Philosophy of Religion as Cultural Politics: A(nother) Rortian Proposal

Richard Rorty never cared much for religion, to say the least. Faithful to his own philosophical and political outlook, he did, however, abandon atheism in favor of anticlericalism—the view that religion should play no role in the public life of democratic societies.¹ This shift sets him apart from advocates of New Atheism (and their opponents), who consider the arguments for atheism a crucial component in the overall case against religion,² but also from the growing group of religious and nonreligious intellectuals who argue that democratic societies need more, not less, religious contributions to public life.³

Rorty also came to articulate—particularly in the last volume of his Collected Papers—his metaphilosophical views in terms of an account of philosophy as a branch of cultural politics, that is, as one of the several arenas on which we critically reflect over human vocabularies through consideration of their social, moral, and political consequences. What matters here, though, is not the vocabularies’ proximity to Reality or ability to adequately represent reality (whatever that may mean), but the social, moral, and political implications of our continued use of them.

In this paper, I want to develop the Rortian proposal to change the course of the conversation in dialogue with Rortian anticlericalism, and on the critical side, I seek to show that the anticlericalist approach tends to reproduce rather than challenge the (current course of the) conversation, the very conversation that, I will argue, lends plausibility to many of the positions directly opposed to anticlericalism. On the constructive side, I wish to show that there are alternatives, and I briefly develop one pragmatic candidate inspired by Stuart Rosenbaum and Roberto Frega. Throughout, I prefer to speak of Rortian anticlericalism, which I take to be the kind of approach to religion that Rorty defends primarily in Philosophy as Cultural Politics and The Future of Religion, to underline that my purposes are not exegetical, but systematical.

Cultural Politics as Philosophical Method

In the preface to Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Rorty proposes cultural politics as a substitute for the technical, quasi-scientific kind of philosophy that continues to dominate Anglo-Saxon philosophy and also, in Rorty’s view, marginalizes philosophers from the larger public and intellectual debates. He writes: “I urge that we look at the specialized and technical debates between different philosophers in the light of our hopes for cultural change. Philosophers should choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of changing the course of the conversation. They should ask themselves whether taking one side rather than another will make any difference to social hopes, programs of action, prophecies of a better future. If it will not, it may not be worth doing. If it will, they should spell out what that difference amounts to.”⁴ Rorty credits Robert Brandom with the claim that cultural politics is “the only game in town”—that is, there are no areas of human life where cultural politics is not an important factor.⁵ It is also, Rorty holds, the least norm-governed of activities—more or less anything is up for grabs in cultural politics. The claim that cultural politics is the only game in town is, of course, itself a cultural-politics proposal and should, as such, be evaluated along the same lines as other proposals; that is, with a view to whether it is conducive to the sociopolitical goals that we consider central.⁶

According to Rorty, human beings have developed an immense number of vocabularies, and what these vocabularies have in common is that they (at least at some point were taken to) help us cope better than we could without those vocabularies.⁷ Coping is different, though, from representing, and Rorty opposes all suggestions that we have developed some vocabularies, for instance, those of natural science, for the purpose of representation of reality, while other practices, such as carpentry, religion, or ethics, were simply developed for purposes of coping.⁸ Sometimes, there may arise a practical need to distinguish between, say, science and pseudoscience, but such needs are best satisfied...