follows that at t1 the thing was necessarily what it was and at t2 it was necessarily what it was at t2. From the contingency and mutability of the object of the concept, you cannot legitimately infer that the concept of the object is contingent and mutable.

Ethnocentric Conditioning

Might not the claim that our concepts are contingent and mutable find support in the fact that we are creatures of time and place and thus that our concepts are historically and culturally conditioned? Rorty and the other advocates of this position could argue that our concepts our contingent and mutable in the sense that they are shaped by the worldview of our particular epoch or culture, leading us to impose on our perception and interpretation of things the presuppositions of our own particular time and place. We would thus know things in a particular historical and cultural context so that our concepts could express things only in the manner we have been conditioned to express them. Because the contexts change, it would follow that our concepts are contingent and mutable in relation to changing historical and cultural contexts

If the claim that our concepts are contextually conditioned is to support the claim that all our concepts are contingent and mutable, it must be joined with the premise that it is impossible for us to transcend our particular context to arrive at concepts that express the essential being of things. Thus our concepts would be contingent and mutable because:

(i)one cannot know outside a context;

(ii)the concepts that we derive from our perceptions of the world vary as the contexts in which these perceptions occur vary.

From these two premises, however, it does not follow that we cannot derive veridical concepts; that would require the addition of one or another of the following:

(iii)the context distorts our concepts so that what we take to be veridical is not;

(iv)the context itself does not distort our concepts of things but rather restricts us to a limited perspective, when in fact there are other possible perspectives, thereby permitting us to form veridical concepts that are only perspectival, so that seemingly competing conceptions of the same thing might be equally veridical since they represent different contextual perspectives;

(v) the different contexts offer us various concepts of things, but since we can never extricate ourselves from context, there is no way to tell which, if any, conceptions is veridical.

Premise (iii) cannot be reconciled with premise (i) since, if we cannot obtain concepts except from within contexts, there would be no way to tell which concepts are veridical and which not. Premise (ii) is also incompatible with premise (i) for the same reason: if our concepts are inevitably contextually conditioned, where do we find the criterion for judging which concepts are veridical and which not, even in the qualified sense of premise (iv), namely, that it is veridical from the standpoint from which it is obtained? Insofar as both premises (iii) and (iv) presuppose a criterion that is unconditioned, they contradict premise (i), namely, that all our concepts are contextually conditioned. But we have seen that premise (i) is absolutely necessary to the claim that all our concepts are contingent and mutable.

This leaves us with the final candidate, premise (v). But it presupposes an assertion that is not evident, namely, that any context is compatible with the formation of veridical concepts.

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Metaphysics (SII)
Epistemology
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