Journal of European Baptist Studies, Volume 9, Number 2, January 2009

tion of a single option creating a false sense of objectivity. Free and open encounters of various philosophical, theological and ethical ideas should lead to repeated choices of best solutions for the respective social groups. This means that no truth should aspire to being established as 11 See: George Herbert Mead, Mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1934). 12 Richard Rorty, Cosmopolitanism Without Emancipation. A Response to Lyotard , [in:] Scott Lash, Jonathan Friedman (ed.), Modernity and Identity (Oxford, UK, Cambridge, USA: Blackwell, 1992), p. 61. 13 See: Richard Rorty, Contingency, irony, and solidarity (Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). New Inspirations and Religious Education in Poland 25 absolute; rather, what we deal with are continual transformations of particular truths resulting from their interaction. A relative sense of stability comes only from accumulated social and individual experience. In order to overcome this awareness, Rorty suggests an ironic attitude which helps us retain a necessary distance when faced with no ultimate answers to human questions. A free and distanced person may belong to various social groups, experiment with different lifestyles, and experience a number of value systems. Only then can one develop by making conscious choices, though at the cost of being aware of one’s casualness. It may be expected that mature societies in the future will derive their sense only from this world and the reality will no longer have to be rooted in transcendence of any kind. This is exemplified even today by citizens of Western democracies. This does not mean, however, rejecting the irrational aspect altogether but perceiving it in esthetic terms as complementary to the rational aspect (the union of art and science), thanks to which the postulated utopia will not slip into nihilism. Even though neopragmaticians (not only Rorty but also Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson and John B. Cobb) are critical of metaphysical realism (in Cobb’s case, of theological dogmatism), they do not advocate relativism. On the contrary, they stress the necessity to retain discursive analyses of great contemporary problems. Putnam calls Rotry a cultural relativist, accusing him of identifying truth with norms of a specific cultural community, which means that all statements have particular meanings only to their authors. Thus it becomes impossible to construct some holistic - though not absolute - system; entities are separated by impenetrable barriers (no continuity and relationship); repetition (e.g. quoting) is impossible because the respective statements only work in their original contexts. As a result, social isolationism grows deeper and any kind of discourse becomes immaterial as knowledge is either totally private or confined to the already existing cultural or religious circles (because o