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identify his own conviction with it. He risks arrogance, error perpetrat–
ing itself on the innocent with smug assurance. There is no absolute
truth, Derrida insists, for who would decide it? After a century of
murderous dogmatism, skepticism seems positively a moral duty. But
is this sufficient? Isn't
some
truth going to prevail, and isn't the
question rather which truth and by what means? Consider basic
political rights: due process of law, equal protection, the various
freedoms listed in the first ten amendments of the United States
Constitution. Is it really better to treat these with skepticism?
If
we are
going to think and talk at all, we need to hold some view and hold it
seriously, making for it a claim not merely personal, but potentially
universal. Otherwise, we simply don 't engage each other at all. A
different aspect of identifying oneself with a "larger interest" is an
identification with institutions. In my experience, the legacy of the last
decade, at least at the middle rank of the profession, is a profound
reluctance to accept and exercise institutional responsibility and
authority. Even where individuals work within institutions, they keep
a certain psychic distance, much as Thomas Buddenbrooks runs the
family firm, but without the spontaneous conviction his father felt. Yet
for all our justified distrust of them, institutions are the only way truth
can be translated into political and social action. And again, the
question is not whether there will be acting institutions, but rather,
what actions will they take and on what principles?
The way to temper this first commitment is with a second, to that
pluralism envisioned by a great and neglected thinker, William James.
He did not-and I do not-mean an atomic fragmentation whose outer
limit is solipsism. I mean something like the idea of "legitimate
opposition," a residual resistance to totalization that keeps actual the
possibility of alternatives. What characterizes this middle ground is the
legitimacy of dispute and the legitimacy of rhetoric as a disputacious
discourse neither skeptical nor authoritarian, but possessing its own
truth.
One final commitment may
be
the most important, though it is, I
think, the least thought about. Erich Auerbach described the situation
of his own work as a reflection on European civilization made possible
by its occurrence at precisely the moment before that civilization ends
as a distinct entity and is gradually engulfed in a more comprehensive
unity. Paul Ricoeur argues that such an engulfment will be based on a
"creative confrontation" between cultures, the unpredictable merging
of traditions through the activities of thinkers genuinely open to more
than one. He gives as an example the confrontation between Greek and
