On the Shoulders of Giants Page 9

  Philosophical holism is similar to linguistic holism, according to which the semantic and syntactical structure of a given language imposes a determined world view of which the speaker of that language is, so to speak, a prisoner. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) pointed out, for example, that western languages tend to analyze many events as objects, and an expression such as “three days” is grammatically equivalent to “three apples,” whereas some native American languages are oriented toward the process and see events where we see things—with the result that the Hopi language would be better equipped than English to define certain phenomena studied by modern physicists. Whorf also pointed out that, instead of the word snow, the Eskimos apparently have four different terms according to the consistency of the snow itself and so they would see several different things whereas we see only one. Leaving aside that this idea has been challenged, even a western skier can tell the difference between different kinds of snow with different consistencies, and were an Eskimo to come into contact with us he would understand perfectly well that when we say snow for the presumed four things that he calls by different names, we are behaving just like the Frenchman who uses glace to describe ice, ice lollies, ice cream, mirrors, and window glass, yet in the morning is not such a prisoner of his own language as to shave while looking at himself in an ice cream.

  Finally, apart from the fact that not all contemporary thinkers accept the holistic perspective, it is nonetheless in line with all those theories of knowledge according to which reality can be seen from different perspectives and each perspective matches one aspect of it, even if it does not exhaust its unfathomable richness. There is nothing relativistic in maintaining that reality is always defined from a particular (which does not mean subjective and individual) point of view. Nor does asserting that we see it always and only in accordance with a certain description exempt us from believing and hoping that what we are seeing is always the same thing.

  Alongside cognitive relativism, the encyclopedias list cultural relativism. That different cultures have not only different languages and mythologies but different moral concepts (all reasonable in their context) was understood, first by Montaigne and then by Locke, when Europe came more critically into contact with other cultures. That primitive tribes in New Guinea still think cannibalism is legitimate and commendable while we in the West do not strikes me as an indisputable observation, as it is equally indisputable that in certain countries adulterers are censured in ways that differ from ours. But, firstly, recognizing the variety of cultures does not mean denying that there are some more universal behaviors (for example, a mother’s love for her children, or the fact that we use the same facial expressions to express disgust or merriment), and secondly, such recognition does not automatically imply moral relativism—that is, the notion that since no ethical values are the same for all cultures we can freely modify our behavior to suit our desires or interests. Recognizing that an other culture is different, and that its diversity must be respected, does not mean abdicating our own cultural identity.

  So how did the specter of relativism come to be constructed as a uniform ideology, a blight on contemporary culture?

  There is a secular critique of relativism, the main thrust of which addresses the excesses of cultural relativism. Marcello Pera, who presents his ideas in a book written with Joseph Ratzinger, Senza radici (2004), is well aware that there are differences between cultures but he maintains that some values of western culture (such as democracy, the separation of church and state, and liberalism) have proved superior to the values of other cultures. Western civilization has good reason to believe it is more advanced than others with regard to these topics but, in maintaining that this superiority ought to be universally evident, Pera uses a questionable argument. He says: “If members of culture B freely show that they prefer culture A and not vice-versa—if, for example, the flow of migration runs from Islamic countries to the West and not vice-versa—then there is reason to believe that A is better than B.” The argument is weak because in the nineteenth century the Irish did not emigrate en masse to the United States because they preferred that Protestant country to their beloved Catholic Ireland, but because at home they were dying of starvation on account of the potato blight. Pera’s rejection of cultural relativism is dictated by a concern that tolerance for other cultures may degenerate into submissiveness and that the pressure of immigration will lead to the West’s acquiescing to the demands of foreign cultures. Pera’s problem is not the defense of the absolute, but the defense of the West.

  In his Contro il relativismo (2005), Giovanni Jervis gives us a relativist who is a strange hybrid made up of a late Romantic, a postmodern thinker with Nietzschean roots, and a disciple of New Age thinking, whose relativism, handily for Jervis’s purposes, looks anti-scientific and irrational. Jervis sees a reactionary streak in cultural relativism: asserting that all forms of society should be respected and justified, even idealized, encourages the segregation of peoples. What’s more, those cultural anthropologists who, rather than attempting to identify the biological characteristics and behavioral constants of populations, have emphasized diversity owed solely to culture—by attaching too much importance to cultural factors and by ignoring biological factors—have again indirectly supported the primacy of spirit over matter, and by so doing they have proved sympathetic to the views of religious thinkers.

