In Our Time - Relativism

Episode Date: January 19, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss relativism, a philosophy of shifting sands. "Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of that relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires. And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own 'ego'." Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given in June 2005, showed that the issue of relativism is as contentious today as it was in Ancient Greece, when Plato took on the relativist stance of Protagoras and the sophists. Relativism is a school of philosophical thought which holds to the idea that there are no absolute truths. Instead, truth is situated within different frameworks of understanding that are governed by our history, culture and critical perspective. Why has relativism so radically divided scholars and moral custodians over the centuries? How have its supporters answered to criticisms that it is inherently unethical? And if there are universal standards such as human rights, how do relativists defend culturally specific practices such as honour killings or female infanticide? With Barry Smith, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London; Jonathan Rée, freelance philosopher who holds visiting professorships at the Royal College of Art and Roehampton University; Kathleen Lennon, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Hull.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, and I quote, today a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture, that of relativism,

which recognising nothing as definitive, leaves as the ultimate criteria only the self with its desires, and under the semblance of freedom, it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her ego. That's Pope Benedict the 16th, and a speech given last June, showing that the issue of relativism is as contentious today as it was in ancient Greece when Plato took on the relativist stance of Protagoras. Relativism is a school of political thought which holds the idea that there are no absolute truths. Instead, truth is situated within different frameworks of understanding that are governed by our human. history, our culture and critical perspective. Why has relativism so radically divided scholars and moral custodians over the centuries? How have its supporters answered the criticism

that it's inherently unethical? And have we lost all contact with transcendental philosophy, or absolute truth, good and bad, right and wrong? With me to discuss relativism at Barry Smith, senior lecture in philosophy at Birkbeck College London, Kathleen Lennon, senior lecture in philosophy at the University of Hull, and Jonathan Ray, freelance philosopher and history. in. Barry Smith, can you define relativism for us? Yes, let me start by suggesting that relativism is a doctrine in philosophy, but it's had widespread appeal outside of philosophy.

It's traveled into the humanities. There's been a lot of use of it in the social sciences. And although it's a popular doctrine to export, it hasn't always had a lot of good press at home in philosophy. The relativist idea is roughly this, that when we make a scientific hypothesis and assert it to be true, when we're trying to decide whether course of action is moral, when we're judging whether a work of art is beautiful.

These claims are not absolutely true. They're always implicitly relative to some background set of standards, some framework, perhaps our cultural assumptions, and that when we say this is beautiful, when we say that killing is morally wrong, when we make a claim that a scientific theory has been established, these are local claims. They depend on our perspective.

only true, as it were, from a particular point of view. Now, that has seemed to be very threatening to some people, because especially in the case of science, the idea is we're not making claims to describe the world objectively as it is. We're not, as it were, trying to get a description of how things are anyway, independently of our judgments. We're always presenting things from our perspective. So what counts as truth, what counts as knowledge,

what counts as even being rational, is going to be what we regard as true or rational by our local standards. It's what is locally as such taken to be a standard of justification or knowledge. So to distill this even further, you're saying that relativism challenges the idea that there's any absolute truth whatsoever in any area? It challenges the idea of an absolute conception,

as if the world is there, as Bernard Williams said, as it is anyway. that our intellectual duty and obligation is to try and get at how it is. If what we're saying is always said or judged from a particular perspective, it might seem as though we only get a partial glimpse. Now, one of the things that we then worry about is whether if how we see things from our point of view and what we say is true from our point of view depends on that point of view,

other people with their standards, with their perspective, with their historical setting, might judge things differently. And the relativist thought is maybe their judgments are equally true, even though they conflict with ours. But as you said, it's spread out from philosophy across the board, and a lot of people listening will think that they are now in familiar territory.

I mean, can we nowadays judge anything in any way whatsoever, which permeates uncertainty in our society in many ways? So we've got two lines to drive through in this discussion. One is the philosophical, and the other is to broaden it out more generally. But can we start with Protagoras? because it's such a nice name for anything, and with the ancient Greeks, because we mostly always do so in these sort of programs, what did he say that could be said to have set it off?

