334 - Relativism, Nihilism, and God

Relativism, Nihilism, and God
By Philip E. Devine
Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 1989. 152 pp. $22.95.

Since at least the time of Kant, most philosophers have assumed that religious claims were marginal to issues in the theory of knowledge. Belief in God might be viewed as a postulate of practical reasoning (Kant), a noncognitive expression of attitude (Ayer and the positivists), an incomplete and inadequate embodiment of philosophical truth (Hegel), or a justifiable exercise of the will to believe (James). But it is seldom construed as an indispensable condition for first-order knowledge and its second-order legitimation. It has long been taken for granted that knowledge and its philosophical validation can be understood in purely secular terms.

Philip E. Devine challenges this assumption. It is a daring attempt to put the God of Christianity back on the agenda of epistemology by insisting that "the only escape from nihilism is through the acceptance of a picture of the world as sustained by a God for Whom the course of the world, in all its detail, is not a matter of indifference."

He develops his case by examining three trends in contemporary philosophy that accept "the death of God" in Nietzsche's sense: pragmatism, relativism, and nihilism. Pragmatists, according to Devine, abjure the quest for "Truth" in the Platonic sense of an order of knowledge transcending human purposes and conventions and opt for the justification. of belief on the grounds that it "works," or "helps us cope." Devine wonders, however, what "coping" might amount to in the absence of non-pragmatic criteria for specifying worthy goals: "What is the end that beliefs are supposed to promote?"

Unless pragmatists are willing to attribute objective value to "the good" as a dominant end-in which case they admit a standard of interest-independent Truth and defect to Platonism-their position slides into relativism. Devine next considers whether relativism can avoid the self-referential inconsistencies that plague "student relativism" (the "true-for-you but not true-for-me" variety lampooned in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind). Consistent relativists limit themselves to arguing that if "some differences of standard are ultimate"

336 - Relativism, Nihilism, and God

(that is, if there exist no further standards to which appeal can be made to determine which of the contending standards is correct) then "it is nonsense to speak of one set of standards as correct." He argues that all attempts to refute this thesis, including those of Donald Davidson and Karl Popper, have failed insofar as some possibility of irreconcilable standards still remains even if one grants the impossibility of radical untranslatability and the canonical status of falsifiability. But the relativist thesis has not thereby been established. The relativist is mired in the awkward position of being unable to refute the Platonist (the believer in Truth cannot be in error, since her form-of-life accepts Platonism as correct) but impotent to justify his own relativism (for that would be a fatal concession to the Platonist refusal of truth-within-aframework).

The consistent relativist tends to slide toward nihilism, the idea that "the pursuit of Truth is a sham." There are inconsistent forms of nihilism, Devine argues, that "attempt to take a standpoint external to our practices, from which it judges them incapable of reaching Truth." Since nihilists claim that any cognitive standpoint is vulnerable to attack, this form of nihilism is self-annihilating. Consistent nihilists, such as Nietzsche, therefore, do not attempt to refute anything, but rather use rhetoric to wean us from our residual Platonic habits. The present-day descendents of Nietzsche's nihilism, Derrida and the deconstructionists, use this subversive technique to great effect against any attempts at rationally interpreting and judging political systems, sexual practices, and literary works, with the unsettling-and, for Devine, obviously repellent-result that no differences ever make any difference.

Nihilism, however, does not have the last word-neither in ethics nor in epistemology. Devine subscribes to a version of the moral argument for the existence of God which maintains that the force of moral obligation can best be understood as following from God's command. If the best account of moral value and obligation is that which affirms God as their source and guarantor, then why should episternic values be excluded? A "God Who supplies the imperative quality of logical and epistemological imperatives" thus "makes possible the distinction between truth and error" and renders the Platonic quest for disinterested knowledge a serious alternative to its pragmatist, relativist, and nihilist rivals.

While Devine's book is refreshingly bold and diligently argued, I have a number of misgivings about it. The pragmatic movement, especially its most recent incarnation in the work of Richard Rorty, is caricatured whenever it is portrayed as indifferent to truth-seeking as such, even if it is genuinely hostile to Platonic explications of Truth. Devine notes that Rorty himself has "reasonably" suggested that pragmatists do not offer reductive definitions of truth-as-expediency, but rather wish to drop the project of building a theory of truth altogether. Devine does not pursue this strand in Rorty's thinking, which is unfortunate; for if he did, he

337 - Relativism, Nihilism, and God

might be able better to comprehend pragmatism as a reaction against a certain strain in philosophy-its habit of setting itself up as a foundational discipline whose authority rests upon the "privileging" of certain methods and representations-rather than as a crass utilitarianism-of ideas.

Furthermore, in his discussion of relativism, Devine begs an important question. He claims that if some differences of standard are ultimate, then neither of the standards can be judged superior or inferior, since there is no further standard to which one can appeal to settle the issue. This assumes that all rational conflict resolution depends upon explicit (or explicable) criteria that will spell out in a way acceptable to anyone how the dispute can be settled. Borrowing Rorty's terminology, "rationality" equals "commensurability" for Devine. But it is precisely this point about the equivalence between reason and commensuration that many recent philosophers-such as Thomas Kuhn, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hilary Putnam and others-have questioned.

If rationality does not turn on the existence of universal standards available to any and all rational inquirers, both the relativist's skepticism about criteria and Devine's rejoinder lose much of their point. This, in turn, raises the deeper issue of why, or whether, it is important for theists in general and Christians in particular to put much stock in the outcome of epistemological controversy. It is one thing for the believer to profess one's faith as justified and to gather good reasons in its behalf; it is quite another to claim that all reasons gesture in its direction and that the refusal of faith risks logical incoherence. The thirst for a transcendental vindication of one's convictions, even when one possesses solid, everyday rationales for them, and even when the prospects for a priori victory look dimmer by the day, is hard to quench. Despite its manifest virtues, Relativism, Nihilism, and God falls victim to this common philosophical urge, the impulse to abandon the everyday task of securing one's beliefs in the forum of dialogue and debate and flee into the arms of an appealing but illusory necessity.

Michael J. Quirk
Pace University
New York, New York