EUGENE GOODHEART
Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have
not
once seen the
truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognize it when we see it again.
This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers
violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form
"there is something within you which you are betraying. Though you
embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure for–
ever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you .
. . ." There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have in–
deed put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the
course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an
appeal to such a criterion, no vigorous argumentation that is not obe–
dience to our own conventions.
235
Rorty here exemplifies the agnostic intellectual, described by the philoso–
pher and Holocaust survivor, Jean Amery, whose morally ungrounded
rationalism could lead him to accept the "morality"of the torturers in the
death camps:
The intellectual ... who after the collapse of his initial inner resis–
tance had recognized that what may not be, very well could be, who
experienced the logic of the SS as a reality that proved itself by the
hour, now took a few fateful steps further in his thinking. Were not
those who were preparing to destroy him in the right, owing to the
undeniable fact that they were the stronger ones?
Rorty is so bent on producing an account of our moral lives that un–
settles any and all appeals to general and universal standards that he is
unwilling to give credence to the appeal to "something inside." He is
content simply to assert that when we presume to speak from "something
inside," it can only be something that we have put there ourselves. He
doesn't even ask the question of why we should want to put it there. Our
task as moral agents, however our agency has been constructed, should be
the cultivation of the "something inside," which enables us to resist the
torturer inside us and out. It is hardly enough to say that cruelty is the
worst we can do. I do not mean to cast any aspersion on Rorty's personal
humanity. His sentiments are nothing but humane. But as a pragmatist,
Rorty seems oddly unconcerned about the consequences of his ideas.
