Rortys kulturpolitik och frågan om religion i det offentliga samtalet

Abstract

This paper comprises a critical discussion of Richard Rorty’s proposal to reorient philosophy of religion in the direction of cultural politics – that is, a never-ending set of negotiations about the kind of society we want to live in and how to achieve it. While I find much of value in Rorty’s approach, I show that Rorty neglects to take his own suggestions seriously enough, something which becomes particularly obvious in his own cultural politics-approach to the question of the role of religion in public deliberation. Here, Rorty neglects the importance of the discourse which serves as the background against which different cultural politics-proposals are understood and assessed, and I show that the analysis of religious belief in terms of “faith” that he suggests as a matter of fact plays right into the hands of his opponents within the religion in public deliberation-debate.

To retain what is fruitful in Rorty’s approach, then, I argue that we need to pay more attention to the dominant discourse within a given field, and seek ways to challenge rather than reproduce assumptions within that discourse. Such an “improved” version of cultural politics may well function as one, among several, approaches to problems within philosophy of religion, and need not exclude that we, in dealing with other prob-lems, operate with a more “traditional” approach.