A Companion To Rorty [1st Edition] 1118972163, 9781118972168, 111897218X, 9781118972182, 1118972171, 9781118972175

Citation preview

A Companion to Rorty

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today’s leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike. 1.  The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui‐James 2.  A Companion to Ethics Edited by Peter Singer 3.  A Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper 4.  A Companion to Epistemology, Second Edition Edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup 5.  A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (two‐volume set), Second Edition Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit 6.  A Companion to Philosophy of Mind Edited by Samuel Guttenplan 7.  A Companion to Metaphysics, Second Edition Edited by Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and Gary S. Rosenkrantz 8.  A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Second Edition Edited by Dennis Patterson 9.  A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn 10.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, Second Edition (two‐volume set) Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright 11.  A Companion to World Philosophies Edited by Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe 12.  A Companion to Continental Philosophy Edited by Simon Critchley and William Schroeder 13.  A Companion to Feminist Philosophy Edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young 14.  A Companion to Cognitive Science Edited by William Bechtel and George Graham 15.  A Companion to Bioethics, Second Edition Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer 16.  A Companion to the Philosophers Edited by Robert L. Arrington 17.  A Companion to Business Ethics Edited by Robert E. Frederick 18.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Science Edited by W. H. Newton‐Smith 19.  A Companion to Environmental Philosophy Edited by Dale Jamieson 20.  A Companion to Analytic Philosophy Edited by A. P. Martinich and David Sosa 21.  A Companion to Genethics Edited by Justine Burley and John Harris 22.  A Companion to Philosophical Logic Edited by Dale Jacquette 23.  A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy Edited by Steven Nadler 24.  A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone 25.  A Companion to African‐American Philosophy Edited by Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman 26.  A Companion to Applied Ethics Edited by R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman 27.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Education Edited by Randall Curren 28.  A Companion to African Philosophy Edited by Kwasi Wiredu 29.  A Companion to Heidegger Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall 30.  A Companion to Rationalism Edited by Alan Nelson 31.  A Companion to Pragmatism Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis 32.  A Companion to Ancient Philosophy Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin 33.  A Companion to Nietzsche Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson 34.  A Companion to Socrates Edited by Sara Ahbel‐Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar 35.  A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall 36.  A Companion to Kant Edited by Graham Bird 37.  A Companion to Plato Edited by Hugh H. Benson

38.  A Companion to Descartes Edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero 39.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski 40.  A Companion to Hume Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe 41.  A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Edited by Aviezer Tucker 42.  A Companion to Aristotle Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos 43.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology Edited by Jan‐Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks 44.  A Companion to Latin American Philosophy Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno 45.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost 46.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Action Edited by Timothy O’Connor and Constantine Sandis 47.  A Companion to Relativism Edited by Steven D. Hales 48.  A Companion to Hegel Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur 49.  A Companion to Schopenhauer Edited by Bart Vandenabeele 50.  A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel 51.  A Companion to Foucault Edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O’Leary, and Jana Sawicki 52.  A Companion to the Philosophy of Time Edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon 53.  A Companion to Donald Davidson Edited by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig 54.  A Companion to Rawls Edited by Jon Mandle and David Reidy 55.  A Companion to W. V. O. Quine Edited by Gilbert Harman and Ernest Lepore 56.  A Companion to Derrida Edited by Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor 57.  A Companion to David Lewis Edited by Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer 58.  A Companion to Kierkegaard Edited by Jon Stewart 59.  A Companion to Locke Edited by Matthew Stuart 60.  The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics Edited by Niall Keane and Chris Lawn 61.  A Companion to Ayn Rand Edited by Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri 62.  The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism Edited by Kelly James Clark 63.  A Companion to Mill Edited by Christopher Macleod and Dale E. Miller 64.  A Companion to Experimental Philosophy Edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter 65.  A Companion to Applied Philosophy Edited by Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen, Kimberley Brownlee, and David Coady 66.  A Companion to Wittgenstein Edited by Hans‐Johann Glock and John Hyman 67.  A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir Edited by Laura Hengehold and Nancy Bauer 68.  A Concise Companion to Confucius Edited by Paul R. Goldin 69.  The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism Edited by Jonathan J. Loose, Angus J. L. Menuge, and J. P. Moreland (Editor) 70.  A Companion to Nineteenth‐Century Philosophy Edited by John Shand 71.  A Companion Atheism and Philosophy Edited by Graham Oppy 72.  A Companion to Adorno Edited by Peter E. Gordon and Espen Hammer and Max Pensky 73.  A Companion to Rorty Edited by Alan Malachowski

A Companion to Rorty Edited by

Alan Malachowski

This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Alan Malachowski to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Malachowski, Alan, editor. Title: A companion to Rorty / edited by Alan Malachowski. Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley, 2020. | Series: Blackwell   companions to philosophy ; 73 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019037133 (print) | LCCN 2019037134 (ebook) | ISBN   9781118972168 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118972175 (adobe pdf) | ISBN   9781118972182 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Rorty, Richard. Classification: LCC B945.R524 C66 2020 (print) | LCC B945.R524 (ebook) |   DDC 191–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037133 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037134 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: Courtesy of Mary Rorty, used with permission Set in 10/12.5pt Photina by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

0004506674.INDD 4

1/23/2020 3:43:57 PM

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

viii

Contributors

ix

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach to Philosophy: Time for Reassessment Alan Malachowski

1

Prologue 9 1 Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan Danielle Macbeth

11

Part I  Early Developments

25

2 Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist? William Ramsey

27

3 Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness James Tartaglia

43

4 Rorty and Transcendental Arguments Neil Gascoigne

59

Part II  Texts

79

5 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 81 James Tartaglia 6 The Uses of Philosophy after the Collapse of Metaphysics: Ironism and Liberalism in Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Colin Koopman

100

7 Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist William M. Curtis

119

8 Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism Richard J. Bernstein

135

v

Contents

Part III  Themes

147

9 Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats? Pascal Engel

149

10 Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?) David Macarthur

163

11 Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope Marjorie C. Miller

178

12 The Center and Circumference of Knowledge: Rorty on Pragmatism and Romanticism 194 Isaac Nevo 13 Rorty and Analytic Philosophy Gary Gutting

211

14 Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy Paul Trembath

229

Part IV  Appropriations

251

15 Rorty on Hegel on the Mind in History Paul Redding

253

16 Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche Steven Michels

268

17 The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy Mark Okrent

281

18 Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James Carol Nicholson

297

19 Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud Alan Malachowski

312

20 Rorty and Dewey David L. Hildebrand

335

21 Common Understanding Without Uncommon Certainty: Rorty’s Wittgenstein Revisited Alan Malachowski

357

22 Rorty, Davidson, and Representation Steven Levine

370

23 The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal Anton A. van Niekerk

395

vi

Contents

Part V  Culture, Politics, and Religion

411

24 Rorty and Literature Serge Grigoriev

413

25 The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism Elizabeth Sperry

427

26 Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars? Molly B. Farneth

444

27 Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion Emil Višňovský

456

28 Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe Emil Višňovský, Alexander Krémer, and Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński

467

29 Rorty and Nihilism Tracy Llanera

482

30 Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility Christopher J. Voparil

490

Part VI  Coda

505

31 Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty Christopher Norris

507

Internet Resources

528

Index

529

vii

Preface and Acknowledgments

With increasing pressures continuing to be exerted on university funding from all sides, and book purchases generally suffering accordingly, the Wiley Blackwell series of Companions offers important resources for both students and professional academics alike. The present volume was planned and put together very much with that context in mind. Indeed, it aims to provide anyone who has an interest in Rorty’s ideas with sufficient understanding of his approach to philosophy for them to make the most of the writings that stimulated this interest. Inevitably, given the wide range of authors and topics Rorty explored throughout a long career, and the voluminous writings that reflected these explorations, there are some omissions here. But, the grounding provided by the chapters that have been included should enable readers to both identify those gaps and tackle them should they so wish. It is only in that sense of providing a “grounding” that the Introduction later refers to this project as a “one‐stop resource.” I would like to thank the contributors as well as the staff of Wiley Blackwell for all their efforts in making this volume possible. I am also grateful to Alta Bridges for her exemplary copy‐editing. The publishers would like to thank both Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press for granting permission to reproduce the following copyrighted material in the volume: “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” Richard Bernstein; in Richard Rorty, Charles B. Guignon and David R. Hiley (Eds.), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003, pp. 124–138. “The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” Mark Okrent; in The Monist, 64(4), 1981, pp.500–517.

viii

Contributors

Richard J. Bernstein is Vera List professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is one of Richard Rorty’s most insightful commentators. His books include Philosophical Profiles, The New Constellation, and The Pragmatic Turn. He is the coeditor of The Rorty Reader. William M. Curtis is professor of political science at the University of Portland. His research interests include theories of liberalism, classical liberalism and the free market, religion and politics, politics and literature, US Constitutional law, and American pragmatism. He is the author of Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Pascal Engel is professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Geneva. He is co‐author (with Richard Rorty) of What is the Use of Truth? His other books include The Norm of Truth and Truth. Molly B. Farneth is assistant professor in the Religion Department at Haverford College. She works in the areas of American and European religious and philosophical thought (nineteenth century to the present), with particular attention to religion and politics, ethics, ritual studies, and feminist and gender studies in religion. She is the author of Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation. Neil Gascoigne is reader in philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London. He is the author of Richard Rorty and Rorty, Liberal Democracy, and Religious Belief. Serge Grigoriev is associate professor of philosophy at Ithaca College, New York. His recent publications include “A Pragmatist Critique of Dogmatic Philosophy of History” and “Hypotheses, Generalizations, and Convergene: Some Peircean Themes in the Study of History.” Gary Gutting is a former professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and holder of the endowed chair. Gary was the author of numerous books including French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, What Philosophy Can Do, and Thinking the Impossible. David L. Hildebrand is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. His publications include Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists and Dewey: A Beginner’s Guide.

ix

Contributors

Colin Koopman is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author of How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person, Genealogy as Critique, and Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty. Alexander Krémer is professor of philosophy at the University of Szeged. His field of interest includes hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, and pragmatism, especially neopragmatism. He is the author of four books including Why Did Heidegger Become Heidegger? and Philosophy of the Late Richard Rorty. He is the editor in chief of Pragmatism Today. Steven Levine is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has published articles on classical and contemporary pragmatism as well as more contemporary figures including Sellars, Brandom, McDowell, and Davidson. He is the author of Pragmatism, Objectivity, and Experience. Tracy Llanera is an assistant research professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut and a faculty affiliate at the UConn Asian and Asian American Studies Institute. She works in philosophy of religion, social and political philosophy, and American pragmatism, specializing on the topics of nihilism, conversion, and the politics of language. Her writings have been published in a variety of journals, including Philosophy and Social Criticism, Contemporary Pragmatism, Hypatia, Analyse & Kritik, and Pragmatism Today. She is currently working on two books: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism and A Philosophical Defence of Nihilism, coauthored with James Tartaglia. David Macarthur is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. His main interests include skepticism, pragmatism, philosophy of psychology, history of modern philosophy, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics. He coedited Naturalism in Question. Danielle Macbeth is T. Wistar Brown professor of philosophy at Haverford College in Pennsylvania and the author of Frege’s Logic and Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing. Her work focuses mainly on philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, language, and logic. She has also published various essays in the history and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and pragmatism, among other topics. Alan Malachowski is a research fellow in the Centre for Applied Ethics at Stellenbosch University. He is author of Richard Rorty, and The New Pragmatism. His edited works include Reading Rorty and The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism. Steven Michels is professor of political science at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield. His scholarship covers work in theory (Nietzsche, Tocqueville, Sinclair Lewis), higher education, and popular culture. His publications include Sinclair Lewis and American Democracy, and “Neitzsche on Truth and The Will.” Marjorie C. Miller is professor emirata of philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York. She has held Fulbright awards in both China and Korea. Her publications include “Rortian Extremes and the Confucian Zhongyong” and “Feminism and Pragmatism” x

Contributors

Isaac Nevo is associate professor of philosophy at the Ben‐Gurion University. His publications include “Richard Rorty’s Romantic Pragmatism” and “In Defence of Dogma: Davidson, languages, and conceptual schemes.” Carol Nicholson is professor of philosophy at Rider University. Her publications include “Rorty’s Pragmatic Patriotism” and “Education and the Pragmatic Temperament.” Christopher Norris is distinguished research professor in philosophy at Cardiff University. He is author of numerous books including The Contest of Faculties, Derrida, and Truth and Meaning. Mark Okrent is professor of philosophy at Bates College. He is the author of Heidegger’s Pragmatism as well as numerous articles on intentionality, teleology, and Heidegger. William Ramsey is professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He works primarily in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and is the author of Representation Reconsidered, “Intuitions as Evidence Facilitators,” and “Must Cognition be Representational?” as well as the coeditor (with Keith Frankish) of the Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science and the Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. Paul Redding is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is a leading authority on Kantian and Hegelian Idealism. He is author of Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought and Thoughts, Deeds, Words and World: Hegel’s Idealist Response to the Linguistic “Metacritical Invasion.” Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński is associate professor of philosophy at Opole University. He is the author of Values, Valuations and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism and Beyond Aesthetic and Politics. Elizabeth Sperry is professor of philosophy at William Jewell College. Her publications include “Dupes of Patriarchy: Feminist Strong Substantive Autonomy’s Epistemological Weaknesses” and “Medina on the Social Construction of Agency.” James Tartaglia is professor of metaphysical philosophy at the University of Keele. He is the author of Rorty and the Mirror of Nature and Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality; editor of Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers; and coeditor (with Stephen Leach) of Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers and Consciousness and the Great Philosophers: What Would They Have Said About Our Mind‐Body Problem? Paul Trembath is associate professor in the Department of English at Colorado State University. He teaches critical studies and its philosophical backgrounds, twentieth‐ century literatures, and interdisciplinary humanities. He has published widely in critical journals and book editions and is finishing a book that examines the relationship of nonreading to capital process, how ordinary language practices produce unnecessary antagonisms between scientific and discursive materialisms as well as policy‐regulated incompatibility of human behavior and eco‐sustainability. xi

0004506677.INDD 11

27-11-2019 16:39:26

Contributors

Anton A. van Niekerk is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Stellenbosch. has published widely in philosophy. He is editor and coauthor of The Status of Prenatal Life and Aids in Context: A South African Perspective. His published articles include “Pragmatism and religion.” Emil Višň ovský is professor of philosophy at Comenius University, Bratislava. His publications include “Peirce and Rorty: An Attempt at a Reconciliation of Two Versions of Pragmatism” and “Philosophy of Science in Classical Pragmatism.” Christopher J. Voparil is professor of philosophy at Union Institute and University, where he teaches philosophy and political theory. He is author of Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision and articles in, among others, Contemporary Pragmatism, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. He is coeditor of The Rorty Reader and Pragmatism and Justice, and is founding president of the Richard Rorty Society.

xii

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach to Philosophy: Time for Reassessment ALAN MALACHOWSKI

The articles assembled for this collection are self‐standing. They can speak for themselves and should be allowed to do so. Moreover, with a large project such as this one involving a controversial thinker, it is important not to prejudge issues or detain readers too long before they set out to explore its contents. Nevertheless, readers who are new to Richard Rorty’s work may be keen to know something about his background. In addition, it will no doubt be useful for most readers to be aware of some editorial decisions as well as the organizational structure of the volume and the motivation behind it. This will enable them to navigate the geography of the various chapters better according to their interests. The rest of the introduction is therefore brief and deals primarily with those concerns. Those who are familiar with Rorty’s background may wish to skip the next section.

1 Background Richard McKay Rorty was born on October 4, 1931, into an intellectual family setting that encouraged political and social awareness. His mother, Winifred Raushenbush, who graduated from Oberlin College to study sociology at the University of Chicago, published books as well as articles on political and social issues. His father, James Rorty, was not only a well‐known poet, but also a journalist with a political bent. Both parents were committed leftist activists, cultivating an ethos that Rorty vividly recalled in later life: “I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyists, at least socialists … So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice” (Rorty 1999, 6).1 Having shown distinct signs of precociousness, Rorty was enrolled at the University of Chicago just before his 15th birthday, where he obtained his BA degree within A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

1

Alan Malachowski

3  years, and then an MA. After additional graduate studies, this time at Yale, Rorty completed his doctorate in 1956 with a 600‐page dissertation entitled The Concept of Potentiality. It exhibited a broad historical sweep that prefigured his later writings. In 1960, following a spell with the signal corps after being drafted into the army, Rorty took up a position as an instructor at Wellesley College before swiftly moving to one of the world’s most prestigious philosophy departments at Princeton University. He was promoted to full professor in 1971. While he was there, Rorty initially aligned his published work with the analytic philosophical tradition that was dominant not just at Princeton, but also elsewhere. His articles on the philosophy of mind in particular were well received, stimulated discussion, and helped set an agenda for further inquiry (Rorty 2014). Nevertheless, Rorty’s acute historical awareness and growing appreciation of the work of writers outside the analytic camp fed a sense of disenchantment. This shone through at the edges of even his earliest writings. It was more obvious in his substantial editorial introduction to The Linguistic Turn (Rorty 1967), and made explicit in what remains his best‐ known book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979. Rorty argued throughout its pages that philosophical problems are more like sociohistorical artifacts than inescapable concomitants of thought, thereby giving free rein to his long‐held suspicion that “philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new assumptions or vocabularies” (p. xiii). Though the book was far from the “death to philosophy” tract of which many critics complained, it signaled a clear break with the tradition to which Rorty had contributed during the first half of his time at Princeton. Furthermore, the objections he voiced to the prevailing preoccupations of his fellow philosophers with, for example, epistemology and ontology ensured that a move to the University of Virginia in 1983 came as no surprise. By this time Rorty was in any case keen to become a general‐purpose public intellectual, practicing culture criticism, if with a quasi‐philosophical slant. His transfer to Virginia facilitated that kind of transformation. After spending 15 very productive years there, publishing a steady stream of articles and a second important book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989), Rorty rounded off his distinguished career by taking up a post at Stanford University. As a member of its department of comparative literature, he was given a relatively free hand to teach whatever interested him. This encouraged him to devise a variety of intriguing courses on such figures as Nietzche, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas. Having retired from teaching in 2005, Rorty died on June 5, 2007, following complications due to pancreatic cancer, leaving a palpable intellectual vacuum that will be difficult to fill.

2  Motivation and Editorial Considerations Whatever else might be said about him, it has to be agreed that Rorty was an engaging, wide‐ranging, and influential thinker. Moreover, as Christopher Voparil tells us in his introduction to The Rorty Reader, an ideal textual companion to this one, “whether or not one shares Harold Bloom’s assessment of Richard Rorty as the most interesting philosopher in the world, that he was for a time ‘the most talked about philosopher’ is hard to dispute” (2010, 1). Voparil is also correct in remarking that Rorty’s influence has 2

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach to Philosophy: Time for Reassessment

continued to grow, that it “transcends the walls of discipline and culture [and] has spawned a body of secondary literature beyond the limits of any single human being to master” (2010, 1). The final point here raises a question as to why a volume such as this one is required. However, although there are notable exceptions,2 much of the secondary literature Voparil alludes to has unfortunately been dominated (especially in the early days) by a hasty, and even at times dismissive, attitude of censure, one that inevitably fails to appreciate, still less explore, deeper and wider aspects of Rorty’s approach to philosophy and the multifarious influences on that approach. The very fact that so many discussions of his work have been opprobrious, piecemeal, and narrowly and/or superficially targeted makes it unnecessarily difficult for those who might otherwise be attracted to Rorty’s writings, particularly students and nonspecialists, to get a general sense of what he was doing, why he was doing it, why his work stirred up so much controversy, whether it was, and remains, important, and how it relates to broader concerns including, perhaps, their own areas of interest. Hence there is still a gap in the secondary literature for a one‐stop resource that helps remedy these failings. In short, the situation has created a need for the present Companion, while also ensuring that an unusually broad range of readers is likely to find it both interesting and useful. At least three other considerations make the volume timely, and have helped the editorial determination of its shape and content. First, a fresh wave of Rorty commentary has emerged relatively recently in which a more considered and mature perspective has been adopted. This commentary is not uncritical. But it transcends the polarized attitudes of knee‐jerk defensiveness by philosophers and blithe acceptance from admirers outside the discipline that has characterized so many previous responses to Rorty’s work. The new wave has been partly inspired by philosophers who have serious standing within the analytic tradition and remain critical of Rorty’s views, but nevertheless discern some abiding value in his various challenges to that tradition, even when they regard them as misguided. This volume capitalizes on and carries further that considered outlook so as to offer readers a more balanced and insightful account of Rorty’s philosophical thought. A parallel positive change, though not yet as prominent, has gradually taken place in the reactions to Rorty’s treatment of so‐called continental philosophy.3 Here again, there is now far less inclination to immediately dismiss his approach, which in this case tended to involve opposing factions: those who, for whatever reason, find themselves to be instinctively hostile to “that kind of philosophy” and those who actually want to defend it from within against what they regard as Rorty’s wayward interpretations and interventions. A Companion to Rorty follows up on this additional move toward maturity in Rorty studies, but it does so in a measured and strategically considered way, as explained in the next section. The second editorial consideration is that in tandem with the twofold maturing of Rorty scholarship just described, there has been a further development in which Rorty’s influence has broadened considerably in geographical terms, with enthusiastic interest being shown in his work in Asia, Central Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. It is too soon to assess what this influence will amount to, or what it should amount to, but this volume makes a start by offering a detailed discussion of how Rorty’s philosophy 3

Alan Malachowski

has been received in central Europe. This serves as something of a case study in how, and why, the widening of his influence has progressed, and what it involves. The final factor that has had bearing on the nature of this volume could be subsumed under the twofold maturation described earlier, but is worth saying something about separately. Rorty’s writings have attracted attention along with controversy for various reasons, most of them addressed in this volume, but there is one that would have stood out even in the absence of the others, and that is his revivalist advocacy of pragmatism. Other philosophers have spoken in its favor (Putnam 1995 and Quine 1996 spring immediately to mind), but none so forcefully or distinctively over such a long period. Rorty’s advocacy was distinctive in that he harked back to the classic pragmatists William James and John Dewy, but took them to be inspirational figures rather than purveyors of particular doctrines. And then, he championed a form of pragmatism that dispenses with the empiricist assumptions of these founding figures, and makes language rather than experience the focal point of its inquiries. In claiming even just an inspirational affinity with James and Dewey, Rorty still provoked intense criticism from pragmatist scholars who accused him of recklessly interpreting the work of these two thinkers in ways that made it impossible to take the proposed new version of pragmatism seriously as a form of pragmatism. Over time though, there has been a more thoughtful reconsideration of Rorty’s pragmatism in which its value has been assessed on grounds that are less rigid than doctrinal/textual conformity. For that reason, Rorty’s relationships to James and Dewey have been reassessed here in separate chapters (see Part IV).

3  Structure and Organization The Companion is divided in to five parts. These are sandwiched between a Prologue and a Coda. These two serve the “opening” and “closing” functions, as such nomenclature suggests. The Prologue introduces the collection by suggesting “a plan for reading Rorty,” while the Coda provides a poetic denouement that chimes with a Heideggerian dictum of which Rorty heartily approved: “All great philosophy is inherently thoughtful‐poetic, the distinction between ‘theoretical’ and ‘poetical’ cannot be applied to philosophical texts” (Heidegger 1984, 73). The individual sections of the Companion are organized as follows. Part I, Early Developments, contains three chapters that deal, as the title signals, with Rorty’s early writings. They assess his contribution to the analytic tradition in two main areas: the philosophy of mind and transcendental arguments. Partly because of the controversy that Rorty later generated, but mainly because many philosophers have been under the impression that their discipline has moved on from the issues thought to be at stake (or at least the ways in which they were framed), these contributions now tend to be ignored. While it is certainly true that progress has been made and problems transformed, the chapters in question show that not only are the original issues themselves worth revisiting, but so is Rorty’s approach to them. Part II concentrates on Rorty’s key texts. It is designed to introduce them and assess their interest and importance. They include the three monographs: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), and Achieving Our 4

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach to Philosophy: Time for Reassessment

Country (1998). But, since Rorty’s output of articles was so prolific (six volumes have already been published) and these are so indicative of his thinking, there is also a designated chapter on his role as an essayist. In Part III, Rorty’s pragmatist approach to some major philosophical themes is investigated, with the first three chapters concentrating on three separate topics: truth, metaphysics, and ethics. This section then broadens its approach to tackle the theme of Romanticism before the last two chapters discuss Rorty’s relationship to analytic and continental philosophy respectively. The latter provides our cue for explaining the Companion’s overall strategy regarding continental philosophy. Taken as a whole, Rorty’s engagements with continental philosophy were expansive, and they warrant a “companion” in their own right. His writings in this connection include copious articles, some substantial, on such figures as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Paul de Man, Jean‐Francois Lyotard, Cornelius Castoriadas, Habermas, Foucault, and Derrida. To cover Rorty’s treatment of these would be beyond the scope of this volume without expanding it into an unwieldy encyclopedic project. What has been done here, however, and it is something that needed to be done, is the laying down of a foundation for a clearer understanding of Rorty’s general approach to continental philosophy and, more specifically, those thinkers within that tradition who most interested him and had the most discernible influence on his thinking. For this purpose, close attention is paid to his reading of three historically important figures: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Appreciation of how he deals with these three thinkers is essential to understanding how Rorty was inclined to interpret those who came after them. Conspicuous among these was Jacques Derrida. But there is scant direct discussion of Rorty’s engagements with him in this volume. There are two main reasons for this. First, from an editorial point of view, it seemed necessary to emphasize the need to grasp the importance of getting to grips with Rorty’s handling of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger before tackling his work on Derrida. The second reason is based on this editor’s point of view: Rorty’s “engagements” with Derrida made little discernible impact on Rorty’s own approach to philosophy. Such changes as were caused by his ventures in “continental territory” kicked in either prior to his reading of Derrida or independently of that reading (for he claimed that reading Derrida sent him back to Heidegger). Although they clearly afforded him immense private enjoyment, it is not clear that Derrida’s writings had any substantial effect on Rorty’s thoughts as they were presented in public. Having digested the material on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, readers should be in a better position to make their own judgment on this score (see, for example, Rorty, 1991). Rorty was very creative in helping himself to the views of a wide range of philosophers, and not always just philosophers. However, he also attracted a lot of criticism for the ways in which he did this. He was, for instance, accused of distorting the positions of the thinkers concerned and/or putting his own words in their mouths. Part IV considers some of his most important “appropriations” and assesses their philosophical interest in connection with particular issues. The individual chapters focus on nine of these: Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, James, Dewey, Freud, Wittgenstein, Davidson, and Habermas. On first encountering Rorty’s writings, the initial impression is always likely to be that one is encountering a thinker who tried to open up the discipline of philosophy so 5

Alan Malachowski

that it can accommodate a wider range of discourse and a greater variety of methods, become more sensitive to historical considerations, less dependent on abstract theory, and, as a result, be more responsive to sociopolitical concerns. In the last collection of his philosophical papers published while he was still alive, aptly entitled Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Rorty 2007a), Rorty urged us to “look at relatively specialized and technical debates between contemporary philosophers in the light of our hopes for cultural change.” He went on to say that philosophers themselves “should choose sides in those debates with an eye to the possibility of changing the course of the conversation” (p. x). Part V deals with Rorty’s treatment of issues in culture and politics. It includes two chapters on religion because this was a topic on which he spent a considerable amount of time later in life, presumably in an attempt to accommodate it within his own hopes for “cultural change” (see Rorty, 2007b, 2010). This section shows how far Rorty’s approach to philosophy brought it closer to being a subject that caters for the social justice aspirations he formed at an early age. It also enables readers to assess the extent to which Rorty fulfilled his conversation‐changing aims and/or inspired others to pursue similar goals.

Notes 1 For more detailed accounts of Rorty’s background and philosophical career, see Voparil and Bernstein (2010) and Gross (2008). 2 The “notable exceptions” produced by contributors to this volume include: Gascoigne (2008), Tartaglia (2007), and Voparil (2006). 3 Rorty was skeptical of the need to make a sharp distinction between analytic and continental tradition in philosophy and endeavored to blur any such distinction.

References Gascoigne, N. 2008. Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gross, N. 2008. The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. 1984. Nietzsche, Vol. 2, The Eternal Recurrence of the Same edited by D. Krell. New York: HarperOne. Putnam, H. 1995. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell. Quine, W. V. 1996. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” In From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn., 20–46. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. ed., 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: Chicago University Press. —. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. “Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?” In Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2, 119–28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2007a. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Leiden, Netherlands: Cambridge University Press.

6

Introduction: Rorty’s Approach to Philosophy: Time for Reassessment

—. 2007b. The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2010. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tartaglia, J. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. New York: Routledge. Voparil, C. 2006. Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. —. 2010. “General Introduction.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by C. Voparil and R. Bernstein, 1–52. Chichester, UK: Wiley‐Blackwell. Voparil, C. and Bernstein, R., eds. 2010. The Rorty Reader. Chichester, UK: Wiley‐Blackwell.

7

Prologue

1 Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan DANIELLE MACBETH

Reading Rorty can be hard, not because his ideas are especially difficult but because they very often are, or at least seem on the face of it to be, quite straightforward and yet somehow wrong. But this is very unlikely: Rorty is not a thinker to get straightforward things wrong. We need, then, a plan for reading Rorty. And Rorty himself offers a suggestion. He tells us that we will not understand him until, and unless, we distinguish between his ordinary, unreflective talk and his reflective, philosophical talk, between his lay and his philosophical uses of words such as “true.”1 This is helpful, but it does not, I think, go far enough in providing us with the tools we need in reading Rorty insofar as there seems to be not two but three different sorts of discourse in which Rorty engages. Indeed, I will suggest that in this regard Rorty’s reflections on truth bear a remarkable (and remarkably suggestive) similarity to Plato’s reflections on knowledge in his dialogue Theaetetus. This is a large and unprecedented claim, one that I can only begin to explicate here. But even this mere sketch of a plan for reading Rorty will be enough, I think, to show that reading Rorty as engaged at various points in three very different sorts of discourse will enable us to make good sense of claims that have seemed to many readers, even otherwise sympathetic readers, to be quite wrongheaded. The overall framework is relatively straightforward. The basic case is our first‐level discourse, that is, our ordinary, everyday and unreflective, talk about things, including the talk involved in first‐order inquiry into things such as cats, corporations, and courage. But we can also engage in a different sort of discourse, as when we conduct a reflective, philosophical inquiry into first‐order inquiry. Obviously, such second‐order, reflective inquiry is possible only in light of first‐order inquiry; second‐order inquiry can be pursued only where there is already a good deal of first‐order inquiry to be made the object of one’s reflective gaze. Second‐order inquiry seems also to be qualitatively different from first‐order inquiry insofar as first‐order inquiry seems, at least on the face of it, to be inquiry into how things are, second‐order inquiry seems better described as concerned to understand, or to make manifest, the nature of our first‐order inquiries.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

11

Danielle Macbeth

The third sort of discourse we will be concerned with here is different again. It is not merely more of the same, a kind of philosophical reflection on the practice of philosophers – though that too is possible. The third sort of reflection and discourse as it will concern us here does not take the form of inquiry at all but is instead a reflection on something more fundamental, something that might be described as our existential condition, our being as humans. In Plato’s Theaetetus, as I read it, not only are all three sorts of discourse in play, as I will suggest they are in Rorty, the three sorts of discourse are also relatively well marked in Plato’s text, as they are not marked in Rorty’s writings, or we will see, often even in Rorty’s thought. Let us begin, then, by recalling some of the most striking features of Plato’s remarkable dialogue. Theaetetus was written after such middle dialogues as Republic. However, it manifests many characteristic features not of the middle dialogues but of Plato’s earliest, aporetic dialogues. It focuses on a “What is …?” question, in this case, the question “What is knowledge?,” and over the course of the dialogue a series of answers are proposed, discussed, and ultimately rejected. Also, as in the early dialogues and by contrast with middle dialogues such as Republic, Socrates claims to have no knowledge himself, save for the knowledge that he does not know. But there are also important differences between this dialogue and Plato’s early dialogues. First, and perhaps most strikingly, in the Theaetetus Socrates’s main interlocutor is not (as he is in all the early dialogues) a self‐professed expert in the topic under discussion. Socrates’s interlocutor in this dialogue is instead a mere boy, the sixteen‐ year‐old student, Theaetetus, who, although already manifesting remarkable intellectual gifts, does not profess to know what knowledge is. Indeed, he is presented at the opening of the dialogue as having just the sort of wisdom Socrates claims for himself: Theaetetus knows that he does not know. The dialogue also combines the standard dialogue form with a more reflective description of Socrates’s method that is reminiscent of Socrates’s description of his activities in Plato’s Apology. But whereas in the Apology Socrates likens himself to a gadfly, in the Theaetetus Socrates again and again describes himself as a midwife to the ideas of others – though, as he tells Theaetetus, it is a “secret” that he has this art. The Theaetetus is written in dramatic rather than narrative form, and as is emphasized in the prefatory dialogue within which the main dialogue is embedded (as it were, halfway in that there is a prologue but no corresponding epilogue), the main dialogue is in the form of a written document, which, according to the prefatory dialogue, is being read aloud by a slave. What we have in the Theaetetus, then, is a written dialogue, a piece of text, within a written dialogue, a piece of text.2 Among other things, this embedding allows Plato to emphasize to the reader that the account of the main dialogue derives directly from Socrates and “has, in effect, Socrates’ own approval and imprimatur” (Sedley 2004, 16). There is, finally, a very curious section midway through the main dialogue, a section that Socrates himself describes as a digression, within which Socrates sketches the life of the philosopher as it contrasts with the lives of others. The digression clearly recalls themes from Republic, but it is not at all easy to understand why it is there, how exactly we are to read it, or what relationship it has to the rest of the text. The Theaetetus is, then, a text with a very complex structure, one that has been carefully crafted to be read on at least three levels. First, and most obviously, there is the examination itself, which, after some preliminaries, comprises three proposed 12

