Coscience and aestethic taste as cultural products. An educational reading of Rorty

In the historical moment we are living in individual conscience and the capacity to engage in ethical reasoning are constantly challenged by choices, dilemmas, events that require sound moral judgement. One of the most relevant challenges is the acknowledgment that aims, scopes, values appear extremely different and sometimes conflicting due to different cultural, economical and social conditions, which would easily lead us towards a relativistic understanding of morality. Also the growing up of global, multicultural and stratified societies highlights the presence of different aestethic tastes,which are confronted according to very different criteria and this highlights how cultural differences shape also our aestetic vision of reality. Ethical and aestetic references are confused, evanescent, fluid and therefore require to be at the same time acknowledged, cultivated but also articulated, contextualized, deconstructed and recostructed in order to play an effective role within individual and collective experience. In his autobiographic writing Trotsky and the Wild Orchids Rorty, pointed out how, in a pragmatist perspective, either individual conscience or aestetic taste are “equally, products of the cultural environment in which we grew up” (Rorty, 1992). Therefore the capacity to make (or not) and to evaluate ethical and aestetic judgments does not derive from individual innate powers nor from inner transcendental categories universally shared, but rather from the cultural enviroment within which single individuals and communities grow up. This opens up a number of pedagogical questions: To what degree the belonging to a determinate cultural enviroment constrains and shapes individual and collective attitudes, capacities, world views? Is education part of the cultural environment and, in this case, is it only a matter of inculturation or does it have other implications in terms of individual and collective growth? How can it be possible to work educationally taking into account cultural differences (in terms of attitudes, norms, values) that may be conflicting with other cultural and environmental traditions?. How can education (according to Rorty’s view of education as a process of “socialization and individualization”) have a significant role in the development of ethical consciences and aestetic sensibilities working across cultural boundaries? To these questions we try to aswer offering a pedagogical reading of Rorty’s philosophy taking into account his works and the works of other readers who, at an international level, have contributed to the advancement of a multifacted interpretations of Rorty’s work.