The relativism that can be told

The relativism that can be told—to borrow a line from Eastern mysticism—is not the eternal relativism. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

Cutting out the jargon, many philosophical debates centering around relativism vs. absolutism reduce to a pattern like this:

Relativist: There are no absolutes in the universe.

Absolutist: On what absolute are you basing that?

Relativist: Dang, you got me.

Afterwards, the relativist holds his head low, his relativistic universe thoroughly rocked. How can relativism be defended without abandoning the principles of relativism? It can't be done.

But the absolutist's trick cuts both ways, with some other debates reducing to the following, different pattern:

Absolutist: There are absolutes in the universe.

Relativist: Yes, according to your premises. But I reject your premises.

Absolutist: But my premises are not mere abstractions. They're truth.

Relativist: So you say.

The trick both patterns exemplify is: both absolutism and relativism make no sense as judged by the principles of the other. Want to poke holes in the other guy's framework? Easy: use your own framework to do so. And thus legions of philosophers, professional and amateur alike, continue poking holes and begging questions. The usual strategy I observe them using is obfuscation: syllables and complexity are added to the debate until at least one of the debate's participants no longer recognizes how the debate fits into one of the two patterns above. But just as you can't change what's in one book by writing new books, no amount of adding to can get around these two points: (1) to the relativist, absolutism's objectivity remains ever yet another framework among many and (2) there's no room for relativism's infinite speculation in the universe of truths as seen by the absolutist. But this isn't the end of the conversation. The nonsense to the other relationship between absolutism and relativism is asymmetrical. Specifically, relativism is indefensible.

The relativist who disagrees with that last point is stuck in debate pattern #1, playing the part of the absolutist and by my account better labeled as such, though of a quasi-relativist kind. That relativism can't be defended is not mere sophistry: it has to do with the absolutist's monopoly on defense itself. Things are objectively right or wrong and objectively true or false only in the absolute universe. Thus relativism, unequipped with even the language of right and wrong and true and false, can't argue its own point one way or the other according to the classical standards of Western argumentation, which hold it as absolute truth that ideas should be defensible. Rather, relativism merely is, and that's about all that can be said for it.

If a conclusion is the place where someone got tired of thinking, many absolutists peter out after the previous paragraph, saying something along the lines of: What good is relativism if it can't even be defended? That's a white flag of surrender (and irrelevance) if I ever saw one! But the absolutist derives his valuation from his own premises, which are exactly what are in question: generally, whether the universe makes some degree of objective sense, and specifically, whether our attempts to make sense of the universe should be defensible. You can't bootstrap absolutism with anything other than absolutism. In all its variations it requires the universe to obey at least one bedrock claim, even when that claim is the one made by the quasi-relativist who says paradoxically but with conviction: Humans are incapable of understanding the universe.

While it's fair to call absolutism a belief or a world view, in my opinion relativism is better described as a tool. Just as there are no perfect carpenters in the world but only people with varying levels of carpentry skill, there are no perfect relativists, only varying degrees to which people are comfortable with and are capable of using relativistic thinking. To borrow again from Eastern mysticism: The relativist that can be named is not the eternal relativist. There's no such thing as an unqualified relativist.

It's little surprise to me then that relativism invites the scorn, ridicule, and bafflement it does. The relativist's world is indefensible, utterly bizarre, and commonly misunderstood. The relativist navigates his ship without longitude and latitude to dock without anchor or ropes. Knowing where you are only in relation to what you see around you sends the mind reeling, not unlike trying to keep one's sense of direction intact while doing a flip off the diving board. And just as there's no trick to doing flips off diving boards, there's no trick to adopting the relativist mindset: it just takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it. As for whether it's worthwhile to do flips off diving boards, that's up to each of us to decide.

Next Monday I'll begin posting what I learn about St. Thomas Aquinas and classical monotheism, just as I've posted about polytheism for the last many weeks. Though I'm no polytheist, I found writing about it straightforward because polytheism employs a lot of relativistic thinking, and I've felt comfortable with relativistic thinking ever since it captured my imagination for keeps in a non-Euclidean geometry class I took in college. So when, for example, the polytheist claims it doesn't matter whether different cultures' conflicting thunder gods are the same god, that makes sense to me, just as do triangles with angles summing to 180 degrees or 270.

Aquinas and classical monotheism, on the other hand, are by no means relativistic. From the start they espouse absolutism by claiming things have a true nature, and it's hard for me to see such teleology as anything other than an assumption—and one that's more misguiding than useful, in my opinion. When such a claim comes from the eleventh page of a 200-page book, time-saving heuristics in my head urge me to dismiss the whole discourse. But that's the disservice I see Internet philosophers doing to themselves daily: judging the value of the other guy's ideas using only one's own ideas. It's no random happenstance we lose a lot of mental flexibility as we age, and I suspect time-saving heuristics have a lot to do with it.

Reading about Aquinas requires a hefty mental shift on my part, but that's a shift I'll try to make here at JEC for the next month or so. Writing about classical monotheism purely by my own standards wouldn't contribute originality to the Internet, and neither would it be much fun to read. Instead I aim to write about classical monotheism according to its own standards and to see what interesting things it has to say. Hopefully you'll find them interesting too.