Terry Eagleton (who shares with me the dubious honour of being a one time contributor to the Catholic Herald) has a candid evaluation of the late Pope here. Reading it, I was (for no reason) reminded of a story T.E. tells elsewhere about a disingenuously ecumenical Catholic Priest, who agrees with a Protestant Bishop that that we can all worship god in our own way, adding ‘You in your way, I in His’.
But isn’t this faux ecumenicalism true of even the most hardened ‘postmodernist’? No one really believes that their firmly held convictions are just one rhetoric or discourse among others, no less or more grounded than anyone else’s. And someone who does make this claim nonetheless believes it to be true. And if he believes it to be true, he must simultaneously believe that those who think that their view is not ‘just one rhetoric’ are deluded. But he also cannot think them deluded by his own criteria. So he's knackered.
Forgive me, these are familiar and uninteresting paradoxes and not really worthy of your time. But when I was an undergraduate I would put these problems to a resident post-graduate Rorty fan, and she would say ‘Don’t you think Rorty’s already taken that on board’ as if that were the end of the matter.
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