  This statement should definitely bewilder those believers whose twofold fear is (1) that cultural relativism necessarily leads to moral relativism—as if recognizing the right of Papuan natives to drive spikes through their noses means that people in Ireland have the right to abuse seven-year-old children; and (2) that maintaining there are various ways of ascertaining the truth of a proposition casts doubt on the possibility of recognizing an absolute truth. Clearly this is not true and it has been proved that there are some people who believe that the Virgin Mary really did appear at Lourdes, but at the same time hold that the New Zealand cormorant is a Phalacrocorax carbo only by classificatory convention.

  With regard to cultural relativism, in some doctrinal notes on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (2002), Joseph Ratzinger, still a cardinal at the time—I choose to challenge cardinals but not popes, given that you never know these days—saw a close relationship between cultural relativism and ethical relativism:

  Cultural relativism … shows clear signs of its presence in the theorization and defense of ethical pluralism that sanctions the decadence and dissolution of reason and the principles of the natural moral law. Following this trend it is not unusual, unfortunately, to come across public statements claiming that this ethical pluralism is a condition for democracy.

  Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Fides et ratio (September 14, 1998), said:

  Forgetting to orient its investigation of being, modern philosophy has concentrated on human knowledge. Instead of working on man’s capacity to know the truth, it has preferred to highlight the limitations and conditioning of that capacity. This has given rise to various forms of agnosticism and relativism, which have led philosophical research to lose itself in the shifting sands of a pervasive skepticism.

  And Ratzinger, in a homily of 2003, said: “A dictatorship of relativism is being established, whereby nothing is recognized as definitive and whose sole measure is one’s own ego and desires. We, however, have another measure: the Son of God, the true man.”

  Here two notions of truth are in opposition, one as the semantic property of statements and the other as the property of divinity. This is due to the fact that both notions of truth appear in Holy Writ (at least according to the translations through which we know it). Sometimes truth refers to the correspondence between something that is said and the way in which things are (“verily, verily I say unto you,” in the sense of “what I’m saying is true”) and sometimes instead the truth is an intrinsic quality of divinity (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”). This has led many Fathers of the Church to positions that
Ratzinger would call relativistic today, since they said that the important thing was not to worry whether a given statement on the world corresponded to the way things were, as long as attention was paid to the only truth worthy of this name, the message of salvation. Saint Augustine, faced with the dispute as to whether the Earth was round or flat, seemed inclined to think it was round, but pointed out that since such knowledge does not serve to save the soul, one theory is practically as good as another.

  It is hard to find a definition of truth among Cardinal Ratzinger’s many writings that is other than the truth as revealed and embodied in Christ. But, if the truth of faith is truth revealed, why contrast it with the truth of scientists and philosophers, which is a concept of a different sort and one with different ends? It would suffice to follow Thomas Aquinas who, in his De aeternitate mundi, knowing full well that supporting Averroës’s theory of the eternity of the world was a terrible heresy, accepted through faith that the world was created, but from a cosmological point of view admitted that it was not possible to rationally demonstrate either that it was created or that it was eternal. For Ratzinger, instead, as reported in his Il monoteismo (2002), the essence of all philosophical and modern scientific thinking is that:

  the truth as such—so it is thought—cannot be known, and we can go forward little by little only with the small steps of verification and falsification. The tendency to replace the concept of truth with that of consensus is strengthened. But this means that man becomes separated from the truth and hence also from the distinction between good and evil, submitting completely to the principle of the majority.… Man plans and “assembles” the world without preestablished criteria and thus necessarily goes beyond the concept of human dignity, so that even human rights become problematic. In such a conception of reason and rationality there is absolutely no space for the concept of God.

  This extrapolation, which moves from a prudent concept of scientific truth as an object of continuous verification and correction to a declaration of the destruction of all human dignity, is untenable; that is to say, it is a position that cannot be defended without identifying all modern thought with the notion that there are no facts but only interpretations, the next step being to claim that existence is devoid of any foundation, that therefore God is dead, and finally that, if God does not exist, then everything is possible.

  Neither Ratzinger nor the anti-relativists in general are visionaries or conspiracy theorists. The simple fact is that those anti-relativists I would define as moderates or critics identify their enemy solely with that specific form of extreme relativism according to which there are no facts but only interpretations, while the anti-relativists I define as radicals extend the claim that there are no facts but only interpretations to include all of modern thought, making an error that—at least in the university of my day—would have caused them to fail their history of philosophy exam.