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

definitions – that knowledge is perception, that knowledge is true judgment, and that knowledge is true judgment with an account – all of which are examined and ultimately rejected. At this level of reading, the fact that the examination is cast in the form of a dialogue, the fact that it is embedded in another dialogue, the fact that Socrates digresses halfway through, all are merely stylistic, merely decorative; what matters are the ideas, what knowledge is said to be, and the arguments to show that it cannot be that. This, then, is first‐order inquiry, inquiry into what something is, in this case, not what a cat, corporation, or courageous act is, but what knowledge is. And as already remarked, that inquiry fails; none of Theaetetus’s answers to the question “what is knowledge?” survive Socrates’s examination of them. When one asks a “What is …?” question, one addresses oneself to something in hopes of clarifying its nature, what it is to be that. One aims for knowledge. In the Theaetetus, it is knowledge itself that is addressed, and this, we are to come to see, is a fundamentally different sort of question. Although there can be first‐order inquiries in the vicinity, for example, in the sociology of knowledge or in cognitive science, to understand what knowledge is requires a distinctively philosophical reflection, that is, a form of investigation that is conducted in the self‐understanding that it is essentially different from first‐ order inquiry. Those who turn to philosophy in order to achieve certainty, or to find an answer to the skeptic, or to secure the foundations of first‐order inquiry, fail to grasp this first and essential lesson of the Theaetetus. There are and can be no marks of truth as there are marks of cats, courage, and corporations. Suppose, for instance, that we said that the mark of truth is clarity and distinctness, that one ought to judge as true only what is clearly and distinctly perceived. It would follow of necessity that what is clearly and distinctly perceived is itself already knowledge. Socrates makes this point, and it is the very last point that he makes in the dialogue: “it is surely just silly, when we are trying to discover what knowledge is, that it is correct judgment accompanied by knowledge” (210a). Socrates is of course talking here about the third answer that Theaetetus had proposed to the question “What is knowledge?,” namely, that it is correct, or true, judgment with an account, in effect, justified true belief. His point is that if so then one’s justification must already have the status of knowledge. As we are to come to see, knowledge is not a thing with marks that one could tell by discerning its marks but instead the fruition of a course of inquiry. It is one’s capacity for knowledge, in particular, one’s capacity for critically reflective examination, that holds the key to the understanding we seek regarding the nature of knowledge. Where we had been focused on the product, knowledge, and looked in vain for marks that distinguish knowledge from, say, mere true belief, now we are to consider instead the process, the activity of inquiry, the exercise of one’s power to know that, if all goes well, does culminate in knowledge. To read the dialogue at this second level, as a philosophical reflection on first‐order inquiry, is to take into account the fact that the Theaetetus is written as a dialogue between Socrates, in his self‐described role as midwife, and the student Theaetetus – with the occasional intervention of Theodorus, a famous geometer and Theaetetus’s teacher. Reading at this level, we find Plato engaged in an extended reflection on the nature of first‐order inquiry, and in particular on the role of critically reflective examination in inquiry. We are taught, for instance, to distinguish between mob‐oratory and serious discourse, between the philosopher and the champion conversationalist. But, as the 13

Danielle Macbeth

digression pointedly reminds us, even this second‐order inquiry into the nature of first‐ order inquiry does not exhaust the meaning of the dialogue as a whole. Relative to the second‐order inquiry into the nature of (first‐order) inquiry, the digression clearly is a digression, just as Socrates says it is; but as its placement midway through the dialogue indicates, it is also central to the message of the dialogue as a whole. Together with other, subtler clues, it marks, I think, yet a third, quite distinctive sort of reflection, this time on philosophers, Plato included, and philosophizing. As Plato asks in the Theaetetus what knowledge is, so Rorty asks what truth is, that is, what is the mark, the necessary and sufficient condition, of something’s being true. And in keeping with the aporetic conclusion of Plato’s Theaetetus, Rorty answers, I would say correctly, that there is no such mark, no test for truth and hence no way to guarantee that one has gotten things right. Anything we think we know may turn out to have been mistaken. There is, as Sellars would say, no Given. Like Plato’s first‐order investigation into knowing in the Theaetetus, Rorty’s first‐order inquiry into truth, according to which truth is just one more thing in the world to be investigated, inevitably comes up empty‐handed. But Rorty occasionally seems to want to go further in this mode. In particular, he sometimes suggests that there is no truth whatsoever at the level of first‐order inquiry, no way things in the world are that we might discover. He seems almost to think that we discovered, at a certain point in history and contrary to what we had at first naively thought, that reality can play only a causal role in our cognitive lives, not a justificatory one, and hence that reality as it is, is unknowable in principle because there simply is no way the world is, no joints in reality at which one might carve, whether correctly or incorrectly. This, to my ear, sounds like just the sort of philosophy‐as‐super‐science that Rorty otherwise so strenuously objects to. Better, I think, to hold that whatever philosophical reflection on first‐order inquiry may achieve, it is not more first‐order knowledge about how things are, or are not. First‐order inquiry into truth, as into knowledge, is inherently aporetic: again, there is no mark of truth, or of knowledge, waiting to be discovered, as there is of cats, corporations, and courage. Because there are no marks of truth, truth cannot itself be made the goal of inquiry, as Rorty often reminds us. It does not follow that there is nothing to be said at the second level about the nature of first‐order inquiry. In the Theaetetus, we have seen, Plato’s Socrates emphasizes, at this level, that inquiry constitutively involves critically reflective examination, and such an examination is aimed, in particular, at discovering whether one has knowledge or only the appearance of knowledge. Socrates’s practice of midwifery, as it is portrayed over the course of the dialogue, shows just what this means, and it is not hard to hear echoes of Plato’s reflections on the nature of inquiry in those of Rorty, in particular, in Rorty’s proposal that “we should be retrospective rather than prospective: [that] inquiry should be driven by concrete fears of regression rather than by abstract hopes of universality” (Rorty 2000d, 61). Socrates the midwife is much more concerned that one has not gotten things right, that one does not know what one professes to know, than he is hopeful that one does know. Nor is it merely a piece of good advice to admonish people to spend more time worrying about the possibility that they are wrong than they do hoping that they are right. That advice reflects a fundamental insight into the rationality of inquiry, one that is  the positive corollary, in reflective, philosophical discourse, of the realization 14

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

(of first‐order inquiry) that there is no mark of truth. It is the insight that, in Sellars’s (1997 [1956], sect. 38) words, “empirical knowledge … is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self‐correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.” Even recognizing that our powers of knowing are inherently and unavoidably fallible, we can nonetheless strive to do better than we have done, seek to correct such errors as we are in a position to recognize – whether errors in our beliefs, errors in our conceptions of things, or even errors in what we take to be rational at all. Sellars’s point is that it is precisely this capacity for self‐correction, of anything that we think we know, that explains the rationality of inquiry, that is, the fact that it constitutes inquiry at all, the striving for truth. It is for just this reason that, as Rorty (2000a, 24) says, “although we do not need … a theory of rationality, we do need a narrative of maturation.” And this, I think, goes some way in explaining why Socrates’s interlocutor in the Theaetetus is a mere boy, a student. Were the dialogue a first‐order inquiry into something such as courage or piety, it would make sense to engage a supposed expert in the relevant object of inquiry. But if the inquiry is, as it is in the Theaetetus, into the nature of inquiry itself, then it is more appropriate to engage a student, that is, someone who is being educated and in the course of that education must be taught, among other things, to think for himself, to use his own powers of critically reflective rationality. Although there is no mark of truth, no certainty, nevertheless inquiry is rational and it is rational because it is self‐correcting. This furthermore applies not only to first‐order inquiry but also and equally to second‐order reflective, philosophical inquiry. Second‐ order inquiry into the nature of first‐order inquiry, like first‐order inquiry itself, inevitably involves various presuppositions any of which may turn out to have been mistaken. For example, Rorty seems to think that giving up the idea that language serves to represent reality entails giving up the idea that language is in any way revelatory of reality. He seems to think that the fact that our descriptions of things are invariably in some human vocabulary or other entails that those descriptions cannot be conceived as cutting reality at its joints. But perhaps neither entailment holds. It is true that, as Rorty (2000e, 185) says, “the story of biological evolution is helpless to explicate the coping‐ representing distinction, helpless to say when organisms stopped coping and began copying.” But we are not restricted either to a representational conception of language or to the notion of biological evolution. We can think instead of language as enabling our cognitive access to reality (as, for instance, Sellars and McDowell do), and we can do so, I would say, in large part because we can retrospectively trace a course of Hegelian intellectual evolution – as indeed Rorty himself recognizes in other contexts.3 He writes (2000b, 89): Once we give up the idea that rationality is a matter of applying ahistorical criteria (as we have to in order to deal with the fact that criteria of choice between theories and policies are as mutable as the theories and practices themselves), we have nowhere to turn except to such [Hegelian] stories. Hegel’s historicization of philosophy seems to me important precisely because Hegel grasped the emptiness of Kantian attempts to make “Reason” the name of an ahistorical faculty, and to build ahistorical criteria into the structure of the human mind. His solution was to start replacing transcendental arguments with narratives – stories about how we hook up with our past.

15

Danielle Macbeth

Much more might be said about second‐order philosophical reflection on first‐order inquiry as, for instance, Plato does in distinguishing mob‐oratory from serious discourse and the philosopher from the champion conversationalist, and Rorty does in his discussions of intellectual virtues such as seriousness, truthfulness, and curiosity. I want, however, to turn now to yet another familiar theme in Rorty’s writings, one that I will suggest should not be seen as a piece of second‐level philosophical discourse but instead as a reflection that belongs to the third, more existential sort of discourse. It is the theme that instead of grounding solidarity in objectivity we should reduce objectivity to solidarity.4 As McDowell reads it in “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity”, Rorty’s claim that the discourse of solidarity ought to replace the discourse of objectivity is addressed to philosophers concerned to understand first‐order inquiry. As McDowell (2000, 109–10) writes: What Rorty takes to parallel authoritarian religion is the very idea that in everyday and scientific investigation we submit to standards constituted by the things themselves, the reality that is supposed to be the topic of the investigation. Accepting that idea, Rorty suggests, is casting the world in the role of the nonhuman Other before which we are to humble ourselves. Full human maturity would require us to acknowledge authority only if the acknowledgement does not involve abasing ourselves before something nonhuman. The only authority that meets this requirement is that of human consensus. If we conceive inquiry and judgment in terms of making ourselves answerable to the world, as opposed to being answerable to our fellows, we are merely postponing the completion of the humanism whose achievement begins with discarding authoritarian religion. The idea of answerability to the world is central to the discourse of objectivity. So Rorty’s call is to abandon the discourse, the vocabulary, of objectivity, and work instead towards expanding human solidarity.

McDowell reads Rorty’s call for solidarity in place of objectivity, then, as a second‐ level claim, one that, according to McDowell, is mistaken and liable to lead to more of just the sort of philosophy that Rorty urges us to give up on, namely, the search for certainty, indubitable foundations. With Rorty, McDowell deplores a “wishful conception of attunement with how things really are, as a means of avoiding an uncomfortable acknowledgement of the limitations of reason and the contingency of our capacities to think as we believe we should”; but McDowell at the same time opposes Rorty’s call for us to “[abandon] the very idea of aspiring to get things right”, “the very idea of making ourselves answerable to how things are” (McDowell 2000, 112). As McDowell reads him, Rorty presents us with what is in fact a false dichotomy regarding the nature of and our capacity for first‐order inquiry: either solidarity or objectivity, either freedom or truth, but not both. On this reading, Rorty’s claim is that our freedom to call any claim into question as reason sees fit is incompatible with recognizing that truth is a norm of inquiry: To choose truth and objectivity is to prolong our “cultural and intellectual infantilism”; to choose freedom and solidarity is to achieve full human maturity. But as McDowell argues, this is simply not so. The dichotomy is, we will soon see, a false one. Truth, according to McDowell, is a norm of inquiry in the sense that achieving a ­satisfactory standing in the space of reasons, that is, knowledge, requires that one’s 16

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

judgment be true. Truth, that is to say, is internal to justification; one’s belief is fully justified only if it is true (see McDowell 1995). Because one’s capacity for knowledge is inherently fallible, this means that one’s standing in the space of reasons is subject to an analog of what Bernard Williams has called moral luck: even with the best will in the world and the most favorable evidence, one’s judgment can after all be mistaken. Judgment, that is to say, involves both a moment with respect to which one is active insofar as judging is an act of spontaneity, and a moment with respect to which one is wholly passive, the moment of truth. Although one is wholly responsible for one’s act of judging, one is not wholly in control of the successful outcome of that act. Judging is not, in other words, merely a matter of assenting to or endorsing some claim. It is, or at least aims to be, an acknowledgment of truth. And if what one aims to acknowledge as true is not true then the judgment fails of its aim. Given that this is what judgment is, it follows, as McDowell (2000, 120) argues, that it is not the defender of the discourse of objectivity who needs to grow up but Rorty: If there is a metaphysical counterpart to infantilism anywhere in the vicinity, it is in Rorty’s phobia of objectivity, and the suggestion that we should replace talk of our being answerable to the world with talk of ways of thinking and speaking that are conducive to our purposes. This fits a truly infantile attitude, one for which things other than the subject show up only as they impinge on its will. Acknowledging a nonhuman authority over our thinking, so far from being a betrayal of our humanity, is merely a condition of growing up.

On McDowell’s view, to appeal to truth and objectivity is not to abase oneself before a nonhuman authority but instead to take the full measure of our contingency, finitude, and historicity in the recognition that the successful outcome of our acts of judgment are not fully in our control. Our acts of judgment succeed only if what we take to be true is true. And this seems clearly to be right. If we read Rorty’s call for solidarity and freedom instead of objectivity and truth as McDowell does, as a piece of second‐level philosophical reflection on our capacities for truth and knowledge, then I think it is clear that, as McDowell argues, Rorty is just wrong. Solidarity and freedom are not incompatible with objectivity and truth. But then we are left with Rorty’s inexplicable failure to see this  –  even after it has been pointed out to him. Rorty seems, in that case, to have an incurable blind spot here, just as McDowell (2000, 117) says he does, one that renders him incapable of realizing McDowell’s point. And while I do think that there is something to this, we need also to recognize that there is a deeper and philosophically much more interesting reason for Rorty’s holding fast to his either/or, either solidarity or objectivity but not both.5 McDowell reads Rorty’s call for solidarity as opposed to objectivity as a piece of philosophical reflection on first‐order inquiry to the effect that because truth (certainty) is beyond our ken, we have only ourselves to answer to. I want to read that call for solidarity instead as belonging to a yet another mode of discourse, one that is about us in particular. Read this way, Rorty’s thought is that when it comes to us, there is no point trying to ground solidarity in objectivity, in some “ahistorical human nature”, because there simply is no such thing as ahistorical human nature (Rorty 1991, 22). When it comes to us, solidarity is all we have, where this is meant not as the upshot of a first‐ order inquiry into how things are, nor even as a philosopher’s second‐order reflection 17

Danielle Macbeth

on first‐order inquiry, but as something different again, something more fundamental, more existential. The task is to understand what exactly that might mean. As Hegel was perhaps the first explicitly to recognize, the history of our intellectual development over the past few thousand years shows that standards of rationality change over time, sometimes very radically. As Rorty (2000d, 60) provocatively puts it, “what counts as rational argumentation is as historically determined, and as context‐ dependent, as what counts as good French” (see also Macbeth 2014). But one does not need a lesson from history to question the rationality of what one is up to. Any sufficiently intelligent and reflective thinker can have moments of profound self‐doubt, moments “when,” as Rorty (2000b, 89) puts it, “we want to reassure ourselves of our own rationality – to convince ourselves that we are not being caught up by something merely voguish or merely self‐interested.” In such moments the reflective thinker is an ironist, in Rorty’s sense, “[facing] up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires” (1989a, xv). The ironist, as Rorty understands him, is “the person who has doubts about his own final vocabulary, his own moral identity, and perhaps his own sanity” (Rorty 1989b, 186). “All human beings”, Rorty writes in “Private Irony and Liberal Hope” (1989c, 73), carry about a set of words [that] they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long‐term projects, our deepest self‐doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives.

Such words form a person’s final vocabulary in Rorty’s sense. To be an ironist (in his sense) is to have “radical and continuing doubts” about this final vocabulary, and hence about who one most fundamentally is and about what value one’s life actual has. The ironist spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe, taught to play the wrong language game. She worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being. But she cannot give a criterion of wrongness. (Rorty 1989c, 75)

And here again, because he does not explicitly recognize that such doubts belong to a very distinctive mode of discourse, Rorty has a tendency to confuse the point that the ironist aims to make with broader claims about reality, inquiry, and truth. He tends to conclude, for example, that “nothing has an intrinsic nature, a real essence” (Rorty 1989c, 74). But this does not follow: it is one thing to think that human beings, as the essentially social, cultural, and historical beings they are, have no intrinsic nature, no real essence, and quite another to think that nothing has such a nature or essence. Rorty’s unfortunate tendency to slide from the one claim about us to the other claim about everything should not be allowed to obscure what I think is the profoundly important point that Rorty is really after here. We have seen that what is at issue in the ironist’s moments of profound self‐doubt is her rationality, her sanity, and her moral identity. Given that it is, it should be clear that the discourse must have shifted again, from inquiry itself, whether first‐ or second‐order, 18

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

to questions about one’s capacity for inquiry, for a form of practice that is by its very nature neither merely voguish nor self‐interested. Such reassurance as one might seek in such moments obviously cannot, without vicious circularity, turn to inquiry for satisfaction. Instead one turns, Rorty tells us, to “those who helped make us what we are”, in particular to “imaginary conversations with people (our parents, our teachers, our friends) who might be imagined to have doubts about what we are up to” (Rorty 2000b, 89), to “people intelligent enough to understand what one is talking about – people who are capable of seeing how one might have those doubts because they know what such doubts are like, people who are themselves given to irony” (Rorty 1989b, 187). As I want now to indicate, I think that the central section of the Theaetetus, the section that Plato has Socrates describe as a digression, is just such a moment of irony on Plato’s part. In the digression Plato has Socrates compare the life of “the man of the law‐courts” to the life of “the man brought up in philosophy, the life of the student” (173d–e). The former is likened to a slave and is, Plato says, always in a hurry; although he is skilled at worldly affairs, his soul is “small and warped” (173a). The philosopher, by contrast, is like a free man, one with plenty of time; he knows nothing of worldly things, and, Plato says, quite surprisingly given what we know of Socrates, that of these things “he knows not even that he knows not” (173e). Indeed, the philosopher, as he is described in the digression, is so far removed from worldly affairs that “he scarcely knows whether [his next‐door neighbor] is a man or some other kind of creature” (174b). As I read it, what Plato is offering us here is a parodic version of the distinction he so skillfully draws in Republic between the tyrant enslaved by his desires and the truly just man. Why would Plato have done that? Why would he write such a parody into the heart of the Theaetetus? Here are two possible reasons. First, he may have done it as an expression of just the sort of self‐doubt that Rorty takes to be characteristic of the ironist. Perhaps the philosopher is merely flattering himself in thinking that he is in some way better than others, in some way more in tune with reality. Perhaps even he is caught up in something merely voguish or self‐interested, not rational at all. Alternatively, Plato may be responding to flat‐footed readings of Republic, readings that find in that work two wholly separate realms, that of being, knowledge, and reality, on the one hand, and that of becoming, opinion, and appearance, on the other. Undoubtably there would have been such readers in Plato’s day, as there are today; perhaps Plato is responding to such readers by carefully laying out that reading in a way that clearly shows just how silly it really is. Suppose that we take the digression the first way, as an expression of profound self‐ doubt. In that case, we will read the dialogue as a whole as a sort of imagined conversation that Plato is holding with his beloved teacher Socrates. This is not an unreasonable reading given that Socrates, the actual historical person, might well have been expected to have doubts of just the sort Rorty describes, that is, doubts about what Plato has been up to, particularly in dialogues such as Republic in which Plato quite freely presents his own positive views as if he has some special and uniquely ahistorical vantage point from which to see things as they really are. If we take the digression in the second way, as a response to uncomprehending readers of Republic, then we will read the Theaetetus as an especially well‐crafted, multi‐layered attempt to find the sorts of readers that Rorty’s ironist seeks, readers who are “intelligent enough to understand 19

Danielle Macbeth

what one is talking about.” Largely as a result of my reading of Rorty on irony, my own best guess, which I will not pursue further here, is that the two are in fact deeply related and both at work in Plato’s dialogue. What I do want to pursue further is the question of the nature of such conversations given that they do not take the form of inquiries, whether first‐ or second‐order, together with the idea that in this case we need to focus on solidarity rather than objectivity. Inquiry takes place in the space of giving and asking for reasons and is, as Rorty (2000a, 17) says, improved by curiosity, by one’s eagerness “to expand one’s horizons of inquiry … so as to encompass new data, new hypotheses, new terminologies, and the like.” In inquiry, one examines as much evidence as can be gathered, both the reasons for and the reasons against any particular view; one gives reasons to others and asks reasons of them; and one is rational throughout the process of inquiry just insofar as one feels the force of the better reason. Because all this is put in doubt by the ironist’s reflections, Rorty’s imagined conversations do not in the same way take place in the space of reasons. They are and must be instead tentative and exploratory. They are also, Rorty suggests, quite like the sorts of conversations that are involved in decision‐ making by consensus as it contrasts with decision‐making by vote or majority‐rule. The process of decision‐making by consensus is essentially egalitarian, cooperative, inclusivist, and participatory. Even more important for our purposes, it is also a powerful means by which to create a substantive sense of community and a shared voice, that is, solidarity. The process aims, as the etymology of the word “con/sensus” indicates, at a thinking and feeling together. In decision‐making by consensus one does not so much talk to others, communicating thereby one’s thoughts on a matter, as with them in order to achieve a common understanding and shared sense of purpose. It is, I suggest, just this sort of discourse – tentative and exploratory, addressed to one’s hopes and fears as much as to one’s beliefs, and aimed at the creation of a community of inquirers – that best characterizes the sort of real or imagined conversations that Rorty has in mind as responding to the ironist’s self‐doubts. Such conversations assuage one’s doubts about one’s own rationality precisely because and insofar as they realize solidarity. Inquiry, whether first‐ or second‐order, takes time; it takes time to amass data, to form hypotheses, to test them, and so on. But inquiry is not constitutively temporal; it takes time but it is not constituted in and by its unfolding in time – as, for instance, a living organism is. Inquiry does not have its being in time; that it takes time is accidental, external to it. Conversation of the third sort, the ironist’s conversation as modeled on decision‐making by consensus, does have its being in time; such a conversation is essentially historical, and organic. It needs time to grow and develop, and it does so because the unity that is sought can be achieve only through such a process of growth and development. Quite simply, communities of the relevant sort can only be grown; they cannot be built. And they cannot be built precisely because there is no objective commonality, no essence to humanity that can be appealed to in unifying the community. This according to Rorty (1989b, 177) is something Orwell saw: “that there is nothing deep inside each of us, no common human nature, no built‐in human solidarity, to use as a moral reference point” (see also Rorty 2000f). Rather the community is unified as a community of inquirers only insofar as we, its members, have unified it through our conversation, only insofar as we have made it the site of free, honest, and open inquiry 20

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

into matters of common concern. Perhaps a totalitarian state could be engineered, but a community in which one is free to speak one’s mind, and heart, openly and honestly, and is able to trust others to do the same, cannot be engineered; it can only be cultivated. This process of cultivation by means of which community, solidarity, is secured is furthermore intrinsically open‐ended and ongoing. We cannot, in this case, retreat to something objective, even to what Cavell calls the Ordinary; as Rorty knows, there is, and at this level there can be, no “peaceful, non‐obsessed, vision of how things deeply, truly, unproblematically are” because with each move in the conversation the whole subtly, or perhaps not so subtly, shifts in ways that call for further conversation (Rorty 2000f, 349). The conversation through which we realize our rationality, our capacity for any inquiry at all, has no end. It is the lifeblood of rationality itself. Rorty writes in his essay on Orwell (1989b, 176–7): All that matters is that if you do believe it, you can say it without getting hurt. In other words, what matters is your ability to talk to [I would say: with] other people about what seems to you true, not what is in fact true … If we are ironic enough about our [own] final vocabularies, and curious enough about everyone else’s, we do not have to worry about whether we are in direct contact with moral reality, or whether we are blinded by ideology, or whether we are being weakly “relativistic.”

What matters in this context is that one can speak freely, without fear, about how things seem to one, and can hear others as speaking likewise. For it is just this, and not any illusory human essence, that realizes us as a community of rational inquirers, seekers after truth. We saw that if Rorty’s claim that we need to choose solidarity over objectivity is read, as McDowell reads it, as a bit of second‐order philosophical discourse regarding first‐ order inquiry, then that claim seems to be simply mistaken. Insofar as our concern is to understand the nature of first‐order inquiry we do not need to choose one or the other, either solidarity or objectivity. We can, indeed we must, instead recognize that both solidarity, freedom, objectivity, and truth, have an important role to play in our investigations into how things are. But in the context of the discourse of the ironist in doubt about his motives, his morals, and his rationality, we really do seem to be faced with Rorty’s either/or: on the one hand, objectivity, that is, an appeal to something nonhuman that would silence once and for all those doubts, or on the other, solidarity, the self‐conscious attempt to create and sustain a conversational community in which one is both free to express oneself and able to trust others to do the same. But if so, then Rorty is absolutely right to claim that full human maturity can be achieved only with the realization that in this case, the case in which the discourse aims at the creation of a community of inquirers, we really do have only ourselves to turn to. Any attempt, in this context, to achieve objectivity directly – that is, by appeal to some supposed ahistorical human nature, some human essence – rather than on the basis of an achieved solidarity will succeed only by fiat, by one’s willed abasement to something. Where our concern is with the peculiar sort of discourse that the ironist engages in, we both can and should heed Rorty’s call to take care of freedom on the grounds that if we do then truth will take care of itself. 21

Danielle Macbeth

Taking my cue from Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus, I have distinguished three sorts of discourse: first‐order inquiry into the various things we find around us, things such as cats, corporations, and courage; second‐order reflective, philosophical inquiry into the nature and workings of first‐order inquiry; and finally a third kind of discourse, a kind of existential reflection on ourselves as rational inquirers. Rorty’s negative point that there is nothing interesting to be said about truth, no mark of truth, belongs, I suggested, at the level of first‐order inquiry. Truth is not merely another thing in the world whose marks we might discover. But we have also seen that something more positive can be said about the rationality of inquiry at the second level, namely, that inquiry is rational precisely because and insofar as it is critically reflective and self‐correcting. Both points are important, both the point that there is no mark of truth, no certainty, and also the point that the rationality of inquiry lies in our capacities of critically reflective self‐correction. It is furthermore important that they are seen as belonging to different modes of inquiry. We need to be clear about the distinctive role of philosophy in our reflections on truth and knowledge, about what it can and what it cannot provide. My principal aim, however, has been to suggest that Rorty’s either/or, either solidarity or objectivity, can be read, as I think Plato’s digression in the Theaetetus directs us to read and hence can itself be read, as an instance of yet a third sort of discourse, one that concerns, in effect, the conditions of the possibility of any inquiry at all. These conditions of the possibility of inquiry are not, of course, transcendental conditions that we (perhaps following Kant) might discover once and for all. They are rather existential, and hence political. That is, as Rorty writes at the end of his essay on Orwell (1989b, 188), “what our future rulers will be like [whether like Orwell’s O’Brien or like J. S. Mill] will not be determined by any large necessary truths about human nature and its relation to truth and justice, but by a lot of small contingent facts.” And here, I have suggested, Rorty is exactly right. Here we really are faced with Rorty’s either/or, either solidarity or objectivity; and we are faced with it because we are the sorts of beings we are, not only contingent – as inanimate objects and nonhuman living things are – but also constitutively social, cultural, and historical. We have no ahistorical essence waiting to be discovered. And yet, I have urged, there can be objectivity, inquiry, the striving for truth. Nevertheless, Rorty is right: There can be objectivity, inquiry, the striving for truth only on the basis of solidarity, consensus, and shared meaning  –  only, that is, within an intentional community of ironists. Only if we take care of freedom can truth take care of itself.6

Notes 1 See, for instance, Rorty (2000b, 89; 2000c, 263–4 and 266). 2 Again, the framing is incomplete: the dialogue as a whole ends with the end of the embedded dialogue. 3 In Macbeth (2014), I explore in detail this Hegelian idea of our intellectual growth and maturation, especially as it pertains to the science of mathematics. 4 In “Solidarity or Objectivity?” Rorty suggests that we call those wanting to ground solidarity in objectivity “realists”, and those wanting to reduce objectivity to solidarity “pragmatists” (Rorty 1991, 22).

22

Reading Rorty: A Sketch of a Plan

5 I offer a diagnosis of Rorty’s blind spot in Macbeth (2008). 6 My thanks to Aryeh Kosman for very helpful comments on an earlier draft. A much shorter precursor to this chapter appeared in Annales Philosophici 2 (2011): 66–73.

References Macbeth, Danielle. 2008. “From Contingency to Solidarity: Rorty’s Pragmatist Turn.” Soochow Journal of Philosophical Studies 17: 1–9. —. 2014. Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1995. “Knowledge and the Internal.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55: 877–93. —. 2000. “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 109–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Plato. 1961. “Theaetetus.” In The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Translated by F. M. Cornford. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1991. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, 21–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989a. “Introduction.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xiii–xvi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989b. “The Last Intellectual in Europe: Orwell on Cruelty.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 169–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989c. “Private Irony and Liberal Hope.” In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73–98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000a. “Universality and Truth.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 1–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000b. “Response to Putnam.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 87–90. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000c. “Response to Bilgrami.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 262–7. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000d. “Response to Habermas.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 56–64. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000e. “Response to Brandom.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 183–90. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000f. “Response to Conant.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 342–50. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Sedley, David. 2004. The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997 [1956]. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

23

Part I

Early Developments

2 Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist? WILLIAM RAMSEY

1 Introduction Richard Rorty is widely regarded as one of the early developers and proponents of a version of materialism known today as eliminative materialism. This characterization is based primarily on papers wrote in the mid‐1960s, especially his “Mind–Body Identity, Privacy and Categories” (Rorty 1965, from hereon MBIPC). While in his later work, Rorty arguably abandons the view suggested in these papers by rejecting the metaphysical and linguistic assumptions they demand, nearly all commentators treat the earlier Rorty as having helped define and establish the radical thesis that the posits of commonsense psychology, especially sensations like pain, do not actually exist. I am going to argue here that on a closer reading of MBIPC, this interpretation of Rorty as a proponent of eliminative materialism is actually a mistake. Others have noted inconsistencies and difficulties in Rorty’s position. But here I will argue that the most plausible interpretation of Rorty’s account of mental states is one in which he rejects several central features of contemporary eliminativism. As other writers have suggested, such as Bush (1974), I believe Rorty should instead be viewed as a more conventional sort of materialist who makes a misguided claim about what mind–brain identity entails. While Rorty argues for the eliminability of terms used to pick out mental states, he does not base this claim about language on a clear commitment to the nonexistence of the states or properties that those terms denote. In the end, while his writing lends itself to different interpretations, I believe Rorty should be seen as simply a good‐old‐ fashioned reductionist/identity theorist. To show this, this chapter will have the following organization. First, I am going to spell out eliminative materialism as it is commonly understood today, highlighting key elements that are relevant to the question of whether or not Rorty was himself an eliminativist. Then, I will spend some time going over the claims and arguments that Rorty makes in MBIPC in an effort to capture his picture of the nature of mental states. I will

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

27

William Ramsey

then elaborate on the mismatch between modern eliminativism and Rorty’s account, and argue that Rorty is best viewed not as an eliminative materialist, but rather as a proponent of the very different view that mental states should be regarded as identical (in some sense) to brain states. I will also contrast my interpretation with the interpretations offered by others, in particular, Lycan and Pappas (1972) and Bush (1974), and explain why I think my interpretation is better.

