World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 372

war of ideas and attitude; a record of confusing conflict. Each one, right from Socrates till post-modernism philosophies tried to meet the difficulty with a doctrine of nature of Truth. "Today, the stakes in this war are enormous. Relativism in the ancient world typically issued in scepticism, whose main result was to be the suspension of all judgment. Today, this is not the way it goes. Today's Relativists persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as a green light to believe what they like with as much conviction and force as they like. So while ancient scepticism was the sworn opponent of dogmatism, today dogmatists feed and flourish on the desecrated corpse of reason. Astrology, Prophecy, Homeopathy, Feng-Shui, Conspiracy Theories, Flying sources, voodoo, crystal balls, Miracle-working, Angel visits, alien abductions, management nostrums and a thousand other cults dominate people's minds, often with official backing. 'Faith education' is encouraged, while Biblical fundamentalism, creationism and Astrology alike salk the White House. We might be reminded of G.k.Chesterton's remark that the problem with people who lose belief in God is not that they end up believing nothing, but that they will believe in anything."
Having gone through the issue, the issue is a philosophic one and 'it is about the source of reason and control of belief by fact.' What then, is the conflict about? When we are Absolutist 'we stand for Truth', 'plain unvarnished objective fact', we like it 'open, transparent and unfiltered.' We may not like it everywhere, confining Truth to some area: scientific Truth or moral Truth etc. But somewhere the Absolute Truth can be found.
Relativists mock these ideas. To them there is nothing anywhere like plain unvarnished, objective, facts, open, transparent and unfiltered. They see everywhere what William James called 'the trail of the human serpant.'Nietzshe said, 'there are no facts only interpretations. Relativism in contrast to Absolutism, chips away our right to disapprove of what anybody says. "Its central message is that there are no asymmetries of reason and knowledge, objectivity and Truth.' Relativism thus goes beyond counselling that we must understand those opinions that are different; not merely we must try to understand them but also we must accept as our own.
In our final critical estimation we can say that both the sides descend from ancient period: the Absolutists from Plato to modern writers such as Iris Murdoch or Thomas Nagel; the Relativists descend from Greek sophists such as Protagoras to William James and Michael Foucault. There are ways in which two sides tend to talk past each other -as classical philosophers liked to say, you give something with the right hand but it may be taken by the left. "The Absolutist trumpets his plain vision; the Relativists sees only someone who is unaware of his own spectacles. The Absolutist parades his good solid grounding in observation, reason, objectivity, Truth and fact; the
323