Between

«A Member of the audience: You explain to us that neither reason nor experience helps us to choose between a transcendental and an immanentist perspective. Does that mean that we just have to resign ourselves to the fact that in this world everyone sticks to their own superstition, or is there a point at which we take stock, and we say: "No, it is preferable to pursue this course rather than the others"? That moment of stock-taking, of assessing the facts, isn't that democracy in action?

Richard Rorty: I think yes, that is the application. Of course reading history philosophy has an influence on which of the great visions of the world you will ally yourself with. But in the end I think we should give up the idea that either philosophy or history provides a neutral court of appeal to decide between us and our friends who are  attracted by the alternative vision. We are gradually working out a form of social life in which atheists and Christians can live together in the same political arena.Three hundred years ago this would have been thought impossible. But we achieved it. It was a great imaginative project and it turned out to be a successful project. I hope we can hold on to this project and that it will become a model for the future course of moral progress.

Gianni Vattimo: I have the impression that, as the last question shows, the idea is widespread in the general public that in the end everyone just sticks with their own convictions. But there is a whole middle ground between total, definitive truth, on the the one hand, and "everything goes", on the other, and experience and history can supply us with what you might call rhetorical arguments ad homines. If someone says "I prefer the Beatles (or something even worse than the Beatles) to Beethoven", what can I do? All I can do is try to convince him: "Listen to this with me, hear how banal that chord is", and so on. More I cannot do. In history and experience I find not so much definitive arguments as rhetorical arguments. I don't know whether Richard Rorty agrees.

Richard Rorty: Yes. I don't mean to say that historical experience, reading history, reading literature, reading philosophy, talking with your friends, taking part in politics, is useless, that it's just a matter of arbitrary preference. All I want to say is that - I agree with you - we should stop opposing universal necessary truth and arbitrary preference, and say that no important decisions are made by an exercise of arbitrary preference, no important decisions are made by assured grounding in universal truth. We are all always somewhere in between.»

Richard Rorty, An Ethics for Today, finding common ground between philosophy and religion