Subjectivism & Suffering

Jonathan Watson responds to my posting of the Richard Rorty quote connecting Christianity to a Nietzschian view of truth:

I believe that I see the connection that Rorty is making - that an insistence on the pragmatic relief of physical suffering as opposed to an other-wordly philosophy could lead (and in many cases has lead) to subjectivism insofar as the means that lead to relief of suffering are often categorized as “good” to the extent that suffering is relieved thereby. Indeed, this is certainly a pragmatic or utilitarian, ends-based, philosophy. (It connects in, I think, with a feeling-based judgment of actions, whereby outcomes that we feel ought to be better are judged as “right,” even if the means used to reach those outcomes often tread the fine line between licit and illicit.)

I would argue that this has most often occurred when the founding scriptures for social justice, especially in the Catholic movements based on social justice, are taken only in the most reductive sense. With no firm foundation in scriptural interpretation, Christ’s emphasis on relief of the brother’s suffering becomes simply a means of decreasing physical suffering, rather than a spiritual basis. I theorize that the disconnect between the need to minister to the poor in all manners (spiritual as well as physical) may result in a reductive reasoning in any such project, whereby the project itself becomes spiritually impoverished, disconnected from the right reason and conscience that holds the Natural and / or Revealed Law as the normative basis, thereby attaching itself to the only normative thinking left to it, the will to power. What results thereby is a thinking that doesn’t take thought for the eternal, but confines itself to the immediate, and thus, pragmatic or utilitarian. It often gets the questions right, but often for the wrong reasons.