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Mark Taylor's paper had begun with a quote from Michael Serres's book, The Parasite, about rats chewing up a Persian rug, and went on from there to talk about "the demonized other of the West." Rorty was accused of thinking improperly about otherness—of exterminating the rats: "Rorty's 'dialogue' actually ends in a monologue spoken/written to colonize the other."4 Rorty, Taylor said, was a "cultural imperialist," wielding his machete of irony against the otherness of the other, the difference of the different, "an other that is forever other," "a difference that is always different."5 Taylor advised Rorty "to travel East—from middle to far—in search of an East that 'is' different … different from a construction through which the West converses with itself while pretending to listen to someone/something other."6
Rorty declined the invitation, not very politely, and he brought down the house in the process. Here are some of the highlights. I refer you to a forlorn University Press of America volume, entitled On the Other: Dialogue and/or Dialectics, for the complete text.
• On the Protestant liberal tradition:
Pascal earned himself a footnote in the theology books by distinguishing between the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the God of the philosophers. Since Pascal's time, the former God has remained about the same. But the latter God has gotten weirder and weirder.7
• On Mark Taylor's "a/theology":
This slash is a trademark of a theologian who, just as a philosopher is congratulating himself on finally having wiggled out from under all those heaps of dirty satin and chiffon, the discarded old clothes of what Heidegger called the "ontotheological tradition," sneaks up behind him and pops an all-enveloping, one-size-fits-all cloak over his head. On the back of this cloak are written, in letters of pale shimmering fire, the cryptic words "Now at your nearby tailor's! For the first time ever! The ultimate Vestment of Godhead! Guaranteed self-deconstructing and self-repairing!"
• On turning East:
Taylor calls me a "cultural imperialist" for saying that "truth and justice lie in the direction marked by the successive stages of European thought." "Imperialist" is a fighting word, in the sense that it suggests images of Conquistadors' horses and of Gatling guns. But I bet that Taylor too thinks that truth lies in the direction that leads away from Aristotle toward Darwin, and that justice lies in the direction that leads away from Marsilius of Padua and toward John Stuart Mill.
"As the old-fashioned kind of atheist," Rorty concluded, "the kind without the slash, I keep wishing that we didn't have any theologians."
Rorty could clearly play Overbeck to anyone's Barth. Theologians should be clear about the fact that their subject matter is an outright scandal, no less so if they cover it over with talk about mazes and disappearing gods and rats chewing the carpet. Hitching their wagon to the latest stars of the Sorbonne won't make them any more respectable. "The theologians read the philosophers in the way in which couturiers in undeveloped portions of the fashion world read the latest reports from Paris. For their activity consists largely in changing the label on the latest philosophical costume. The new label always reads 'God,' no matter what the old label was." Or translated: Religious questions and experiential descriptions of longing or ultimacy, however new or remarkable, are just questions like all other questions, and are answered with greater satisfaction by Freud and Marx than by the onto-theologians. Why call the questions and experiences God? Why not primal longings for your mother, or insidious economic determinants of the sort Marx analyzed. So, I figured, what the heck, why not go ahead and talk about the scandal in all its scandalous detail, "foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God."
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