Well, he's the sophist who really two and a half thousand years ago started the idea of relativism going, and it's been with us ever since. He said famously, which reported have said, man is the measure of all things. What does that mean? Well, there are certain things that we must be the measure of, perhaps how things taste, if you think that avocado is delicious,

and I think it's disgusting. We can see that we must be the measure of those things. It's not as though avocado in itself is either good or bad. It's how it tastes to you or to me. Also, Protagoras was wont to say that a wind could feel hot to some people and cool to others. So there's no such thing as the wind being hot or cold. It was hot for you, cold for me. Really his idea is something like this, that what we count as just or unjust,

what we count as ugly or beautiful, what we count as true or false, depends on human customs and conventions, depends on a particular outlook. And the Greeks came to this thought, I suppose, because they had had interaction with other cultures and they saw that people did things differently and that there were different standards of morality, there were different practices.

Jonathan, Ray, can I come to you, did Plato put up an argument against this? Well, he put up Protagoras as someone to argue against. But I think I want to broaden it a bit because this word relativism troubles me a bit. I mean, we're using it as though it was in the same category as words like skepticism and stoicism and cynicism. But it's different because those are old words

which ancient philosophers actually used in order to identify themselves. Relativism is really a 20th century word. I checked in the British Library yesterday, and there are about 200 books about relativism, and two-thirds of them were published since 1990. And what's more, nearly all of them have titles like Against Relativism or the Tyrannies.

or the tyranny of relativism. So, I mean, the word has been, there's been an explosion in the use of the word very recently, and it's always used with negative connotations. And it does seem to, but in spite of that, I think that the word can be used, can be extended to refer to the protagonist that Plato set up as his opponent.

There could be no rationality to any discussion or conversation at all, unless you presuppose that transcending that discussion, there was some goal that everyone was aiming at, which was the truth. And if, let's say, if man was the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that they aren't, then there would be no point in talking about anything. So that seems to me to be the general argument against relativism.

It's that there would be no meaning to discussion whatsoever unless we presuppose that there was some common truth to which we were all in our different ways trying to arrive. How did the science, how did the, because there tends to be when I've read about this from the notes of Eutherian, among other people, they jump from the Greeks, which is touched on, as almost a sort of a diving board, and then you get into the pool

and you're right up to the scientific revolution with Galileo and Newton. How did they come into this argument? What was their input into this argument? Well, I suppose that the Copernican revolution, I mean the fantastic change between seeing the solar system, well, thinking of the earth as the center of celestial events,

and thinking of the sun as the center of, of the solar system, that gave a very, very dramatic idea of what the difference is between understanding something scientifically and understanding something pre-scientifically. You'd say understanding something pre-scientifically is understanding it as if your own point of view, I mean literally your location on the surface of the earth, was absolute and that everything moved relative to that. And that science arises when you make a jump and start seeing things from a different point of view, I mean, you could say from the point of view of the sun, and then everything

falls into place. And I think that gives a certain model of how knowledge develops, namely not by the gradual accretion of new information, but by leaping from one point of view to another. And I think that's actually where this very, very powerful metaphor of points of view and shifts of points of view really gets a grip on the European imagination from Copernicus and the explanations of Copernicanism by Galileo, Descartes, Newton. I've got to go to Kathleen Lennon now. Sorry to John, well I'm not sorry, I should tell you the truth. It's quite interesting.

How did Marx take up Hegel's brand of relativism and develop it, Kathleen Lennon? I mean, one of the most famous things that Mark said was that people's consciousness is formed by their circumstances. And in that he recognised that the beliefs that we come to have are not simply a consequence of the exercise of reason and that the coming to change people's beliefs about things was not simply a question of putting arguments to them, that what people came to believe was a product of where they stood not just historically,

but within the material and social conditions they were placed. So that people, you know, for example, in different classes, would see the world differently. So, for example, one of his examples is this, that from the point of view of the capitalist who's got money, capital is fertile. It breeds itself. If you invest properly and you buy certain, kinds of things with it, more comes out of it. From the point of view of the proletariat or the workers, capital was only fertile as a consequence of the fact that they as workers put in labour,

which made more profits and they were given back in terms of wages. So that was one of his examples where, if you like, an insight into the way in which the capitalist society worked, you'd get a different perspective from the point of view of the capitalist from the point of view of the worker. So we have relativism there. That looks as if you've got relativism because then the question, but Marx actually himself was, you know, a little bit of an old

