Absolute and Relative - Truth, Morality, Anything...

While questions of "absolute right and wrong" are not as pressing these days as they were, say, in the 90's (the heyday of groups like Focus on the Family and other "moral majority" groups), thinking about "absolutes" is an interesting and fruitful question. I recently came across one of Richard Rorty's arguments on this point. And like typical Rorty, it is grand, dismissive, and extraordinarily interesting. 

Rorty begins by mentioning that many people attack him on this particular point: that he denies there is any concept that we call "truth," and is thereby a relativist. What he denies, instead, is the dichotomy "reality-appearance", and the attendant correspondence theory of truth that this dichotomy implies. His detractors think that any theory of truth besides the correspondence theory leads us on the path toward relativism (especially the pragmatic theory, like Rorty's). 

But that doesn't mean he doesn't believe in truth, or so he maintains. Truth is surely an absolute notion. He gives two examples: we don't say "true for me but not for you," or "true then, but not now." Clearly, the geocentric view of the solar system is untrue, and never was true, absolutely and with no preconditions. But, he then says, "justified for me but not for you" is a common locution, and one most of us are quite happy to go along with (although not for everything). And the thing is, "justification" is the application of truth - or at least it goes along with it quite strongly, as William James points out. In fact, Rorty argues, justification does indeed seem to be something that always goes along with any claim to truth. From this Rorty draws a conclusion I've often myself thought about. 

His conclusion is this: granted that truth is an absolute notion, the application of this concept is always relative to the situation we are in. The criterion for applying the concept "true" is relative to where we are, our limitations, and our expectations. At the same time, the nature of truth is certain absolute. But if this is the case, what is the point of a theory of the nature of truth? Rorty sees none. If we only encounter truth in application to relative situations, what is the point of specifying "absolute" truth. We never encounter it, so even if we saw it we wouldn't know that we were looking at it. 

I have to be honest here. I should have written this like eight years ago, when I first encountered James Dobson's "Right versus Wrong" campaign. At the time I thought, "sure, in general we have a good idea of right and wrong. But absolute right and wrong? How could we ever know that? We are never in situations that are clear enough, never in situations that present themselves to us so cleanly. Who has ever had to make a decision a.) with full information, and b.) with full moral certitude? How would we even get this certitude, since by definition 'absolute' means something unconditioned by how we think about it. But what could that be?" 

I believe this line of thinking comes from a specific source for me, and on this Rorty agrees. Orthodox Monotheists (Jews, Christians, and Muslims) actually basically view God in this way. They say, "God has indeed been revealed to us - but we can never fully capture God conceptually, given our limitations." Even the most fundamentalist Christians recognize this point, at least in principle. And indeed, this is a point that has been driven home to me throughout my life. We use the language of Scripture, but we also recognize that we fall short of intellectual capacity to understand it. Calvin makes this point repeatedly when he says that God "condescends to us," speaks to us with the language like a wet-nurse, with concepts like the Trinity, and salvation, etc. 

What does this mean philosophically? I'm not entire sure, except that perhaps Christianity ought not to be so hostile to pragmatists, or at least that notion of truth. Perhaps there is something we can learn from Rorty and other pragmatists, who insist on the "useful" as the basic category of thinking.