  The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations begins with Nietzsche who explained it very clearly in On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense (1896). Since nature has thrown away the key, the intellect plays on conceptual fictions it calls truth. We think we talk about trees, colors, snow, and flowers, but these are metaphors that do not correspond to the original entities. Faced with the multiplicity of individual leaves there is no one primordial “leaf,” an “original form according to which all leaves are supposedly woven, sketched, circled off, colored, curled, or painted—but by awkward hands.” Birds and insects perceive the world in ways different than ours, and it makes no sense to say which of those perceptions is the most correct, because that would require a criterion of “right perception” which does not exist. Nature “knows no forms and concepts, and hence not even species, but only an x that is inaccessible and indefinable for us.” Truth, then, becomes “a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms,” of poetic inventions subsequently hardened into knowledge—illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten, But Nietzsche avoids considering two phenomena. One is that, by falling into line with the constrictions of this dubious knowledge of ours, we manage in some way to deal with nature: if someone has been bitten by a dog, a doctor knows which kind of injection to give, even though she has no knowledge of the particular dog that bit the patient. The other is that, every so often, nature obliges us to recognize that our knowledge is illusory and to choose an alternative form (which is, moreover, the problem of the revolution of cognitive paradigms). Nietzsche saw the presence of natural constrictions that struck him as “terrible powers” which constantly press upon us, challenging our “scientific” truths. But he refused to conceptualize them, seeing that it was to defy them that we constructed conceptual armor to defend ourselves with. Change is possible, not as a restructuring, but as a permanent poetic revolution: “if we had, each taken singly, a varying sensory perception, we could see now like a bird, now like a worm, now like a plant; or if one of us saw the same stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third heard it even as a sound, then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature.”

  So, he says, art (and with it, myth) “constantly confuses the categories and cells of the concepts by presenting new transferences, metaphors, and metonyms; constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be variegatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting, and eternally new, as is the world of dreams.”

  If these are the premises, the first possibility would be to take refuge in dreams as an escape from reality. But Nietzsche himself admits that this dominion of art over life would be deceptive, albeit supremely enjoyable. Or—and this is the real lesson that posterity has learned from Nietzsche—art can say what it says because it is Being itself that accepts any definition, because it has no foundation. For Nietzsche, this fading away of Being coincided with the death of God. And this allowed some believers to draw a false Dostoyevskian conclusion from this death foretold: if God does not exist or exists no longer, then all things are permitted. But if there is no heaven or hell, it is the nonbeliever who realizes that if we are to save ourselves here on earth then we must establish good will, understanding, and moral law. In 2006, Eugenio Lecaldano published his book Un’etica senza Dio, an ethics without God, which draws on a wealth of anthological documentation to argue that only by putting God to one side can we truly lead a moral life. I certainly do not want to establish here whether Lecaldano and the other authors he cites are right. I merely wish to point out that there are some who hold that the absence of God does not eliminate the ethical problem—and this was quite clear to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini when he founded a “nonbelievers teaching chair” in Milan. The fact that Martini did not go on to become Pope may cast doubt on the divine inspiration of the conclave, but I am not competent to judge such matters. I just remember that Elie Wiesel used to say that those who believe that all things are permitted are not those who believe that God is dead, but those who think they are God (a shortcoming of all dictators great and small).

  The idea that there are no facts but only interpretations is by no means shared by all contemporary thinkers, most of whom put the following objections to Nietzsche and his followers: First, if there were no facts but only interpretations, then what would an interpretation be an interpretation of? And second, even if interpretations interpreted one another, there still ought to be some initial object or event that triggered our interpretation. Third, even if the entity were indefinable, we would have to specify who is talking about it metaphorically, and the problem of saying something true would shift from the object to the subject of knowledge. God might be dead, but not Nietzsche. On what basis do we justify Nietzsche’s presence? By saying he is merely a metaphor? But if he is, who is saying so? And not just that. Even though we often use metaphors to describe reality, in order to formulate them we would need words with a literal meaning that denote things we know through experience: I cannot call the thing that holds up the table a “leg” if I do not have a non-metaphorical notion o
f the human leg, knowing its form and function. And finally, fourth, in asserting that there is no longer an intersubjective criterion for verification, we forget that every so often certain things outside of us (which Nietzsche called the terrible powers) oppose our attempts to express that criterion even metaphorically; in other words, if you treat an inflammation with, say, phlogiston theory you cannot heal it, whereas by administering antibiotics you can. And therefore one medical theory is better than another.

  So perhaps there is no absolute, or if it does exist it will be neither conceivable nor attainable, but there are natural forces that back up or challenge our interpretations. If I interpret a trompe l’oeil painting of an open door as a real door and march straight on to go through it, the fact that is the impenetrable wall will considerably weaken my interpretation.

  There must be a way in which things are or go—and the proof of this is not just that all men are mortal but also that, if I try to walk through a wall, I am going to break my nose. Death and that wall are the only forms of the absolute that we cannot doubt.

  The evidence of that wall, which tells us “no” when we wish to interpret it as if it was not there, is arguably a very modest criterion of truth for the guardians of the absolute, but as Keats put it, “that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”