Enlightenment thinker. I mean, he was still very attached to the Enlightenment idea of truth and in fact later thinkers like Fouca said of him that he had a nostalgia for truth that he should have given up. So he wanted to be able to

say, yes, there were different beliefs from different perspectives, but some perspectives were privileged and gave you a kind of privilege line to the truth. There was a difference between true conceptions of the world and distorted conceptions, or what he called ideological conceptions of the world. And some positions within society made it more likely that you were going to get a distorted perception, and those were the positions of power and privilege, and the positions of people who were marginal, or for him, the position of the working class,

was going to give you, if you like, an advantage. You were much more likely to come up with a true account, for examples, of the workings of society. I mean, the difficulty for him was in justifying the claim that certain positions were in society were more likely to lead you to the truth. Because once you've introduced this recognition, if you see, that different positions in society

are going to lead to different ways of looking at things, it's then quite difficult to justify the idea that some of those are privileged, not in a social sense, but privileged epistemologically, and more likely to lead you to a correct account. So that people following him, if you like, took up his perspectivalism,

the idea that different positions in society gave you different ways of looking at things. But they dropped his, you know, enlightenment thinking that some of those were going to lead you to true accounts of the world. Who took up those? those ideas is a perfectaisalism, as you've put it. It's perspectivalism.

Well, I mean, in the 19th century, it was Nietzsche, the end of the 19th century. And, of course, in the 20th century, you know, a whole stream of continental philosophers. Can we take it on to Nietzsche then? And can you try to bring it together where we are there? At the end of the 19th century, we've given our little bow to the Greeks. Jonathan has broadened the whole thing out completely, which is very useful. and then we've tried to put it back into a historical see-through now. But on the brink of the 20th century,

where as Jonathan said earlier on, most of the action takes place. But did Nietzsche set that up? Where is he? What does he bring together? Well, Nietzsche's got a terrific fear that what we call the truth will actually depend on our needs and interests and our vested interests. Sometimes it'll actually be a matter of who we defer to

and subscribe to. People think that Nietzsche was skeptical about the truth, A lot of thinkers and interpreters who'll tell you that Nietzsche actually has no place for the truth, but what he has no time for is false conceptions of the true. Orthodox doctrine, what the Catholic Church perhaps dictates to us or what any organized religion dictates to us. So the idea is that we should seek the truth for ourselves, and we should set actually a much higher value on truth

than has commonly been ascribed to Nietzsche. But that notion of truth will have to come from where we are, from our own predicament, from our own standpoint, from our own outlook, and we must seek to be as authentic as possible. There's a kind of straining for truthfulness here, for not being hoodwinked, for not being taken in, for actually seeing things as they are. Jonathan Ray, how did Heidegger, Martin Heidegger, take on Nietzsche's ideas? Well, he was very interested.

Nietzsche's word was prospectivism, and he was interested in the idea that truth was always from a perspective. Now, his critics supposed that that meant he didn't really believe in truth, but he insisted, no, he believed in truth. He believed, I believe in my truths, he says. You believe in your truths. And I think it was obviously it was a deliberate provocation, the idea of using a personal adjective in connection with the word truth. From Nietzsche's point of view, he was actually defending truth. He recognized, I think, that the human condition, as you said,

as people with thousands, millions of years of evolution behind us, is one where we can't but speak from where we are. Nietzsche was saying that does not prevent us from having access to the truth and indeed that we should not think that we are insulting the sciences by claiming that science is simply from a perspective, science is from a perspective that has been heroically won by scientific effort. Heidegger accepts all that. Heidegger's big idea in being in time in his great classic work of art

of a philosophy book in 1927 is that, Everything is historical. Things are far more historical than you imagine. The words you use, the thoughts you have. But he insisted that that did not mean that there was, that you had to be skeptical about our ability to get truth. It was only because we had specific, historically rooted points of view, because our ideas were rooted in languages that have histories of which we know very little. It was only because we have these very individual points of view that we are able to have truth. And what he hated about the traditional philosophy or traditional understandings of philosophy was the idea that to think that individuals see things

from particular points of view is to say that they don't have access to the truth. It is only because we are historical entities that we are capable of understanding the truth, according to Haydata. Kathleen Lennon, can we move to the German philosopher Geyer Gadima? I hope that's how you spell it. And his idea of prejudice and how that fits into the argument we're trying to conduct.

I mean, here Gaddamar is picking up on Heidegger's idea that we're initiated into ways of seeing the world by being brought up within a culture, that they provide us with our concepts and our frameworks of understanding. And that this actually is a precondition of the possibility of knowledge at all because they provide our openings into the world. He calls them our prejudices. And he calls them prejudices, not in a negative sense of prejudice, but prejudices are those frameworks of understanding without which knowledge wouldn't be possible.

