Rorty and Marx in a postmodern world

[randall patrick]

From Richard Shusterman's essay, "Ethics and Aesthetics are One":


"To say that a postmodernist cannot generate a general or even personal ethic from his or her specific functional role because we all collectively and individually inhabit a plurality of inadequated integrated roles is to say with Wittgenstein and Lyotard that we inhabit such a motley variety of language games and are shaped by so many forms of discourse that we can no longer say definitively who we are.....It is questionable, Rorty would argue, because it is not definitively there to be discovered but instead open to be made and shaped, and should therfore be shaped aesthetically. Moreover, according to Rorty not only is there no point in trying to penetrate our social roles to find a common human essense, which is not there, but even the idea of an underlying coherent indidvidual essense of particular personhood [one's own true self] is a myth, which Freud effectively exploded.....Rather than something unified and consistent emerging from an autonomous, stable, and rational core, the self is seen as 'centerless', a collection of 'quasi selves', the product of 'random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs',shaped and modified by 'a host of idiosyncratic, accidental episodes', transformed by distorted memories. For Rorty, this Feudian decentering, multiplication, and randonization of the self 'opened up new possibilites for the aesthetic life', as an ethic, for with no true self to discover and conform to the most promising models of moral reflection and sophistication, become 'self-creation' and 'self enlargement' rather than 'self-knowledge' and 'purification'"



This observation collates two points I often try to impress upon people:

1] that human identity is by and large an existential contraption we ceaselesly construct, deconstruct and reconstruct from the cradle to the grave. It is basically refabrications of a prefabricated self that was hard wired into our brains as children at any given cultural and historical and experiential intersection in time

2] that human ethics revolves by and large around the interactions at these profoundly problematic intersections....interactions of all the prefabricated and then endless refabricated minds going about the business of devising rules of behavior so as to make social interaction less rather more dysfuntional


But there is, it can be argued, a third factor that many postmodernist thinkers either overlook or play down: the role of political economy in the creation of both human identity and human moral values.

In my view, you can take the "aesthetic self" perspective above to the point where it bears almost no resemblance whatsoever to the human condition as it's actually exprerienced by the overwhelming preponderance of folks who have ever lived and died. In other words, there are, in fact, crucial factors all of us share in common that are, in turn, fundamental to any legitimate [realistic] philosophical perspective on or appraisal of either human identity or human value judgments.

These:

1] we are, first and foremost, naked apes----the end result of millions of years of evolution on planet earth

2] as such, we have fundamental biological needs that must be met [just as with any other species] or we perish: food, water, clothing and shelter

3] we need a relatively stable environment in order to reproduce the species

4] we need those willing [or conscripted] to defend us from enemies---internal and external


To what extent, however, do many postmodernist thinkers take this materialist, naturalist context into account when they discuss things like values and authenticity and self? Human social interactions are always ultimately about politics, economics and power. They are about men and women agglomerating into communities in order to facilitate the very survival of the community itself. They are about those relatively few who are smarter or more aggressive or more resourceful [or luckier] being able to enforce a moral [and a legal] agenda that revolves around political and economic and military relationships that perpetuate their own best interests. And then passing this down to the next genaration that will constitute the new ruling class.

The difficulty of course lies in figuring out how to understand human identity and human ethics as though from the combined perspectives of thnkers like Richard Rorty and Karl Marx. Where do the social/political and the personal/psychological variables come together so as facilitate the most coherent assessment of human interaction?


RP