2  Contemporary Eliminative Materialism Generally, eliminativism about something is the thesis that the targeted entity, process, event, property, or whatever else assumed (at some time) to exist actually does not exist. Thus, we are all eliminativists about some things – ghosts, demons, the crystal spheres that were thought to hold the stars in their fixed position. Eliminativism is thus a form of antirealism regarding something once assumed by some to be real. The term is misleading as the allegedly nonexistent item is not actually eliminated (it can’t be eliminated, since it doesn’t exist). What is proposed is the elimination of the reliance on, or perhaps the positing of or explanatory appeal to, the corresponding notion or concept. So while no one has eliminated demons, as such, we (or most of us) have eliminated the practice of invoking our concept of demons to explain various phenomena. We have eliminated demons from our understanding of the furniture of the world. Modern eliminative materialism is a form of eliminativism with regard to certain mental states or processes. Thus, modern eliminative materialists typically claim that specific sorts of mental states or mental processes do not actually exist. In recent years, the most popular target of eliminativist writings have been intentional states and, in particular, propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. Thus, eliminative materialists like Paul M. Churchland (1981, 1993) and Patricia Churchland (1986) have claimed that there are no such things as beliefs, in the same sense in which there are no such things as demons. But there have also been those who have endorsed an eliminativistic outlook toward phenomenal states like pain (Dennett 1978; Hardcastle 1999), consciousness (Rey 1983), concepts (Machery 2009), and a variety of other mental states, capacities, and processes. Most contemporary arguments for various sorts of eliminative materialism typically involve two major steps. The first step involves establishing a set of central properties that the relevant mental state or kind is assumed to possess. Often this is done by claiming that our understanding of that mental state is based on some broader theoretical framework, like our commonsense or “folk” psychology (Churchland 1981). In other words, our conception of the mental state in question is claimed to be rooted in a theory that is used to explain and predict behavior; as an explanatory posit, the state in question is assigned a set of defining characteristics, such as various causal properties. The second step involves arguing that such a thing cannot be identified with – at any level of analysis – anything in our most advanced scientific account of the brain, either now or down the road. Thus, eliminative materialists share with dualists a sort of antireductionist outlook. They agree that a given mental state cannot be identified with anything going on in the brain. Dualists say this is so because mental states exist as 28

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

­ onphysical states, whereas eliminative materialists say this is so because the mental n states do not actually exist. Some further clarification is needed to understand each of these steps. Regarding the first step, a great deal of discussion has been devoted to the question of whether or not our invoking of commonsense mental notions like “belief ” or “pain” is the expression or application of some broader theoretical framework. Proponents of the so‐called “theory‐theory” claim that commonsense psychology is a predictive and explanatory theory, albeit a nonscientific one, that we learn while growing up. Many philosophers (and some psychologists) reject the theory‐theory, and claim instead that we make sense of one another through some other process, like simulating their decision making using our own decision‐making machinery (Goldman 2008). However, strictly speaking, eliminative materialism does not really require that our commonsense mental notions are embedded in a theoretical framework used for explaining and predicting. Just about any sort of embedding conceptual framework can be used to support an eliminativistic outlook. In fact, although it is seldom appreciated, the only thing eliminative materialism actually requires is the boring assumption that we have mental concepts (that is, concepts of mental states and processes) and that those concepts assign certain properties to those mental states and processes. That is an extremely weak thesis. Even the most ardent opponent of the theory‐theory will typically grant that we possess concepts about mental states like beliefs and pains, and that those concepts (at least tacitly) assign to their corresponding mental entities a variety of intrinsic, intentional, phenomenal, causal, temporal, and other properties. To deny this would be to deny that we possess distinct concepts of mental states. Regarding the second step, the immediate and crucial question that comes up is this: Just how mistaken does a given conception of something need to be for us to properly say that it turns out there is no such thing? Because so many eliminative materialists regard our mental notions as part of a folk theoretical framework, this question is often framed as this: Just how wrong does folk psychology need to be for its theoretical posits to fail to correspond with anything that exists? Obviously, wrongness of the theory alone is insufficient for claims of nonexistence. We have been initially wrong about many things invoked by both commonsense frameworks (stars, light, fire) and scientific theories (planets, genes, atoms), and yet we nevertheless regard these things as real, but just different than we initially thought. In response to Rorty’s MBIPC, Steven Savitt (1974) described the relevant difference as one between ontologically conservative (retentive) and ontologically radical (eliminativistic) theory change. But beyond making this helpful distinction, Savitt did not go far in explaining what motivates it. So why do we revise and retain (reduce) ontological posits of some frameworks and abandon the ontological posits of others? As it turns out, this is not an easy question to answer. There are no clear, fixed, and acknowledged sets of criteria that tell us how much (or what sort of) mismatch is needed between a given concept and the world to motivate and justify a change that is ontologically radical. A survey of the history of science seems to reveal a hodgepodge of different factors influencing different cases. Still, as Savitt notes, one plausible thing we can say is that in many clear cases of retention, the mismatch was relatively minor, whereas in most cases of elimination, the mismatch was quite substantial. For instance, while 29

William Ramsey

we were wrong to think that planets orbit the Earth as Ptolemy claimed, we were right that there are spherical bodies in solar systems that orbit something and have moons and a wide array of other properties we assigned to planets; thus, we revised our conception of planets and they found a home in Copernicus’s and Newton’s frameworks. By contrast, the notion of a malevolent supernatural being that has taken possession of someone’s soul is so radically unlike anything now associated with mental illness or neurological disorders like epilepsy that the mismatch led us to say “there are no such things as demons” and not, “It turns out demons exist but they are really just a form of mental illness.” So while the difference between retention and elimination may be determined by a judgment call motivated by various factors, much of the time it is, I believe, motivated by the not‐unreasonable criterion of degree of match or mismatch between the central or core properties of the target notion, on the one hand, and the core properties of the posits of the new framework on the other hand. Hence, eliminative materialists today claim that the core properties we associate with some sort of mental state, like the intentional and causal properties associated with beliefs, are not to be found clustered together in any structures within (or states of) the brain, at any level of analysis (see, for example, Ramsey, Stich, and Garon 1990). Modern eliminative materialists claim that those who invoke these mental states are wrong to do so, and that anyone’s commitment to the existence of such states, whatever that commitment might amount to, is also wrong. For example, in the case of belief, eliminative materialists reject the view of reductionists like Fodor (1987), who claim that the mental representations associated with classical computational accounts of the brain, sharing as they do the causal and intentional properties of beliefs, vindicate the reality of beliefs. Eliminativists typically say “No, there are no such computational states in the brain, and moreover there are no other sort of states with which beliefs can be reasonably identified.” Thus, any commitment to the reality of the target mental state is mistaken, and any belief in their existence is empirically false. Of course, when the target for elimination is the mental state of belief itself, things get tricky, as the eliminativist must avoid any self‐refuting claims to the effect that people hold the false belief that there are such things as beliefs (Ramsey 2013). In any event, eliminative materialists insist that we have or will discover that the target mental state does not exist in any sense. By contrast, reductionists claim that the belief that the target mental states exists is true, even if our conception of the mental state in question is a little off. Along with these ontological/metaphysical claims about the existence of certain mental states, modern eliminative materialists also make a claim about the referential role of the mental concepts and linguistic items. Certain mentalistic concepts (e.g. BELIEF) and their corresponding public language terms (e.g. “belief ”) are empty – they fail to denote anything. Just as the term “demon” does not “really” refer to epileptic seizures or types of psychosis, so too, a modern eliminativist about belief does not think the term “belief ” really refers to a specific neurological state. This is another way in which eliminativists are distinguished from reductionists. Whereas reductionists claim that our terms for mental states successfully refer to certain neurological, or computational, or perhaps certain functional states realized in the brain, the eliminativist claims such terms designate nothing at all. Thus, it is crucial for the eliminative materialist (and the reductionist) to very sharply delineate two sorts of historical cases. On the one hand, you have cases where there was 30

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

such a large mismatch between our new, revised understanding of the world and our conception of something that we had previously thought was in the world. In these cases, we say of the latter that there are no such things. This is what happened with demons, caloric, bodily humors, heavenly crystal spheres, and a variety of other things that we once thought were real but are not. We do not say about these things that they are really just something else; they are not really anything. The eliminativist claims these cases provide the correct model for understanding the ontological status of certain mental states. On the other hand, you have cases where the mismatch was much smaller – where we were somewhat confused about the nature of something, and our revised understanding of the world included an improved understanding of that very thing, perhaps coming to see it as really something else. This is what happened with lightning (which is really a discharge of electrons), temperature (which is really mean molecular kinetic energy), middle‐sized objects like tables (which are really a conglomeration of molecules), and so on. The eliminativist denies that these cases provide a proper model for understanding the ontological status of various mental states. Indeed, it is the anti‐eliminativistic reductionist who appeals to these sorts of cases, typically saying things like we will come to see that, say, beliefs are real, and they are really just certain computational states of the brain, just as temperature is real, and is really just mean molecular kinetic energy (MMKE). To sum up, modern eliminative materialism requires that we can draw a distinction between concepts and terms that, on the one hand, do not successfully correspond with anything that exists, and those concepts and terms that, on the other hand, do successfully denote real things and aspects of the world. Eliminative materialists claim that some posit (or set of posits) of our commonsense conception of the mind belongs in the former category. They treat the public language terms that pick out such posits, terms, such as “belief ” or “pain,” as empty – as failing to refer to anything, including neurological states.

3  Rorty’s “Disappearance” Version of the Identity Theory As noted above, Rorty’s early account of the relation between mind and body is most fully articulated in MBIPC. However, this is a difficult article, and in several spots Rorty appears to endorse positions that are mutually exclusive, at least as we understand things now. Rorty’s paper is primarily designed to defend materialism from a particular line of criticism against the identity theory. Identity theorists claim that commonsense mental states, like sensations, should be identified with as‐yet‐to‐be‐discovered neurological states. Some critics, like Cornman (1962), argue that claims of mental‐state/ brain‐state identifications involve a conceptual confusion because neurological states are not the sort of thing that could possess the features associated with mental states. Thus, identity theorists are charged with being guilty of a category mistake. Whereas mental states have the property of, say, being false or throbbing or incorrigibly known, brain states can’t possibly have those sorts of features. It is this criticism that Rorty attempts to diffuse in MBIPC. Rorty begins his essay by noting that there are two different strategies the identity theorist can use to respond to this criticism. The first is what he calls the “translation” 31

William Ramsey

strategy, as endorsed by Smart (1959). Smart suggests that apparently conceptually confused and odd‐sounding identity claims, like, “my orange after image is a brain event” can be translated into “topic‐neutral” statements that remove the oddity. Thus, “my orange after image is identical with a brain event” becomes converted to a statement like, “something is going on right now that is just like what is going on in me when I stare at a an orange patch, and that something is a brain state.” While Rorty has some sympathy with this approach, he expresses doubts about the adequacy of topic‐neutral translations, especially when they involve claims about sensations. The second strategy is what Rorty calls the “disappearance form” of the identity theory and it is this form that Rorty attempts to articulate and defend. Rorty tells us that the disappearance form of the identity theory does not try to establish any sort of strict identity because, it claims, the mental state being referred to does not exist as such. The disappearance view, as he puts it, “holds that the relation in question is not strict identity, but rather the sort of relation which obtains between, to put it crudely, existent entities and nonexistent entities when reference to the latter once served (some of) the purposes presently served by reference to the former – the sort of relation that holds, for example, between “quantity of caloric fluid” and “mean kinetic energy of molecules” (Rorty 1965, 26). Thus, we don’t worry about whether or not mean molecular kinetic energy can have the properties of caloric fluid because we have come to realize there is no such thing as caloric fluid. With the disappearance view, when we say “Xs are really nothing but Ys,” we recognize that not all of the properties associated with X need to be shared by Y. On the disappearance view, statements like “demonical possession is really a type of psychosis” are elliptical and should be read as actually saying “What people used to call ‘demonical possession’ is really a type of psychosis.” While forms of psychosis can’t possibly have the sort of features associated with demons, the thing called “demonic possession,” whatever that may be, need not have such features. Rorty recognizes that there is a potential problem with adopting this outlook with regard to the relation between mental states like sensations and brain states. While we are happy to say that there are no demonic possessions, just forms of psychosis, no one is willing to say there are no such things as sensations. But Rorty believes this potential difficulty can be surmounted if we can provide a plausible account of what is going on when people report having certain sensations like pain. That is, the absurdity of saying there is no such thing as pain can be handled by a reasonable account of what is really going on when people say things like “I’m in pain”: Just as we now want to deny that there are demons, future science may want to deny that there are sensations. The only obstacle to replacing sensation‐discourse with brain‐ discourse seems to be that sensation‐statements have a reporting as well as explanatory function. But the demon case makes clear that the discovery of a new way of explaining the phenomena previously explained by reference to a certain sort of entity, combined with a new account of what is being reported by observation‐statements about that sort of entity, may give good reason for saying that there are no entities of that sort. The absurdity of saying “Nobody has ever felt a pain” is no greater than that of saying “Nobody has ever seen a demon,” if we have a suitable answer to the question “What was I reporting when I said I felt pain?” To this question, the science of the future may reply “You were reporting the occurrence of a certain brain‐process, and it would make life simpler for us if you would, in the future, say ‘My C‐fibers are firing’ instead of saying ‘I’m in pain.” (Rorty 1965, 30)

32

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

Rorty allows that it may, in fact, be quite unlikely that we will replace terms like “pain” with “excitation of C‐fibers,” even if we come to see that that is what pain really is. But the only reason for this, he insists, is simply because it would be very impractical to do so. Rorty argues that opponents of materialism claim that there are two sorts of cases where we are inclined to say “Xs turn out to be nothing but Ys.” The first is when both X and Y refer to observable entities, but claims like “this is an X” are empirically false. For example, the claim “this is a unicorn horn” is false; thus, we might say something like, “unicorn horns turn out to be nothing but narwhal tusks.” The second sort of case is when an observable entity is identified with unobservable, theoretical entities; in this sort of case, there are no false beliefs. For instance, we might say that a table is nothing but a cloud of molecules. Now the problem that Rorty dwells on is that the claim, “sensations are nothing but brain events” does not appear to assimilate to either sort of scenario. When people report having sensations, he insists that they are not making an empirically false claim. As he puts it, “we do not wish to say that people who have reported sensations in the past have (necessarily) any empirically disconfirmed beliefs. People are not wrong about sensations in the way in which they were wrong about “unicorn horns” (Rorty 1965, 33). And yet, brain processes are not really unobservable theoretical entities either. Thus, Rorty suggests, the materialist claim that sensations are nothing but brain events is criticized for being absurd because this claim makes no sense on either available interpretation. To resolve the difficulty, Rorty recommends that the materialist should reject a tacit assumption in the identification of tables with molecules. That assumption is that the identification of tables with clouds of molecules does not permit us to infer the nonexistence of tables. But, he insists, we could abandon the practice of talking about tables, just as we did with demons. The reason we don’t is simply because it would be extremely inconvenient to do so. Terms are employed to refer to things in both inferential and non‐ inferential (i.e. observational) scenarios. Rorty suggests that if we habitually use a term, “X” non‐inferentially, then we are far more likely to say “Xs are nothing but Ys” and less likely to say “there are no Xs,” than when “X” is regularly used inferentially. The term “table” is regularly used non‐inferentially, so we are far less likely to drop it from our vernacular. Rorty offers a typical case history of the elimination of a term. The term “X” might have both inferential and non‐inferential uses, but eventually a new thing, Y, is introduced in the same domain and the laws and explanatory role of Y proves to be superior to the laws and explanatory role of X. Eventually, people stop making inferential reports of X, preferring instead to invoke Ys. As for observational reports of X, either (a) these are treated as reports of Ys, or (b) they are treated as something like a hallucination. This eventually leads to the cessation of observational reports of Xs, and the ensuing claims that there are no Xs. Applying all this to the identification of sensations with brain events, Rorty suggests it is doubtful that the laws of neuroscience will be sufficiently superior to our normal psychological explanations to overcome the inconvenience of dropping terms like “sensation.” It would also be odd to treat our introspective reports of certain sensations as simply reports of brain events. But the crucial thing that Rorty wants us to note is that despite these considerations, we could, in principle, stop talking about sensations and instead talk about brain events. It would just be very impractical to do so, just as it is impractical to do so in the case of tables. When we are making non‐inferential reports 33

William Ramsey

of sensations, we are really just making non‐inferential reports of brain events. This strikes us as an odd thing to say, and thus we get the original criticism of the identity theory as involving a category error. But feeling pain is what being in a certain brain state is like.

4  Why Rorty Was Not an Eliminative Materialist What are we to make of all this, and, more importantly, what does all of this imply about Rorty’s status as an eliminative materialist? Let me begin my analysis by making a couple of concessions. First, as others have noted, Rorty’s discussions lends itself to different readings, as he says things that appear inconsistent and puzzling, especially given his main agenda. Thus, while I’ll offer one interpretation, I concede that other interpretations are certainly possible and not unreasonable. Second, it must be conceded that much of what Rorty says does indeed appear to be an endorsement of a form of eliminativism materialism that is not so different from what people now think. His discussion of our treatment of both caloric and demons suggests that he is modeling his account of mental states on past cases of conceptual elimination. And sections of his paper entitled “The Analogy Between Demons and Sensations” encourage that interpretation. So the fact that so many people view Rorty as an early eliminative materialist is not so surprising. In fact, it takes close attention to the details of his account to recognize the ways in which Rorty’s picture goes against the central tenets of eliminativism. My reading of Rorty as a non‐eliminative materialist is based on just how much of what he says makes sense only as a defense of some type of reductionism (i.e. the view that mental states are real and are to be identified, in some way, with brain states). To begin, the phrase Rorty uses to label the theory he endorses is the disappearance form of the identity theory. Insofar as it is a version of the identity theory, then it is a theory that promotes the identification of mental states with brain states. Eliminative materialists reject all versions of the identity theory. It is an anti‐identity theory because (like dualists) it claims there is nothing in the brain with which we can identify mental states. While Rorty may have simply regarded the terms “materialism” and “identity theory” as interchangeable, it is at least a little puzzling that he would do so if he regarded mental states as nonexistent. More significant is the fact that one of Rorty’s main goals is to answer the anti‐ materialist complaint that the identification of sensations with brain states involves some sort of category error. As subsequent materialists have noted, he is right to point out that the appearance of a category error in identity claims is often due to conceptual mistakes about the fundamental nature of things. As Paul Churchland has noted, it once seemed like a category error to identify the Earth with a planet – planets move after all, and yet to move was to change position relative to the Earth; thus, Earth just isn’t the sort of thing that could be a planet (Churchland 2013, 48). The mistake here is obvious, and proponents of mind–brain identity claims can say the same thing is going on with regard to any alleged category error they are making. The critic claims that brain states aren’t the sort of thing that can feel awful, or be known through private introspection. Well, that’s alleged only because we fail to fully understand the real nature of brain states or introspection. If certain identity claims seem odd, that is exactly what we 34

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

should expect whenever our confused and mistaken conception of things needs to undergo revision. It is that mistaken conceptual framework that generates the philosophical intuitions of oddity. So the error lies not with the odd‐sounding identification, but with those oddness intuitions that are generated by a flawed conceptual framework. Thus, Rorty’s claim that the thing reduced need not share all of the same attributes with the thing it is reduced to – that we can make “cross‐category identities” – is a perfectly reasonable defense of the identity theory. However, it is a defense of an identity theory, and not any sort of eliminativism. That is, his central argument makes the most sense as a defense of some form of reductionism, where it is recognized that we may be confused about the nature of the very real thing being reduced. To claim that we are conceptually confused about the actual nature of X (and thus the appearance of a category mistake) is to assume that X has an actual nature – that it is real. Eliminativism about X is to deny the reality of X. With eliminativism, we are often not confused to intuit that a property attributed to the eliminated posit should not be assigned to the newly introduced explanatory posit. For instance, with eliminativism, our intuition that neurological disorders are just not the sort of things that could come from the supernatural realm and that have malevolent intent is quite correct, and indeed, is partly why demons were eliminated from our ontology and not identified with neurological disorders. Similarly, for certain eliminative materialists about, say, states with intentional properties (like propositional attitudes), the intuition that brain states do not have, or perhaps even cannot have intentional properties is not mistaken. Consequently, insofar as Rorty treats his rebuttal  –  the promotion of cross‐category identities – as a virtue of the version of materialism he wants to endorse, then that version of materialism really shouldn’t be regarded as eliminative materialism. Moreover, Rorty repeatedly states that it would be a mistake to say that statements like “this is a sensation” are empirically false. For instance, when trying to explain away the intuitive implausibility of eliminating mental terms, he tells us that we cannot treat statements like “this is mental state X” as analogous to statements like “this is a unicorn horn,” because the former is not empirically false. Instead, Rorty invites us to regard statements like “this is mental state X” as more analogous to “this is a table.” The term “table” could be eliminated (and replaced by some complicated description of a conglomeration of molecules) but it would just be very inconvenient to do so. So, too, we could stop using words like “pain” (replaced by some complicated neurological state) but it would simply be very inconvenient to do so. However, eliminativism about mental state X entails that statements like “this is mental state X” are indeed empirically false! In fact, eliminativists would say the situation with the mental state in question is exactly analogous to the situation with unicorn horns – we have discovered empirically that there just are no such things. Insofar as Rorty is committed to the truthfulness of statements like “I am in now in mental state X,” then he simply cannot be an eliminative materialist and should instead be viewed as a reductive materialist. Furthermore, Rorty suggests throughout his essay that terms like “sensations” really do refer but they actually just refer to brain states. As he puts it, In the case of sensations, however, we can give a relatively simple account of how to get along in the future. Both the explanatory and the reporting functions of statements about

35

William Ramsey

sensations can be taken over by statements about brain processes. Therefore, we are prepared to identify “What we called ‘sensations’” with brain processes, and to say “what we called ‘sensations’ turn out to be nothing but brain processes” (Rorty 1965, 31).

Yet, as noted above, modern eliminativists typically regard the terms corresponding to the posits slated for elimination as empty – they don’t refer to anything, and never have. They do not even refer to whatever actual condition or state of affairs that generated their use in the first place. Thus, for them, there actually is no sense in which the statement “caloric fluid is the same thing as what we now call mean kinetic energy of molecules” is true. Statements like “Demonical possession is really a type of psychosis” are perhaps indeed elliptical, as Rorty suggests, but they should actually be read, not as he recommends, as shorthand for “What people used to call ‘demonical possession’ is really a type of psychosis.” Instead, the eliminativist says they should be read as something more like “What initially prompted talk of demonical possession is really a type of psychosis.” Similarly, an eliminative materialist about sensations would say, “What we called ‘sensations’ are really nothing at all. There are no such things. Talk about sensations was prompted by the occurrence of brain states, but sensations aren’t ‘really’ just brain states, just as demons aren’t ‘really’ just forms of psychosis.” To review, Rorty’s disappearance view differs substantially from eliminative materialism in a variety of crucial ways. It is characterized as a form of the identity theory, whereas eliminative materialists reject any sort of mind–brain identity. Rorty is trying to defend and make sense of claims like “mental state X is really just brain state Y.” But eliminative materialists don’t care about making sense of such claims because they regard them as false. In response to the charge that mind–brain identity claims involve a category error, Rorty’s disappearance view counters that we may be ignorant about the real nature of mental states (for example, that they are actually brain states). Eliminative materialists deny that the relevant mental states have any real nature because they don’t actually exist. Rorty’s disappearance view entails that reports of the occurrence of the relevant mental state are not empirically false; eliminative materialists claim such reports are empirically false. Rorty insists that mental terms like “sensation” do indeed successfully refer. Eliminativists deny that the relevant mental terms refer to anything at all – they are empty. Rorty insists that reports of the occurrence of mental states like sensation should be properly treated as reports of the occurrence of brain states. Eliminative materialists insist that such reports should be properly treated as reports of nothing at all. Given the different ways in which Rorty’s position is decidedly un‐eliminativistic, and the degree to which he seems to be endorsing a conventional version of a reductionism, how can he also, in the same essay, suggest that the relation between brain states and mental states should be modeled on “the sort of relation which obtains between, to put it crudely, existent entities and nonexistent entities”? I think an answer might be found in a discussion about language and our talk of demons and tables that reveals what, for Rorty, being a nonexistent entity amounts to: That there is room for reflection here is apparent when we place the case of tables side‐by‐ side with the case of demons. If there is any point to saying that tables are nothing but clouds of molecules it is presumably to say that, in principle, we could stop making a

36

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

referring use of “table,” and of any extensionally equivalent term, and still leave our ability to describe and predict undiminished. But this would seem just the point of (and justification for) saying that there are no demons. Why does the realization that nothing would be lost by the dropping of “table” from our vocabulary still leave us with the conviction that there are tables, whereas the same realization about demons leave us with the conviction that there are no demons? I suggest that the only answer to this question which will stand examination is that although we could in principle drop “table,” it would be monstrously inconvenient to do so, whereas it is both possible in principle and convenient in practice to drop “demon” (Rorty 1965, 34)

It seems that for Rorty, there is no deep ontological difference between tables and demons. Both are really something else (clouds of molecules and forms of psychosis). So apparently this leads Rorty to suggest they each thereby qualify as nonexistent entities. The only difference between the two is that whereas it would be very inconvenient to drop the term “table” from our vocabulary and replace it with complex descriptions of clouds of molecules, it was not inconvenient or impractical to drop the term “demon” from our vocabulary and instead talk about psychosis. Hence, in this picture, mental states like sensations may have the same status as demons, because they too are really something else. But the term “sensation” is probably more like the term “table” in that it would be extremely inconvenient to drop it. Like a true non‐eliminativistic identity theorist, Rorty thinks that the relation between mental states to brain states is just like the relation between tables and clouds of molecules. It is just that for Rorty, that relation is apparently one in which the reduced entity can be described as “nonexistent.” I believe that to make sense of most of the things Rorty says, we should focus on this claim as the deeply problematic one, as the locus of confusion – as the claim that Rorty doesn’t really intend, given the other things he says. In fact, the whole paragraph seems fundamentally wrong‐headed. The fact that we could replace the term “table” with talk of clouds of molecules without any loss in our ability to describe and predict is not significantly connected to what happens when we come to say something (like demon) does not exist. The class of everyday terms which could be replaced without loss by scientific terms does not correspond with the class of terms that we think refer to nonexistent entities. The difference between tables and demons is that in the case of tables, the scientifically respectable entity that prompted talk about tables shares most of the same properties with the folk notion of tables. Certain clouds of molecules are indeed configured in such a manner that they often have four legs, can be sat around, can uphold other objects, are in rooms described as “dining halls,” and so on. By contrast, the scientifically respectable entity that promoted talk about demons (epileptic seizures, extreme psychosis, etc.) share virtually none of the properties we associate with demons (supernatural origin, malevolent intent, possessor of souls, etc.). So that’s why we dropped “demon” from our vocabulary and did not drop “table,” and came to regard the former as nonexistent, but not the latter. Moreover, it is not at all clear that convenience or practicality have much to do with the dropping of terms from our vocabulary. Dropping the term “demon” involved the upheaval of a long‐standing and entrenched theoretical framework that enjoyed enormous support from a broad range of people, including many top religious authorities. The same can be said of a variety of other entities that we now regard as nonexistent. By contrast, it seems like it would be relatively easy to replace, say, all uses of the word 37

William Ramsey

“water” with “H2O,”or “temperature” with “MMKE.” It does not even seem like it would be all that big of a deal to replace all uses of “table” with some complex description of molecule clouds playing the relevant functional role. So Rorty’s general linguistic account of why terms disappear does not seem very plausible. A far more plausible theory is the one embraced by modern eliminativists: terms get dropped when there is an ontologically radical theory change. They get dropped when they denote entities that fail to correspond with any of the entities posited by the replacing conceptual or theoretical framework (where failure to correspond means failure to share a sufficient number of features). Note that if we take Rorty at his word and regard him as thinking that a sufficient condition for nonexistence is being really something else, then we should treat Rorty as being an eliminativist about practically everything, include all middle‐sized objects. I suggest it makes more sense to regard this as a fundamental mistake, and that, in reality, Rorty does not really think that tables nor sensations are unreal by virtue of being something else. In fact, the proper historical model for what Rorty seems to have in mind with his disappearance version of the identity theory are neither cases of demons or caloric on the one hand, nor cases of tables and temperature on the other hand. Instead, the proper model for what he thinks could possibly happen to terms like “sensation” would be cases where a successful reduction occurred, where we came to identify X with Y, but for some reason the term referring to X was dropped from the vocabulary. Consider the term “consumption,” a term once used to denote a certain illness. We discovered the cause of this illness to be the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and, for whatever reason, eventually the term “tuberculosis,” or “TB,” became the standard name for the same illness. Use of the term “consumption” in this role disappeared from our language, although everyone agrees that what people used to call consumption is a very real condition now called “tuberculosis.” So here is a case where use of the term actually disappears, unlike what happened with “table,” and yet it disappears not because it is thought to be empty, designating nothing, as in the case of “demon.” The referring term that designates something real is, for whatever sociological or linguistic reasons, replaced by another, despite it being a case of identification and not elimination (a case of ontologically conservative theory change, not radical theory change). Rorty thinks it is possible that for sensation terms like “pain” the same thing could happen, not because he is an eliminative materialist, but because pains are really just brain states and eventually the term designating the brain state may come to replace it. That is a claim that nearly all anti‐eliminativistic reductionists would also endorse. My interpretation of Rorty is bolstered by some of the things he says in other writings at this time. For example, in his essay, “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism,” Rorty sets out to defend his view from a family of related criticisms put forth by James Cornman (1968) and Richard Bernstein (1968). These criticisms point to the apparent inadequacy of using predicates of the neurosciences to play the role currently played by the predicates that we use in describing sensations. Statements about, say, C‐fibers and how they are firing could never accurately describe our experience, and thus could never replace, without loss, statements about the intensity of our pain. Rorty responds by noting that there will be neurological predicates denoting neurological properties that will correspond to what we are talking about when we say a sensation is “intense,” “sharp,” “throbbing,” and so on. In other words, as claimed by most conventional 38

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

i­dentity theorists, the properties ascribed to the reduced entity find a home in the reducing theory. We will one day come to understand what the throbbing of a pain really is, as properly explained by the terminology of neuroscience. At one point, Rorty does say something that appears to undermine my interpretation. He states: “I want to say that none of the predicates appropriate to sensations are appropriate to brain processes” (1970, 114). Here it looks initially like Rorty is saying something very much in keeping with modern eliminativism – that the core features of nonexistent mental states are not shared by anything in the brain, at any level of analysis. But it is important to see that here Rorty is talking about predicates, not properties. He is noting that terms like “throbbing” are not appropriate in the language of neuroscience. This is like noting that “bright” is not a predicate one is likely to find in scientific descriptions of electro‐magnetic radiation and the behavior of photons. Nonetheless, there is something that can be expressed in the language of electro‐magnetic radiation and photons that corresponds to what the brightness of light really is (involving, from what I’m told, the amplitude of the wave and the flux of photons). There really is light and it really can be bright – it is just that the predicate “bright” is not appropriate to the level of description used in physics. Similarly, “throbbing pain,” may not appear in our neurological account, but something like “rapid oscillating excitation of C‐fibers” will, and the latter corresponds with the former. It is worth contrasting my interpretation of Rorty’s disappearance view with the interpretation of others. For example, Lycan and Pappas (1972) present an interpretation of Rorty that has him promoting something of a hybrid view  –  something in‐­ between straightforward reductive materialism (the view I claim Rorty is actually endorsing) and strong eliminative materialism. They read Rorty as promoting something they call “weak eliminative materialism” (WEM). Weak eliminative materialism shares with strong eliminative materialism the tenet that there are no sensations and thus sensations are not to be identified with brain processes, but it also shares with reductive materialism the tenet that our belief that there are sensations is true and the term “sensation” successfully denotes brain processes. The idea is that the term “sensation” is not empty, but it does not refer to sensations because there are no such things – it denotes whatever the relevant brain state is that prompts such talk. Lycan and Pappas go on to note a number of difficulties with this view, especially its lack of internal coherence and how easily it collapses into either reductive materialism or the strong version of eliminative materialism. While I have some sympathy with the Lycan and Pappas interpretation, here are a couple of reasons to prefer my interpretation over theirs. First, at no point does Rorty explicitly endorse some of the distinguishing characteristics of WEM. For example, at no point does Rorty say that he thinks “sensation” fails to denote sensations but does denote brain processes. Nor does Rorty explicitly state that sensations are not brain processes; indeed, he often says they just are brain processes, or nothing but brain processes. Because Rorty’s collection of claims is inconsistent, different interpretations typically pick out on different claims as the one that Rorty, in some sense, didn’t really mean – as the one we should more or less ignore. On my interpretation, the claim that Rorty makes that we should ignore is the claim that, by virtue of being really something else (e.g. a cloud of molecules), something qualifies as a nonexistent entity. If we simply ignore that claim, then the other things Rorty says make fairly good sense. We can 39

William Ramsey

understand why he says our belief in the reality of sensations is true, why “sensation” is referentially successful, why the Leibniz Law sort of challenges don’t work, and why he continually claims that sensations are nothing but brain states. By contrast, on Lycan and Pappas’s interpretation, they are forced to insist that Rorty is confused about a lot more things. He is confused to claim that belief in the reality of sensation is correct, he is confused to claim that sensations are really brain processes in the same sense in which tables are really just clouds of molecules, and he oddly fails to explain that he thinks the term “sensation” refers not to sensations, but to brain processes. Given a principle of charity (and perhaps also simplicity), I think my interpretation should be preferred. Second, WEM is an odd position that is not illustrated by any of the historical models Rorty invokes. For a weak form of eliminativism to be instantiated, we would need a case where one term came to be viewed as denoting some scientifically respectable posit, but at the same time we did not regard whatever it was the term was originally thought to denote as existing, or being identifiable with the scientifically respectable posit. That seems like a weird scenario. Suppose an everyday term “X” denotes some (perhaps commonsense) entity or kind X, and the scientifically respectable term “Y” denotes some scientifically respectable posit Y. What WEM would require is a case where we say “X” refers to Y, but Xs don’t exist and cannot be identified with Ys. I’m not familiar with any such historical case.1 What has happened instead is one of two scenarios. In one case, we think “X” does indeed denote Y (say, the term “heat” denotes high MMKE), but we also say X exists and is really Y (heat exists and is really high MMKE). Or, alternatively, we say that Xs don’t exist, the term “X” is empty, and doesn’t even denote Y (caloric doesn’t exist, and the term “caloric” does not denote anything, including MMKE). I’m claiming that Rorty’s view of sensation and other mental states really belongs in the former camp and is not some sort of hybrid position between the two. Another interpretation of Rorty that is much closer to my own was offered by Eric Bush (1974). Like me, Bush regards Rorty as endorsing a more conventional form of reductive materialism – a view not so different from Smart’s. However, unlike me, Bush sees Rorty as committed to the thesis that terms like “sensation” are ambiguous, having two different meanings. On the one hand, “sensation” means nonphysical mental entity. It is this sense of “sensation” that corresponds with something nonexistent and that should be dropped. On the other hand, “sensation” has a more topic‐neutral meaning, denoting something like “what happens when I am pinched.” It is this notion of “sensation” that Rorty wants to say corresponds to brain states and that make one’s belief “I am now having a sensation” empirically true. Whereas Lycan and Pappas regard Rorty as promoting an incoherent view, Bush suggests the position can be seen as coherent as long as we treat these mental terms as ambiguous in this way. I do not have a strong objection to Bush’s interpretation, especially since, on the crucial question of whether or not Rorty was an eliminative materialist or identity theorist, we are in agreement. However, a problem with the Bush reading is that Rorty never actually says that he thinks terms like “sensation” are ambiguous or have multiple meanings. Moreover, if he did hold such a view, then his account should have been different. Instead of saying that sensations do not exist and that one’s belief that one is having a sensation is not empirically false, what Rorty should have said, and what you 40

Was Rorty an Eliminative Materialist?

would expect him to say, is that sometimes when we use terms like “sensation” what we are talking about really does exist and sometimes it doesn’t, depending on which use of the term is at work. And sometimes our belief that we are having a sensation would be true and sometimes it would be false, depending on which sensation concept was invoked in the belief. In other words, the bifurcation in the meaning of “sensation” and other such terms would lead to lots of other bifurcations, with one branch always corresponding to the different consequences of eliminativism, and the other branch always corresponding to the different dimensions of reductionism. Since Rorty never promotes anything like this, it leads me to suspect that Bush’s interpretation is at least partially off. On my reading of Rorty as a conventional identity theorist (as a conventional reductive materialist) nearly everything lines up: his strategy for defending materialism against the charge of a category mistake, his claim that terms like “sensation” denote brain states, his insistence that beliefs about the occurrence of mental states are not false and the various ways he suggests that mental states are really just brain states. The only thing that is out of place is how, in various places, he suggests that mental states like sensation should be treated as nonexistent entities. But this oddity can be seen as a mistake that is rooted in an odd conception of what it is for something to be a nonexistent entity. Something is nonexistent for Rorty if it is really something else; a view that is incoherent on its face (you cannot consistently say A is really B and also maintain that A is really nothing). But the bottom line is this: if you think that mental states have the same ontological status as tables, then you almost certainly are not an eliminative materialist. While Rorty’s original “disappearance theory” was not an early version of eliminative materialism, I certainly don’t want to deny that it played an extremely important role in the formation of eliminative materialism. Indeed, it forced others to make explicit the ontological, linguistic, and theoretical distinctions and commitments that have been essential for clarifying the difference between reductionism and eliminativism. For example, as I noted above, Savitt’s distinction between ontologically radical and ontologically conservative theory change, which is critical for distinguishing modern eliminativism from reductionism, was made in direct response to Rorty’s MBIPC. So with our modern perspective on conceptual change, we can criticize Rorty for being confused about what should be said when we’ve determined that something “is really” something else. But in fairness, we should also note that our modern perspective is what it is partly because of Rorty’s presentation, and because he helped make clearer the sort of ontological commitments that go together and, perhaps more importantly, the sort of commitments that do not.

