The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is … - David E. Cooper

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A country's greatness lies in its undying ideals of love and sacrifice that inspire the mothers of the race.

David E. Cooper

The dis-incumbenced stance is the one people should cultivate, we are told, once they recognize that there is no world beyond the human world. They will, indeed must, have their beliefs and values, but they will recognize that these 'lean upon' - and are answerable to - nothing other than human commitments and purposes. The only fidelity, Rorty remarked, can be to our own conventions.

Commitment, Commitments, Conventions, People, Purpose, Recognize

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It is indeed impossible to describe reality 'in itself', but that does not mean that our lives are answerable to nothing but our own conventions and commitments. They are answerable to a way of things that transcends the reach of our conceptual schemes.

Commitment, Mean, Nothing, Reach, Reality, Things

It is hubris, claim the critics of 'absolutism', to suppose that we could ever even approximate to a true description of how the world anyway is. It is bad faith or 'bullshit', respond 'absolutists', to suppose - as the rhetoric of postmodernism implies - that we could seriously live and act with the thought that truth and value are simply our own projections. An attractive feature of 'ineffabilism', as I see it, is that it evades these accusations.

Absolutism, Bullshit, Implies, Respond, Simply, World

Nietzsche's 'perspectivalism' was expressly directed against the 'laughable juxtaposition of "man and world"'. But 'absolutist' accounts, too, typically try to demonstrate that human beings are integral components of the world these accounts articulate - that, for example, we are simply material bodies subject to the same natural processes as everything else.

Beings, Directed, Example, Integral, Men, Trying

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

Abiding, Effort, Fear, Philosophy, See, Words

To describe this world is not to describe reality 'in itself', as it is independently of how we regard and describe it.

Independently, Reality, Regard, This World, World