But one of the things which I think Gadimir did, which helps us is he gave us a description of the way in which differences between different ways of looking at the world can be negotiated. He talked about a process which he calls, called Fusion of Horizons, which is a way of negotiating difference. Now with fusion of horizons, we start with our own way of looking at the world. We don't know how much of that is a consequence of frameworks which we've been given. Because we've been initiated into these ways of looking at

the world, it appears natural to us. It appears as if we're simply reflecting the way things are. It only becomes obvious to us the extent to which we've constructed our way of looking when we encounter difference. Then we encounter the possibility that other people may be seeing the world in a different way. And that encounter with difference brings into relief our way of our way of looking at it that's actually to some extent contingent. We then engage, if you like, across difference for Heidegger. We attempt to understand the world from other people's points of view. We can never see it as they see it because we've also got our own framework of understanding. And out of that kind of encounter comes a possibility for reflexivity of reflecting

on which of these is making best sense of the world. And the outcome of that is something he called fusion of horizon. So he's saying relativism or fusion of horizon is based on practical experience. This is the way the world is. This is the way we have to cope with it because we see difference all the time. Well, as soon as you move around, we start seeing difference all the time. The difference is the way in which, if you like, epistemological progress is going to be made. It's not going to be made because we've got some absolute rules which tell us how to judge whether this point of view or this point of view is the best one. It comes from us actually engaging with other people's points of view and thereby bringing into relief what is constructed about our own point of view and then having a process, but is the process of actively engaging in trouble. trying to see the world as other people see it.

That seems to be a very, that is indeed, a very dignified way to take the argument of relativism, I think, various minutes. But then it moves across to the notion Paul Fierbant of where we have the phrase, anything goes. How does it move from that to that? Because when we get into the anything goes position, then I think that people listening and people around, I mean, it's very much, it's an anxiety for people.

It's also in certain ways. It's a liberation for people. But how does it go from what Kathleen has said, which has a great sort of dignity as an idea, to anything goes, which actually doesn't seem to be, doesn't seem to have anything like the philosophical dignity. Yes, and it leads us to worry that we're losing our grip on saying anything true and getting any form of knowledge.

Nothing certain. That's right. That's right. Well, Fire Albans are philosopher of science who worries that the methods that scientists use are actually not guaranteed ways of getting. getting at the truth, but in fact depend on very different standards and different meanings they attach to terms within their theories. His claim was that the anything goes claim was that different sciences and different scientists will use different methods and we can't, as it

were, stand outside all of these methods have a God's eye point of view and say which one's actually getting at the truth, which one's getting things more nearly right. So instead, he thought what was going to lead to progress in science was having many scientific theories, not this idea of converging and getting the right one. He wanted them to rub up against each other. But he thought that in the competition between scientific theories, it wasn't possible to adjudicate them by saying, well, this theory is just objectively better than that because it's delivering more truths. We could have the very same data and it would be differently interpreted by one scientific theory and by another. And you couldn't then say which was right. It

depended on the interpretation of the data. Data is only data relative to a theory. As you said at the very beginning of the program, it spills into other areas at this point, doesn't it? Yes, it does. That anything goes, you can justify anything by understanding it. I mean, to understand everything is to pardon everything. That begins to be part of it, doesn't it?

That begins to be part of it. And you can see why, for scientists, this is actually a very dangerous thought that anything goes, that you could accept one theory or another, and it's a matter of choice rather than a matter of, trying to strain for truth. It also means that you could accept creationism or any creation myth instead of an evolutionary story because it's just another viable alternative. And the way it moves into other areas is the idea that, as you said, it was a kind of liberty, but it's

also kind of modesty. I mean, who are we in effect to criticise other people's moral practices or decide that they're morally wrong or abhorrent? So we get a kind of modesty about whether we're entitled to criticise other people's standards. Yeah, but people immediately rear up and say, well, you know, genocide, serial killers, why shouldn't we criticize them? Why shouldn't we criticize them? What grounds should we not criticize them? Notice there are some things which are just, as it were, verboten in all societies. I mean, there's a kind of myth here the relativist, you know, the crude relativist might have that there are some societies where genocide is okay. Rather, the idea is that

