Review

Nicholas Rescher: Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus

For much of the history of Western philosophy, consensus - or uniformity of belief and evaluation - has been viewed as a desideratum the ultimate attainment of which can be taken as assured. Aquinas regarded the attainment of consensus on fundamentals as something which is assured by 'God'; Kant considered it to something which is rooted in the very nature of 'Reason'; Hegel saw it as assured by the spirit of cultivation which, working through the onward march of history, is incrementally enlarging its hold on human society; Habermas viewed it as inherent in the very nature of communication.

In contrast, many present-day writers view the attainment of consensus with hope rather than confidence, and take interpersonal agreement as a substitute for the eternal guarantors in whom they have lost faith. Thus Thomas Kuhn, considering objective rationality to be an illusion, exchanges the logical mandates of positivism for the 'paradigms' defined by communities of enquiry; and thus the Edinburgh school exchanges rationally validated knowledge for group agreements arrived at under the pressure of political constraints.

Whether as inherent in the nature of things or as a requirement of societal well-being, consensus has traditionally been accorded a central position in the rational scheme of things. The aim of Nicholas Rescher's book Pluralism: Against the Demand for Consensus - Oxford, 1993) is to argue the case for an abandonment of the centrality of consensus.

There are two main thrusts to Rescher's argument. Against what he calls 'dogmatic uniformitarianism', he defends the position of pluralism in cognitive and social theory; and, against what he calls 'relativistic indifferentism', he defends our ability to nevertheless take a committed and definite position on cognitive and social issues. Consequently, what emerges from his arguments an approach which seeks to occupy the middle-ground between a traditional rationalism, which views our cognitive and practical problems as admitting of only one possible 'correct' solution, and postmodern 'irrationalism' which dissolves every answer to these problems into the indifferentism of personal interests, matters of taste, group customs, etc.

Rescher strives to achieve this balancing-trick by emphasising the central role of 'interpretability' or understanding, rather than cognitive agreement, in matters of communication, and of 'acquiescence' rather than practical conformity in our social and political interactions. As a result, Rescher promotes an epistemology of hermeneutics over that of consilience, and a politics of 'live-and-let-live' over one of compliance.

Critical to the success of Rescher's approach is his ability to argue convincingly that, whether in matters of inquiry or in the realm of social activity, coordination and cooperation are possible despite disagreement over fact or value/differences in belief and evaluation. And Rescher makes a decent fist, presenting a sustained and coherent argument which he develops through a critique of both neo-contractarian theory as represented by Rawls and Habermas. Whether or not this argument succeeds is, of course, a question which the reader must decide for herself.

Rescher views the traditional 'sanctification' of consensus as 'the last stand in an ethos of democracy of a pre-democratic dirigisme - an insistence on social co-ordination that is unwilling to let people go their own way into a social diversification that affiliates each not to all but to such kindred spirits as circumstances may offer.'. In contrast to this sanctification of consensus, Rescher stresses the importance of:

• legitimate diversity, arguing that the varying experiential situation of different people makes it normal, natural, and reasonable that they should proceed differently in cognitive, evaluative, and practical matters;

• restrained dissonance, arguing that a sensibly managed social system should be so designed that a general harmony of constructive interaction can prevail despite diversity, 'dissensus', and dissonance among individuals and groups of individuals, and that differences need not necessarily lead to conflict;

• acquiescence in difference, arguing that people can and should accept and come to terms with the fact that others will differ from themselves in opinion, evaluation, customs, and ways of going about things; and,

• respect for the autonomy of others, arguing that the rational reaction to dissensus is not merely to tolerate others but to actively respect and promote their autonomy, and that we should concede the right of everyone to go their own variant way within the framework of such constraints as must be imposed in the interests of the autonomy of others.

This last point is reminiscent of J.S. Mill in his essay On Liberty and is, of course, vulnerable to the same line of criticism: that the level of constraints required to ensure the autonomy of each can become a tyranny much greater than the one which it replaces (Cue: the well-known jokes appertaining to the excesses of 'political correctness').

However, the appeal of Rescher's approach lies in its hard-headed realism. It opposes a utopianism, which looks to a uniquely perfect social order which would prevail under ideal conditions, with a social order which looks to incremental improvements within a framework of arrangements which none of us would find perfect but which all of us can live with.

The fact is that we live in an imperfect world. The resources at our disposal - including our own intellectual resources - are limited, and we must simply recognise the fact that consensus is, in general, unattainable. We must learn to live with dissensus and pluralism in matters of opinion and evaluation. The challenge which Rescher lays down is to construct frameworks of social interaction which make collaboration possible in spite of our diversity and which facilitate cooperation in the face of dissensus, and to base our intellectual lives on a 'contextualistic rationalism' which disavows both dogmatic absolutism on the one hand and relativistic nihilism on the other.

If only he didn't use so much jargon...!

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