Note 1 James Woodbridge has suggested that on the version of linguistic fictionalism he endorses, our term “proposition” does not actually refer to propositions, because such things don’t exist, but it does refer to a complex array of other linguistic devices. If so, this might qualify as a form of weak eliminative materialism. See Woodbridge (2006).

41

William Ramsey

References Bernstein, Richard. 1968. “The Challenge of Scientific Materialism.” International Philosophical Quarterly 8: 252–75. Bush, Eric. 1974. “Rorty Revisted.” Philosophical Studies 25: 33–42. Churchland, Patricia. 1986. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind‐Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Churchland, Paul M. 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.” Journal of Philosophy 78: 67–90. —. 1993. “Evaluating Our Self Conception.” Mind and Language 8(2): 211–22. —. 2013. Matter and Consciousness, 3rd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cornman, James. 1962. “The Identity of Mind and Body.” Journal of Philosophy 59: 486–92. —. 1968. “On the Elimination of ‘Sensations’ and Sensations.” The Review of Metaphysics 22: 15–35. Dennett, Daniel. 1978. “Why You Can’t Make a Computer that Feels Pain.” In Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, 190–229. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fodor, Jerry. 1987. Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Goldman, Alvin. 2008. Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology and Neuroscience of Mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press. Hardcastle, Valerie. 1999. The Myth of Pain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lycan, William and George Pappas. 1972. “What Is Eliminative Materialism?” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 149–59. Machery, Edouard. 2009. Doing Without Concepts. New York: Oxford University Press. Ramsey, William. 2013. “Eliminative Materialism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, summer edn. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/ materialism‐eliminative. Ramsey, William, Stephen Stich, and Joseph Garon. 1990. “Connectionism, Eliminativism and the Future of Folk Psychology,” Philosophical Perspectives 4: 499–533. Rey, George. 1983. “A Reason for Doubting the Existence of Consciousness,” in Consciousness and Self‐Regulation, edited by R. Davidson, G. Schwartz, and D. Shapiro, Vol. 3, 1–39. New York: Plenum. Rorty, Richard. 1965. “Mind–Body Identity, Privacy and Categories.” The Review of Metaphysics 19: 24–54. —. 1970. “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” Review of Metaphysics 24: 112–21. Savitt, Steven. 1974. “Rorty’s Disappearance Theory.” Philosophical Studies 28: 433–6. Smart, J. J. C. 1959. “Sensations and Brain Processes.” Philosophical Review 68(2): 149–56. Woodbridge, James. 2006. “Propositions as Semantic Pretense.” Language and Communication 26, 343–55.

Further Reading Christensen, Scott and Dale Turner. 1993. Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

42

3 Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness JAMES TARTAGLIA

1  The Odd Physicalist Out These days, Rorty’s name is most associated with his postmodern (he would say pragmatist) rejection of objective truth, and his attempt to blur the boundaries between philosophy and literature. In the 1960s and 1970s it was most associated with his philosophy of mind. That Rorty did not abandon his interest in philosophy of mind, however, is indicated by the fact that the book which enacted the transition between his earlier and later images, namely Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, both begins with, and argumentatively hinges on, an attempt to deconstruct modern conceptions of mind and, in particular, consciousness. Moreover, consciousness was an issue Rorty regularly returned to thereafter; it figures prominently in the final collection of his papers, for instance, where we find him reflecting on the contemporary debate led by David Chalmers. This was not a lingering, nostalgic interest in the kind of debates in which he was once prominent. Rather, his views on truth, metaphilosophy, and consciousness were all intimately linked. Consciousness was a philosophical issue that Rorty felt he needed to discredit in order to pave the way to his views on truth and metaphilosophy. Those views became increasingly prominent in defending his position on consciousness, and in the end, there was just a unified package; but consciousness provided Rorty’s a means of breaking into that hermeneutic circle. Rorty’s philosophy of consciousness is part of a physicalist tradition that stems from Ryle; as is Dennett’s, of which Rorty enthusiastically approved. Detractors of this tradition accuse it of “eliminativism,” which derives from the label James Cornman coined for Rorty’s position, and which Rorty embraced for a time. But it is now a term of abuse in some quarters; an attitude Galen Strawson writes large when he says that consciousness eliminativism is “surely the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just in the whole history of philosophy,” adding that it is, “the silliest view ever put forward” (Strawson 2008, 6). I know what he means; on

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

43

James Tartaglia

the face of it, my current situation – looking at the computer screen and thinking about what to write – provides ample reason to think that consciousness could never be eliminated from a credible worldview. The particles that physicists currently talk about seem far more likely candidates for eventual elimination, given how much physics has changed over the centuries; but experiences, like tables and chairs, seem ineliminable simply because they number among the manifest realities which science and other disciplines set out to explain. So why did Rorty endorse this view? We will not find the usual physicalist motivation, namely that everything is physical, and so either consciousness is too, or else is an illusion. And that raises the question: why would Rorty commit to an agenda which, on the face of it, is set by goals diametrically opposed to his own? For consciousness provides the main obstacle to physicalist ontology; to a metaphysical conception of the world as essentially physical. As Putnam once said, physicalism is the only metaphysical view with “contemporary ‘clout’” (Putnam 1983, 208), and that is why the issue is so hard fought within philosophy; physicalists want to overcome the apparent obstacle of consciousness, so they can keep their work in step with science and help to demystify the world. Given that Rorty’s goal was to eradicate metaphysics, and free us from the kind of scientism that privileges the vocabulary of physics over others, then it might seem rather puzzling that Rorty was with the physicalists. In line with his pluralism, should he not have welcomed this obstacle to the last bastion of metaphysics, deplored the scientism behind attempts to overcome it, and insisted that talk of conscious experiences is as legitimate as talk of anything else? Should he not have said that efforts to show that discourse about mind can be reconciled with an exclusively physical discourse, are a paradigmatically philosophical waste of effort? That they are misguided attempts to make different discourses commensurable, in order to satisfy the demands of metaphysical ontology to privilege one, and then reconcile all others to it?1 Rorty, however, thought the Rylean tradition provided “one of the few clear instances of intellectual progress which analytic philosophy has to its credit” (Rorty 1991a, 3). To understand why he thought this, we must turn to his metaphilosophy. For what makes Rorty a unique philosopher of consciousness is that his position is metaphilosophically driven – explicitly so. He never wasted an opportunity to turn debates about consciousness around to metaphilosophy – to the motivations of philosophers who oppose physicalism, and to his own purportedly better, more historically attuned, motivations. This should come as no surprise, given that Rorty thought “substantial philosophical doctrines” were “inseparable” from “metaphilosophical issues  –  issues about what, if anything, philosophy is good for and about how it is best pursued” (Rorty 2007, 122). To understand the motivation for his position, then, and indeed what it amounts to, we need to see how it connects with his metaphilosophy.

2  Rorty’s Position Rorty’s position has two integrated components. The first consists in making the case that the language of natural science is capable of incorporating consciousness. Thus he is happy to endorse Frank Jackson’s statement that “if you duplicate our world in all 44

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

physical respects and stop right there, you duplicate it in all respects” (Rorty 2007, 176). Of course, many philosophers would accept this, and hence call themselves “physicalists,” while still thinking that consciousness presents an obstacle to scientific understanding; that there is an “explanatory gap,” as Joseph Levine (1983) puts it, between our microstructural understanding of the brain and our first‐person conceptions of conscious states. Rorty, however, thinks these are just different ways of talking that can be easily reconciled; he has no patience with “defeatist guff ” about the “limits of science” (Rorty 1998, 120). This first‐order, more purely philosophical component of his position is entirely in line with the Rylean tradition, and hence not terribly original. In fact, Rorty regarded distinctions within that tradition as essentially trivial; behaviorists, identity theorists, and functionalists, he drolly says, “had very little to disagree about, but managed it nevertheless” (Rorty 1982a, 333). What sets Rorty apart is that he wanted to detach physicalism from ontology and scientism. So he does not think the ability of physics to describe everything in microstructural terms shows that it thereby captures the ultimate nature of reality, and consequently should be privileged as the area of culture uniquely capable of telling us what is actually out there in the world. This difference stems from the second, metaphilosophical component of his position, which consists in explaining why we should welcome the idea of an exclusively physical description of ourselves, and why resistance to it is badly motivated. Both explanations have the same root. Thus the reason that purely physical descriptions are to be welcomed is that they distance us from the idea that there is an objective truth to which we can anchor our contingent conversations, and to which we might turn for ahistorical guidance; the idea that we are alone in the universe without supernatural help went “hand‐in‐hand with the admission that Democritus and Epicurus had been largely right about how the universe works” (Rorty 2007, 147). While the reason that the apparent obstacle of consciousness to universal physical description has been invested with philosophical significance, as Rorty sees it, is exactly because of such hopes for a guiding objective truth. Persuading us to abandon essentialism, intrinsicality, and hence ahistorical, objective truth, was the overarching aim of Rorty’s philosophical career. So since he saw the mind as the “last refuge of intrinsicality” (Rorty 1998, 110), it was crucial to his project to show it to be just as much a relational node within our culturally constructed web of belief as anything else; that it was just something we talk about, and could talk about in various ways, including physical. Ways of talking about consciousness which allude to an intrinsic nature resistant to physical description thus needed to be abandoned, and Rorty’s efforts to persuade us to do this are an exercise in “cultural politics,” on a par with efforts to discourage racial, nationalist, or theological terminology (Rorty 2007, 3ff.). However, in addition to promoting the demystifying language of physicalism, Rorty also needed to show that it does not have positive metaphysical implications of its own; otherwise his project would backfire. And this is the balancing act Rorty’s philosophy of consciousness tries to perform. It is essentially an endeavor to harness the anti‐ metaphysical force of a universal physical vocabulary, while discouraging any rebound into physicalist metaphysics. With hindsight, at least, Rorty’s direction of travel was clear in his first published works, and his subsequent writings simply developed and refined his position. Thus in 45

James Tartaglia

1963, we find him arguing that empiricism and extensionalism are unobjectionable, so long as they are held apart from the reductionist project of constructing a unitary language adequate to the world; the latter being infected by Sellars’s “Myth of the Given” (Rorty 2014, 96ff.). This was a first effort to separate worthy ambitions for a universal scientific language, from metaphysical ambitions. Then in 1965 (pp. 106ff.), in his influential paper advocating eliminative materialism, we find him arguing that talk of conscious sensations, just like talk of tables, will probably always be with us, due to its convenience over talking about complex microphysical configurations. However, since this is a matter of convenience rather than principle, such talk need not always be with us; which is all physicalism needs to establish. Here we see clearly that all that ever concerned Rorty in this area was showing that consciousness lacks an intrinsic nature which stops science in its tracks, and thereby motivates metaphysics. The excitement to be found in later eliminative materialists about the progress that science can make when not held back by the obsolete category of “mind,” is entirely lacking in Rorty. He did not think “a perfected neurophysiology would tell us anything interesting about mind or language” (Rorty 2007, 177), and wondered why philosophers like himself should take any interest in the latest scientific developments, when they are “puzzled by ends” but “offered information only about means” (p. 100). Rorty continued this trajectory in 1967 (Rorty 2014, 132ff.) by arguing that the fundamental opposition between metaphysicians and analytic philosophers, was that the former think metaphysics will make us wise by setting a certain description of the world in stone, while the latter invest their hopes in redescribing and recontextualizing; as he planned to do with consciousness. And then, between 1970 and 1972, all the main pieces of his position fell into place, as he argued that the notion of prelinguistic awareness of consciousness to which our descriptions must answer is untenable (pp. 199ff.), that the Cartesian notion of consciousness is at the root of modern metaphysical ontology (pp. 208ff.), and that physicalism should not be construed as finding scientifically acceptable inner causes of behavior to replace Cartesian mental states (pp. 290ff., 299ff.). The details of Rorty’s position emerge most clearly in five papers that span his career after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN).2 We already know from PMN, that Rorty thinks the modern concept of mind as something which presents a contrast with the physical world, arose from two influential attempts to solve once pressing, but now obsolete social needs. The first was the need felt by the ancient Greeks to find some distinguishing characteristic of humans that accounts for our dignity, and raises us above the level of mere animals. Plato’s solution was that we have minds which allow us to think about universal truths, such as those of mathematics, and thereby raise ourselves above mundane, particular states of affairs. The second was the need felt in the early modern period to make human reason, rather than divine revelation, the foundation of knowledge. Descartes’s solution was that all knowledge is built up within the conscious mind.3 This innovative conception of mind required Descartes to lump together two categories, thoughts and sensations, that had not previously been combined; and according to Rorty, should never have been. But by bringing sensations upwards to join thoughts in the mind, Descartes was able to settle another matter that worried him, namely that the mathematical approach of the new science seemed to portray reality as a “a vast web of relationships” (Rorty 1993, 401), with no room for the manifest and apparently 46

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

intrinsic qualities we encounter, such as the greenness of a leaf or the taste of an apple. So Descartes housed these “secondary” qualities in the mind to save them from the onset of science. It is this last move which ultimately generated the problem of consciousness as we understand it now; what Chalmers calls “the hard problem” (Chalmers 1996, xii). As Rorty sees it, this was due to an “unfortunate bit of residual Aristotelianism” on Descartes’s part, which led him to create consciousness as “a refuge for Aristotelian notions of substance, essence and intrinsicality” (Rorty 1998, 113, 111). It would have been better if he had allowed the new science to sweep away all vestiges of intrinsicality. But a residual religious craving for our discourses to be guided by something solid and unshakable, led to trust in God being transposed into the apparently secular alternative of trust in the independent nature of reality; though in actual fact, reality “as it is in itself, apart from human needs and interests” is “just another of the obsequious Names of God” (Rorty 2007, 134). Thus the enlightenment project of attaining human self‐ reliance was left incomplete; Rorty wanted to finish the job. These developments to the concept of mind landed philosophy with a “blur” that has proved to be more trouble than it is worth (Rorty 1982a, 325ff.). The resulting concept was a blur because it combines distinct epistemological and moral concerns. Epistemologically, the mind is supposed to be our first point of contact with the world, and hence essential to our status as knowing subjects; this feature was the focus of British empiricism. And morally, the mind is supposed to account for our moral worth, such that people (and other animals, we now think) are supposed worthy of moral concern because they are conscious; this feature was the focus of German idealism. These concerns were artificially hitched together by Plato and Descartes’s innovations, and the result is that we now have “no ‘intuitions’ about mind as such” (p. 325). Philosophical ontology emerged as both a response to the epistemological problems Cartesianism generated – the task being to describe the world in such a way as to undermine skepticism – and also as a reaction against the creeping materialism which modern science set in motion, and which was thought to devalue us. Thus metaphysics had both epistemological and moral motivations, in line with the blur of a concept it worked with. With the advent of Darwinism in the nineteenth century, however, the question of the human place in nature had been settled in favor of materialism – we were fundamentally like the rest of nature, from which we had blindly evolved. This led to two kinds of bad philosophy; the kind that saw consciousness as our last hope for specialness, and the kind that embraced materialism, but thought we must radically adjust our self‐ image now that we know we are machines. But materialism is essentially anti‐ metaphysical – it makes everything relational. And it is also morally benign, because The secret in the poet’s heart remains unknown to the secret police, despite their ability to predict his every thought … Our inviolable uniqueness lies in our poetic ability to say unique and obscure things, not in our ability to say obvious things to ourselves alone. (Rorty 1979, 123)4

In the twentieth century, consciousness became an interesting topic again, when Ryle realized that we do not have to take consciousness seriously. The reasons why we thought we needed to were subsequently dismantled. Thus, consciousness was detached 47

James Tartaglia

from epistemological concerns by Sellars’s “Myth of the Given” idea, which showed that nothing we talk about has epistemic privilege. And the idea that we have privileged access to subjective states was undermined by realizing that we have come to think this way only because of a special linguistic practice, namely that of according incorrigible status to the non‐inferential and automatic reports we have trained ourselves to make on some of our internal states; this status was accorded because such reports are reliable, but was metaphysically blown out of all proportion. This tradition became truly credible when it led to nonreductive physicalism, and hence detached itself from both metaphysics and scientism. It achieved this through the realization that reduction is a relation between linguistic items, not ontological categories, and hence that the irreducibility of mind is simply a matter of convenience; it remains a useful linguistic tool because of the practice of making incorrigible reports, and the complexity of neurophysiology  –  and useful tools will always stick around unless they can be replaced by better ones. Philosophers who continue to resist this linguistification of consciousness, by insisting on the intrinsically subjective nature of “what it is like” to have an experience, are motivated by an essentially religious “ambition of transcendence”; their aim of transcending our current understanding of the world to discover how it really is, is just a “tender‐minded yearning for an impossible stability and order” (Rorty 1998, 104–5). Since our physical understanding of the world is purely relational, then, their yearning attracts them to consciousness, for which they have invented a “specifically philosophical game”; the only function of which is to “disjoin pain from pain‐behavior” (Rorty 2007, 12). Playing this game allows them to imagine “zombies” who are physically identical to us but lack consciousness. But zombies that simulate consciousness perfectly are conscious; “sufficiently widely accepted simulation is the real thing” (Rorty 1980, 445). The only way to deny this is to invoke the ineffable. For you can only defend intrinsic, nonrelational features, if knowledge of them is not the same as knowledge of how to describe them; and for that you need nonlinguistic acquaintance with the ineffable, given that only “the ineffable – what cannot be described at all – cannot be described differently” (Rorty 2007, 118). To resist this kind of pernicious mysticism, you need only invoke a little commonsensical verficationalism, while reminding people that exactly the same line, now taken by defenders of subjectivity, was once taken to defend religious belief. Thus traditional theologians argued that to deny God was to fly in the face of common experience, and said that theology begins in the acceptance of supernatural events; just as some contemporary philosophers say that investigating the mind begins in the commonsense acceptance that experience is subjective. Just as the former beliefs died away not because of internal theoretical flaws, but rather the attractions of humanist culture, so the latter will die away because of the attractions of Rylean physicalism.

3 Assessment The central component of Rorty’s history is bunk; namely that thinking about the mind as an internal arena of thoughts and feelings was a social innovation led by philosophers. For without the benefit of twentieth century physicalist philosophy, I cannot 48

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

even begin to imagine an alternative way of thinking about the mind (and as we shall see, even physicalist philosophy does really not change the situation). To think that our ancestors had a different way of looking at the matter is to portray them as inscrutable aliens; but from the documents they left, they seem essentially just like us. Here is an example which shows Rorty is wrong; there are many others I could have used, but I think this one is good enough on its own.5 In Homer’s Odyssey, there is a scene where Circe the witch transforms some of Odysseus’s companions into pigs. As he puts it, They had bristles, heads, and voices just like pigs – their bodies looked like swine – but their minds were as before, unchanged. In their pens they wept. (Homer 2006, 10.313–15)

The pigs are weeping, surely, because they are having human thoughts such as “oh no, I’ve been turned into a pig”; along with human feelings of despair. They are weeping because their conscious minds – their inner thoughts and feelings – are now trapped inside pigs. I think it would take some extraordinarily implausible interpretative pyrotechnics to make the case that this was not exactly what Homer had in mind; and exactly what innumerable generations have immediately thought of when hearing this story. And Homer did not get the idea from Plato or Descartes! If that is how people have always thought about consciousness, the back of Rorty’s metaphilosophical case is broken. For once we rule out the idea that this way of talking emerged because of theoretical concerns about morality or knowledge, we are left with the mundane alternative that it emerged simply because thoughts and feelings exist, and so just as with other things we encounter in day to day life (like trees), we developed the most appropriate way of talking about them that we could muster. I think people did rather well with the notion of inner subjective events, in fact, given that others can neither hear my thoughts nor feel my emotions; given that we dream at night; and given that I can make my experience of the tree blurry by closing my eyes a little, while I cannot affect the tree itself in this way. Of course our conception of mind has developed over the course of the history of philosophy. But it is simply bizarre – and not remotely backed up by the historical documents  –  to suppose that this was not roughly our starting point, from which we could never stray too far without thereby ceasing to talk about thoughts and feelings. Why should they be any different from trees in this regard? Now if the supposedly “Cartesian” conception of consciousness is really just a natural way of thinking about preexisting items that Descartes sharpened up,6 then we are committed to the idea, which Rorty and like‐minded Ryleans pretend to find preposterous, that we are conscious before we learn to talk about consciousness. But really, what is so odd about that? There are trees before we learn to talk about them. Rorty cites with relish Sellars’s parody of this idea: “‘This one,’ this child’s mind says to itself in its private little language, ‘stands out clearly. … That must be what mother calls “red”!’” (Rorty 2007, 114). Well, I think we can all agree that this is not what happens; whoever thought otherwise? But what is supposed to be wrong with the idea that after we have learned to talk about external objects (which we know comes first), we then acquire the sophistication to talk about the inner states that alerted us to those objects in the first place, and which were there before we could talk? 49

James Tartaglia

Wittgenstein’s private language argument, perhaps (Rorty 2007, 12)? If successful, it would show that our words can only latch onto things in the public domain. But expert wine tasters do a good job of putting their private sensations into the public domain, and generating intersubjective criteria for discussing them; and at a more theoretical level, all those endless discussions about qualia in the philosophy journals have done the same thing. Two people can stand in front of the same tree and reach intersubjective agreement on how best to describe it, and I see no reason why two people having the same kind of private sensations should not reach this sort of agreement also. The fact that they cannot see each other’s sensations makes no fundamental difference, because each can feel something; and if their descriptions of what they can feel are a suitable match (they both try popping candy for the first time – “did you feel that?”), then they can discourse at leisure about how best to describe the experience they are sharing.7 People do this kind of thing all the time, and thereby learn about each other’s feelings, while also learning better ways to describe their own. Rorty confuses ineffability‐to‐contemporary‐science, with ineffability. It seems to me that Ryleans have quite a nerve reaching for the intuitive high ground against prelinguistic consciousness, because their alternative – given the best possible gloss – is that consciousness magically arises when we learn to talk, and that prelinguistic babies and dogs in pain are simply squeaking like door hinges.8 That is about as implausible  –  as distant from how people ordinarily think about the world  –  as a philosophical thesis can possibly get. But such a gloss would be misleading, as the most self‐aware and consistent Rylean (i.e. Rorty) realized, since what the view really amounts to is that there is no consciousness (as commonly understood), only talk about consciousness. And once you see that, you also see that it was merely tautologous for Rorty to claim that (talk about) consciousness only arises when we first talk about consciousness. Prelinguistic consciousness becomes a contradiction in terms on this conception of “consciousness,” according to which talk about sensations is not talk about something, but rather simply talk, with the things we take ourselves to be talking about revealed as simply shadows of language. With this idea, we reach the very limits of philosophical implausibility. Berkeley got to the same place, albeit from the opposite direction, by claiming that there are only experiences of trees, and not really trees; that the trees were the shadows of language. The whole Rylean tradition, right through Place and Armstrong to Dennett, has been premised on the idea that when we think about conscious experiences, we are actually thinking about behavior. The tradition started out with Ryle’s idea that this is all we are thinking about; but Place could not stomach the notion that our first‐person reflections fail to latch onto anything solid, and so adjusted the tradition with his idea that our conception of an experience is of a generic “something” that is caused by, and in turn, causes, certain kinds of behavior. The tradition has since wavered between going on to say, like Place, that the “something” is an inner cause (a brain state), or else that it is an illusory shadow of language; the latter being Rorty’s preferred option. And the reason it has wavered, is that our conception of a conscious sensation is obviously not just that of a behavioral nexus (with or without a categorical basis), because we also form positive conceptions of experiences as subjective, private events which feel a certain way; otherwise there never would have been a philosophical problem of consciousness. The whole tradition agrees that this specifically phenomenal way of thinking 50

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

about consciousness is illusory, so given that this is all that was ever at issue, the distinctions within that tradition are, as Rorty said they were, essentially trivial; Rorty simply preferred to make do without an inner “something,” because he did not want philosophers and scientists to be looking for physically respectable replacements for conscious states, and hence have them perpetually in hock to the Cartesian tradition.9 For the Rylean tradition, then, when it seems that we are confronted by a private sensation, we are actually just making a false judgment. Dennett is refreshingly clear about this, when he says that although it may seem to him that he is having a vivid experience, no “such ‘plenum’ ever came into his mind”; he simply formed the false judgment that it did, in the sense that he was disposed to utter a false statement (Dennett 1991, 408). However the insurmountable obstacle to taking this line, it seems to me, is that the purportedly false judgments will never go away; so given that we are always going to judge that we have experiences, the philosophical view that this judgment is mistaken will never be believable. Prescient as ever, Rorty tried to undermine this line of thought with his Antipodeans thought‐experiment (Rorty 1979, ch. 2; see also Rorty 2014, 204). These imaginary people refer directly to their brain states, and having never been infected by the Cartesian tradition, they consequently have no dispositions to make false judgments to the effect that they undergo subjective experiences; they first heard about this latter idea from us humans, and find it thoroughly baffling. Rorty thinks that we could in principle become just like them. However, this example backfired because Kenneth Gallagher (1985), in one of the most conclusive rebuttals of a philosophical argument I have seen, showed that the Antipodeans would actually have to be just like us. Gallagher’s essential point is that even if Antipodean children learn to say “my c‐fibers are firing” rather than “that hurts,” when they graze their knees, they would still notice a massive difference between this way of thinking about c‐fibers, and what they would later learn when they came to study neuroscience. Seeing the apparent irreconcilability between their objective and subjective conceptions of c‐fibers, then, they would be landed with the same problem of consciousness as us; whenever they hurt themselves, they would judge that their c‐fibers were presenting themselves in a special, private way; and Rylean philosophers would have to insist, against all odds, that those judgments are false.10 Note that the situation for Ryleans is quite unlike Rorty’s favorite example of a once implausible thesis which became accepted as common sense, namely the Copernican revolution. For once you know the Sun does not really pass over the Earth, and that it simply looks like that because we are rotating, you retain no inclination to judge that the Sun is going around the Earth. You know it is not, but you also know what it looks like, and hence why people once thought otherwise; you understand the inclination to make a false judgment, but you do not have it. In the Rylean case, however, you are not being told to interpret your experience differently, but rather that you do not have any experience; the false judgment is not one made on the basis of experience, but rather one based on no experience. The inclination to make these false judgments will never go away, then, so long as we seem to feel and think things; which of course we always will. Given that the false judging cannot actually be the experiencing, otherwise it would not be false (I suspect that confusion in this area lends the position a false sense of stability in the minds of some of its advocates), we end up with a position which is unfalsifiable from a third‐person perspective, and unbelievable from a first‐person perspective. But if 51

James Tartaglia

the position were correct, and hence there were no first‐person perspective, then it ought to be believable; we ought to be able to lose our inclination to make false judgments. Even the Antipodeans cannot do that, however. Rorty likes to talk about usefulness, so let us follow suit. He thinks the concept of consciousness that his opponents apply is useless; that it serves no purpose except to set up unverifiable differences between us and zombies, and thus provoke pointless debates. But is it really pointless to distinguish us from physical replicas that lack consciousness, assuming such things are possible?11 It seems to me that the distinction serves a crucial explanatory function. Human sex and drug addicts have an obvious motivation which explains their behavior: they are trying to get “that feeling,” again and again. They cannot get enough of it. But what would their zombie equivalents be up to? A zombie teenage boy locked away in his bedroom with a pornographic image would be engaged in completely inexplicable behavior. But add the consciousness, and we all know why his human counterpart is doing that: for the internal fireworks that Ryleans are seriously telling us do not exist! Or to raise the tone somewhat, why would zombie gourmets rave about expensive food, when cheaper and more nutritious alternatives are readily available, as they are in our physically identical world? Or ride rollercoasters, listen to music, or visit art galleries? In short, large numbers of activities undertaken in the zombie world would not make much sense; despite their making perfect sense in our world, where consciousness experiences can be invoked to explain them.12 Let us take this into the political arena, which is something else Rorty would approve of. He thinks there is no moral or political significance to the question of whether we are conscious in a way that a machine designed to be behaviorally indistinguishable would not be (or at least, could not be known to be, in the absence of a mechanistic understanding of subjective experience). He says, I cannot see how the question would come up unless one thought that the question of whether fetuses, or illiterate slaves, have rights is to be answered by figuring out whether they contain ineffable whatsis called “subjectivity” or “personhood”. Those who do think so hope that metaphysics will guide us when we make moral and political decisions. This hope strikes me as pathetic. (Rorty 2000: 108)

Rorty’s readers might be mistaken for thinking this hope is anything but pathetic, given that he spent so much of his time arguing that the notion of conscious subjectivity, which has evidently played a leading role in arguments about abortion, vegetarianism, and the like, was a product of metaphysics. However, his wider point is that the concept of consciousness will not help us in the moral and political sphere; that its invocation is an unnecessary and counterproductive red herring. That cannot be right. In Joshua Oppenheimer’s extraordinary 2012 documentary film, The Act of Killing, the mass murderer and torturer Anwar Congo is cleverly led by Oppenheimer to reenact his brutal acts for the camera; he displays a certain pride and wry amusement in this. In the climax of the film, however, Oppenheimer gets Congo to reverse roles with one of his associates, so that Congo is now playing the blindfolded one facing imminent death. He is exposed to the same situation, and consequent feelings, that he had perpetrated on his many victims; although it is not as bad, as Oppenheimer points out to him, since he is not actually facing death. Congo breaks down under the enormity of it all. Almost 52

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

unbelievably (practically nothing is unbelievable by this point in the film), it seems he had not thought of it like this before; he had not thought about what it was like for his victims. Placed in their position, however, he is directly confronted by the kind of first‐ person perspective they would have had on the situations he placed them in. And that is what he cannot bear. If he had continued to take a third‐person stance, viewing his victims as machines squeaking like door hinges, then he might never have been morally affected. But by employing the “Cartesian” conception of consciousness – which Rorty would have us believe somehow found its way from Western philosophy into Indonesian culture, so as to infiltrate this thoroughly unsophisticated man – Congo grasps the terribleness of what he has done. Rorty is very keen on hermeneutic engagement with unfamiliar perspectives (Rorty 1979), and the moral potential of novels to expand our empathy by telling sad stories which “sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language” (Rorty 1989, 94); he even approvingly quotes Kundera saying that novels are what safeguard our “right to an inviolable private life” (p. viii). What Rorty does not seem to have realized is that his philosophy of consciousness ran exactly counter to this agenda. For there is a no more powerful and vivid way to empathize with another person, than by imagining yourself into their conscious perspective; by thinking about what it is like for them. If Congo had done that, he would not have found life as a torturer so carefree. And yet Rorty’s philosophy of consciousness tells us that this way of thinking is an illusion; he discourages it. I think we are currently at a cultural crossroads in our thinking about consciousness. Rorty captured something of the zeitgeist, in that many educated people are now increasingly inclined to think about consciousness in an exclusively third‐person way, most typically as a type of computer program. However, I do not think this is due to the influence of Rylean philosophy, but rather the fact that science dominates our culture to a greater extent than ever before; the simple thought is that science says what everything is, so it must say what consciousness is.13 And since science is well on the way to making machines that look like they are conscious, people will accept that they are conscious; and also have no qualms about enhancing their own consciousness with transhumanist technologies. We face a world in which people envisage uploading their minds onto the Internet so they can live forever. An extreme manifestation of this trend is provided by the enduring popularity – which never ceases to amaze me  –  of Derek Parfit’s conception of personal identity (Parfit 1984). If you put aside our first‐person conception of consciousness, then Parfit’s idea that we might travel by stepping into a teletransportation machine – which obliterates us and then creates a physical replica in another place – is unproblematic. So if (and this is effectively the same situation) a replica of me were to suddenly appear by my side, and I am obliged to kill one of us, I am invited to consider it a matter of indifference whether I turn the gun on myself or my replica; since he has an indistinguishable third‐person consciousness. And people happily go along with this (I have witnessed it on numerous occasions), despite the fact if the appearance of the replica were accompanied by an unbearable pain (in their “original” body), they would immediately transfer the pain to the replica if given the option – and pain cessation is obviously a less grave matter than death in this situation. The pain would force them to engage in first‐person reflection (as would the real prospect of death); and yet in their studies, so to speak, people go along 53

