Relativism: So What? (Part Six: Pope Talks Out His Ass)

[koganbot]

International Herald Tribune, July 17, 2008:

"Do not be confounded by those who see you as just another consumer in a market of undifferentiated possibilities, where choice itself becomes the good, novelty usurps beauty, and subjective experience displaces truth," he said

Comments

[dubdobdee]

sorry not to be contributing more -- the problem as usual is that it's too big a topic, not too small a topic, and i have a different thinking cap on currently (viz a deadline on monday

[koganbot]

Oh yes, I'm really more interested in the left here than the right, though the pro-"relativist" left is more fascinating than the anti-"relativist" left is, since the former is at least trying not to be dogmatic. In fact, giving oneself the right not to be dogmatic can be an impulse that motivates "relativism."

But left or right, the anti-relativists cheat, since they're simply unwilling to distinguish between "Don't you see that if you don't accept my absolute truth you really have no good basis for saying that anything is better than anything else?" and "The reason you don't accept my absolute truth is that you believe nothing is better than anything else." (But as I've been saying, I think a lot of the pro-relativists who think of relativism as a big deal buy into something like the former statement ("don't you see"), because I'm not sure you can make relativism a big deal if you don't buy into some such statement