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>>BRUCE WILSHIRE: Philosophy is that field that must encompass
our possibilities as we try to come up with some ontology that doesn't just resort to
the fact world out there.
That doesn't perpetually detach us from our involvement in the world,
perpetually use the Cartesian turn on us and say how we're feeling about all these things
is just a matter of
opinion, preference, just a matter of subjectivism.
Subjective in Descartes' sense.
Well Kierkegaard's notion of subjectivity, and the same thing applies to James and Jaspers
and Heidegger,
his notion of subjectivity is not Cartesian subjectivism.
His notion of subjectivity presupposes the existence of the world that threatens us,
involves us, engages us,
Nearly anybody if properly encouraged, stimulated, prodded,
might be led to agree that the deepest need we have as human beings,
even to the point at times of trumping the need to survive and the needs for water and
shelter and food and all that, is the need to believe in one's guts that you're real.
You're a real man.
You're a real woman.
That's the question of being. In this case we're asking what's the being of human being
and more exactly and concretely what is the being of this being.
What is this need to feel and to believe that one is real?
There's a, I think there's an occludedness in much dominant, politically dominant, analytic
thought here. They just don't raise the question of being, or we say as my colleague Jerry
Fodor does at Rutgers, well, you want to know what a fact is, Bruce?
A fact is the way the world is. You stick the litmus paper into the solution. If it
comes out red it's acid. If it comes out blue it's...
Well, I don't think all questions can be subjected to a litmus test. I think that when you say
that facts are the way the world is, without having that be the entrée into a question
of what is being, or using the verb of being here, whatever the world is, is just a way
of coming up with another repetition of naïve Cartesian objectivism and its Siamese twin,
naïve Cartesian subjectivism.
And the whole objective-subjective business bothers me.
Some analytic philosophers have, for example, complained about Richard Rorty's neo- neo-pragmatism.
I would say he no longer believes apparently in the objectivity of truth.
Well, I would put it a different way.
I would simply say that according to some of his writings at least, he seems to suggest
that truth isn't really real, and the great American philosophers never said anything
like that.
In James' colloquies about this with Royce and also with Peirce -- they disagreed a bit
on the notion of truth -- none of them suggested that truth wasn't real. It was just a disagreement
over what the reality of truth consisted in. And here's an example of I think if we appropriate
all three thinkers, Royce, James, and Peirce, we can come up with great springboards for
continued discussions of what truth is.
God knows we need that today.
We're buffeted by so many, as Santayana would put it, winds of doctrine, and it's not just
the doctrine of fundamentalist Muslims.
Our whole nation is engaged in a kind of Civil War between fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism,
and what I'm afraid in many cases is mindless secularism.
If we don't find some kind of middle way, something that we can all agree on is true
and importantly true about how to live, about how to survive, then I think we're probably
doomed.
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