James Tartaglia

with Parfit. How has such a crazy view come to seem plausible? Because an extreme faith in science blinds people to what they already know. And “faith” must be the right word, since if they thought there were even an outside possibility that they would be committing suicide, they would not even say that they would consider turning the gun on themselves. If this conception of consciousness as something you look at from the outside continues to gain acceptance, we will end up in a stupid and even more selfish world. For we will no longer think about the first‐person experiences of others; but will continue to think of our own consciousness this way – because this conception is forced upon us in our own case, but not that of the other. In our own case, we have no alternative; and the Rylean tradition has not provided one, since the false judgments it insists on will inevitably take place in the “apparent” presence of consciousness. The intellectual accoutrement of telling yourself that you are making a false judgment will not get in the way of worrying about your own perspective (false judgment or not), but it might confirm your inclination to disregard that of other people. Though I share Rorty’s lack of faith in the ability of metaphysics to settle political and moral matters, it can have influence; and stifling the Rylean tradition, while promoting the legitimacy of our first‐person conception of consciousness, strikes me as a step in the right direction. This is already well underway; the emergence of Chalmers onto the scene marked a turning point, I think. He is no frock‐coated fogey, which is the image anti‐physicalists once had, and placed in the context of the discussions he has sparked off in both science and philosophy, Rylean materialism is now starting to look dated; which is a good sign when it comes to hopes of cultural influence. Finally, let us talk about motivation: Rorty’s favorite arena of discourse on this topic. Rorty’s motivation is clear. He thinks that, as John Caputo nicely puts it, Kant’s so‐called Copernican revolution “substantially undid the real Copernican Revolution” (Caputo 2013, 135; emphasis in original), by placing the Cartesian notion of mind at the center of reality; when Copernicus had shown the way to a purely scientific conception of reality in which we are not at the center of things in any sense. In doing so, Kant preserved the notion of an intrinsic nature of reality about which we might discover the objective truth, and this lingering, quasi‐religious loyalty to truth gets in the way of what Rorty wants; namely a world in which everything we say, we take responsibility for. This would be a better world, because without loyalty to truth, only to each other, scientists would no longer feel obliged to find out what happens when you split the atom, or test IQ across racial groups; we could decide, as a matter of cultural politics, not to pursue these descriptions. I think some of the outcomes that Rorty envisages are good, but he is looking at things in entirely the wrong way. Truth itself is not the issue; there are innumerable objective truths which the world forces us to accept whether we like it or not. The issue is the motivations which drive people to invest effort in discovering some of these truths rather than others; and that is something we need to get some rational control over if we are to survive and prosper. Getting rid of the concept of consciousness will not rid us of truth; it will simply make us blind to certain truths, and encourage a developing situation in which all truth is thought to reside in science. Which brings us to the gaping lacuna in Rorty’s nonontological physicalism: for if the world is not essentially physical, why should it be that (to quote Jackson again), “if you duplicate our world in 54

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

all physical respects and stop right there, you duplicate it in all respects”? Why should it be that physics can predict “every event in every space‐time region” (Rorty 1979, 28)? Ontological physicalists can give the obvious answer; but since Rorty thinks reality has no intrinsic nature, and can be described in any way that suits us, the ability of a physical, as opposed to any other, form of description to be all‐encompassing, becomes an inexplicable mystery on his account – athletic or economic descriptions would not work, after all. And he ended up in this situation, I think, because he went along with the agenda of metaphysical scientism that dominated Anglo‐American philosophy in the twentieth century; simply because of his hunch that anything presented as an obstacle to physical description must have something to do with religion. Rorty’s continual invocation of religion as a hammer to batter his opponents with reminds me of the classic episode of Fawlty Towers in which on hearing that some German tourists are coming to stay at his hotel, Basil runs around reminding everyone not to “mention the war”; despite the fact that nobody apart from him has the slightest inclination to do so. For I struggle to detect any religious motivation whatsoever in philosophers like Searle, simply on account of their insistence on taking a first‐person perspective on consciousness; but that would not matter to Rorty, who used the historical influence of religion as an unfalsifiable explainer of practically any source of opposition to his views. For Rorty was obsessed with religion  –  just like Nietzsche  –  and projected this obsession onto everyone else. Because of his obsession, he bought into a tradition stemming from Comte, according to which all vestiges of religion must be eradicated from our worldview and replaced with pure science. But unlike the other Ryleans who followed on a crusade against consciousness, Rorty did not believe in science either; he was so obsessed with religion that even scientific truth was too religious for him. Thinking in vain that he could detach Ryleanism from metaphysics, then, he signed up to what is essentially a program of radically revisionary, scientistic metaphysics. However, I do think Rorty was right to detect a connection between consciousness and religion, since reflection on consciousness can lead into religious hypotheses of transcendent existence; this kind of thing is to be found throughout the history of philosophy. But the crucial point is that it does not have to (see Tartaglia 2016); Rorty’s obsession with religion led him to reject consciousness because he could not stomach even the mere possibility. This led him to neglect his own insight that the “fact that the vast majority of our beliefs must be true will … guarantee the existence of the vast majority of the things we now think we are talking about” (Rorty 1982b, 14). My final assessment, then, is that Rorty’s philosophy of consciousness is indeed – as Strawson says of consciousness eliminativism generally – silly; though it is considerably more self‐ aware than the other versions. But the self‐aware and original bit, Rorty’s metaphilosophy of consciousness, is simply wrong.14

Notes 1 If he had said this, his position would have been strikingly close to Collingwood’s. 2 “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (Rorty 1982a); “Non‐Reductive Physicalism” (Rorty 1991b); “Consciousness, Intentionality, and Pragmatism” (Rorty 1993); “Daniel Dennett on

55

James Tartaglia

Intrinsicality” (Rorty 1998); “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God” (Rorty 2007). 3 Although Descartes is invariably the philosopher that Rorty mentions in this regard, he apparently considered him to have been mainly just a compiler of extant ideas, rather than an original thinker; see Geuss (2008). 4 Note the elitism in this statement; consciousness makes everyone unique, not just “poets.” 5 I could have talked about the Egyptians, for instance; see MacDonald (2003). 6 Descartes was in a position to sharpen it up, it seems to me, because he was of a generation which supposed that science was able to mathematically describe the entire physical world; in earlier times, the idea that feelings might reside in the physical world would not have seemed so problematic. 7 Imaginative skeptical hypotheses must be put aside; but these would cause just as much trouble for attempts to agree on the nature of the tree. I say that switching from trees to sensations makes no “fundamental” difference, because privacy is an obstacle to scientific description; which is the worry at the root of this position. Also note that I make no claim to knowing what Wittgenstein had in mind (generations of scholars have failed to agree on that), only what Rorty did; and the problem with that argument is that if our private sensations can play no role in what we say about them, then why should it be that we spontaneously and autonomously say the same kind of things? Try popping candy, if you have not already, and I bet you will describe the consequent sensations roughly as I did. 8 Pain is a conversational complement we reserve for attractive animals only, as Rorty (at his most unguarded) once argued (Rorty 1979, 173). 9 A variant on this tradition emerged in the 1990s, which tried to reconcile it with phenomenal concepts by claiming that they are based on the intrinsic nature of our brain states (Loar 1997). As you might expect, the result was incoherent; see Tartaglia (2013). For an account of why physicalism always ends up in the same place, see Tartaglia (2016, ch. 4). 10 I am rather more careful (perhaps unnecessarily) about what Gallagher’s argument shows in Tartaglia (2007, 83–5). 11 As Chalmers assumes; if you reject this assumption (perhaps on the grounds that we currently lack an adequate physical account of consciousness, and that this might show that certain physical conditions necessitate consciousness), then simply think of zombies as behaviorally identical to us in what follows. 12 Rorty would presumably respond that the zombies’ behavior is explained by the fact that they are physically identical to us, and hence make the same false judgments. But then if the judgments really are false, the question becomes: why do we act in these ways? 13 If Rylean philosophy were more widely known and understood, I suspect that its implausibility would tend to produce the opposite effect. 14 For my own views on all of these matters, see Tartaglia (2016).

References Caputo, J. 2013. Truth: Philosophy in Transit. London: Penguin. Chalmers, D. 1996. The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This is the contemporary classic in the philosophy of mind, which sets the agenda for all those discussions about zombies and the “hard problem.” The start of the book, where Chalmers sets up the issues impeccably, is rather more interesting than the later stuff, where (to my mind, at least) he goes off the rails. Compare and contrast Rorty and Chalmers on the question of whether photoelectric cells (Rorty) and thermostats (Chalmers) are conscious!

56

Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness

Dennett, D. 1991. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. The main source for a contemporary Rylean theory of consciousness; unlike Rorty’s, it is inspired by science rather than historical metaphilosophy. Rorty’s glowing review (“Blunder Around for a While”; listed in the “References” section of this chapter) is revealing about his own stance. Gallagher, K. 1985. “Rorty’s Antipodeans: An Impossible Illustration?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45: 449–55. Geuss, R. 2008. “Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections.” Arion 15(3): 85–100. Homer. 2006 [eighth century bc]. The Odyssey. Translated by I. Johnston. Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications. Levine, J. 1983. “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354–61. Loar, B. 1997. “Phenomenal States.” In The Nature of Consciousness, edited by N. Block, O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, 597–616. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. MacDonald, P. 2003. History of the Concept of Mind. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Putnam, H. 1983. Realism and Reason: Philosophical Papers Volume 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. —. 1980. “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain.” Behavioural and Brain Sciences 3: 445–6. —. 1982a. “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind.” Synthese 53: 323–48. In Note 2, I list the five papers which (in addition to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) are the main sources for Rorty’s views on consciousness; but if I had to choose only one, this would be it. —. 1982b. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991a. “Blunder Around for a While.” London Review of Book, 13: 22 (21 November). —. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993. “Consciousness, Intentionality, and Pragmatism,” In Folk Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by S. Christensen and D. Turner, 388–405. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000. “Response to Dennett.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 101–8. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strawson, G. 2008. Real Materialism and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tartaglia, J. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. London: Routledge. In this guidebook to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, I explain at length Rorty’s “fast dissolution” of the mind‐problem, his attempt to deconstruct its history, and his “Antipodeans” thought‐experiment. —. 2013. “Conceptualizing Physical Consciousness.” Philosophical Psychology, 26: 817–38. —. 2016. Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality. London: Bloomsbury. For a completely different line on consciousness and its metaphilosophical significance to the one which Rorty takes, have a look at my new book.

57

James Tartaglia

Further Reading Malachowski, A., ed. 2002. Richard Rorty: Sage Masters in Modern Social Thought. London: Sage. This expansive four‐volume set is great to use if your library stocks it; it contains many key works on Rorty’s philosophy of mind, including the important Kenneth Gallagher article that I cite in the chapter. If your library instead stocks my derivative version, called Richard Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers (Routledge 2009), then that will work too. Nagel, T. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 82: 435–50. This classic, which ironically enough took the bat example from a Rylean behaviorist (B. A. Farrell), threw a spanner into the Rylean physicalist works which I doubt will ever be extracted. Rorty, R. and J. Searle. 1999. “Rorty v. Searle, at Last: A Debate.” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 2: 20–67. Unfortunately they discuss truth rather than consciousness; but it is nevertheless fascinating to witness this clash of the titans, and what they say can be readily applied to the topic at hand. Ryle, G. 2000 [1949]. The Concept of Mind. London: Penguin Books. This is from where Rorty’s physicalist philosophy of mind ultimately comes. Searle, J. 1992. The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Searle’s despair at the Rylean physicalist tradition knows no bounds; the first two chapters will be of most interest to students of Rorty.

58

4 Rorty and Transcendental Arguments NEIL GASCOIGNE

But is it adequate to answer to the scepticism of the idealist, or the assurances of the realist, to say that “There are physical objects” is nonsense? For them after all it is not nonsense. Wittgenstein, On Certainty

1 Introduction Traditionally, a transcendental argument seeks to establish as necessary for some X being the case that some Y is the case, where X is self‐evident or otherwise uncontentious and Y is a claim likely to contribute to our stock of nonempirical knowledge. Since the Ys in question can be doubted or are at least worthy of the effort, transcendental arguments are generally construed as anti‐skeptical; and since the doubt is often leveled against a (metaphysically) richer conception of reality than the skeptic thinks is justified, they can be characterized as antireductionist.1 This association goes back to their origins insofar as their earliest systematic use is attributed to the first Critique, where versions of what we have come to call transcendental arguments are used to legitimate an account of the necessary structure of experience against what Kant took to be the reductive, anti‐metaphysical implications of Humean phenomenalism. Accordingly, the skeptic who accepts some X (like “I speak meaningfully” or “I have experience”) can be compelled rationally to accept some Y as it is their calling to deny, or doubt is known (like “there are physical objects” or “there are minds other than my own”), because it can be demonstrated to them that X only if Y, or no X unless Y, or Y must be the case if X is to be possible. If successful, one might hope to demonstrate that, for example, we simply couldn’t have experience unless (we know) there are physical objects; or perhaps even that we couldn’t have the experiences we are having right now if our beliefs about the (presumed) objects of perception weren’t true.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

59

Neil Gascoigne

In Rorty’s work – especially that leading up to and culminating in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature  –  transcendental arguments understood in this way  –  as “realist” ­arguments – are regarded as the “last best hope” of those who think “there is such a thing as philosophical criticism of the rest of culture” (Rorty 1979, 77). By promising to delineate the necessary structure of mind and/or world they purport to justify a conception of philosophy “as an autonomous critical discipline” that, through its privileged access to nonempirical truths, “can say something which science cannot about the claims to objectivity and rationality to which various parts of culture are entitled” (p. 77). Underpinning this “transcendental standpoint” is the conception of the mind that Rorty attempts to deconstruct in his major work: as a realm yielding up to the tutored inner gaze, the privileged representations that are “automatically and intrinsically accurate” (Rorty 1980, 170), and which consequently serve to legitimate – in the sense of answer Kant’s quaestio juris2 – our cognitive endeavors. For Rorty, the very authority of philosophy as a “non‐empirical criticism of culture” presupposes the “realist” conception of transcendental arguments, and abandoning it signifies “abandoning philosophy” in this sense (Rorty 1979, 78). The notion that some edifying successor to “transcendental” philosophy might arise from its ashes was discarded in the 1980s.3 However, Rorty’s rejection of the “realist” interpretation of the associated arguments proceeded initially through the promulgation of an alternative. The “conceptual dependence” or “parasitism” view of transcendental arguments is articulated in papers published in the 1970s4 and takes Strawson work (1959, 1966) as its starting point. Such “redescription” became part of a general strategy of offering up pragmatic explications of concepts like reference and truth5 to help liberate “us” from the concept of mind that makes the “realist” construal possible; and from that perspective alone Rorty’s treatment of transcendental arguments illuminates the emerging metaphilosophy of neo‐pragmatism. But the significance of the topic extends beyond this. In his most comprehensive piece on the topic, Rorty contends that Davidson’s argument against the “dualism of scheme and world” (Davidson 1984, 198) amounts to “a transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments” (Rorty 1979, 78). Since (on this view) it undermines the basis from which the felt need for the question of the legitimacy of thought arises, it constitutes an argument against the (very) possibility of understanding the task of philosophy on the “realist” model. But this in turn introduces the prospect of a view of philosophy which, while recognizing the illusory nature of the traditional image, rejects nevertheless the path of the philosophical renunciant. This is relevant to the developing outlook of those contemporary pragmatists who, taking their lead from Peirce, are more favorably disposed toward Kant’s legacy;6 but it includes others who, although more circumspect in their affiliations, oppose likewise Rorty’s radical revision of concepts like truth and objectivity. Since, among these, it is John McDowell who has most clearly identified his philosophical method with a nonrealist conception of transcendental arguments; we will examine in Section 5 his suggestion that Rorty fails to keep faith with his own metaphilosophical insights and that a more consistent pragmatism need not pack up the legitimacy game. But let us first look in more detail at Rorty’s revisionary account of transcendental arguments and at one well‐known objection to it.7 60

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

2  Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments According to Rorty, the following conditions are sufficient for designating an argument “realist”:8 (1) A distinction is made between scheme (concept, thought, language) and content (intuition, objects of thought, “given,” world). (2) The internal coherence of the scheme is deemed insufficient for knowledge: further legitimation is needed which can be viewed as neither “empirical” nor “verificationist.” In addition to these, a realist transcendental argument requires that: (3) The legitimating knowledge that the scheme will correspond to the content is made possible by the fact that the former is better known to us than the latter, and creates it. To understand how Rorty’s “redescription” of transcendental arguments works against the realist interpretation – and in particular against the notion that philosophy can provide an answer to the quaestio juris (3) – it is helpful to turn to a little recent history. In Anglophone philosophy, the development of the anti‐skeptical and antireductionist potential of transcendental arguments is usually ascribed to the work of Strawson (1959; 1966) and other philosophers influenced by the later Wittgenstein. Part I of Individuals, for example, aims to demonstrate that a necessary condition of the Xs required to make sense of skeptical doubt is that “in our conceptual scheme as it is … material bodies and persons … are the basic or fundamental particulars” (Strawson 1959, 11). Consequently, the skeptic “pretends to accept a conceptual scheme, but at the same time quietly rejects one of the conditions of its employment. Thus his doubts are unreal … because they amount to a rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense” (Strawson 1959, 35).9 Despite their promise, however, the idea that transcendental arguments could reveal to us how the world must be is subject to what many regard as devastating criticism by Barry Stroud. Stroud (1968) discusses two transcendental arguments from Strawson (1959), which he takes to be attempts to refute the (reductively minded) skeptic. The first of these (see Strawson 1959, ch. 1), Stroud takes to be an attempt to demonstrate that it is a necessary condition of (P) We think of the world as containing objective particulars

that one of the following hold. Either, (C4) We believe objects continue to exist unperceived,

or, (C5) We know objects continue to exist unperceived.

61

Neil Gascoigne

(P) is taken to be the premise that the skeptic accepts, and either (C4) or (C5) the necessary condition of (P) “making sense” which the skeptic doubts or denies. If a transcendental argument against the skeptic is being effected, two conditions must be satisfied: (I)  (C5) is a necessary condition of (P), and (II)  The skeptic rejects (C5). If only (C4) is a necessary condition of (P), then, as Hamlet would say, the skeptic’s withers are unwrung for she need deny neither that we do, nor even must, possess such a belief, but only that the possession of the belief is consistent with its falsity. Strawson’s argument as Stroud reconstructs it can be formulated thus: (P) We think of the world as containing objective particulars

only if (C1)  We can reidentify particulars

only if (C2)  We have satisfiable criteria for making reidentifications.

As Stroud notes, the argument stops here. What has been demonstrated is that (C2) must be true if (P) is true; but the truth of (C2) is consistent with the falsity of our reidentification statements even if the latter are asserted on the grounds of the best criteria we have. The only way to avoid this skeptical conclusion is if we add the following: (P2)  If we know that the best criteria have been satisfied then we know that objects continue to exist unperceived.

For Stroud, this is either what Strawson means by “satisfiable criteria” or “a suppressed premise” of the argument (p. 246). Made explicit, the overall argument amounts to a statement of what Stroud calls the “the verification principle” (p. 247): (V)  If we think of the world as containing objective particulars, it must be possible for us to know whether objects continue to exist unperceived.

This does not establish that (C5) is true, but it does if we add: (P3)  We sometimes know that the best criteria we have are satisfied.

Stroud’s conclusion is that since (C5) is not a necessary condition of (P), that cannot be what the skeptic is denying when it is said that his denial involves a (“quiet”) rejection of one of the conditions of possibility of its making sense: On his grounds, to deny this would be just as unjustified as our asserting it – he argues only that our belief that objects continue to exist unperceived can never be justified. (p. 247)

62

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

Accordingly, (P3) is unnecessary to refute the skeptic since the verification principle alone suffices to demonstrate that a condition of possibility of the skeptic’s doubt making sense is its falsity. If, however, we “subtract” the verificationism then the skeptic’s doubt makes sense from her – philosophical – perspective and we are left with the claim that all transcendental arguments achieve is (C4), which qua ordinary, vulgar belief the skeptic need never deny in the first place. As Stroud notes – and Strawson (1985, 9–10) later concedes – it is disquieting to contemplate that how we are obliged to think about the world might constrain the way it is – that the ordo essendi is somehow fixed by the ordo cognoscendi. But this oddness arises in part because of the categorical distinction between mind and world. To state it in the terms of Rorty’s analysis, Stroud10 demonstrates that although the “realist” framework suggested by (1) and (2) makes pressing the question of the legitimacy of our beliefs, any attempt to satisfy (3) will fall foul of the impossibility of identifying the requisite world‐independent evidence – of distinguishing in thought between a putative psychological necessity like (C4) and a way the world must be (captured in C5). Stroud can maintain that Strawson’s argument needs to be extended beyond (C2) because (1) and (2) combine to make satisfaction of our best criteria (the “internal coherence” of the scheme) irrelevant to truth. In the context of the realist framework, the only way to fix that mismatch is through a verificationism that ensures mind (or at least language) cleaves to the world – a verificationism which, constituting a “straight” realist argument, renders the question of legitimation supernumerary. In “Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments” (1971) Rorty remarks that Stroud’s paper shows something important; namely, that “no transcendental argument will be able to prove necessary existence … appearance is as good as reality for giving meaning to terms” (p. 5). This appears to concede that the skeptic is correct in insisting on the irrelevance to truth of the satisfiability of criteria and thus on the impotence of transcendental arguments. However, for Rorty the fact that they cannot disburden us of skeptically induced ontological anxieties impugns only the realist conception of such arguments. In so doing a space opens for an alternative interpretation, according to which transcendental arguments reveal that the skeptic’s conception of the world is “parasitic on more conventional notions” (p. 4). A key assumption here is that a skeptic who (merely) draws attention to the fallibility of our knowledge claims is an unworthy opponent; unless, that is, she can motivate her doubts through an account of how things might be that differs from how they are understood “conventionally.”11 So a transcendental argument against the Cartesian skeptic would aim to show that a language denoting purely subjective (private) states cannot be described because it is parasitic on a notion of language as a public practice (see Rorty 1970a, 236–7). Since the skeptic fails to make good on her “revisionary” suggestion, the difference between appearance and reality is dialectically irrelevant: we are left where we were to begin with. A preliminary way to think about Rorty’s positive account of transcendental arguments, then, is to regard it as an attempt to show that arguments like Strawson’s can stop at (C2) by demonstrating that the possession of satisfiable criteria cannot be made irrelevant in the way that Stroud (on the skeptic’s behalf) implies. We can then see that the charge of verificationism made by Stroud is ill‐conceived. One would assume that the verificationism in question is of the classical variety12 only if one assumed that the 63

Neil Gascoigne

arguments in question were realist in nature. But since meaning and truth are not alienated from one another, transcendental arguments stand in no need of an ad hoc verificationist fix. Absent the appearance‐reality distinction presupposed by the skeptic, the verificationism in question amounts to the view that “you couldn’t know about anything unless you could talk about quite a lot of different things” (Rorty 1971, 14), a “brand of verificationism [that] makes meaningfulness depend not upon a word–world connection, but upon connections between some bits of linguistic behavior and others” (p. 9). Although relatively little has been written about Rorty’s conception of transcendental arguments, Anthony Brueckner has been damning. Brueckner concedes (2010 [1983], 14–15) that there is something potentially question‐begging about Stroud’s assumption that it is always open to the skeptic to insist on the mind‐dependent nature of the conditions for meaningfulness (C4). Despite acknowledging that Stroud “has made no strong case for the general charge that transcendental arguments collapse into verificationism” (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 14–15),13 however, he contends that Rorty’s parasitism strategy “has no anti‐skeptical force whatsoever” without the strong, classical form of verificationism and that the weaker version he promotes “adds nothing” to this strategy (p. 27). Now one might have thought that the acknowledgment of Stroud’s assumption would more favorably dispose Brueckner to Rorty’s attempt to dialectically deflate the relevance of the appearance‐reality distinction, so his critique is revealing. Specifically, it draws attention to what skepticism is for Rorty, and what opposing it amounts to in relation to the desire to overcome “traditional” (realist; epistemology‐ centered) philosophy. Before discussing Brueckner’s criticism, however, we need to say more about Rorty’s parasitism account, and about the account of conceptual connection that underpins it.

3  Parasitism and Conceptual Dependence According to Rorty, all that transcendental arguments can show “is that if you have certain concepts you must have certain other concepts” (1970a, 231). Since the possession of a concept is, following Wittgenstein, to be equated with a piece of skilled linguistic behavior, no attempt to elucidate the nature of the modality in question “can avoid reference to the way which people use words” (Rorty 1973, 327). To determine that X only if Y is thus to resolve that anyone who exhibits competence in X‐talk must exhibit the linguistic behavior identified with possession of the concept Y. Against the backdrop of Quine’s attack on non‐Humean accounts of “necessary” or “essential” connection, the dependency of X on Y is therefore neither one of logical adequacy/criteriological nor correlational (signs or symptoms); rather, it comes down to establishing that someone “would have to be able to know about” Ys if they are to know about Xs (Rorty 1973, 325). As Rorty acknowledges, establishing these sorts of conceptual dependencies can be a messy business. We might demonstrate that someone doesn’t know the meaning of democracy (doesn’t know what democracy is) if they don’t know what voting etc. is,14 but the sorts of dependencies that philosophers are traditionally concerned to establish require rather more work. More importantly, since they cannot invoke analytic connections (which if they existed would be trivial), these analyses are 64

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

always going to be inconclusive when judged according to a standard that demands certitude. For them to be other than inconclusive on this (revised) account would be for the analyst to be able to survey in advance all possible alternative ways of talking, which would be to “know in advance the range of the sceptic’s imagination” (Rorty 1979, 82). Since conceivability is ill‐defined, transcendental arguments cannot be general demonstrations to the effect that certain concepts are impossible to do without, but rather show that particular revisionary‐skeptical alternatives are parasitic on the linguistic resources that we do in fact use. They are ad hominem arguments “against a certain proposal by showing that the proposal tacitly presupposes what it purports to deny” (1979, 82) – “reminders” assembled by the philosopher for the “particular purpose” of dealing with the reductionist‐skeptic.15 To see where the verificationism fits into this, let’s return to Brueckner. As noted, he makes two criticisms:16 (I)  Rorty’s “conceptual connection”17 view of transcendental arguments has no anti‐ skeptical force unless supplemented by classical verificationism, and (II)  Rorty’s supplementary (weak) verificationism adds nothing to the conceptual connection view. The argument for (I) is straight‐forwardly Stroudian. If  –  to take an obvious example – we point out to the Cartesian that a condition of possibility of her being able to engage in experience‐talk – to know what experience is – is being able to talk about physical objects, we can rightly get her to concede that she must know what physical objects are. But knowing what physical objects are is not the same as knowing that there are physical objects. Accordingly, all that Rorty’s conceptual dependence arguments show is that to be able to make judgments of the undisputed class (Xs. Say, about experiences) we must be able to make judgments involving the disputed class (Ys. Say, about physical objects). But none of this implies that the Y‐judgments are true – that there are any Ys. Of course, one could maintain that what it is to obey the appropriate norm for making judgments about Ys – to satisfy the best criteria – is to know that there are Ys; but that would be to adhere to the classical version of verificationism, which is alone sufficient to deal with the skeptic. Turning to (II), recall the following: (C1)  We can reidentify particulars

only if (C2)  We have satisfiable criteria for making reidentifications.

(C1) is a specific example of the seeming right/being right distinction (we can get right or wrong the question of whether a thing is the same thing we have just seen) and (C2) an expression of the requisite norm. As with Stroud’s response to Strawson’s notion of “satisfiable criteria” the normative practice can only do the heavy lifting against the skeptic if it legislates away the gap between meaning and world, and that amounts to classical verificationism. Anything weaker and the satisfaction of such criteria/­practices 65

Neil Gascoigne

is consistent with their truth irrelevance. And as Rorty remarks, the brand of verificationism that he favors is something weaker, along the lines that satisfiable criteria are to be understood in terms of there being a situation which the linguistically competent would call “someone having accepted a method of finding out whether some particular has been re‐identified” (see 1971, 9). The reason why Rorty in effect endorses Strawson stopping his argument at (C2), then, is because the satisfiable criteria are cashed out in terms of up‐and‐running linguistic practices  –  but not practices that need to be infallible. In criticizing this weaker form of verificationism, Brueckner recognizes (2010 [1983], 22–3) Rorty’s (1971, 10–11) rejection of the classical variety. He therefore acknowledges that it cannot be intended to do any ontological work, and that its role in anti‐skeptical argument “must be very different” (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 23). Here’s Brueckner’s formalization of what he takes to be the principle underpinning Rorty’s weak verificationism: (Vr)  A term T is meaningful only if sentences in which it occurs bear non‐trivial confirmation relations to other sentences (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 23)

As Brueckner rightly notes, this principle cannot warrant ontological or epistemological conclusions of the sort that would impress a skeptic. That we must count object‐ talk as confirmed by the sort of (fallible) linguistic practice that we actually use to confirm it does not respond to the quaestio juris and legitimate that talk. It cannot show that there must be objects, since the aim of skepticism is to raise doubts about those practices of confirmation in the first place. If (Vr) can’t play the role that classical verificationism played, what role can it play? Brueckner’s conclusion is stark: Rorty’s verificationism plays “No role whatsoever” (p. 24) in dealing with the skeptic. Brueckner’s principle argument for this conclusion comes from Rorty himself, who maintains (1979) that the only good transcendental argument is a parasitism argument. Since a parasitism argument is just a particular demonstration of conceptual dependence, and (Vr) does not fill the gap in such arguments, (Vr) is otiose. Brueckner is well aware that Rorty does not intend for (Vr) to fill the gap in demonstrations of conceptual dependence (p. 25), but his conclusion is misleading nevertheless. To see why, consider that Rorty introduces his talk of verificationism (Vr) in order to rebut Judith Jarvis Thomson’s (1966) criticism of Norman Malcolm’s (1954) reconstruction of the private language argument.18 Recast in the form of a transcendental argument, we get: (i)  A sign “T” is a word in a man’s language

only if (ii)  Its use is governed by a rule

only if (iii)  It is possible to misapply the rule

66

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

only if (iv)  It is possible to believe a thing “T” and it not be

only if (v)  It is “logically possible” (for someone else) to “find out” that it is not a “T.”

For Thomson (v) is not a necessary condition of (iv) since it is compatible with the privacy of sensations. To get from (i) to the anti‐skeptical conclusion (v) requires something like the following: (i) only if (v); and that is nothing other than classical verificationism. In response, Rorty (1971) suggests an amendment: (iv)  It is possible to believe a thing “T” and it not be

only if either, (v1)  sensations have private names (accept the being right/seeming right distinction but deny that there has to be a public criterion)

or (v2)  There is some way of confirming that it is a T that is accepted by him.

According to Brueckner, (Vr) aims to be of use in demonstrating the impossibility of a private language because it says that “T” will not refer to a sensation if the only evidence invoked for the sentence “T here now” is “I believe that T here now,” which is not a genuine – nontrivial – confirmation relation. But (Vr) does not by itself rule out the alternative to (v2); namely (v1): “a pure‐experience” language (Rorty 1971, 8n10) whereby those “other sentences” to which “T” bears nontrivial confirmation relations relate to other private objects. Since that elimination is an example of a parasitism argument it is just more conceptual dependence. (Vr), he concludes, simply “drops out of the picture” (p. 25n26). Brueckner is right to conclude that, viewed from the perspective of one intent on a heroic refutation of skepticism, (Vr) does no work. But since that is not the appropriate perspective the choice of metaphor is inapt. It is rather the case that Rorty’s verificationism retreats into the background because it is built into his understanding of conceptual dependence. As he remarks (Rorty 1971, 7), (Vr) is a corollary of the Wittgensteinian maxims about meaning being use and stage‐setting being presupposed if naming is to make sense (see Wittgenstein 1953). We can only trace inferential/confirmatory relations in the way conceptual dependence arguments require on the understanding that concept possession is a “skill at linguistic behavior – the ability to use a word” (Rorty 1970a, 237). As he says elsewhere, anti‐Cartesian arguments that turn on excavating relations of “conceptual dependence” require some sort of pre‐commitment to this variety of Wittgensteinian “verificationism” if they are “to get off the ground” (Rorty 1973, 326). (Vr) is no ad hoc supplement to conceptual dependence, then: it is intrinsic 67

Neil Gascoigne

to it. The insistence on its acknowledgment should be regarded as an attempt to subvert Stroud’s and Thomson’s assumptions about the dialectical context in which arguments like Strawson’s should be viewed. The implication is that the lack that they identify as requiring classical verificationism is just a projection of an aporia at the heart of realism. As he notes in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, If you ask Dewey why he thinks Western culture has the slightest notion of what goodness is, or Davidson why he thinks that we ever talk about what really exists or say anything true about it, they are likely to ask you what makes you have doubts on the subject. If you reply that the burden is on them, and that they are forbidden to argue from the fact that we would never know it if the skeptic were right to the impossibility of his being right, Dewey and Davidson might both reply that they will not argue in that way. They need not invoke verificationist arguments; they need simply ask why they should worry about the skeptical alternative until they are given some concrete ground of doubt. To call this attempt to shift the burden back to the skeptic “verificationism,” or a confusion of the order of knowledge with the order of being, is like calling “verificationist” the man who says that he will not worry about whether the things he has called “red” are really red until some concrete alternative is provided. (Rorty 1980)

This returns us to the heart of Brueckner’s criticism. The reason he gives for neglecting discussion of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in his essay is that Rorty “does not further develop his Kantian anti‐skeptical strategy in that work” (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 23–24n24). Now it is clear that, among other things, Rorty 1980 offers an extended account of the Quinean, Sellarsian, and Wittgensteinian bases of conceptual dependence arguments – of the role that the socialization of norms can play in undermining the notion of privileged representations. But given that book’s contribution to “the anti‐Cartesian and anti‐Kantian revolution” (p. 7) it seems reasonable to ask to what extent Rorty’s anti‐skeptical strategy is indeed Kantian. To characterize Rorty’s failure as a specific sort of failure to refute Cartesian skepticism  –  one “in the Kantian tradition … he is following” (p. 21)  –  Brueckner quotes Rorty’s endorsement of Kant’s attempt to transcend foundational epistemological projects that seek “metaphysical principles which would ensure that the contents of our mind referred beyond themselves to physical objects … by showing that our very conception of what it was to be a mental content presupposed that there were physical objects” (Rorty 1970a, 243). He concludes: “Rorty here seems to commit himself to proving that one could not have the concept of a mental content unless there were physical objects” (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 21) and that this necessitates a commitment to verificationism. Given how self‐evident this commitment purportedly is, it is surprising that Rorty doesn’t see it; and, indeed, that his rejection of verificationism is unequivocal. But what Brueckner fails to note is that Rorty precedes this section by drawing a parallel between Kant’s Copernican revolution and “the revolution in philosophical thought introduced by the later Wittgenstein” (Rorty 1970a, 243). Kant’s contention that the situation the skeptic describes is unexperienceable  –  that it is an impossible experience – is, he notes, constrained by the requirement that possible experiences are due to the unification of intuitions by concepts. Even with the advent of the linguistic turn, the skeptic is given the wiggle room to invoke the possibility of a nonlinguistic experience. What is required is the “Wittgensteinian” move to the effect that 68

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

experiences are what are reported by certain assertions and the possibility of experience the possibility of certain assertions being made. To combat the skeptic we need to show her that “we cannot imagine an assertion about anything being made by a person who was not capable of making assertions about physical objects” (Rorty 1970a, 243). This puts the dialectical relation with the skeptic in a different place. As Rorty concludes, once we get rid of the “mental eye” view of epistemology then Strawson’s argument is sufficient against the skeptic. There’s no verificationist premise to get rid of the alternative to (C2) – the notion that our best criteria could be false – because the verificationism, such as it is, is built into the linguistic behaviorism. The point is to bring out the “mental eye” assumptions, not to formally refute the skeptic. Displacing the “mental eye” view is what Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature becomes about.

