On Relativism

IN A NEWSPAPER COLUMN after the first year of the Pope’s pontificate, John Allen wrote: “In terms of content, no one has to speculate about Benedict XVI’s most important teaching concern. He told us, the day before his election, in his homily Pro Eligendo Papa on April 18, 2005: the challenge to a ‘dictatorship of relativism’ in the developed West.”¹ Allen’s prediction finds support in a long series of documents. As Prefect of the Congregation for Doctrine, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger frequently pointed to the evils of relativism. At Hong Kong in 1993, he called it “the gravest problem of our time,” and at Guadalajara in 1996, he called it “the central problem of faith for our time.”² Ratzinger returns to the theme of relativism in several books published in English since he became pope, notably Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures and Without Roots: Europe, Relativism.³ From these and a few other sources, we can piece together a fairly complete description of his critique.

Origins of Relativism

Relativism holds that mutually opposed points of view can all be valid. According to Ratzinger, relativism is an outgrowth of the metaphysical agnosticism of Immanuel Kant (TT, 126, 135). Rejecting the possibility of metaphysics in the usual sense, Kant held that the human mind can properly know only sensory “phenomena” or what can be logically deduced from them. Knowledge is therefore conditioned by appearances, which are relative to the observer. The absolute, Kant maintained, cannot be found within history or validly deduced from it, though earthly realities may be interpreted as pointing to it.

Kant himself, while denying that we can strictly know eternal and necessary principles, avoided relativism by affirming that there were universal and necessary a priori forms of the intellect and postulates of practical reason that enjoyed the same universality. Making use of these postulates, the enlightened person could, in Kant’s opinion, construct a system of morals and a viable religion within the limits of reason alone without appeal to the supernatural. But Kant continued to hold that there can be no knowledge properly so called of transcendent realities.⁴

Nineteenth-century thinkers in the West, sharing Kant’s agnosticism, likewise stopped short of relativism. The dominant outlook was scientific positivism, a system that attempted to account for all reality on the basis of fixed mechanical laws. This system eliminated morality as a specific category. The favored theory was utilitarianism, which assessed the goodness and badness of human acts not on grounds of transcendental precepts or intrinsic values, but on the basis of their beneficial or harmful consequences.⁵

Moreover, socialists of various types attempted to construct a fully scientific explanation of society. Marxism was the last great effort to found a universally valid code of behavior and to lay the foundations of a new society. The collapse of Marxism in central and eastern Europe in 1989 brought about a profound disillusionment. Relativism has filled the resulting vacuum (TT, 116–17).

In WR, co-author Marcello Pera discusses two forms of contemporary philosophical relativism: contextualism and deconstructionism (Pera in WR, 11–22). Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers represent the first. They maintain that different cultures have their own rules of thinking and speaking. Different linguistic universes, they say, are incommensurable. What one community holds to be true, beautiful, and good is only so according to the criteria by which that community guides its judgment. There are no meta-criteria by which to judge what is universally true, beautiful, or good. Since all the criteria are contextual, relativism, they argue, must in the end prevail.

The second form of relativism derives from Nietzsche and is masterfully represented by Jacques Derrida, who deconstructs supposedly universal concepts and assertions to show that they are self-contradictory. For this school of thinkers, there are no facts, only interpretations. The meaning of a text depends entirely on the subjectivity of the reader.

Wittgenstein and Derrida have their disciples and peers in the United States. The names of Willard Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty, and John Caputo come to mind. But I shall not...