Preparing the Metaphysical Way for Judgement: Paths Out of Relativism

This chapter deals with the metaphysical framework for situating the capacity for judgement and justification. It starts by considering the default position of ‘relativism’, whereby one’s judgement is ‘relative’ to some bounded spatio-temporal region, such as a culture or a society, in terms of which the judgement needs to be justified. Its natural opposite is ‘universalism’, which says that one’s judgement could (under the right conditions, with the right justification) encompass the entirety of spacetime. This is the usual way of presenting the debate between the Sophists and Socrates. Indeed, it also seems to capture Plato’s own way of regarding the matter because he believed in a fixed reality that our experience regularly degrades, as we become fixated on the moment to moment; hence the need for a cloistered environment for incubating ideal rulers. However, starting with St Augustine, the lack of fixed boundaries and the changing nature of reality start to be taken more seriously, resulting in a more dynamic and open-ended view of history, in which the need to find a final point of judgement becomes a human aspiration materially realized in the future, not Plato’s endless struggle to recover of the memory of the ideal. This sense of the future originally corresponded to divine redemption but over time was secularized as utopia. The corresponding metaphysical stance is ‘absolutism’, whose modern champions have included Leibniz, but especially Hegel and his successors.