4  The Ends of Transcendental Arguments In Section  3 we noted two criticisms that Brueckner makes of Rorty’s account of transcendental arguments. Concerning (II), Brueckner is right to conclude that Rorty’s verificationism adds nothing to the account of conceptual dependence; but that is because his such‐as‐it‐is verificationism is built into that account. He is similarly right to observe that the conceptual dependence view of transcendental arguments has no anti‐skeptical force against the skeptic who insists on the need for a realist response (I); but on that point Rorty never demurred. Principally, then, what Brueckner’s response highlights is that if one insists on seeing the skeptic’s challenge as naïvely motivated, one will determine that Rorty’s response is inadequate. If, however, one thinks of the skeptic as the avatar of a certain sort of realism, her attempts to motivate doubt will be regarded with deep suspicion, and the insistence that she makes manifest her “alternative” account of reality deemed germane. We get an insight into the nature of that “alternative” account by reminding ourselves of why on Breuckner’s account (Vr) fails. As he points out, although the methods of confirmation/inferential connections are embedded in the linguistic practices, there is nothing to assure us that they are sound, and so even if the sentences related to T inferentially (call them [T]) are known to be true we cannot infer that we have conclusive evidence for the existence of Ts. As he goes on to say, we cannot go beyond saying that “we could not fail to count T‐sentences as being confirmed by some sentence or another, e.g. the kind (or kinds) we actually use to confirm them. But this hardly amounts to justification of our practice with respect to T‐sentences” (Brueckner 2010 [1983], 23). Now, the obvious response to this is to ask, what would count as a justification of our practice if not this? Is there some other sort of justification that Brueckner has in mind? Well, quite possibly that enshrined in the following: The internal coherence of the scheme is deemed insufficient for knowledge: further legitimation is needed which can be viewed as neither “empirical” nor “verificationist.”

What Brueckner is drawing attention to is the claim we see in relation to Thompson and Stroud; namely, the idea that all our beliefs could be false despite our confidence that our best methods or criteria have been used or met. A transcendental argument 69

Neil Gascoigne

against realism, then, is an argument to the effect that attempts to make sense of a notion of justification that would do the work of legitimation required is parasitic on what can be gleaned from the methods of confirmation/inferential relations that we use in practice. And what that means in effect is demonstrating that any attempt to make sense of a gap between truth and internal coherence cannot be made good on because our grasp of the concept of truth forbids us to hold apart truth and justification in the required way. This is of course Davidson’s argument to the effect that most of our beliefs must be true. According to Rorty it is a transcendental argument to end all realist – and therefore all realist transcendental –arguments because it “functions as a recipe” (Rorty 1979, 100–1) for constructing particular parasitic arguments against attempts to go beyond the intuitions embodied in Tarski’s convention T. Since, for Rorty, this is “the everyday, philosophically innocuous, sense of truth” (p. 98), what Davidson gives us is not a direct argument for Tarski, but a recipe for dealing with any attempt to say more about truth by attempting to cash out the various metaphors that might be used to make sense of the scheme–content distinction. Without some sense being given to such uses of terms like “represent” and “correspond to,” no explanatory use can be found for “true” that would give content to the project of legitimation, of thoughts being true because they represent or correspond to reality. And without this no sense can be given to the notion that philosophy has a task to perform that requires a standpoint on our beliefs in general to go beyond coherence to legitimate our thinking about the world. Now, it’s important to note two things here. First, this is an argument that suggests that the realist conception of transcendental arguments is itself parasitic on the parasitism account. Although particular transcendental arguments can only target specific proposals for making sense of the scheme–content distinction, the implication is that the work of establishing conceptual connections with its such‐as‐it‐is verificationism is the best description of where we are. And as Rorty acknowledges (1979, 77), once we recognize the extent to which transcendental arguments work in this practically orientated way, there’s no pressing reason to see them as essentially antireductive or anti‐ skeptical. Moreover, in carrying out the business of doing transcendental philosophy in this way we operate with the “everyday, philosophically innocuous, sense of truth.” And that leads to a second point: Rorty does not at this stage associate the end of projects of legitimacy with the end of philosophy. Combined, then, the implication is that philosophy does have a method19 – one intimately related to our pre‐philosophical intuitions about truth and carrying within it the resources for undermining attempts to contrive an outside view on our practices.

5  Beyond Im/modesty? In his preface, McDowell observes that he made the “first sketches” of what would become Mind and World “in an attempt to get under control” his “usual excited reaction to a reading [of] … Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (McDowell 1994, ix). Although not an affiliated pragmatist,20 McDowell takes the opportunity of a lengthy “Afterword” (part I) on Davidson to describe Rorty’s pragmatism as “half‐baked, according to standards set by his own account of what pragmatism is” (McDowell 1994, 155). That 70

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

account is the one that Rorty offers in a discussion of the relevance of Davidson’s work: “a movement which has specialized in debunking dualisms and in dissolving traditional problems created by those dualisms” (Rorty 1991 [1986], 126). Rorty’s pragmatism is half‐baked, then, because his approach is rather to dismiss than to dissolve traditional problems; and for McDowell this is because he has in turn failed to debunk – or, perhaps, even to register  –  the dualism that purportedly controls his thinking: of reason and nature, of an inside view and an outside view, of norms and (causal) descriptions. To be a fully baked pragmatist on this account one must bring the inside and outside views together and thereby give oneself the “right not to worry about” philosophy’s problems (McDowell 1994, 155n30). And as that suggestion of legitimacy hints, a fully self‐conscious version of such a pragmatism might involve borrowing from Kant, a thinker “whom Rorty finds utterly suspect” (p. 155). McDowell elaborates his version of pragmatism through an appropriation of Davidson’s attack on the dualism of scheme and world that rivals Rorty’s own. The thought, in brief, is that if one rejects the idea that meaning is aligned with the scheme idea in an account that sets the endogenous dualistically against the exogenous, one can redeem the idea that “our mindedness … has a necessary structure” (McDowell 1994, 158). The question this raises is what we are to think about the status of those demonstrations that “any intelligible conceptual scheme has a necessary structure” (p. 158)? In Mind and World McDowell is tentative: if they are seen as reassurances that our thought “is on the right track” then they are aiming to solve rather than dissolve traditional philosophical problems. To bring about the latter, unsurprisingly enough, we have to do what the later Wittgenstein does; namely, “to discover the limits of what makes sense … [by] working out towards them and noting the extent to which one loses one’s grip” (p. 159). The demonstrations that McDowell has in mind here take the form of transcendental arguments. As we’ve seen, the conception of these according to which we aim to solve problems is the realist interpretation: delineating necessary structures of thought reassures us about thought’s bearing on the world because such structures are constitutive of the world. However, deprived of the transcendental idealism that makes such a conception possible, these immodest aspirations became subject to Stroud’s charge of verificationism. For Stroud, however, this does not mean that such arguments serve no purpose. Developing Strawson’s suggestion that they can still help us investigate “the connections between the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme” (Strawson 1985, 22), he concludes that a modest form of transcendental argument might establish such connections if it is acknowledged that they are “now only within our thought” (Stroud 2000, 164). It’s an open question whether Stroud’s modesty is the same as Strawson’s. Where Stroud’s is set against the idea that one retreats to the modest position when one comes to acknowledge the failure to find and cross “a bridge of necessity” (p. 159) between mind and world, Strawson suggests that since the doubts that imply the need for such a bridge are idle we should just ignore them. What is clearer is that McDowell’s desideratum for transcendental arguments cannot sit easily alongside either conception of modesty. On the one hand, Strawson’s treatment of the skeptic appears to align him with Rorty’s half‐baked pragmatism; on the other, Stroud’s conception makes sense only if one accepts the very dualism that Davidson is supposed to have helped us overcome. Of course, the rejection of that dualism is itself a matter for 71

Neil Gascoigne

argument, so whatever McDowell’s conception of transcendental arguments is, it cannot be one that presupposes the success of that argument.21 McDowell (2008) provides the clearest account of his understanding of transcendental arguments. Since this is by implication the way in which they should be understood from the perspective of a fully baked pragmatism, this promises to give us an insight into where Rorty’s treatment, emblematic of his metaphilosophical stance (relating to legitimacy) goes awry. Accordingly, we have the following options:

5.1  Stroudian Immodesty A transcendental argument aims to establish the large‐scale features that the world must have if it is to be possible for thought/experience to be as they are.

5.2  Stroudian Modesty A transcendental argument aims to establish the large‐scale features that we must conceive the world as having if it is to be possible for thought/experience to be as they are.

5.3  McDowellian Post‐Modesty A transcendental argument aims to establish “how we must conceive the epistemic positions that are within our reach, if it is to be possible that our experience is as it is in having objective purport” (McDowell 2008, 387). The attempt to conceive of the epistemic positions that are within our reach is a restatement of the specifically Wittgensteinian exhortation about discovering the limits of what makes sense. In discovering what does and doesn’t make sense – what we can and can’t conceive as being within our reach – we dissolve the problem about (the possibility of) objective purport, which in turn “frees us to pursue our ordinary ways of finding out how things are in the world” (p. 387). And since we are in this sense “freed” from some burdensome consideration, the post‐modest transcendental argument of the fully baked pragmatist serves to legitimate our ordinary ways of finding out (of verifying) in a way that the modest account does not. With that in mind, let’s turn to the details of McDowell’s transcendental demonstration. McDowell contends that it is enough to “undermine … scepticism about perceptually acquired knowledge of the external world” (2008, 378, 382) that one formulates a transcendental argument that starts from the fact that perceptual experience at least purports to be of objective reality, and yields the conclusion that we must be able to make sense of the idea of perceptual experience that is actually of objective reality. (p. 382)

This gives us: (A)  Experience purports to be of objective reality,

only if 72

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

(C)  We can make sense of the idea that there are experiences in which objective facts are made directly available in perception.

One response to this is that it goes too far: we can identify as a necessary condition for (A) something that falls short of (C): (B)  There is a distinction between the experience of seeing that something is the case and the experience of seeming to see that something is the case.

If one is in the epistemic situation one takes oneself to be in (A) then one regards oneself as seeing that certain things are the case. Granted, to make sense of the idea that one can see things are a certain way one needs to make sense of the idea that one might be wrong or misled – a distinction is required between being right and merely seeming to be right. Indeed, that is part of what it is to be fallible. But this distinction is one that the skeptic requires: one is right when one is awake and merely seems to be right when one is asleep or a brain‐in‐a‐vat. Accordingly, what blocks the inference to (C) is the thought that one does not know which of these epistemic situations one occupies (or has no evidence favoring one over the other22). It is in this context that “scepticism expresses an inability to make sense of direct perceptual access to objective facts about the environment” (McDowell 2008, 378). To make sense of such access, then, requires eliminating the possibility that the skeptic’s way of understanding (B) is a genuine way to make sense of the distinction it exploits. To put this in familiar McDowellian terms, the transcendental argument is to the effect that the objective purport of perceptual experience necessitates that the disjunctive conception (DC) of experience is available to us. And since the skeptic’s attempt to make sense of the distinction required in (B) turns on the intelligibility of a highest common factor (HCF) conception of experience, the intention is to impugn it. To this end McDowell aims to diagnose in part the lure of the HCF conception by showing that it arises from a misunderstanding – in Wittgensteinian mode, a philosophically motivated misunderstanding – of the nature of fallibility. The thought here is that the subjective indistinguishability of veracious and nonveracious experiences appears to explain why people can be misled and (therefore) grounds the conception according to which perceptual experience as such fails to provide a conclusive warrant for belief – that the veracious and nonveracious are epistemically on a par. But since the fact that people can be misled is – maintains McDowell – a mere restatement of the truism about fallibility that there is nothing in the innocent acknowledgment of that fact that would lead us to infer that we do not in ordinary circumstances know that things are the way we take them to be. The disjunctive conception blocks the inference from indistinguishability to the HCF conception of experience because it gives us a theoretically innocent way of construing fallibility. As things stand this is not, of course, a “transcendental” move; it does not show that the HCF conception fails to make sense of the distinction in (B). The argument here is rather brief, but it goes as follows: to block the natural move to (C) the skeptic interprets the distinction in (B) in such a way that although there is a formal distinction between being right and being wrong the concept of appearance exploited to make that distinction requires that “appearances as such are mere appearances, in the sense that any 73

Neil Gascoigne

experience leaves it as an open possibility that things are not as they appear” (McDowell 2008, 380). Since on this account there is no epistemic difference between a seeming and a seeing, we cannot see ourselves as possessing legitimately (as making sense of) a concept of experience in which the world is made directly available to us (the one we think we possess). Correlatively, the disjunctive conception of experience enshrined in (C) is to the effect that there is a difference between those cases where one has a conclusive warrant for one’s perceptual beliefs (when one sees that something is the case) and those where one lacks that warrant (when it merely seems to one that something is the case). But – so the argument goes – we can make sense of the concept of appearance and thus articulate (B) only if we can make sense of the idea that some appearances (qua appearances) can yield more in the way of warrant for belief than others. Accordingly, the HCF conception is parasitic on the DC: in rejecting a condition of possibility of its own position making sense, it undermines “its own entitlement to the very idea of appearances” (p. 381).

6 Conclusion What can we conclude from this? The first point to note is that McDowell’s transcendental argument appears to be an example of Rorty’s parasitism account: it is a specific argument leveled against a particular reductive‐skeptical target; namely, anyone who subscribes to the HCF conception.23 It is, however, worth noting that while in the background to Rorty’s conception stands the such‐as‐it‐is verificationism associated with Wittgenstein, McDowell wants to see an explanation of objective purport in terms of experiences exemplifying “forms that belong to the understanding” (2008, 388). On that score at least McDowell’s putative pragmatism seems more than a little half‐baked itself. But this leads to a second point. The primary reason McDowell sees for regarding Rorty as having failed to bring to a successful conclusion the debunking work of pragmatism is the latter’s insistence that “the question whether a belief achieves disquotability is … descriptive as opposed to normative” (McDowell 1994, 150). This seems to be right, and if – as Rorty concedes – convention T enshrines “the everyday, philosophically innocuous, sense of truth” then he should have accepted it.24 Dividing the spoils in this way, we get a better appreciation of what a more fully baked pragmatism involves with respect to the use of transcendental argumentation and what stance it should take on the traditional problems of philosophy.

Notes 1 The antireductionism comports well with their use in ethical thought, which is revealing of the fact that they don’t aim to identify mind‐independent facts; though not because there are such facts, which presupposes a metaphysical mind‐world distinction, but because the irrelevance of that distinction is brought thereby to the fore. See for example Korsgaard (1996).

74

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13

14

15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24

Kant (1998, B116–B119). Rorty (1989) presents a vision of what a post‐philosophical intellectual life might be like. Rorty (1970a, 1970b, 1971, 1973, 1979). On reference see Rorty (1976). The clearest attempt to articulate a “use” view of truth is Rorty (1991 [1986]), which is a good example of another aspect of “redescription;” namely, the appropriation of someone else’s work (in this case Davidson’s). See, for example, Macarthur (2015), Misak (2013), Price (2013), Habermas (2003), and the collection of Misak (2007). The objection is due to Tony Brueckner. Tony was originally slated to write this piece but sadly died before he could do so. Although I met him only once I am a great admirer of his work and dedicate this chapter to his memory. Adapted from Rorty (1979, 79). In Strawson (1985) “unreal” becomes “idle” and the theoretical burden on the antireductionist is lightened. Stroud would reject the suggestion that he adheres to any such framework, maintaining that the question of legitimacy arises from an (at least) initially innocent reflection on our epistemic practices. The “conventional” here relates to social‐linguistic practices. For Rorty, the norms that these practices exemplify are always potentially revisable and are not therefore to be identified with the “logic” of our language (and therefore a transcendental argument as traditionally understood). See the original introduction to Rorty (1992). Crudely, that to make sense of X‐talk you must possess criteria the satisfaction of which logically implies the existence of Xs. Going back to Rorty’s (1)–(3): in (2) verificationism is rejected as a move in a realist argument. Insisting on mind‐dependency here suggests a need for (3), but that then (on Stroud’s analysis) collapses back into verificationism (denied by [2]). But voting and whatever else one includes in one’s “analysis” are not on this account “logically adequate criteria” for democracy, and nor are they (just) correlated with democracy. Wittgenstein (1953, sect. 127). The first is specifically a criticism of Rorty’s reconstruction of Strawson’s objectivity argument in Rorty (1970a), but Brueckner clearly maintains the more general position that no argument based on conceptual dependence could have any anti‐skeptical value. See Note 23. Brueckner (2010 [1983], 17, 21) calls this the conceptual presupposition view. For Rorty, the classic way of alienating meaning from truth is to insist on the possibility of a private language. By insisting on the public nature of the satisfiable criteria, Rorty is rejecting that possibility. It is for this reason that he opts to “suspect … that there is really only one transcendental argument … a single anti‐Cartesian argument” which boils down to the private language argument (1971, 14). On this account, Macarthur’s (2015) reading of Rorty is flawed. See McDowell (2011, 120–1) for some thoughts on the irrelevance of the label. See McDowell’s concluding paragraph at (2008, 388). For the claim that there is a difference here of crucial importance for responding to skepticism, see Pritchard (2015). In support of this point, note that Brueckner (2010 [1993], 192n3) rejects the anti‐ skeptical bona fides of a related argument in McDowell (1998 [1986]) claiming it amounts to no more than Rorty’s conceptual connection. For more detail here see McDowell (2000) and Gascoigne (2008, 198–212, 215–218).

75

Neil Gascoigne

References Brueckner, A. 2010 [1983]. “Transcendental Arguments I.” In Essays on Skepticism, 9–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2010 [1993].“Singular Thought and Cartesian Philosophy.” In Essays on Skepticism, 188–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davidson, D. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gascoigne, N. 2008. Richard Rorty: Liberalism, Irony and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, J. 2003. Truth and Justification. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kant, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer and A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C. 1996. The Sources of Normativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macarthur, D. 2015. “A Kant‐Inspired Vision of Pragmatism as Democratic Experimentalism.” In Pragmatism, Kant and Transcendental Philosophy, edited by G. Gava and R. Stern, 67–84. New York: Routledge. Malcolm, N. 1954. “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations.” The Philosophical Review 63: 530–59. McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1998 [1986]. “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space.” In Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 228–59. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2000. “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 109–23. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2008. “The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument.” In Disjunctivism, edited by A. Haddock and F. Macpherson, 376–89. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2011. “Pragmatism and Intention‐in‐Action.” In New Perspectives on Pragmatism and Analytic Philosophy, edited by R. M. Calcaterra, 119–28. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi. Misak, C., ed. 2007. New Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2013. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, H. 2013. Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pritchard, D. 2015. Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R. 1970. “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” Review of Metaphysics 24: 207–44. —. 1970b. “Wittgenstein, Privileged Access, and Incommunicability.” American Philosophical Quarterly 7: 192–205. —. 1971. “Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments.” Noûs 5: 3–14. —. 1973. “Criteria and Necessity.” Noûs 7: 313–29. —. 1976. “Realism and Reference.” The Monist 59: 321–40. —. 1979. “Transcendental Arguments, Self‐Reference, and Pragmatism.” In Transcendental Arguments and Science, edited by P. Bieri, R.‐P. Horstmann, and L. Krüger, 77–103. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel. —. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991 [1986]. “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth.” In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1, 126–50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1992. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. With Two Retrospective Essays. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.

76

Rorty and Transcendental Arguments

—. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, R. 2000. Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism: Answering the Question of Justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strawson, P. F. 1959. Individuals. London: Methuen. —. 1966. The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen. —. 1985. Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. London: Methuen. Stroud, B. 1968. “Transcendental Arguments.” Journal of Philosophy 65: 241–56. —. 2000. Understanding Human Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomson, J. J. 1966. “Private Languages.” In Philosophy of Mind, edited by S. Hampshire, 116– 43. New York: Harper & Row. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

77

Part II

Texts

5 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature JAMES TARTAGLIA

1 Metaphilosophy Metaphilosophy attracts malcontents. If you are a philosopher who does not much like the contemporary philosophical scene in which you find yourself, then there is a good chance you will start to think about what philosophy is, or could be. Then you can either set about transforming it into something more true to the essence that your metaphilosophical reflections reveal it to have, and which you think the contemporary scene has strayed from, or else set about molding it to your vision of what it should become. Philosophical malcontents have this luxury because the nature of their discipline is a notoriously elusive affair, cloaked in a long and diverse history, and designated by a title that means very little. Other disciplines rarely provide space for equivalent self‐ questioning, except at rare, pivotal points in their histories; but each new generation of philosophers has the option to turn their thoughts primarily to philosophy itself, rather than the problems it delivers as default. Rorty took this option, with the dissatisfaction behind it fueling a career‐long effort to transform it into something more socially useful. It was a mission that defined his thinking. Metaphilosophy is not just for malcontents. Establishment figures take it up too; Timothy Williamson (2007) provides a good recent example. But this kind of metaphilosophy bears little resemblance to the Rortian variety. Williamson’s interest is in honing philosophical methodology so the exact science he thinks his discipline has been steadily evolving into can make even better progress in future. He has little interest in determining the nature of philosophy (2007, 4), and thinks it should be essentially what it is now, only better. His dissatisfaction is limited to irritation with junior colleagues who cannot resist making big claims, when they should content themselves with modest ones that can be proved – through diligent hard work – beyond any shadow of a doubt (2007, 278ff.). For that is how piecemeal progress is to be achieved.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

81

James Tartaglia

Rorty’s metaphilosophical message was always diametrically opposed to this. For Rorty, the history of philosophy leaves its current nature essentially up for grabs, while providing ample reason to think that regular attempts, made ever since Kant, to place it on “the secure path of a science” have been badly motivated, peripheral to the best insights that tradition has to offer, and ultimately doomed to failure. Rorty liked big claims – the bigger the better – and often maligned as “scholasticism” the kind of tight argumentation that focused on the detail, while leaving the big picture for posterity to determine. Rorty wanted social impact now, and his Hegelian historicism persuaded him that this was all philosophy could realistically aspire to.1 He liked Sellars best, for instance, in those “few places” where he “let himself go” in order to provide a “vision of world history” (Rorty 1997 [1956], 10). Mainstream analytic philosophers who admire Sellars, by contrast, will typically cite his technical prowess to justify their admiration. Perhaps Rorty was more honest. Perhaps his lack of faith in the ability of technical argumentation to reach the truth led him to pin his hopes for philosophy to achieve cultural respect and influence elsewhere. Perhaps these hopes, combined with his reflections on the history of philosophy, are what produced his lack of faith in argument and truth. Rorty identifies a distinct kind of revolutionary metaphilosophy from his own, which seems to offer a midpoint between the extreme poles of business‐as‐usual and all‐change metaphilosophy (Rorty 1979, 365ff.). Thus, he thinks that philosophers who share the same aim as normal systematic philosophers  –  that of science‐like, incremental progress – may turn to metaphilosophy because they do not think extant methods can achieve it. So they invent a revolutionary new approach to philosophy. Logical positivism provides a prime example with its metaphilosophy combining reflection on what philosophy has been and should become. The positivists saw that philosophy had hitherto combined metaphysics and analysis, and liking the latter but not the former, sought to make philosophy what it ought to be by eradicating metaphysics, while presenting a new vision of the purposes and methods of analysis. Rorty’s metaphilosophy shares something of this approach in that he finds inspiration for his vision of what philosophy ought to be from its history. He likes Hegel’s broad historical narratives and conception of philosophy as its time “held in thought”; and he likes subsequent “edifying” philosophers like Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, who react against and try to disrupt the efforts of systematic philosophers in an effort to instigate new directions in the thought of their time. Since he aspired to be an edifying philosopher himself, then, his approach in this regard may seem to be essentially the same as the positivists’; he just had different ideas about where the wheat/chaff distinction lies.2 But there are two differences which might distinguish his metaphilosophy as a unique kind. The first is that he rejects the Kantian aim of making philosophy scientific, because he thinks this cannot be done, and that there is no good reason to want to do it anyway, only obsolete social needs, lack of historical awareness, and pressure to conform to an intellectual culture dominated by science. He also thinks this Kantian aim will lead philosophy down the path of insularity and detract from its ability to play its part in “cultural politics” (Rorty 2007). The second is that Rorty denies that philosophy has a historical essence, which we can reflect on to distinguish the chaff from the wheat. On his minimalist conception, philosophy is just “a genealogical linkage connecting certain 82

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

past figures with certain present figures … an ancestral relation of overlapping fibers” (Rorty 1991, 67).3 How the authors caught up in this literary web are to be interpreted is a matter he leaves open; and doing so makes space for him to realize his ambitions concerning what philosophy ought to be. I do not think these differences mark out a distinctive approach to metaphilosophy, however. The first gains much of its force from the claim that philosophy cannot proceed like science, which would require a good argument to back it up; an argument which, on the face of it, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) provides. Such an argument would seem to need to take place on a realist plain to have any purchase on its target; which again is what, on the face of it, transpires in PMN – despite its conclusions apparently precluding such argumentation. But arguing against previous approaches to philosophy is what all revolutionary philosophy does. And the second purported difference is put in doubt by the fact that Rorty’s interpretations of the historical figures that he discusses are fairly conventional in PMN, and apparently need to be, in order for his arguments to find their mark. So I think Rorty was, after all, just cherry‐ picking the parts of the history of philosophy he liked best and suggesting a way to put them together into a new and improved program. His metaphilosophical approach was essentially the same as the revolutionary systematic philosopher, except without the systematic aims; but this difference is simply because he disapproved of systematic philosophy, rather as the positivists disapproved of metaphysics. Now, rather than diving straight into the contents of PMN, I have so far been concerned with its metaphilosophical trajectory, which strikes me as rather more familiar than he would have us believe. This beginning seems appropriate, given that the reason PMN is such an important book is that it is where Rorty presents his metaphilosophy. Moreover, it is where he argues for it. In his other major work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS), Rorty acted out that vision by practicing philosophy the way he thought it should be practiced; he provided a concrete model of a possible future that the first book motivated. As such, the two fit together perfectly. The second repeats some of the arguments of the first in its early chapters, albeit in condensed form, but Rorty’s skepticism about the value of argument here becomes more prominent than before (Rorty 1989, 8ff.; 1979, 12), and his main concern is now with doing something new; with reading philosophy as literature, such that its authors are driven, for instance, not by a will to understand the world, but rather on the need to express their individuality. Rorty was most proud of his second book (Rorty 2007b, 17) and occasionally went out of his way to slight the first, describing it as, for instance, “partly amateurish cultural history and partly an attempt to dissolve certain very particular problems which were being discussed by analytic philosophers in the 1970s” (Rorty 2000, 214). There is enough plausibility to this to see how an older Rorty might have convinced himself of it; but it simply does not ring true with the incredible scope, ambition, and – especially in its final part – passion of the book. Nor with the fact that his pre‐ PMN works essentially lead up to it (Rorty 2014), and that there is very little it contains which he did not continue to press home for the rest of his life. Nothing substantial was abandoned; he simply lost enthusiasm for some of its terminology (and most notably, gained enthusiasm for the terminology of “pragmatism”), some of its history, and a couple of philosophers he had once seen as allies. Even his irony and solidarity combination  –  ostensibly the main conceptual novelty of the second book  –  was 83

James Tartaglia

­ resaged in the first under a different terminological guise (Rorty 1979, 383–7). As he p said himself in his final assessment, “I still believe most of what I wrote in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” (Rorty 2007b, 13) – an understatement, in my view. But he went on to say it was “out of date,” having been superseded by better critiques of the mind‐ body problem and epistemology by Daniel Dennett and Michael Williams respectively. Even if there was some truth to this, however, the older Rorty neglects the fact that, within his book, these critiques underpin a unique and overarching purpose; he rather uncharacteristically failed to make a holistic assessment. He also says that the second book did “on a larger scale” what the first had done, namely provide a “big swooshy narrative of the history of Western thought” (Rorty 2007b, 17). Again, I find it hard to see it that way. The inclusion of politics, literature, and much more continental philosophy might justify “larger scale,” I suppose; though PMN was arguing for a pluralistic democracy between all discourses about the world. However, CIS strikes me as considerably more piecemeal, containing readings of Proust, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Nabakov, and Orwell, which are indeed held together by a narrative, but which might have stood on their own; it all seems much less “swooshy” to me. More importantly, it strikes me as a very different kind of book primarily because, by this point, Rorty saw philosophy as one kind of literature among others and is acting out that vision; the justification offered is secondary, and largely recycled. But in PMN, Rorty is making an urgent case that there is something seriously wrong with philosophy as it has hitherto been practiced, and his suggestions for how it might continue in future come only at the very end (the last six pages). The emphasis reversed, which is why the second so naturally follows the first. Still, it is easy to see why Rorty might have favored CIS, for it realized the vision that meant so much for him; he had become bigger than analytic philosophy and was now trying to engage in cultural politics. PMN simply laid the metaphilosophical foundations for him to do what he wanted, and he did not want to get bogged down in an ongoing defense of them. Plus creative people typically favor their later work; otherwise they would lose the clearest justification for their having kept going. But it is just as easy to see why PMN is the book that analytic philosophers continue to regard as Rorty’s main work. For it speaks to and challenges them, while offering conclusions much bigger and more exciting than they are accustomed to, outside of their acquaintance with more distant historical figures; seemingly outrageous conclusions that just beg to be overturned – by those open‐minded enough to empathize with his point of view and not just use the scale of his interests as an excuse to dismiss his arguments as “sloppy.” I am inclined to take the essentially Rortian line that the success of CIS will be determined by whether the approach to philosophy demonstrated there will be adopted by others and bear sufficiently interesting fruit. Alan Malachowski thinks it will, and maybe he is right; we will have to wait to see how the “New Pragmatism” pans out (Malachowski 2010). However, I think PMN is already successful. Not because it brought an end to representationalism, taught the world how to be “consistent” atheists (Rorty 1998, 62), and instigated a revolution in philosophy. So far it has categorically failed on all these fronts, and that situation may well not change. Rather, it was successful because it made Rorty a canonical figure whose ideas are part of the history of philosophy. The impact of those ideas on contemporary, cutting‐edge debates is hard to assess, as is the impact of, say, Sartre and Quine; but it is certainly there, and shines 84

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

clearly through on occasion. But as with all canonical figures, articles and books about him are regularly produced, and that, it seems to me, is the result of his book addressed squarely to philosophers, rather than the one that showed them and others something new. So long as the history of philosophy never becomes entirely detached from its ongoing debates, Rorty’s ideas will have the potential to affect them. Skeptical metaphilosophy was nothing new with PMN, of course, but Rorty’s achievement with that book was to place a dedicated, full‐scale defense of it into the history of philosophy.

