Can Philosophers Help Their Clients?

...Their combined influence moved philosophy away from the question "What are we...

...The Enlightenment's cry of "Justice...

...When justice conflicts with loyalty, loyalty usually wins...

...To which he added: "That which may be pretentiously unreal when it is formulated in metaphysical distinctions becomes intensely significant when connected with the struggle of social beliefs and ideals...

...In such societies philosophers can only be priests in the service of a state religion...

...There is, I think, no point in looking to this tradition for help with the problem of justice versus loyalty as long as it continues to assume that justice is a transcendent value, whereas loyalty is an empirical matter, unworthy to play a part in moral deliberation...

...But this movement is of little use in thinking about social problems...

...The latter is especially interesting, since it argues in detail that universalism is not, as Kantians insist, intrinsic to morality...

...Most of us are far more interested in the welfare of our fellow citizens than in that of people on the other side of the world...

...On Walzer's view, moralities are local, parochial, "thick...

...Most of us feed and protect our families before thinking about the needs of our neighbors...

...to the question "What might we try to become...

...But philosophy cannot possibly end until social and cultural change ends...

...Thin" universalism is not, pace the Enlightenment, the root from which moral insight grows...

...Only as philosophers began to take time and history seriously did their hopes for the future of this world gradually replace their desire for knowledge of another world...

...These thinkers have tried to situate themselves in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and Weber...

...There is every reason to think the globalization of the labor market will be followed, not by a globalization of democracy, but by almost unbearable pressure on the democratic institutions of the richest countries...

...But it obviously creates a new, immeasurably greater tension between our particularistic loyalties and our universalistic sense of justice...

...What do the philosophers' clients need from them as the 20th century draws to a close...

...Few members of the Canadian middle class would even listen to a proposal to equalize socioeconomic opportunity in Canada, Portugal, Uzbekistan, and Burma...

...contemporary philosophers, like engineers and lawyers, must find out what their clients need...

...Yet the staggering inequalities under the status quo are taken for granted by the middle class of every industrialized democracy, and it is the existence and prosperity of this middle class that is essential to the viability of democratic government...

...In free societies, there will always be a need for philosophers' services, since such societies never stop making old vocabularies obsolete...

...The best contemporary books I know of on the conflict between justice and loyalty are Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice (1983) and Thick and Thin ( 1994...

...In the coming century our children will experience very sharp conflicts between their loyalty to the people around them and their obligation to continue working for a Utopian global democracy...

...I doubt, however, whether the poorest nations would be willing to postpone their leveling demands for a few centuries while that happened...

...We have to agree with Marx that our job is to help make the future different from the past, rather than claiming to know what the two must necessarily have in common...

...has, in the course of 200 years, helped to eliminate such horrific contrasts between misery and affluence in a dozen or so countries...

...Hegel's idealism was of course in conflict with Darwin's naturalism, but Hegel and Darwin nevertheless reinforced each other...

...Despite the heroically original imaginations of Nietzsche and his successors, their tradition yields no resources of the sort Dewey hoped philosophy might provide—none of the kind of redescription and reconceptualization of our historical situation that Marx and Weber made available to our ancestors...

...Priests and sages can set their own agendas...

...Still, it has been assumed by social democrats as well as Marxists that the nation-state will, and should, eventually wither away...

...But those very countries have no interest in lowering their own standard of living in order to make democracy an international reality...

...We all have dreamed of a planet-wide cooperative commonwealth—Tennyson's "Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World...

...The most original movement of philosophical thought in this century stems from Nietzsche, and runs through Heidegger to Derrida and Foucault...

...Walzer effectively restates Hegel's principal objection to Kantian ethics: that the universal duty to produce equal dignity for all men leaves no place for the particular allegiances that determine our moral identity—our allegiance to our culture, our country, our historical tradition...

...But it has been relentlessly ahistorical in its pronouncements, consigning questions about changing historical circumstances to the empirical social sciences...

...Whereas Plato, and even Kant, hoped to survey the society and the culture they lived in from the standpoint of changeless truth, philosophers have, over the last two centuries, gradually abandoned such hopes...

...These include Jürgen Habermas in Germany, Charles Taylor in Canada and Michael Walzer in the United States...

...It has not, like the Nietzschean tradition, disregarded social needs in favor of the need of the gifted individual to transform his or her life into a work of art...

...Global equality might, of course, come about gradually through market mechanisms, without the rich suffering any deprivation...

