No quedé satisfecho con mi post anterior. Siento que peca de reaccionario, de ignorante, de apurado, y algunas otras faltas menores. Pero lo escribí de una manera u otra, sin filtro, porque también lo siento necesario.
Dos cosas considero importantes en el acto de escribir (y publicar) de esa manera. El primero, ya lo anoté en mi libro, es la cuestión socioeconómica: tengo la educación que tengo, el tiempo que me queda libre, y mi lugar en la sociedad está bastante acotado y alejado de la reflexión sesuda y superculta. Defiendo hablar de nuestras ideas, y compartirlas, mucho antes que el “tener razón”.
La segunda, sin embargo, está mucho más determinada por el texto de Meillassoux. Se trata del trabajo intelectual, sus modos, y su rol. Ayer tenía mucho más a mano a Foucault, y por eso lo cité, en esa reflexión sobre la metafísica, que atesoro desde hace años. Pero otra reflexión, que hoy me tomé el tiempo de ubicar, me parece todavía más atinada (y representativa de mi posición frente al tema). Se trata de Rorty, en Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:
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We need to get off this seesaw. Davidson helps us do so. For he does not view language as a medium for either expression or representation. So he is able to set aside the idea that both the self and reality have intrinsic natures, natures which are out there waiting to be known. Davidson’s view of language is neither reductionist nor expansionist. It does not, as analytical philosophers sometimes have, purport to give reductive definitions of semantical notions like “truth” or “intentionality” or “reference.” Nor does it resemble Heidegger’s attempt to make language into a kind of divinity, something of which human beings are mere emanations. As Derrida has warned us, such an apotheosis of language is merely a transposed version of the idealists’ apotheosis of consciousness.
In avoiding both reductionism and expansionism, Davidson resembles Wittgenstein. Both philosophers treat alternative vocabularies as more like alternative tools than like bits of a jigsaw puzzle. To treat them as pieces of a puzzle is to assume that all vocabularies are dispensable, or reducible to other vocabularies, or capable of being united with all other vocabularies in one grand unified super vocabulary. If we avoid this assumption, we shall not be inclined to ask questions like “What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules?” “Are colors more mind-dependent than weights?” “What is the place of value in a world of fact?” “What is the place of intentionality in a world of causation?” “What is the relation between the solid table of common sense and the unsolid table of microphysics?” or “What is the relation of language to thought?” We should not try to answer such questions, for doing so leads either to the evident failures of reductionism or to the short-lived successes of expansionism. We should restrict ourselves to questions like “Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?” This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question about whether our beliefs are contradictory.
“Merely philosophical” questions, like Eddington’s question about the two tables, are attempts to stir up a factitious theoretical quarrel between vocabularies which have proved capable of peaceful coexistence. The questions I have recited above are all cases in which philosophers have given their subject a bad name by seeing difficulties nobody else sees. But this is not to say that vocabularies never do get in the way of each other. On the contrary, revolutionary achievements in the arts, in the sciences, and in moral and political thought typically occur when somebody realizes that two or more of our vocabularies are interfering with each other, and proceeds to invent a new vocabulary to replace both.
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Nuevamente, el énfasis es mío. Rorty nos avisa que la historia está llena de esa clase de debates. Pero lo que afirma no es ocioso; él también nos llama la atención porque, él piensa, y yo comparto, dedicar el pensamiento a esos problemas casi paralelos a los que suceden en la sociedad tiene consecuencias nefastas. Otra cita de otro texto, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3, lo deja más claro:
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As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.
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Cabe destacar, que escribo todo esto a sabiendas de que muy probablemente estoy absolutamente equivocado en mi juicio prematuro y sesgado contra el (apenas primer capítulo del) texto del pobre Meillassoux. Pero qué se le va a hacer…