2  The Plot The plot of PMN goes something like this. The establishment’s conception of philosophy is all wrong. Philosophy is not an ancient discipline with a subject matter consisting of perennial problems for the human intellect. Rorty does not think the traditional problems of philosophy are such that any suitably primed member of the species Homo sapiens, whether from the Stone Age or the Space Age, would in principle be able to empathize with them. He does not think that it was inevitable that people came to be concerned by these problems, but rather an accident of history. And he thinks that once we reflect on that history, together with the social irrelevance of these problems to the present age, we will be motivated to forget them; to simply leave them alone. Then we can turn our minds to finding something more useful to do with the great writings of the philosophical tradition, which may have been misguided, but which are still inspirational feats of the imagination. Rather than an ancient discipline dealing with perennial problems, Rorty thinks philosophy as we know it now began to rise in the seventeenth century, when intellectuals fixated on the metaphor of the mind as a mirror of nature; a metaphor which already had cultural currency, having been poetically employed by the likes of Shakespeare. These intellectuals started to take the metaphor literally. They started to think of the mind as each person’s first point of contact with the world; as a conglomeration of inner reflections of the environment, such that we are guided around that environment by knowledge of these reflections. This idea was fixated on it because it seemed relevant to the pressing intellectual issue of the day, namely the conflict between church doctrine and the new science of men like Galileo; a conflict most spectacularly illustrated by the disagreement about whether the Earth was at the center of God’s creation, as the church insisted, or whether it was orbiting the Sun, as Galileo’s observations and reasoning seemed to show. If the mind was a mirror of nature, and hence the basis of all knowledge was rooted in reflections hidden within each individual, then this seemed to vindicate the scientists’ reliance on observation and reason. So, reflection on mind seemed capable of providing foundations for science. Philosophy as we know it began to emerge, then, with an effort to assist science in its cultural conflict with the religious establishment. How effective the mirror of nature idea was in this regard is not an issue Rorty lingers over, but science did eventually secure its own secular autonomy, of course, and the church had to retreat from dictating the nature of God’s creation to the more enlightened position that God provided us with the faculties to work these matters out for ourselves. In any case, Rorty’s polemical interest is in what happened next; namely that people started to see that the mirror of 85

James Tartaglia

nature idea generated distinctive problems of its own. For it seemed that the mirror would have to be different from the rest of the world, given its special reflecting qualities; but also part of it, in order to explain how mind and world can be in reciprocal communion – that was the metaphysical mind‐body problem. And if we only see reflections of the world, then the question arises of how we can know those reflections are accurate – that was the epistemological “veil of perception” problem. Work consequently began on trying to solve these and other related problems, before in the late eighteenth century, Rorty’s nemesis  –  Kant  –  wrote the Critique of Pure Reason. This book transfigured the mirror of nature problematic, making it considerably more complex and multifaceted than it had been before, while laying the foundations for Kant to go on to systematize pretty much everything – all aspects of human intellectual, emotional, aesthetic, and political life. To this day, Kantians all around the world are still working out the implications of Kant’s views (or just what those views amount to). Kantian philosophy’s resources are endless and its implications all‐ encompassing. It provided subsequent generations with a paradigm around which to build a professional way of life. And Kant provided this paradigm with an ancient history, by convincingly tracing his concerns back to those of Plato and Aristotle. This allowed him to lay claim to the honorific title “philosophy,” a word ineluctably associated with the Greeks, while making his paradigm seem continuous not only with over two millennia of Platonists and Aristotelians, but also with his immediate predecessors like Descartes and Locke, who had similarly grappled with the problems of the mirror. And thus, as Rorty sees it, philosophy as we know it was born. It has been part of the academic establishment ever since because of “Kant’s eternalization of the intellectual situation of eighteenth‐century Europe” (Rorty 2007b, 13). Any potential for social value it may once have had has now long been expended, however, and yet the discipline continues to attract young scholars who fail to realize that without Kant “Greek thought and seventeenth‐century thought might have seemed as distinct both from each other and from our present concerns as, say, Hindu theology and Mayan numerology” (Rorty 1979, 149). So Rorty’s task is to undermine the Kantian image of philosophy, in order to persuade philosophers to find something more useful to do. He goes about this on two parallel fronts. First, he tells this deconstructive history. And second, he argues that the mirror of nature idea is fatally flawed, such that even if you neglect to ask yourself about the point of tackling its problems, you are still demonstrably wasting your time. In particular, the definitive reason it is flawed was brought to light in 1950s analytic philosophy. Thus the game was already up by the time Rorty wrote PMN, and it was the need to publicize this purported fact – not even realized by the philosophers who made the breakthrough – that led him to write it, he tells us (Rorty 1979, 10). Now the aims of dismantling philosophy’s history, undermining its traditional problems, and persuading its practitioners to radically change direction, might seem more than enough for one monograph to tackle; but Rorty had an even grander ambition for PMN. An ambition that does not sit easily with his attempt to downsize philosophy, and occasional comments to the effect that philosophy is a “somewhat peripheral academic discipline” (Rorty 1998, 58). But nevertheless it was an ambition that clearly drove him on. For Rorty does not think the success of the mirror of nature idea can be explained solely in terms of its one‐time potential for social utility, plus the imaginative brilliance 86

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

of Kant. Rather, he thinks it spoke to an outdated but persistent human need and that the world would be a better place if we could outgrow it. He formulated this need in various ways throughout his writings, but the one I like best is the need for “redemptive truth” (Rorty 2007, 90). Redemptive truth is “a set of beliefs which would end, once and for all, the process of reflection on what to do with ourselves”; it would present “the one true description of what is going on,” allowing “every thing, person, event, idea, and poem” to be fitted into a “context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique” (p. 90). It would be, you might say, the meaning of life (p. 84). The grandest ambition of PMN is to persuade us that philosophy will never lead us to redemptive truth, that this goal is illusory, and that if we can learn to abandon it, we will become better placed to harness the full potential of human life. We would thereby complete the process that the Enlightenment set in motion. For all the acute modesty with which Rorty liked to portray himself, his discipline, and his first major work, this is the ambition which underpins PMN.4 He thinks the mirror of nature idea was seized on because it offered the prospect of a new, more secular vision of redemptive truth, at a time when the power of religion was beginning to wane. For it seemed that if philosophy could work out exactly how the mirror (the mind) works, it could determine the conditions under which it accurately reflects the world. On the assumption that science meets these conditions, then, the redemptive truth could be discovered, rather than divinely revealed, with scientists taking the place of priests as its privileged purveyors; this is a task to which science was always very badly suited, in Rorty’s view (2007, 98ff.). Or alternatively, philosophers could take on the task themselves, by building metaphysical systems to reveal the objective truth and, from this basis, work out the redemptive truth about what we should do in it. But both the goal, and the mirror that was supposed to help us reach it, are chimerical, according to Rorty. And once we realize this, we will abandon objective truth, stop privileging science, and grasp that how we think of ourselves and our world is a matter we must decide for ourselves. No fact of the matter will make the decision for us, for we are free to describe and redescribe the world to our hearts’ content, thereby discovering fresh possibilities and sweeping away descriptions that have outlived their usefulness; this is “the most important thing we can do” (Rorty 1979, 358–9). Thus liberated from objective truth, our creativity will be unleashed. Human beings will have achieved the prerequisite maturity to take control of their own destinies. To persuade us of all this, Rorty’s strategy is as follows. In the first part of PMN, he tries to historically and conceptually deconstruct the mind. Then, in the second part, he tries to show that the philosophical project of determining when our minds accurately represent the world, and thereby produce knowledge, is irrevocably flawed; and that this was demonstrated by developments in 1950s analytic philosophy. Now this second task might seem redundant, for if Rorty succeeded in persuading us to abandon the mirror of nature in part one, we would also have to abandon any hopes for it to show us what constitutes knowledge; no mirror, no reflections. However, a large proportion of part two is taken up with Rorty arguing that we should not, after abandoning the mirror, try to reconstruct the project of discovering the conditions under which accurate representation takes place. Mind was just the traditional philosophical means for seeking redemptive truth, and the one which made philosophers most confident that they had an ahistorical subject matter to concern themselves with; but it is the goal 87

James Tartaglia

rather than this particular means which is Rorty’s principal target. Finally, in part three, he sketches his utopian vision of life without objective truth and, right at the very end, makes suggestions about what philosophy might do in future – in order to avoid accusations of being an “end‐of‐philosophy”‐type philosopher (it did not work). CIS subsequently took up these suggestions. And that, in a nutshell, is PMN. I shall now turn to the question of how successful it is; successful on its own terms, that is. Already, I think, tensions are discernible from the overview I have presented; and I do not think I have skewed it to cause this. For how did Rorty expect a work of philosophy to bring about something as culturally enormous as a widespread abandonment of objective truth, by showing that philosophy is a much smaller and less significant phenomenon than had previously been thought; one which lacks any special expertise, and was born out of an idea that has impeded cultural progress? Why should anyone listen to a philosopher who says that? And supposing they do, if there is no limit to how we describe the world, does not that very assertion admit of redescription? If not, surely it must be objectively true, and hence self‐contradicting. Relatedly, is not Rorty arguing that the mirror of nature idea is objectively false? If so, he cannot conclude that there is no objective truth; if not, how do his arguments support his conclusion? In addition, given that Rorty’s notion of endless redescription is considerably more conducive to the idealist tradition of philosophy than the realist, was he really proposing such a radical break from what he portrayed as the history of philosophy’s pointless oscillation between realism and idealism? Was he not simply making the latest case for idealism, while diminishing the tradition that provided the only hope of making such grand conclusions viable?

3  Part One Rorty’s deconstruction of the mind‐body problem begins by questioning the unity of the concept of mind. Why, he wonders, do we group certain states together as mental, and then contrast them with the physical? To presuppose this is a natural grouping and contrast, he thinks, is to concede too much to dualism at the outset. After all, pains and beliefs possess no obvious commonality – an intuition Rorty shares with many philosophers (e.g. Searle 1983, 1) – and if even physicalists concede that all these items are at least apparently nonphysical (for otherwise there would be no problem for them to solve), then this appearance needs to be explained. Rorty finds the explanation in a series of historical errors. Beliefs (and other intentional states) were thought nonphysical because of a misunderstanding of the nature of meaning. Sensations (and other phenomenal states) were thought nonphysical because they were conceived as things whose essence is pure appearance, in order to provide a primitive account of our privileged access to them; but they are actually states of people, and states do not have essences. Then they were yoked together, because some intentional states are also phenomenal (e.g. occurrent thoughts), and Descartes used this accidental coalescence to reconceive the phenomenal as mental; which he wanted to do in order to house the secondary qualities in the mind, and thereby save them from the science of Galileo, which seemed to render them illusory. 88

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Descartes managed this by spotting an apparent commonality between thoughts and sensations in that they can both be indubitable. And thus the mind‐body problem was bequeathed to us. It resulted from mistakes which made it seem that sensations and beliefs belong together and cannot be physical. But there is no good reason to group them together, so the concept of mind is a mishmash; and neither is there any good reason to think they cannot be physical, so there is no obstacle to being a physicalist. Note that this entire argument presupposes an agenda shared by most contemporary philosophers of mind, namely to defeat dualism and pave the way to physicalism. Moreover, it all seems to take place on a realist plain, by showing that the real nature of meaning and the phenomenal was historically misunderstood, and that the mental is not really a unified category. Past philosophers made mistakes because they had obsolete theories and were motivated by obsolete social needs. Rorty does not simply argue that it would now be more useful to describe the mind as physical; that agenda would have called for a completely different approach. Rather, he argues that our predecessors got it wrong, and thereby landed us with a pseudo‐problem. This argument, which takes place in chapter 1, has a couple of loose ends. For Rorty has yet to tell us what privileged access really consists in and, relatedly, why some intentional and phenomenal states seem equally indubitable. He takes this up in chapter 2, but had already provided an answer in one of his earlier classics, namely “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” (reprinted in Rorty 2014). In that paper, he adapted Sellars’s idea that the linguistic practice of incorrigibility – of granting authority to people’s sincere first‐person reports – explains intuitions of privileged access. Given that this practice generates no obstacles to physicalism, and could in principle die away – if third‐person science developed to be more reliable that first‐person reporting – then Rorty has everything in place to complete an argument for eliminative materialism. And since eliminative materialism is what he was best known for at the time, that must have been what his original readers were expecting. It is not what they got, however, because Rorty was now beginning to transcend analytic philosophy in the interests of his endless redescription thesis. Instead, he embarks on a highly convoluted discussion of an imaginary alien race  –  the “Antipodeans”  –  whose history developed in such a way that they never developed a mind‐body problem. When we Earthlings meet them, they cannot understand what we are talking about, despite the best efforts of our philosophers to work out whether they actually have minds or not. The imaginary discussion is so convoluted, in fact, that I have always suspected that Rorty intended to parody what he regarded as pointless philosophical scholasticism in this chapter. In any case, the main conclusion is clear enough, namely that the Antipodeans get along fine without the troublesome concept of mind, and there is no good reason we should not follow their lead. The surprise comes when Rorty does not reach this conclusion with eliminative materialism, which he now rejects on the grounds that there are no facts about reference which might determine that terms for mental states have always been referring to physical states (Rorty 1979, 118ff.). Incorrigibility is not the mark of the mental, then, just “all that is at issue” (p. 121). And his new conclusion is that having seen through the history that gave us the problem, and how well the Antipodeans get on without it, we should simply refuse to take up a stance within its conceptual tangles; we should just forget about it. Rorty still advocates physicalism, understood as the “probably true (but uninteresting)” claim 89

James Tartaglia

that physics can predict “every event in every space‐time region” (p. 28); but insists that we detach it from the philosophical issue of ontological primacy.5 There are some big problems in his argument, which I shall leave for my other chapter in this volume, “Rorty’s Philosophy of Consciousness.” But nevertheless, his general approach, as I have argued before (Tartaglia 2008), is one which contemporary debates could learn from. The overarching problem I shall press here concerns its motivation and trajectory. For on the face of it, the only good reason to try to deconstruct the mind‐body problem, and show that there is no good reason to think the mind cannot be physical, is to defend physicalism; the normal, ontological kind, which thinks science gets things right, and that it is important to silence challenges to the scientific worldview to hold superstition and antiscience at bay. Now Rorty clearly shared some of this motivation, in that the whole of part one is a crusade against “mind‐stuff,” and he defends his own watered‐down version of physicalism. And yet the scientific realist perspective of the normal physicalist is his overall target; he does not think science, or anything else, gets reality right, and his endless redescription thesis is designed to put science in its place by instigating a pluralism according to which all discourses are potentially on a par, thereby revealing the privilege traditionally accorded to physics as dispensable Enlightenment propaganda. Dualists and idealists broadly share this kind of aim – and that places Rorty on both sides of the debate at once. Light is shed on this situation in a later essay, where he says that “getting rid of spooks … has exhausted the utility of natural science for either redemptive or political purposes” (Rorty 2007, 103). That gets to the heart of it, I think, in that Rorty thought belief in “spooks” was socially bad, but that science had already managed to dampen it down, making continued philosophical debates about the mind‐body problem a waste of time. But Rorty does not argue this in PMN; he argues that the mind‐body problem is rooted in philosophical errors. And in any case, the social question is very much a moot point, especially at this present time of writing, when the problem of consciousness is all the rage among both philosophers and scientists, and when scientists are on the verge of creating machines able to perform cognitive tasks that only people have previously been capable of. The latter raises social concerns about employment redundancies  –  especially among the traditional middle class, whose dissatisfaction has hitherto been the main engine of social unrest – that future mechanization now seems likely to bring about. Maybe in this situation, we would all be better off continuing to believe that consciousness marks a radical division between people and machines; if not a principled one, then at least one we currently have no idea how to physically enact, despite our growing ability to make machines that behave like us. Rorty does not consider issues like this, but rather writes as if he has already decided that it is socially deleterious to think our minds set us apart from machines. But suppose he had considered the social implications and concluded that belief in spooks is good for us. Would he then have altered his description of the Antipodeans to present their world as a catastrophic dystopia, while defending different theories of meaning and privileged access? If he would, then we have no reason to trust his arguments – they could have gone either way, depending on the outcome of his secret social deliberations. If he would not, this would suggest that he thought reality simply does not contain any spooks; in flagrant violation of his overall position. It seems to me that such considerations place 90

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Rorty’s entire method of argumentation, his final conclusion, and particularly the fit between them into serious doubt.

4  Part Two Rorty begins part two by telling his story about Kant’s invention of philosophy. The key conceptual blunder which made this possible is attributed to Locke, and is the idea that sensations come to us ready conceptualized, and thus able to provide our epistemic point of contact with the world. So within Lockean empiricism, the idea is that a sensation of redness, for instance, comes to us already understood as red, and it is on the basis of such “simple ideas” that we build up the rest of the more complex ones with which we understand the world. As such, all our beliefs can ultimately be traced back to the sensations given to us by our perceptual capacities and thereby justified in terms of the world that systematically caused them within us. The mirror of nature idea thereby gave theoretical substance to the simple empiricism of “experience is the best guide,” offering the prospect of a principled way of adjudicating between our various beliefs about the world, to determine which are best grounded in the world itself. It was hoped that apparently intractable disputes (such as between science and the church) could be decisively settled on a theoretically neutral plain, and we could refine our theories to make them maximally sensitive to the world’s impartial input, thereby discovering the truth; hopefully a redemptive one. The trouble with this idea, according to Rorty, is that nothing is ready conceptualized; neither sensations nor anything else. The world does not make sense of things for us; we have to do that for ourselves. Kant came close to realizing this when he said Locke had “sensualized all concepts of the understanding” (Kant 1933 [1787], B327), and insisted that concepts and sensory input needed to be brought together to generate knowledge. However, he wound up simply making a more complicated version of the same Lockean mistake, as Rorty sees it, and it was not until the 1950s that the problem came clearly into view as what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given.” The problem is essentially a mix‐up between causal explanation and justification; sensations may be part of the causal explanation of knowledge – part of the causal condition that generates knowledge – but that does not mean they justify our beliefs, and thereby make them count as knowledge. The idea of ready conceptualized sensations was a “mongrel,” as Sellars put it (1997 [1956], 21), and there were no other “givens” capable of taking their place. Quine bolstered this argument, as Rorty tells the story, by showing that no principled distinction could be made between analytic and synthetic statements, such that the truth of the former was determined only by how we define our terms, while the truth of the latter depended on the input of the world. Rather all statements are part of the same “web of belief,” and the world does not dictate how we adjust this web in light of experience. Neither Sellars nor Quine realized what they had done, namely shown the theoretical bankruptcy of Kant’s discipline. But Rorty did, and concluded that since any attempt to base our decisions on something outside of historically contingent conversations will inevitably succumb to the Myth of the Given, the justification for our 91

James Tartaglia

descriptions can have no firmer basis than open discussion and, ultimately, considerations of social usefulness. It had seemed otherwise, only because the mirror of nature idea persuaded us that knowledge was a relation to an object. But it is in fact a relation to a proposition; and a proposition is not the kind of thing with which you can come causally face to face, to be coerced by its sheer presence. Realizing this, we become “epistemological behaviorists,” as Rorty rather clumsily put it; “clumsily,” because he promotes this in a book arguing for the demise of epistemology. Almost immediately after publication, though, he switched to the terminology of “pragmatism” (Rorty 1982, ch. 9). After presenting his pragmatism, Rorty goes on to argue that philosophers should not react by looking for a new and improved mirror substitute to ground our conversations in the objective truth, such as by looking to developments in empirical psychology, or philosophical work on the semantics and logic of language. The same obstacles will face them, and the motivation will be just as bad. It is in these chapters (5 and 6) that Rorty’s later dismissal of the book as outdated most rings true. But they were prescient nonetheless, in that philosophers increasingly look to cognitive science for backup. And these chapters still contain plenty of lasting content, much of which has been largely overlooked; such as an attempted deconstruction of Kripke’s argument for a causal theory of reference (Rorty 1979, 288–95), a theory which has persuaded a new generation to take up analytic metaphysics, moral realism, a new approach to the mind‐body identity theory, and lots of other things of which Rorty would disapprove. The chapter on philosophy of language also allows Rorty to invoke Davidson to complete his deconstructive case. For although Sellars and Quine had already shown that the notion of conceptual schemes for understanding the world was unable to provide the epistemic guarantees for which it was designed, since how we adjust these schemes to accommodate the world was not a matter the world would decide, it took Davidson to provide the icing on the cake, by undermining the scheme/world distinction altogether – by showing that we cannot make sense of the notion of alternative conceptual schemes. This idea, along with the distinctively philosophical notions of “world” and “truth” it supported, must be abandoned. How successful was this part of the book? Let us leave aside for now my line of argument about the realist plain on which these arguments apparently take place. Namely, was Rorty arguing that Kant really invented philosophy, or just trying to persuade us of a useful description of the philosophy phenomenon? Did he think empiricism really is blighted by the Myth of the Given, and that there really is no analytic/ synthetic or scheme/content distinction? Or would he have argued to the contrary, if convinced that doing so would be socially advantageous? I shall return to this theme shortly. Leaving that aside, then, the first thing to note is how thoroughly implausible the Kantian invention of philosophy story is. Kant and his immediate predecessors read and were influenced by Plato, Aristotle, and medieval philosophers, and they took up their themes and interests in new ways. And even leaving aside this direct influence, a common interest in the appearance/reality distinction, and its bearing on understanding the human place in the universe is clearly discernible throughout the history of Western philosophy; I simply cannot take seriously the idea that we would not still have seen a plain connection between Plato’s and Descartes’s attempts to transcend illusory appearance had Kant never been born. Moreover, as we now know, and as was 92

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

beginning to become apparent in the West at around the time of Leibniz, these same themes had been independently pursued in other parts of the world since ancient times; a fact that Rorty did his best to ignore, and when pressed, tried very ineffectually to deny/neutralize (see Tartaglia 2014). It is hard to see what more continuity could possibly be required in order to justify philosophy’s traditional self‐image. The only smidgeon of plausibility to Rorty’s thesis is in the idea that Kant brought together traditional interests in epistemology, metaphysics, logic, and morality, and thereby made it possible to conceive them as parts of a distinct discipline bearing the title “philosophy”; though it is unclear to me that Plato had not already done that. But in any case, without the much weightier thesis Rorty proposes, his idea that philosophical problems stem from obsolete social problems loses credibility. For on the face of it, philosophical concerns are as natural  –  in a world where appearance often deviates from reality, and into which we are born without an instruction manual – as concerns with the weather or the relations between numbers. Of course, the histories of meteorology and mathematics have been influenced by social concerns and needs, but the motivational influence of the need to work out the trajectories of cannonballs, for instance, has no bearing on whether the resulting calculations were correct. Perhaps Rorty would say that philosophical concerns are obsolete. But appearance still deviates from reality, and we are still being born without instruction manuals – and Rorty’s endless redescription thesis shows concern with the former, while his interest in novels as a means of moral education shows concern with the latter. Nevertheless, perhaps the Myth of the Given puts paid to the mirror of nature approach to these concerns by establishing the endless description thesis. Perhaps that was all the conclusion Rorty needed; and sticking with it would certainly help him distance himself from the end‐of‐philosophy image he did not like. But I do not think it does establish it. Suppose we accept that nothing comes to us ready conceptualized. Still, something does “come to us,” otherwise we would have nothing to talk about. A long tradition in philosophy has concluded that to explain the appearance/reality distinction, we must conceptualize this “something” as a mental representation. But if the world does not force this conceptualization on us, and we have to decide for ourselves, it does not follow that this conclusion is wrong. One way to make such decisions is in terms of predictive power, by seeing whether our descriptions allow us to make predictions that come true. But in more rarefied cases like philosophy, we have to content ourselves with whether our conceptualizations stand up to argumentative scrutiny and produce intellectual satisfaction. Even if there are no conceptual schemes, there is still a difference between, say, how a chess player, and somebody who has never encountered the game before, will conceptualize a chessboard. And this kind of difference provides space for philosophers to debate how best to conceptualize the world, even if radically different forms of conceptualization can be ruled out. Now it is extraordinarily hard to suppose that the world has no part to play in these decisions; and even Rorty – especially in his passing reference to “contact with reality” as “a causal, non‐intentional, non‐description–relative relation” (Rorty 1979, 375) – struggled to consistently maintain this stance (see Tartaglia 2007, 212–16, for discussion). But the Myth of the Given idea does not rule this out in any case. It rules out the world playing an atomistic, foundational role; but that leaves other ways, for it show some of our descriptions to be better than others – of 93

James Tartaglia

the kind Sellars and Quine explored, for instance – and it certainly does not show that our only criterion of “better” can be social utility.

5  Part Three Part three is where Rorty sets down his vision of a society unencumbered by objective truth, in which the whole world becomes a text to be endlessly reinterpreted. We are to embrace “the power of strangeness” (Rorty 1979, 360) by seeking out new and unfamiliar descriptions so that life can never get boring, and we can continually harness fresh forms of social utility; this is what our freedom ultimately consists in. Stale descriptions that have outlived their usefulness are to be left behind, as life becomes an “infinite striving” (1979, 377) which continually opens up new goals. Freed from the restrictive delusion of a single goal dictated by The Truth – a goal which always seemed to hang tantalizingly just ahead of us – we will be able to realize our full potential, or rather, decide for ourselves what that potential is. We will have outgrown the need for such a goal, which was always just a product of insecurity; the felt need for quasi‐parental guidance. Systematic philosophy was a product of that insecurity, and edifying philosophy is to be welcomed for its continual efforts to disrupt its projects; to stop systematic philosophers setting certain descriptions in stone, by redescribing their efforts. Edifying philosophy “can never end philosophy,” though it can “prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science” (Rorty 1979, 372); but Rorty speculates that maybe in the future a “purely edifying” philosophy will arise which is not simply a reaction to systematic philosophy, but rather “philosophy” solely in terms of the canon of literature it seeks to redescribe (p. 394). Now the stock (and best) response to this vision is presented in Putnam’s objection that Rorty is trying to say “from a God’s‐Eye View there is no God’s‐Eye View” (Putnam 1990, 25). This line of objection has been pressed many times (Dworkin 1991 does the best job, I think), and the main argument I have been developing so far – and will now complete – is along the same lines. However, I shall take into account Rorty’s standard rebuttal (e.g. Rorty 1998, 57), namely that he was just making a move in cultural politics: a pragmatic proposal for something we should try on the grounds that this promises to bring about greater social utility, rather than the philosophical claim that certain arguments establish that there is no objective truth. And my overriding concern is not to split hairs with Rorty; for he was more than capable of splitting them in response. Such a visionary and broad‐brush philosopher must be given the maximum benefit of the doubt if you are to effectively engage with him. So Rorty was not arguing that it is objectively true that there is no objective truth, and hence that endless description is possible; and he was not arguing that considerations based on the Myth of the Given, for instance, establish this because of their objective truth (because causation really is distinct from justification). Rather, he was trying to persuade us to reject the concept of objective truth because he thinks believing in endless redescription would be useful; the arguments he employs are simply useful for getting us to believe this. But then you wonder how useful these arguments could possibly be. For you are only going to think the arguments are useful if you think both that endless description is useful, and that usefulness is a good enough reason to accept 94

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

it – and if you think that, then you are not going to need the arguments. If you do not think that from the outset, however, then as soon as Rorty tells you the arguments are simply a useful means to his conclusion (thereby letting his private irony out into the public arena), or else you work it out yourself from the conclusion, you are bound to feel tricked. For you will now realize that the arguments rest entirely on your accepting the conclusion that they were apparently trying to establish; philosophers who naturally enough interpreted the arguments realistically were being seduced to go somewhere this interpretation could no longer hold. Either way, the argumentative bulk of PMN becomes an irrelevance; for if an argument’s persuasive force depends entirely on its conclusion, it has no persuasive force. Rorty was well aware of the edifying philosopher’s predicament of having to “decry the very notion of having a view, while avoid having a view about having views”; he thinks this is “awkward, but not impossible” (Rorty 1979, 371). I think that his standard methodology of appropriating arguments from philosophers who drew very different conclusions from them accentuated the problem. But the main problem comes from the fact that he did have a view: he thought it was useful for us to believe in endless description, or at least that we should try it out. Without this view, his response to Putnam collapses along with his whole project; and in any case, practically his entire philosophical output (post‐PMN) makes no sense without it. The problem is that the notion of “useful” requires some kind of reality, since it begs the question “useful for what?” If you answer with something real, then you concede to objective truth; but if you answer with yet more usefulness, then the notion is drained of all sense. If you think of Rorty’s proposal in a realist way, you can see what he has in mind. The world of endless description would be more useful because people will be more creative and intellectually flexible, sterile debates will be avoided, and so on. Of course, Rorty has not really argued that this would be a positive social development, such as by weighing up the social costs and benefits  –  his argumentative strategy is entirely different (it is philosophical) – but nevertheless his opinion has a certain plausibility.6 But thinking that people interacting with each other differently will make the world a better place, is thinking of usefulness realistically; it is thinking that something about the world makes these interactions useful. Yet the endless description thesis tells us not to think of it like this, and instead think the description of this situation as more useful is itself simply a useful description. But if it is only useful to describe this world as more useful, we are back with the question “useful for what?” Rorty might say that it is useful from the perspective of our current description of usefulness to describe this world as more useful; because things we now describe as useful will become more plentiful. But once we accept that our current description of certain things as useful is itself just a useful description, we root usefulness in the description, rather than the things; and are left with no idea of what could make a description useful. In the end, we will not be able to avoid saying “useful for being useful” – and that means nothing. Despite his best efforts, useful description became Rorty’s version of the idealist’s substitute for physical reality. But unlike the subjective realities of traditional idealism, it was not a coherent substitute. Useful description makes sense as something physical, or something mental; but not as a self‐sustaining reality, since there are useful descriptions only because it is useful to describe them that way. The “them” immediately drops out and we no longer know what we are talking about. Of course, people 95

James Tartaglia

could adopt the linguistic practices of the endless description world, and receive the benefits Rorty envisages (I am construing these benefits the only way I can, namely realistically). But if I am right, then their beliefs would be incoherent; so on realizing this they would have to either go back to objective truth, or else learn to tolerate incoherence – if this kind of tolerance were to spread then I very much doubt it would turn out useful by anybody’s lights. But perhaps it would remain a secret known only to philosophers, and philosophy would soon be forgotten. This would require philosophy to have massive cultural influence one moment (in promoting an incoherent vision), then immediately slip away into obscurity. That is the best outcome I can think of for Rorty’s vision; but it requires an awful lot of “ifs,” and as far as I can see, he provides nothing more than a few hunches about possible utility to persuade us to take the social experiment. Now on the face of it, Rorty could have had almost all the benefits he desired by simply denying objective truth in morality, politics, and aesthetics, while leaving it in the physical world to keep his position coherent, insisting that this base truth cannot be filtered upwards to tell us what to do with our lives. After all, he was not promoting the social benefits of endless redescription of physical particles, and advocated a form of physicalism himself. Had he just made it ontological, his only significant loss would have been the lingering intuition that everything else then becomes second‐rate truth (which he could have argued against by trivializing, but not rejecting, ontology). His Nietzschean worry that we treat objective truth as a God substitute would be curtailed if such truth was limited to natural science, which he could have argued can never tell us anything redemptive. Most of the arguments of PMN could probably have stayed in place, in fact, had he not reached a conclusion that undermined them. So why go the whole hog and embrace endless redescription? Here is my redescription of his project; I am not sure if it is useful, but I am not sure why it would need to be.7 Rorty came to philosophical maturity in the radical days of the 1960s; as did Derrida, his continental philosophy counterpart. Rorty was an early reader of continental philosophy, which was then dominated by the bleak existentialist vision that there is no redemptive truth for us humans; life is meaningless, and the best we can do is to strive for authenticity. The physicalist analytic philosophy of the day, in which fundamental truth is confined to a dance of particles taking place indifferently to our hopes and fears, must have seemed to confirm this nihilism; and Rorty knew how much the austerity of the scientific worldview, and the hope for redemptive truth it seems to preclude, concerned the idealist philosophers whom he chose as the focus of his postgraduate education. Now Rorty liked to tell us that he first came to philosophy in search of redemptive truth, but became disillusioned (e.g. Rorty 1999). Moreover, according to his first wife’s testimony, as a young man Rorty had strong religious proclivities.8 So what could he do to enact the next revolutionary step in philosophy – as the times and his inclinations demanded – when redemptive truth seemed untenable, but the alternative of a nihilistic truth seemed intolerable? Reject all truth. Then reality and the human place within it becomes a matter of interpretation decided by us. We may not get redemptive truth, but without the world to get in the way – with the final authority figure silenced, so to speak – we at least recover the freedom to put a positive spin on things. 96

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Rorty gives the game away, I think, in a discussion of Sartre’s existentialism (Rorty 1979, 361–2). Sartre’s mistake, he says, was to think that it is only the “for‐itself ” (us) that can be endlessly redescribed, as opposed to the “in‐itself ” (the world), which has a fixed essence. Rorty, however, proposes to extend existentialism by rejecting all essentialism, such that everything is opened up to endless redescription. Thus at a stroke, the existentialist pathos of our distance from an indifferent world is negated, and the meaning of our situation becomes as malleable as the literature Rorty spent much of his life immersed in. Existentialism evolved into postmodernism. And Rorty held his time in thought.

Notes 1 Though he sometimes acknowledged being involved in a long‐term struggle (e.g. Rorty 1998, 41), he certainly knew what he wanted to achieve. 2 Rorty never actually identifies himself as an “edifying” philosopher in PMN, but he more or less equated it with “therapeutic” philosopher (Rorty 1979, 5), and after later abandoning the “edifying/systematic” distinction (Rorty 2010, 14), he did call himself a “therapeutic” philosopher (Rorty 1998, 142). 3 Rorty is here amending slightly the position he presented at Rorty (1982, 92) – by making it even more minimal. 4 Contra Neil Gross (2008), I think missionary zeal to realize this ambition presents a considerably more plausible candidate for what drove Rorty on, than do mercenary considerations for seizing opportunities for career advancement, and the pressure to develop an intellectual self‐ concept that would allow him to succeed within his institutional settings. Gross’s book is easily the strangest biography I have ever read (it is also the only biography by a sociologist I have ever read); if Rorty gave it his blessing in order to make a posthumous anti‐philosophical statement, then he really could not have done better. 5 Looking back at his earlier papers, I am not sure any of this was terribly new, except for the fact that Rorty no longer wanted to be pigeon‐holed as an eliminative materialist. 6 As does the opposite one that it would stifle creativity and generate no end of waffle. 7 For the full version of the story I am about to tell, within a much wider context, see Tartaglia (2016, esp. chapter 2, section 5). 8 I must admit that this seems very strange to me, given that even truth was to become too religious a notion for Rorty; but she says he was “dedicated to the greater glory of God through philosophy” (A. O. Rorty 1977, 40).

References Dworkin, R. 1991. “Pragmatism, Right Answers, and True Banality.” In Pragmatism in Law and Society, edited by M. Brint and W. Weaver, 359–88. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Despite the legal angle, this is the clearest, more forceful, and best exposition of the line of argument against Rorty which I take in this chapter (which originally derives from Putnam). Gross, N. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, I. 1933 [1787]. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. Malachowski, A. 2010. The New Pragmatism. Durham, UK: Acumen.

