ANATHEM, PLATO, RORTY

In Neal Stephenson’s novel ANATHEM the two main factions are the Procians, who are Wittgensteinian (one can also think of Feyerabend, Latour and Rorty) in outlook, and the Protans, who are Platonists. Despite the great difference between a physical cosmology and a mathematical ontology, Badiou provides a good comparison here. Neal Stephenson seems to favour the Platonists, whereas on this blog devoted to pluralism I tend to favour the anti-Platonists.

Yet there is an interesting analogy between Stephenson’s and Rorty’s move away from transcendence : Stephenson physicalises Plato’s ideas, while Rorty “linguisticises” them. If we take a step back, we can see that both are transposing Platonic transcendent ideas into immanence.

Relativism is not a danger in this move, and is rather a straw man caricature of immanentist positions, that are realist rather than relativist. I have argued this in the case of Feyerabend and Latour here.

However, the appearance of relativism needs to be defused by injecting just the right amount of “mini-transcendence”. Stephenson’s solution is fictional, and is interesting for the form rather than for its specific details.

A further point is that despite making the Platonists the protagonists all through the book, the book concludes with the founding of a new Concent. The entry requirements are (1) you must never be sure that you are right, (2) you must understand that “symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting”. So the conclusion ends up favouring the Rortyan perspective.