Over the last week, I've been dealing with media shallowness, but one comment I found interesting on the Rorty article:

It's all fine and good to be a skeptic in the Rortian vein or Stanley Fish-style and argue that metaphysics and foundationalism are bunk and that democracy doesn't need any sort of philosophical grounding.

The problem is that there is trickle-down of ideas: not directly from academia to the average citizen, but from philosophers to the media elite, who are mostly college-educated and whose views of reality and discourse are a kind of cartoon version of the dominant trends in academic thought.

You wonder then where the MSM gets this idea that empiricism doesn't matter, that reality is just a construct, that public life is nothing but a power-struggle in which the right thing to do is find out what the daddy-party wants, and just obey that?

Look no further than Rorty, Fish, and the two-bit latter-day deconstructionists.

Ideas have consequences, and so does the weak-tea thesis that ideas themselves are inconsequential. Without a strong commitment to truth, empiricism, and foundationalism in ideas, all you have left is tribalism on right, and triangulation on the left.

I've been making fun of the following Wilber quote:

"The single greatest problem was stated this way.  When green attacks orange, amber wins.  And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl Rove.  Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly.  All of this thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"

I think I may have to take back my fun-making.  That quote above - coming from a completely different place than Wilber - essentially says the same thing.

Something to think about.

I came across this artice on Richard Rorty today, over at the Los Angeles Times.

Richard Rorty was, in many ways, the american postmodern.    He rejects epistemology early on, and situated "truth" as, in his famous expression - ""Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying."

You can't get more postmodern than that.

As the article points out though, he would review other philosophers works, and, to put it mildly, "misinterpret" what they have said:

These positions irritated many people. But what absolutely killed philosophy professors was Rorty's interpretation of the great figures of the Western tradition. The average philosophy professor may spend a decade or a career trying to elucidate the works of Martin Heidegger or W.V.O. Quine. Rorty lined up such figures in support of his own positions in a fundamentally careless way. He quoted them out of context and ignored everything he couldn't use.

This truly enraged people. The Dewey scholars hated him, as did the Wittgenstein scholars, the Davidson scholars, the Nietzsche scholars, the Derrida scholars and so on. Every one of them thought they could prove that Rorty was wrong about their particular boy, and that he'd have to listen and take back all the things he had said. In this, they didn't understand him at all.

Another example"

As Rorty spoke, Gadamer just shook his big, eminent, bereted head. When it was over, Gadamer said, in German-accented English: "But Dick, you've got me all wrong." Rorty gave the grin and the shrug and said: "Yes, Hans. But that's what you should have said."

Wilber, of course, is coming from a different worldview.  In his case, making room for transcendent truths, without negating the current truths of science and modernity.  A version of perennialism, although one based on perceptual spaces. 

Also interesting then, that so many Wilber scholars not associate with Wilber, share some of the concerns of misrepresentation of other scholars, that drove people crazy about Rorty.