Dictatorship of the Professoriat? Antiobjectivism in Anglo-American Philosophy

Whether Cardinal Ratzinger was right, in his homily, that modern society and too many individual lives are enslaved to "a dictatorship of relativism" is a question we may best leave to sociologists, moralists, and pundits to determine. It is likely that Gianni Vattimo is right to say, in introducing this symposium, that the cardinal "was not referring to philosophical relativism so much as he was to vaguer social phenomena that cluster around the adage 'everything's relative'." On the other hand, Joseph Ratzinger was for many years an academic, one with philosophical as well as theological training; and, again as Vattimo points out, Ratzinger has, since leaving the academy for the Vatican, debated in a university setting with Jürgen Habermas and commented periodically on developments in Anglo-American as well as German philosophy. As my contribution to this symposium, then, I would like to explore the relevance of Ratzinger's metaphor, "dictatorship of relativism," to the state of contemporary academic philosophy. I shall limit my remarks to mainstream Anglo-American departments of philosophy, though the principal philosopher with whose work I shall be concerned, Ludwig Wittgenstein—the leading influence, even now, on those departments—wrote in German. More precisely, I want to explore to what extent the cardinal's metaphor might be said, or should not be said, to sum up the mentality of these departments, the kind of work that their faculties produce, and the kind that they demand as well of their students. I want to argue—perhaps not too provocatively in a discussion of Ratzinger's provocative homily—that mainstream Anglo-American philosophy has been for some time, under Wittgenstein's influence, the home address of antirealism, antiobjectivism, and ne plus ultra forms of "meaning-skepticism."

By mainstream philosophy I mean the kind that emerged in the wake of old-style logical positivism/empiricism and that these days decides what count as serious contributions to various core areas of the discipline, among them epistemology, ethics, and the philosophies of mind, logic, and language. My initial hypothesis is that Wittgenstein has succeeded, against his own desires, in establishing a philosophical orthodoxy whose power is all the stronger for its claiming to be no such thing but rather something like the opposite. So far from showing the fly a way out of the fly-bottle, the legacy of his Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty has been to keep philosophers obsessively buzzing around a number of topics—notably, the "private language" and "rule-following" debates—that permit no solution except in the terms that Wittgenstein set for them himself.¹ This legacy has been most pronounced, moreover, among those who dissent in various ways from Wittgensteinian orthodoxy yet find themselves drawn back inescapably into the same closed circle of argument as almost everyone else. Wittgenstein has a remarkable way of conjuring doubt or evoking skeptical qualms in his readers even while professing to lead us back to a sane acceptance of their self-defeating character. One result has been a strange compulsion on the part of many otherwise-dissident thinkers to run their case past the standard range of likely Wittgensteinian objections and hence, very often, to surround that case with so many caveats and scruples as to bring it out more or less in conformity with his. This tendency is most clearly visible when advocates of a realist position—the present-day philosophical position furthest removed from anything that could be termed "relativism"—attempt to find a way of working with the kinds of antirealist argument developed on the basis of Wittgenstein's thoughts about rule following and related topics.² What often results is a tortuous attempt to explain how one can have all the truth and objectivity that realists demand of any discourse, while accepting the force of those passages in Wittgenstein's later work that speak of communal "agreement in judgment" as the closest we can come to objectivity and truth.³

There is no way of reconciling Wittgenstein's claims with the premises of realism.⁴ The realist holds that truth transcends any constraints on our...