where we do see general differences or important differences in our moral judgments, we just can't stand outside our framework. We can't actually, there's no neutral perspective from which to judge their morally wrong and we're morally right. Now, the worry I think about that position is it tends to lead to a loss of confidence

in one's own view. I mean, if you have the anything goes philosophy here and that every alternative way of judging something morally or judging which scientific theory we have is right, then you have a feeling they're all equally valid. But then how can you, as it were,

propound your view, propose your view, drive forward what you believe in, because you're meant to have, the modesty is meant to kind of shrivel up your ambition to say something true because you know it's only true for you or true within your culture. Kathleen, can I come back to the French philosophers, which took this into a different direction, Derrida and Foucault. Can we talk just about one of them about Foucault and tell us what he did? Because I think that connects with what you were saying about Marx. And, of course, I think that's a, there's a very interesting connection between Fouca and Mark. and Foucault, in a sense, in writing about knowledge,

was in conversation with Marx mentally a lot of the time. I mean, that was the person that he was, you know, having a conversation with how. For Marx, there was a distinction between ideology and truth, between distorted knowledge that was tied up with power and the good knowledge that was going to come that give us an accurate account of the world. For Fouca, all knowledge is tied up with power.

There isn't a way of purifying it in getting some knowledge which is simply reflect. in reality. All knowledge is tied up with the workings of power. And when we're talking about the world and we think we're simply reflecting how things are, our very language, in terms of which we talk about it, is actually producing the form and order and classification which we give to the world. So we think we're simply reflecting reality and in part we're producing it with our language. There's an example of this which is used by someone influenced by Fouca's idea, a writer called Judith Butler.

She talks about when a baby is born, the midwife holds up the baby and says, this is a girl. And we think that's just a description. But it's also for writers like Butler and Foucault, part of the production of the classification of gender. By saying it's a girl, we're actually bringing into effect a certain way of classifying reality, human beings into just two categories, male and female. So the language is not just reflective. It's also productive. It's producing a structure.

It's not simply reflecting something that's already there. But you still feel what, how, I mentioned once or twice, an apprehension around the word, that if everything's relative, where does that leave us? Where are we? Do you think this is because of a hangover, a nostalgia, as Kathleen said,

Mark said a nostalgia for transcendentalism, for transcendentalism, or is something deeper going on? Or something else going on. I think something else is going. I mean, it seems to me that the word relativism is used in order to denigrate a position that is actually extremely respectable. The old word for it, I would say, is skepticism. Skepticism is the idea that whatever you think,

however strong your reasons are for thinking it, you might nevertheless discover subsequently that there were reasons for disbelieving it. That's to say, whatever you think you might turn out to be wrong. And it seems to me that is, I mean, Barry used the word modesty. I think that that's the truth behind relativism is skepticism. I don't think that skepticism means there's no such thing as truth. It just means that whatever you think, you might be wrong. Well, that seems to me that's a very benign view of relativism.

You were trying to get at what the danger is or why people feel there's a danger. A lot of nonsense has been talked by people who take relativist positions in philosophy, although they don't call themselves relativists. I mean, this is rather like Magrits, you know, Sassine-Paz-un-Pipe as a description of a painting of a pipe. But relativists, when they get into danger,

they say things like this. Look, our judgments and our claims to knowledge are always made from a perspective, and we can't escape our own perspective. And then they say things like this, there are just perspectives. Now we can see that that's nonsense. I mean, where you're sitting right now,

there's a perspective on the room you have from your point of view. It's different from my perspective on the room. We've got different perspectives, all of us. But there couldn't be perspectives unless there was a room on which we had those perspectives. There's got to be something that we are taking in from our point of view.

So the idea that if we say all knowledge and all claims to truth are always perspectival, there's just perspective, that's a bad inference. It's rather like some of the French philosophers who said, we can only get at the world through the language in which we describe it, so there's only language. Again, bad inference. This is just bad philosophy. So what we need to say is we acknowledge a bit of the truth of relativism,

namely that we only come at issues of truth from a particular point of view, but we ought not to be scared of the idea that that point of view really does take in and encompasses a bit of reality, that we are getting something right from that point of view. So you might be able to combine a kind of relativism with a kind of objectivity, and that way it's not so dangerous. Right, well, in our beginnings, is our ends. Thank you all very much. Thanks, Jonathan, Ray, Barry Smith and Kathleen Lennon.

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