...I do not know how this new form of the contest between the weak and the strong —between the economic decision-makers and those at the mercy of their decisions—is going to be resolved...

...That is the sort of polity the majority of the world's population—the electors of the Parliament of Man—would certainly favor...

...None of them are Marxists (at least not any more), but all of them agree with De wey that the sort of thing Marx did for us—waking us up to the possible obsolescence of the vocabularies in which we conduct ourmoral and political deliberations and frame our Utopian visions—is something that still needs to be done...

...Rather, Walzer contends, it is the cream that—with luck, and in especially fortunate circumstances— floats to the top of particular local moralities...

...As I see it, the beginning of the new millennium will confront us with the problem of whether Enlightenment values—the values that have been more or less successfully embodied in the institutions of the industrial democracies— can survive the breakdown of the nationstate as a socioeconomic unit, a breakdown that is the inevitable consequence of economic globalization...

...Their talk of justice sounds like an excuse for betraying their fellow citizens, the workers whose jobs are being exported to Southeast Asia...

...Only a society without politics—a society, that is, run by tyrants who prevent social and cultural change from occurring—would no longer require philosophers...

...In the 200 years since the French Revolution, the industrialized democracies have made considerable progress toward the kind of freedom and equality the thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged...

...Intellectuals may not be of much help to them in dealing with these contrary moral tugs, but philosophers like Walzer will be of more help than most...

...For such changes gradually render largescale descriptions of ourselves and our situation obsolete, creating the need for new languages in which to formulate new descriptions...

...Thinkers like Marx, Weber, Ortega, and Dewey took note of the shifts in power structures that the Industrial Revolution had brought about and warned us that the moral and political vocabularies we were heir to would not be sufficient to deal with the new world coming into being...

...Dewey—a philosopher who, like Marx, admired Hegel and Darwin equally—suggested that we see philosophy as springing "from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies...

...The endeavor to take time seriously began with Hegel, who developed detailed doubts not only about Platonic efforts to break free of time, but also about the Kantian project of discovering ahistorical conditions for the possibility of temporal phenomena...

...Because Plato invented philosophy precisely in order to escape from transitory needs, to rise above politics, taking time seriously has often been described as "giving up on" or "ending" philosophy...

...By Richard Rorty Philosophy began as an attempt to escape into a world in which nothingwouldeverchange.Plato, who pretty much founded the area of culture we now call "philosophy," assumed that the difference between the past and the future would be negligible...

...Few members of the Argentine bourgeoisie would be good, obedient, belt-tightening citizens of a World Federation dedicated to averaging out the standard of living of Argentina, Zambia and Pakistan...

...But the economic decision-makers who are currently globalizing the economy—and insisting that workers in the industrialized democracies must tighten their belts in order to be competitive with workers in Singapore and Taiwan—pride themselves on being beyond national loyalty...

...Heidegger simply turned his back on the Enlightenment, as do contemporary thinkers in this line like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard...

...Insofar as we take time seriously, we philosophers have to give up the priority of contemplation over action...

...The difference between the 50 countries with the lowest standard of living and the 12 with the highest is now as great as that between the very poor and the comfortably-off middle class in England or Spain at the onset of the Industrial Revolution...

...The chief rub is that present inequalities in standards of living cannot be reconciled with a genuinely internationalist socioeconomic polity, one that would treat every Zambian, every Argentine, every Burmese, and every Canadian as entitled to the same opportunities for health care, education, and so on...

...I would hope that intellectuals—and, in particular, philosophers —would be of some value in helping us cope with this intensified conflict of traditional values...

...They sanctimoniously proclaim themselves interested in justice on a global scale...

...We have to shift from the kind of role that philosophers have shared with priests and sages to a social role that has more in common with the engineer or the lawyer...

...As for analytic moral and political philosophy of the Kantian variety—the kind dominant in Anglophone countries—it has tended to brush off Hegel, Marx and history...

...There are a few contemporary philosophers, however, who have freed themselves from Kant without turning in the direction of Nietzsche...

...But now that technology has made it feasible to globalize nearly everything, none of us can imagine how such a democratic federation might come into existence...

...Even Foucault, who looks more like a social philosopher than the others, offers suspicions of the encroachment of any and every sociopolitical institution on individual freedom, rather than proposals for the reform of such institutions...

...Yet I am not sure that the philosophers of the 20th century have given us much to goon...