Richard Rorty and a bunch of words related to the idea of language.

So, a couple months ago I read a book by Richard Rorty.  He's one of those evil postmodernists who adamantly deny that they are postmodern and probably don't consider themselves evil either.  Now I'm reading a book that is a collection of essays on his legacy.  Half the essays laud him for his brilliance and innovation, the other half deplore him as a shallow prophet of Western liberalism.

I love the guy.  I say this as someone who has read a single book by him.  Yet, in terms of philosophy, he writes in a very straight-forward way.  I don't get the feeling he is inventing a new language simply to obfuscate his meaning, allowing only scholars the opportunity to understand him.  

I also love him for the fact that he comes across as someone who is anti-authoritarian by birth.  (One heart to another, I guess.)  He shows a general disregard for the positions of professional philosophers as generally scholars of trivia who try to maintain their salary by overstating their own importance to society at large.  He claims that generally the last century followed the death of God with the death of Philosophy.  Funny that a philosopher would profess the demise of his own discipline.  Yet, I love it, for his intent seems to be one of liberation.  He claims his purpose in undermining philosophy is freeing social and political structures from the crutch of philosophy as a means to self-justification.

I feel this is quite pertinent to theology as well.  It seems that theology in modern day waivers in its search for some ground to rest on.  Half the time it reverts to Scripture and exclusive revelation epistemology; the other half it seeks to justify itself by philosophy.  Hans Kung who I have infinite respect for is even somewhat guilty of this.   He tries to establish philosophical grounds to justify his theological claims, starting with Kant.  Not that he does a bad job, just I found it ironic that we would justify our talk of God by referring to an absolutized Philosophy.

Rorty dispenses with absolutized philosophy by a variety of means, but from what I've read he mostly attacks language as a means of conveying truth . . . at least Truth.  (This is where people start attacking him as a postmodernist, which he finds a bit preposterous.)  For Rorty, the meaning of all language is historically contingent, depending on the lost experiences of a bygone age.  He denies any point where our words actually connect with reality, but rather claims that the meaning our words carry is always completely contingent on the words that surround them.  Not merely that meaning is contingent on context, which we all know, but that everything is context and therefore there is no such thing as a settled meaning of a word.

The basic idea is that every experience is one that we instantly interpret upon having it.  There are no uninterpreted experiences.  The next point is that all interpretation is language.  Therefore all experience is only known through language, but that we have no direct, non-linguistic experiences.  Rather what we experience is largely pre-determined by what language we speak and the categories our linguistic culture has made available to us.  The point then becomes apparent that there is no such thing as a "correct" way of speaking of an experience.  In short, no one gets "it" right.  All language is plastic and determined by the context we live in, and therefore a "correct" description today will likely be wrong tomorrow.  

The point is that there is no such thing as a "right or wrong" way of speaking on a subject, only useful and useless ways.  Thus, returning to the previous discussion, theology does well to refer to philosophy to find useful ways to speak of God, but when it makes an attempt to appeal to philosophy to prove who is and who is not speaking correctly of God, it has bastardized its own discipline and asked philosophy to do what it has no capacity to do.  Philosophy is impotent to help us get anything "right".  Especially God.  Yet philosophy is infinitely helpful in aiding us to find useful ways of speaking of God or spirituality, as well as dismissing the forms of speech that have become useless.

I'm enthusiastic about the possibilities that Rorty opens up for living differently (even as a theologian, which is a discipline Rorty has little respect for).  I have not even begun to consider all the detrimental possibilities which his philosophy might have, and I'm sure there are plenty.  Still, I do find that his ideas connect with many of the ways I have thought about God for some time.  I have long thought it ridiculous that we consider our verbal formulae sufficient to describe an infinite God.  "Infinite" being a verbal category whose point seems to imply that which is impossible to understand of fully experience (!).