The Journal of Speculative Philosophy

Religion is that element which, in beings endowed with reason, is called upon to make good any deficiency of attachment to life.

—Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

This is an essay about the theological uses of Richard Rorty's ironism.¹ I have written it for several reasons, not all of which can be explored here, but by stating them the reader will better understand the cluster of ideas of which it is a part and which I hope to flesh out in future essays. This cluster of ideas is as follows:

First, the religious/secular divide that has resulted from, most notably, the Enlightenment project has been accepted, largely, without a proper and sufficiently nuanced examination of the possibilities associated with the meanings of the terms religious and secular. I would argue that those terms have been hijacked by those who think of each only narrowly to mean something like (a) belief that is settled along the lines of Peircean methods of isolated subjective speculation, authority, or tenacity (where tenacity includes revelation from beyond time and chance); and (b) the, loosely speaking, "scientific method," which values inquiry as part and parcel of a self-correcting public enterprise in which doubt is viewed as salutary, as the beginning of newer and better beliefs. In the minds of the hijackers, the "religious" is, of course, associated with (a); and the "secular," more or less with (b). The dogma on which this distinction rests should be challenged. Indeed, I take the view that there is nothing inherent in the concept of religion that places it beyond the pale of an enterprise that is self-correcting, open to change, and views doubt as salutary, as the beginning of further inquiry leading to deeper and richer religious experiences and engagement with the world. Indeed, the very conjoining of religion and faith (which may more profitably be thought of as a Grand Conclusion or Grand Vision without all of the pieces of the conclusion or vision fully explicated) implies enormous room for doubt. The sphere of the religious is not exhausted by recounting the blind creeds and bloodbaths that result from some of its various iterations, any more than politics is exhausted by recounting pogroms and colonialism. As Charles Taylor reminds us: [End Page 33] It is [too] quick to jump to the conclusion that whatever has generated bad action must be vicious (hence nationalism must be bad because of Hitler, communitarian ethics because of Pol Pot, a rejection of instrumental society because of the politics of Pound and Eliot, and so on). What it loses from sight is that there may be genuine dilemmas here, that following one good to the end may be catastrophic, not because it isn't good, but because there are others which can't be sacrificed without evil. . . . All this, in a context of historical ignorance, helps to accredit the over-simple and almost caricatural readings of one or another strand of modernity. Such readings make various facets of modernity seem easy to repudiate. . . . Above all, we have to avoid the error of declaring those gods invalid whose exclusive pursuit leads to contemptible or disastrous consequences.

(1989, 503, 511)

Second, the practical/spiritual divide—another dogma of modernity, centered largely, it seems to me, in a European ethnocentric fixation on considerations of what is better and what is worse in terms of our time and energies—is equally ripe for critique, as it is more than arguable that this divide is a social construction that need not exist and ought not exist. The criticisms of homo economicus and of "the one dimensional man," proffered by Veblen, Marcuse, Radhakrishnan, and others, are apt and must be explored.

Third, the view of truth in phenomenological terms rather than in mere logical or scientific terms goes largely unexplored other than by thinkers who can blend streams of thought from various traditions (as have Rorty and, before him, Emerson).

Fourth, Rorty's ironism is a significant structural element of a virtue ethics for the twenty-first century and one (or something like it) we would do well to incorporate if...