“The hundred-odd years spent absorbing and improving on Darwin’s empirical story have, I suspect and hope, unfitted us for listening to transcendental stories.”  (Richard Rorty, 1994)  He acknowledged that we sometimes try to “stick with Kant” and “insist … that transcendental stories have precedence over empirical stories.”   Sometimes we try like Aldo Leopold to “think like a mountain” in the hope that transcendence is green.  Or, we try as some Christians do to think that God is yet knowable through evolution in the hope that we will be redeemed.  Or, we try as critical realists do to think, in spite of Darwin’s evidence to the contrary, that we are knowing ourselves and our world through science and philosophy because we tell ourselves without correspondence of our beliefs with Reality or Truth we have no hope at all.  Rorty suspected we would not be able to sustain such efforts and hoped that we would not.

Rorty believed that since Darwin “we have gradually substituted the making of a better future for ourselves, constructing a utopian, democratic society, for the attempt to see ourselves form outside of time and history.”  He believed our new hope is more useful than the old hope.  Rorty believed the old hope impeded the new hope.

Eliade beautifully described the old way of hope in The Myth of the Eternal Return.  Through ritual and other religious (or philosophical) ways ancestors escaped what he called “the terror of history.”  Through religion and philosophy our ancestors could see themselves “outside of time and history” (in Rorty’s words.)

I do think we have chosen the path Rorty described, but I don’t think we have as much confidence as Rorty had that this path does lead to utopia.  It is tough to sustain Rorty’s confidence in the face of the terror of history.

Could we possibly escape the terror of history by finding our way back into the green world from which we came?  Is that not as Darwinian as is the pragmatism of Rorty?  Is that not as Darwinian as it is religious?

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