Fromm's Humanism and Rorty's Relativistic Historicism

THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN recognition that the ultimate justification of our commitment to scientific method and scientific knowledge, as well as to moral and aesthetic values does not rest on anything but that commitment itself, and the inference that one commitment is as good as another. Commitments to courses of action, beliefs and evaluations, have consequences which require renewal of commitments or their alteration. Consequences matter. Richard Rorty would agree. But then, if consequences matter, why does Rorty deny scientific method and scientific knowledge a preferred epistemological position in relation to, say, literature? Literature is a valued product of the human imagination, useful for its intended purposes, but hardly as reliable a guide to intelligent action as the scientific pursuit of knowledge. One is led to think of Peirce's insistence that no intuition—literary or otherwise—is self-justifying.

It will be argued in this paper not only that Rorty is an historicist—a classification he accepts, but also that his position is one of relativism—something he prefers to deny. Further, I intend to rebut what I regard as the deleterious consequences of Rorty's relativism for ethics—the implication that there can be no cross-cultural criteria of moral values. In line with this objective, I have chosen to counter Rorty's ideas with those of Erich Fromm (1941), (1947), (1955), (1962), (1964), (1968), (1963), a thinker who stands out as one sharing many of Rorty's premises but who yet does not draw Rorty's relativistic conclusions. Indeed Fromm argues on the basis of pragmatic assumptions akin to those of Rorty that a scientific knowledge of human nature is possible. It is important to recognize at the outset however that such knowledge does not in itself also deliver knowledge of cross-cultural moral standards: whatever genuine moral standards there are in a given instance remains