97

James Tartaglia

An accessible and engaging book, which usefully places Rorty in the context of other important pragmatist philosophers; though Rorty is very much the focus. Putnam, H. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, A. O. 1977. “Dependency, Individuality, and Work.” In Working It Out, edited by S. Ruddick and P. Daniels, 38–54. New York: Pantheon Books. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. “Letter 4.” In Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty, edited by A. Balslev, 67–74. Atlanta: Scholars Press. —. 1997 [1956]. “Introduction.” In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by W. Sellars, 1–12. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, 3–23. London: Penguin Books. —. 2000. “Response to Michael Williams.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 213–19. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. “Intellectual Biography.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by R. Auxier and L. Hahn, 3–24. Chicago: Open Court. —. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, J. 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sellars, W. 1997 [1956]. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tartaglia, J. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. London: Routledge. This is the only comprehensive guide to the text of PMN, and is geared to the needs of students; so how could I fail to recommend it? It explains Rorty’s arguments and the various philosophical positions with which he presupposes the reader’s familiarity; plus there is plenty of criticism, which is useful for essays and exams. —. 2008. “Consciousness, Intentionality, and the Mark of the Mental: Rorty’s Challenge.” The Monist 91(2): 324–46. —. 2014. “Rorty’s Thesis of the Cultural Specificity of Philosophy.” Philosophy East and West: A Quarterly of Comparative Philosophy 65(4): 1016–36. —. 2016. Philosophy in a Meaningless Life: A System of Nihilism, Consciousness and Reality. London: Bloomsbury. Williamson, T. 2007. The Philosophy of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

Further Reading Ayer, A. J. 1971 [1936]. Language, Truth and Logic. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. This passionate, crystal clear, and short classic should be compulsory reading for all philosophy students anyway; but it makes for particularly useful background reading to PMN, since Rorty’s book is diametrically opposed to almost everything it stands for. Blackburn, S. 2005. Truth. London: Allen Lane. Though Rorty is not always mentioned by name, his views pervade this book; and since Blackburn thinks they are crazy, it is very useful for those seeking a critical angle.

98

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Guignon, C. and Hiley, D., eds. 2003. Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A very useful collection of essays for anyone studying PMN; especially for the editor’s introduction and the essay by Michael Williams. Kuipers, R. 2013. Richard Rorty: Contemporary American Thinkers. London: Bloomsbury. This is the best book on Rorty’s philosophy as a whole; and it contains plenty of useful stuff on PMN. Malachowski, A., ed. 1990. Reading Rorty: Critical Responses to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Beyond. Oxford: Blackwell. This classic remains the best collection of critical essays on PMN. Rorty, R. 1970. “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology.” in J. Smith (ed.) Contemporary American Philosophy, London: Allen and Unwin; reprinted in S. Leach and J. Tartaglia, eds. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty wrote this essay when the ideas that were to form PMN were still fresh in his mind; it encapsulates the main part of the plot in a nutshell. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. Rorty was rarely more straightforward and engaging than in this collection of essays, and although most of them do not relate to PMN, the introduction and essays 2, 3, and 12 are definitely worth a look.

99

6 The Uses of Philosophy after the Collapse of Metaphysics: Ironism and Liberalism in Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity COLIN KOOPMAN

The metaphysicians. I am speaking about the greatest misfortune of modern philosophy … Friedrich Nietzsche, as cited by Michel Foucault (2013 [1971], 29n5)

1  His Most Rortian Book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is the most Rortian of all of Richard Rorty’s books, perhaps indeed the most quintessentially Rortian work among all of Rorty’s writings. Looking back over his career in April 2007, Rorty wrote in his “Intellectual Biography” of Contingency as “still my favorite among my own books.”1 It may be that Rorty is more famous for his arguments in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature published ten years prior to Contingency, but the upshot of those arguments is insufficient for picking out Rorty’s particular appeal from among a wide number of similar twentieth‐century assaults on foundationalist philosophy. The brilliance of Mirror, we might observe, was not so much a feature of originality of thesis, but rather of vividness of argument. The book’s central argumentative thesis can after all be identified with claims by a raft of other thinkers alongside whom Rorty is profitably read: Wittgenstein, Dewey, Heidegger, as well as Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and, more recently (well after Mirror was published), Brandom. And where Mirror made Rorty famous, other of his writings made him rather infamous. The defense of postmodern left liberalism that Rorty constructed in a number of writings collected in his four volumes of Philosophical Papers and in Achieving Our Country was, without doubt, one of the most influential intellectual provocations of the late decades of the twentieth century. However, these arguments too are insufficient for picking out the unique diacritic of Rorty’s contribution to contemporary cultural critique. For the gist of his pragmatist defense of liberalism sits quite comfortably with some of the most impressive statements of recent political philosophers: Rawls and Habermas readily come to mind and if we look further back then the resonance with Dewey on this point too is unmistakable. A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

100

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

In searching for what really distinguishes Rorty as a thinker whose name by itself justifies a philosophical orientation (if we want, in other words, to justify the plausibility of the very idea of a distinctively “Rortian” style of thought), it is to Contingency that we must look as the center of a constellation within which Mirror, Achieving, and many other writings orbit. What is most distinctively Rortian in Contingency is the book’s deft combination of the severe philosophical antifoundationalism that connects the Wittgenstein–Sellars strain in philosophy with the committed political liberalism of the Rawls–Habermas tendency in recent political theory. Rorty’s pragmatism, in other words, is a distinctively doubled philosophy formed at the twain of a rigorous antifoundational philosophical perspective and a committed postmetaphysical cultural criticism. Rorty’s unique appeal, were we to put it in terms of the name‐dropping jargon characteristic of his writing, consists in his able development of a Davidsonian Rawlsianism, a Habermasian Sellarsianism, and other such provocative philosophical combinations. Confirmation of this by Rorty’s own hand is offered in unpublished draft notes for Contingency that I shall here be drawing upon.2 In these notes, Rorty describes his project in the illuminating terms of a “Rawls‐Davidson way of thinking.”3 There are indeed a raft of paired figures that form the heroic pantheon of Rorty’s liberal ironist utopia: Wittgenstein and Mill, Derrida and Habermas, the pragmatist Dewey and the liberal Dewey, to name just a few. What matters most is not the impressive multiplicity of names, but the pairings achieved therein. These pairings are not just feats of philosophical redescription. They are also crucially important contributions to the history of twentieth‐century philosophy. Philosophy then, as is still the case now, faced a number of central challenges as it began to absorb insights (often pinned to the work of Nietzsche) about the deaths of God, metaphysics, transcendentality, and so forth. What Rorty helps us see is that none of these deaths should be taken as the death from which we would finally be able to extrapolate the lesson we need. What we lose grip on when metaphysics goes, from Rorty’s perspective, is the very idea of any idea or argument being the single ur‐event of contemporary culture. The death of metaphysics, thus, is not an insight from which follows important results, like the politics of liberalism. Rorty instead rigorously held to the line that no particular politics follows from antifoundational philosophy.4 He endorsed the rather more deflated view that liberalism begins to look increasingly attractive to a culture that has lost its stomach for metaphysics while at the same time the loss of an appetite for metaphysics is facilitated by the ever‐widening cultural consumption of liberal democracy. On this view, antifoundationalism and liberalism are fit for one another but without either being the groundwork for the other. In developing this view, Rorty managed to combine antifoundationalism and liberalism in a way that is thus resoundingly, and sometimes even surprisingly, consistent with both. This quality of his thought helps us pick out what is unique, and forceful, in the swerve of his work. Rorty’s fame and infamy are in many ways a result of his paradigmatic grasp of the condition of philosophy in recent decades. For the central bid of Contingency is also the central, if not also enormously controversial, tendency of much of late twentieth‐ century philosophy itself. Contingency thus strikingly represents the peculiar position of the philosopher today, midst all our opportunities, and all our discomforts. That Rorty disturbs so many philosophers is better read as a symptom of contemporary 101

Colin Koopman

philosophy’s lack of comfort with itself than as a sign of any intellectual mistake or interpretive overreach on Rorty’s part. Rorty’s work shows why we might wish to abandon the grand philosophical project of discerning metaphysical foundations. But it also shows why doing so need not involve an abdication of philosophical critique of every possible variety. This remains important in contemporary philosophy insofar as recent fashions are tending once again toward a renewal of vigorous metaphysical programs as well as unrelenting critiques of liberal modes and strategies. For in a context where it has quite suddenly become fashionable again to become a metaphysical antiliberal, it repays to revisit Rorty so that we might observe at least why some remain unmoved by these renegade revivalisms. What contemporary philosophy can, and should, continue to draw from Contingency in particular is a useful pair of conceptual handles by which we can pick up the two central themes of antifoundationalism and liberalism that Rorty so distinctively spun together. The first of these handles is Rorty’s metaphilosophical distinction between the ironist and the metaphysician. This distinction helps put Rorty in a position to mount a non‐metaphysical criticism of metaphysical philosophy. This is the position he shares, at least in rough outline, with a broad Wittgensteinean lineage in recent philosophy. Rorty’s particular handle on this distinction offers an especially powerful way of putting that general criticism into motion without collapsing into a purely negative mode of philosophizing the end of philosophy. The second handle involves another metaphilosophical distinction, this one based on the familiar liberal distinction between the public and the private. By invoking and reshaping this distinction Rorty is not only able to immunize philosophical practice against tendencies to overdraw the anti‐metaphysical lesson of his first distinction, but is also able to maintain a place for self‐aware forms of postmetaphysical philosophy in the midst of his self‐titled liberal ironist utopia. It is my contention that these two distinctions taken together represent the organizing center of Rorty’s many arguments and redescriptions in Contingency, and so also of his broader oeuvre more generally. Both of these distinctions are thoroughly controversial. Interestingly, however, most (if not all) of the controversy stems from taking either of the two distinctions on their own. Rorty’s importance, I shall argue, consisted in his offering a way of seeing how these distinctions can be packaged together. When in motion with one another these two distinctions summarize the indelible mark, which too many hasty readers regard as a simplistic stain, that Rorty continues to leave on contemporary intellectual culture. Rorty opens Contingency with the portrait of a striking figure who neatly encapsulates the terms of my argument. In the “Introduction” he states that the hero of his book is the “liberal ironist.”5 This is the figure in whom is combined the familiar liberal impulse to stare down unnecessary suffering wherever we confront it with the historicist sensibility that no set of convictions or commitments is finally unrevisable because legible in the unwavering fabric of reality itself. What is provocative about the figure of the liberal ironist, importantly, is neither their liberalism nor their ironism each taken on its own. The provocation consists rather in the combination of a fierce commitment to the eradication of cruelty with a sense of the contingency of even that commitment. This is provocative because we tend to think that fierce commitments are incompatible with a reflexive sense of their own contingency, and that thoroughgoing contingency is insufficient for the sustenance of moral and social commitment. But, as Rorty claims on 102

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

the penultimate page of Contingency, “There is no neutral, noncircular way to defend the liberal’s claim that cruelty is the worst thing we do.”6 To get us toward the point at which we might find comfort with this conclusion, Rorty suggests at the outset of the book that, “A postmetaphysical culture seems to me no more impossible than a postreligious one, and equally desirable.”7 Ironism and liberalism, in motion together, are Rorty’s offering for how inhabitants of a postmetaphysical culture might achieve such coherence, perhaps even such desirability.

2  Ironists and Metaphysicians Rorty is a writer whose style operates through cuts. The cuts that pervade his writing should not, however, be taken for dichotomies. They are, rather, functional and instrumental distinctions that can help bring complex problems into view. Insofar as cuts fail to illuminate they should be abandoned. But where they do offer light we should not hesitate to use them. The characteristic light that Rorty brought into philosophy, I am suggesting, was mostly a matter of an innovative series of distinctions in exactly this instrumental sense. The first distinction that Rorty defends in the text of Contingency itself, that is after the “Introduction” sets the stage for the book by laying out in merely summary fashion the crucial distinguishing figure of the “liberal ironist” noted above, is rooted in an argumentative context that was central for the achievements of Mirror published ten years prior. In the first pages of Contingency Rorty claims that, “The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not.”8 He elaborates: “To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.”9 This first distinction of Contingency is a redescription of the most crucial distinction defended by Rorty in Mirror: that between causation and justification. Rorty’s claim is that we should keep separate the idea that there is a causal order over which humans do not exert complete control from the idea that this causal order contains its very own inferential or justificatory structure which it is the task of humans to read off of natural causal processes. Keeping these two ideas separate, Rorty claims, helps us get over the idea that the truth itself is out there. There is such a thing as truth, and the world is out there, but the world is not out there in such a way that the truth is out there. Rorty suggests that, “The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.”10 This is the idea that the world carries within itself its own authority. This is the animating idea of philosophical metaphysics and a raft of attendant enterprises. The ostensible object of critique in Mirror is what Rorty called “representationalist epistemology,” which is the project of analyzing the family of views according to which human knowledge is a product of human minds construed as containers for ideas whose purpose it is to accurately represent real states of affairs outside of those minds. Representationalist epistemology is intimately tied to another object of critique referred 103

Colin Koopman

to by Rorty as “epistemological foundationalism,” which is the idea that there exist some basic or foundational truths, such as a distinctively privileged class of epistemic representations, that form the ground out of which all other viable candidates for knowledge can be elaborated. Representationalist epistemology is not the only form of foundationalist epistemology, but it can be assumed to be the most plausible such theory on offer. Rorty’s arguments against representationalism thus do not cut down every single form of foundationalism, but rather the seemingly best form of foundationalism. The implications for foundationalism of the demise of representationalism are, then, obvious enough. Connected to both of these epistemological tendencies is a philosophical strategy connecting epistemology itself to metaphysics. If one is arguing for a foundationalist epistemology, then it helps to have in view a philosophical metaphysics according to which one could discover and certify the purported foundations of knowledge that one is analyzing. Without such a foundationalist project it is not clear what work could be left for a philosophical metaphysics, if any. Rorty’s arguments against representationalism, foundationalism, and metaphysics‐first philosophy in Mirror are complex and not always easy to navigate without careful guidance. They can, however, be fairly even if only provisionally summarized in terms of the organizing distinction between causes and reasons. The chapter in which Rorty develops that distinction is Chapter 4 – the central chapter of the book.11 The heroes of this organizing distinction are W. V. O. Quine and Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty tells his reader that the “Quine‐Sellars attack on the Kantian notion of … representations … amounts to a protest against an archetypical philosophical problem: the problem of how to reduce norms, rules, and justifications to facts, generalizations, and explanations.”12 The details of this double attack  –  the Sellarsian assault on the framework of epistemic givenness and the Quinean unbalancing of any stable distinction between the empirical and the conceptual in the way of knowledge – are crucial to the philosophical history of the twentieth century. 13 Of equal interest is Rorty’s combination of the Quine‐Sellars attack with Davidson’s then‐recent insights in philosophy of language.14 But both are beyond my scope here.15 For present purposes, it will suffice to take note of Rorty’s conclusion in Chapter  4: “the epistemological tradition confused the causal process of acquiring knowledge with questions concerning its justification … Sellars’s criticism of the Myth of the Given and Quine’s criticism of the notion of truth by virtue of meaning [are] two detailed developments of this more general criticism.”16 What is most provocative about Rorty’s argument is the consequences he draws from it for epistemology. By taking all three of Quine, Sellars, and Davidson seriously, Rorty argued, we put ourselves in a good position to recognize “the abandonment of the search for privileged representations as the abandonment of a ‘theory of knowledge.’”17 The attack on representationalism that Rorty mounted, then, is not a critique of a bad theory of knowledge in favor of the one correct theory of knowledge. It is rather an attempt to get over the very idea of a theory of knowledge. This is where Rorty wants to take Sellars, Quine, and Davidson (the true heroes of the book even if Rorty himself named Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger as his main philosophical inspirations).18 That none of the three readily complied is no doubt of interest, but it is also another story. What matters most for present purposes is the uses to which Rorty put these three figures. 104

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

Consider that immediately following the first quotation above in which Rorty specifies the terms of the “Quine‐Sellars attack” he offers a striking qualification of his own argument: “We will not find neutral metaphilosophical ground on which to argue the issues Quine and Sellars raise. For they are not offering an ‘account’ to be tested for ‘adequacy’ but pointing to the futility of offering an ‘account.’”19 This is an admission that should give any standard philosophical reader pause. In the course of a purported argument against epistemological representationalism, indeed one of the most celebrated arguments against that view from all of twentieth‐century philosophy, we find the author of the argument admitting that the argument itself cannot be settled on neutral ground. Rorty concludes that “A holistic approach to knowledge [such as that endorsed by Sellars, Quine, and, of course, Rorty himself] is not a matter of antifoundationalist polemic, but a distrust of the whole epistemological enterprise.”20 But Quine and Sellars had sought to naturalize epistemology, not distrust it. What exactly is going on here? If this reflexive positioning of his own argument is adequate to the terms of the argument itself, then Rorty’s maneuvers in Mirror are better seen not as entrants into the philosophical contest between competing epistemologies so much as moments in an intellectual historical survey of the dialectic of then‐recent philosophical epistemology that reveals the unraveling of the very field under survey. Rorty’s achievement in Mirror, perhaps, are due less to originality of thesis and execution of argumentative rigor, and more to a powerful combination of historical interpretations and textual redescriptions that enabled him to put a familiar argumentative context in doubt. Seen in this way, Mirror is less an argument in a familiar context and more a history of the breakdown of a certain argumentative context. To read Mirror in these terms is, however, to read the text against itself. Despite occasional intrusions such as the uncomfortable admission that his argument cannot possibly be neutral, the text on the whole tends to present the reader with a forceful series of powerful arguments. Rorty is clearly wrestling with this self‐presentation in the book. In the “Introduction” he describes his efforts as part of an attempt to “set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines” and explicitly contrasts this to “arguing against” the core of classical philosophy.21 Having stated this, Rorty then proceeded to develop exquisitely precise arguments against epistemology and metaphysics. If Mirror expressed a dawning awareness of the tension implicit in any such argument, Contingency is metaphilosophically self‐obsessive about its own status as a set of philosophical maneuvers. Rorty is here still clearly wrestling with a contrast between “setting aside” and “arguing against” but in this case the contrast itself becomes a central organizing theme. When Rorty returns in the first chapter of Contingency to the distinction between justification and causation that had been central in Mirror’s brief against representationalist epistemology, he picks right up where his Quine‐Sellars attack had left off – with Davidson. Davidson’s critique of the notion of language as a medium for representation, namely the idea that language is “a third thing intervening between self and reality,”22 is (among certain other of his views) taken by Rorty as support for the now‐familiar distinction between causal happenings and justificatory inferences. This distinction does away with the notion that there are truth‐makers (such as facts) out there that make our sentences true. As Davidson put it, “Nothing … no thing, makes sentences and theories true.”23 Getting rid of truth‐makers helps us get 105

Colin Koopman

us over the conflation between causation and justification since that conflation turns upon the seemingly enticing idea that there are nonhuman authorities that make our beliefs true. What Rorty sees Davidson as getting by without is precisely what Sellars and Quine had earlier taught him to attack. The central upshot of this analytic trifecta is also the central theme of Rorty’s entire philosophical career, namely that we should “try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi‐divinity, where we treat everything  –  our language, our conscience, our community, as a product of time and chance.”24 Contingency makes use of themes already central to Mirror. But Contingency operationalizes Mirror’s themes differently. The Davidsonian insights that now stand in for the Quinean–Sellars attack are similar in substance, but Rorty is also here much more explicit about the fact that he has no neutral ground to stand upon in proffering these insights. If Mirror at times interrupts its arguments to mention this point, then Contingency is positively obsessive about it and is structured around developing a form of philosophical practice that would be adequate to its own conclusions. For example, Rorty introduces his discussion of Davidson as follows: “Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may be used to describe a variety of topics.”25 This general theme returns time and time again in the book.26 This rhetorical theme culminates in what I would argue is the central organizing chapter of Contingency, which once again happens to be the fourth chapter. Here Rorty self‐consciously develops his contrast between philosophical “argument” and philosophical “redescription” in terms that help produce one of the book’s two most important handles: the distinction between the ironist and the metaphysician. This distinction enables Rorty to remount Mirror’s central criticisms of the conflation of causes and reasons. Whereas Mirror seemed at times to want to offer a definitive argument against this conflation, Contingency operates differently. The risk of the approach in Mirror is that it could implicate Rorty in a foundationalist critique of foundationalism, or a metaphysical critique of metaphysics. But Rorty realized already in Mirror that he cannot possibly give an argument against metaphysics without immersing himself in metaphysics and that he cannot possibly knock down foundationalism once and for all without propping himself up on some purported foundation. Rorty thus took as a goal for Contingency to elaborate a philosophical modality whereby one cannot only evade these traps but also positively make space for alternative forms of philosophical engagement. These alternatives are rooted in an attempt to gain heightened reflexive self‐ consciousness about what it means to “set aside” metaphysical philosophy and do philosophy otherwise. Rorty opens Chapter 4 of Contingency with an explication of the contrast between ironists and metaphysicians that was only casually announced in the “Introduction.” He spells out the distinction in terms of two different relations we might have to what he calls our “final vocabularies,” the words with which “we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives.”27 Final vocabularies structure our deepest commitments and our deepest understandings of the commitments of others. With this idea in hand, Rorty defines the ironist in terms of three conditions: the ironist deeply doubts their own final vocabulary, the ironist realizes that their own final 106

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

­ ocabulary is insufficient for resolving these doubts (either for or against the terms of v the vocabulary itself), and the ironist does not think of their final vocabulary as any closer to or further from reality than any other final vocabulary.28 The ironist is the figure who is able to reflexively critique their own final vocabulary without assuming that the terms of any such critique are themselves beyond further critique. The figure of the ironist, we might say, is committed to the practice of immanent critique. They are willing, indeed eager, to critique their own commitments and they regard any such critique as itself contingent and so subject to further such immanent critique. The ironist is the figure who is never able to rest contentedly with any position as final. In this sense, the term “final vocabulary” is infelicitous. For his point is that there are some people for whom no vocabulary is really “final” in the normal sense of that word, some people for whom even the most precious commitment can be subjected to any manner of tests of doubt. The ironist confesses to a deep commitment to some portion of their vocabulary, but forswears backing up that depth by calling it “final” or “real” or “ultimate.” The metaphysician, by contrast, does exactly that. The metaphysician, says Rorty, “assumes that the presence of a term in his own final vocabulary ensures that it refers to something which has a real essence.”29 The metaphysician is prone to this assumption because it is the only way they have of dealing with any skepticism that confronts their own final vocabulary. Everyone’s final vocabulary, Rorty surmises, comes to be challenged at one point or another. Some people meet these challenges by drolly repeating the platitudes of their context. Others, however, take the challenges seriously. The metaphysician is the figure who takes the challenge as an opportunity to defend their final vocabulary by going beyond their platitudes in order to save them. The metaphysician is the figure who searches for essences that would give real standing to the platitudes built into their final vocabulary. The metaphysician gives incontestable definitions, stops the regress of skeptical questioning, and grasps something special that demonstrates the indubitable finality of their own final vocabulary. The ironist, by contrast, also takes the challenges seriously, but delights in doubts about any and all platitudes, and has long since reconciled themselves to the probability of the inevitability of such doubts. In developing the contrast between these two figures, Rorty is explicit about the contrast between argument and redescription: “The metaphysician thinks that there is an overriding intellectual duty to present arguments for one’s controversial views – arguments which will start from relatively uncontroversial premises.”30 Rorty, by the time he is writing Contingency, clearly does not believe this. Hence his argument on behalf of the distinction between reasons and causes is never presented as if it could possibly be knock‐down or even uncontroversial. In introducing Davidson as a champion of that distinction, Rorty tells us he will “make him look attractive” without resorting to “argument in favor of his views.” It should not be underestimated how frustrating this typically feels to professional philosophers whose disciplinary identity is by and large constructed around a fetishization not only of argument, but even more so a particular style of argumentation. The ironist, says Rorty, is not opposed to argument, even deductive and airtight logical arguments. But the ironist is also not, as it were, automatically impressed with argument, nor are they convinced that argument always deserves rational priority. There is, it is Rorty’s brief, no special argumentative procedure or method that the philosopher is a special expert in that would give them a default 107

Colin Koopman

advantage in any disputational context. The belief that there is such a procedure is the definitive assumption of the method peculiar to that figure called the metaphysician. The metaphysician thinks of themselves as having a method that guarantees argumentative victory. The metaphysician is all about depth. The ironist is more humble. They substitute range and breadth and quickness for ponderous depth. This no doubt encourages the ironist to always be cautious, sometimes even downright anxious, when they find themselves in the company of metaphysicians who would propose to drag them back into metaphysics. The ironist, says Rorty, is a “dialectical” thinker whose “method is redescription rather than inference.”31 Here we meet with another instance in Contingency of a term that is easily misleading. Rorty draws on Hegel as the inspiration for the idea that the ironist is dialectical. But, most historians of philosophy will note, Hegel was a metaphysician par excellence. His pursuit of the dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit not only ruthlessly undermines every competing moment of philosophical weight by exposing the inner contradictions that necessitate its failure, but also culminates in the grandiose claim that this pursuit itself offers a glimmer of the Absolute, or Reason, or what may as well be God in the grand Metaphysicial fashion. Suffice it to say that Rorty reads Hegel quite differently. Rorty’s Hegel pursues the dialectic without ever so much as suggesting a need for argumentative finality. The wisdom of Hegel, for Rorty’s purposes, is rather just that dialectical pursuit undermines any hope at all for finality. Thus Hegel embodies “the partial substitution of redescription for inference” and the possibility that philosophical thought may proceed otherwise than by way of argumentative exposure of contradiction.32 Hegel, says Rorty, helped “de‐metaphysize philosophy.”33 This may seem quite a distance from other more familiar images of Hegel, but it would in any event be consistent with Rorty’s own self‐conception to redescribe for his reader an unfamiliar but provocative Hegel. The intricate details of Rorty’s rereading of Hegel are, however, once again outside the scope of my survey here. They can safely be left for another occasion since Rorty himself offers a usable alternative to Hegelian dialectic as the name for what the ironist does. After his initial homage to Hegel, Rorty notes, “A more up‐to‐date word for what I have been calling ‘dialectic’ would be ‘literary criticism.’”34 “Literary criticism” was Rorty’s term in Contingency for what he once called “culture criticism,”35 and what he eventually came to call, in the “Preface” to his final volume of Collected Papers, “cultural politics.”36 The ironists who adopt these modes of criticism are working at “enlarging our acquaintance” and “enlarging the canon.”37 They are unlike metaphysicians who would claim special insight, by virtue of possession of metaphysical method, into what is really real. Rather, the only special insight that the literary‐critical ironist has is that they are familiar with a much wider number of final vocabularies than are most other persons, and this only because they spend a lot more of their time reading strange and exciting books. The critics, Rorty notes, are “moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around.”38 As described in his draft notes for Contingency, the ironist literary critic is “the figure who rises triumphantly out of the muck, if only b[y] virtue of having the kind of mind which is a sheer network of quotations rather than an ‘outlook’ or ‘method’ or ‘perspective.’”39 The critic is in a better position than most of the rest of us to throw a final vocabulary into doubt or disarray not because they know something 108

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

that nobody else knows, but only because they have probably seen similar such vocabularies thrown into similar differing kinds of disarray before. They are masters not of argument but of redescription – purveyors not of deduction but of abduction. They are, just like Hegel in the Phenomenology, stupefyingly successful at taking any tangled position and pulling at precisely those loose threads that make the whole thing magically unravel in an instant. This is, Rorty insists, “not an argumentative procedure … but simply a literary skill.”40 Rorty exploits the model of literary and cultural criticism in Contingency to evade the possibility that his critique of metaphysics is itself metaphysical. Rorty at one point defines “the problem of ironist theory” as the difficulty of “how to overcome authority without claiming authority.”41 The difficulty indeed runs deep. Philosophy has long been aware of the treacherous path of evading metaphysical dogmatism. Indeed one might even define much of modern philosophy as charting that path. Probably as early as Hume, but certainly beginning with Kant, modern philosophy by and large has been an attempt to wrestle with the very question that structures the development of Rorty’s line of thinking in Contingency. This is why I have insisted that the book is remarkably self‐aware of its situation as perched on a crucial topic of modern philosophy. If Kant was the first to blow the whistle on metaphysics, then Hegel was the first to really spell out the difficulty involved in blowing that whistle. This is why Hegel, for Rorty, was the first ironist.42 Philosophy ever since has been struggling with its own ironism. For Rorty in Contingency, the most characteristic figures in this struggle are Nietzsche,43 Heidegger,44 and Derrida.45 Rorty’s fascinating readings, or redescriptions, of these figures are not my concern here. What is important is rather Rorty’s attempt to navigate the treacherous trenches of evading metaphysics without lapsing back into metaphysics. To recognize the difficulty involved it is crucial to note that any position that seeks to refute or disprove metaphysics practically guarantees a return back into metaphysics. To be against metaphysics is already to be helplessly caught up in the practice of metaphysics. This, for Rorty’s purposes, is the lesson we learn above all from Nietzsche and Heidegger. The true ironist, however, would be a nonmetaphysician rather than an anti‐ metaphysician who thereby becomes once again a metaphysician. This helps explain why Rorty’s ironist steadfastly refuses to argue against metaphysics, preferring instead to redescribe certain metaphysical tendencies in such a way as to provoke doubt while redescribing certain non‐metaphysical critical and literary strategies in such a way as to provoke admiration. Rorty thus seeks to engender a philosophical criticism that would be outside of the scope of metaphysics without requiring an anti‐metaphysics to make its way there. Rorty’s ironist, to place this figure in a quick typology, would like to situate themselves somewhere between the extremes of the metaphysician and the denier. The ironist does not focus on whether metaphysics is good or bad. They focus, rather, on how they can pursue their projects without having to take any kind of final stand. So as much as possible, the ironist seeks to evade the obligation of being either for or against metaphysics. The ironist simply wants to be allowed to refrain from metaphysics. This view is probably provocative only insofar as the ironist also claims to be doing something called philosophy.46 109

Colin Koopman

What the ironist really wants is to be allowed to neglect metaphysics and still get on with doing something that they would call philosophy. Indeed, ironism itself may seem hardly needful outside of the context of doing philosophy. Perhaps the occasional sociologist or physicist may benefit from ironist ideas in case the campus metaphysician ever bursts into their office and insists that they are obliged to do some metaphysical accounting. But for most people, this seems well outside of what would be expected. Consider the dentist working away on the metaphysician’s cavities. Would we expect the metaphysician, either prior to or just coming out of the stupor of the nitrous oxide, to sit up in the chair and demand of the dentist their metaphysical accounting of teeth: are they real or not, and if so then what kind of reality do they instantiate, material or ideal? This seems far‐fetched. And yet at the same time every professional philosopher knows that there are rafts of metaphysicians who would suggest, and indeed have suggested in print, that everyone (including the dentist, presumably) is under an obligation at some time or other (but when exactly?) to do their metaphysical accounting. It is precisely in dealing with such rudenesses of the metaphysician that ironism as an all‐purpose position may be useful. But if ironism is possibly of help in such an all‐ purpose fashion, surely it is quite probably of use in the rather narrow context of philosophy. The philosopher is the person who is most likely to be confronted, in their everyday chores, with the inquisitions of the metaphysicians demanding an accounting. Indeed it is not at all uncommon in the context of contemporary professionalized philosophy to be told that any philosopher who has not criticized their own metaphysical presuppositions is not really doing philosophy at all, but maybe something else proximate to but not identical with philosophy (maybe it is psychology, or maybe applied philosophy, or maybe “just” the history of philosophy, or maybe it is even sophistry). Ironism offers the philosopher inoculation against this insistence. For ironism is the studied denial not of metaphysics itself, but only of strong forms of pro‐metaphysical argument. All ironism involves is the denial of the claim that the philosopher (or more broadly, the intellectual, or even more broadly, everyone) stands in a special kind of relation to metaphysics that entails an obligation to undertake an accounting of one’s own metaphysical presuppositions. The ironist is the figure who is working out a way to just be allowed to leave such accounting to the side. The ironist takes up an attitude toward metaphysics that is the equivalent of the secularist toward evangelical theology. They simply want the freedom to not have to engage. For, the ironist wonders, what is the real force of the must when it is insisted that one must do metaphysics? What kind of obligation is this? One must do it so as to avoid the risks of incoherence and stupidity? But plenty of people had never heard of metaphysics – were they all incoherent or stupid? One must do it or risk moral failure? But has every decent person really made use of metaphysics to be decent – and if not, then what sort of immorality is actually at stake? Or is it that one simply must do it as a matter of (logical? metaphysical?) necessity? Does that mean that one is always already doing metaphysics whether one admits to it or not? But in that case why should anyone insist that everyone else has got to do what is inevitable anyway? If the idea is that one inevitably does do metaphysics such that one really ought to admit that one is doing it, so that one can do it more self‐consciously and presumably better, then this only moves back the same line of questioning one step further. For then the ironist simply wonders 110

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

what is involved in the claim that one must better one’s metaphysics? Does that mean that we must be better metaphysicians in order to avoid being incoherent or immoral? If so, then it will just be asked again if all coherent and decent persons have always self‐ consciously striven for a better metaphysics. It seems unbelievable that anyone would actually assert that.

3  Public and Private What is the metaphysician arguing in favor of when they claim that there is a distinctive province of philosophy called metaphysics that would bestow benefits, or confer obligations, on everyone? Who gets to specify what this province is and what methods operationalize it? Has there not always been unending dispute about the substantive contents and procedural methods of any and every metaphysics anyway? These sorts of questions have a charge when applied to any culture in which metaphysics is featured as one among many practices. They are especially charged, however, in a cultural context in which metaphysics has historically featured as the center of a practice of philosophy that is beginning to question that centrality. This is to say that questions concerning the particular obligations we are under with respect to metaphysics are quite charged in our own culture, and especially in the context of what would hope to remain philosophical but not metaphysical in our culture. This is to suggest that Rorty’s ironism is not at all an attempt to bring philosophy to an end – a position he was continually charged with but which he dutifully rejected on numerous occasions.47 Rorty’s ironism is much more concerned, rather, with bringing philosophy forward into a non‐metaphysical present. Rorty’s philosophy is focused around his hope that “a postmetaphysical culture” would become equally desirable as a “postreligious one.”48 This does not mean that Rorty thinks that metaphysical philosophy must be banned any more than he or anyone else thinks that religious practice ought to be banned. Rorty thinks rather that we are just not under the obligation to account for ourselves in metaphysical terms, even though attempts at such an accounting should be quite allowable. The central mark of a postmetaphysical culture is not that nobody in that culture does metaphysics, but only that everyone is free to engage or not engage metaphysics as they see fit, and within the bounds of certain shared standards of decency. This last qualification is more important than it may at first blush seem. How can Rorty allow that metaphysics might persist in the context of an ironist utopia that demands that metaphysics need not be obligatory? Would not metaphysics be that which presents itself as always already obligatory anyway? And if so then would it not be impossible to insure its maintenance in an ironist context that was primarily structured around the denial of an obligation to engage in metaphysics? This, as Rorty sees it, is a question best left to the metaphysicians. The ironist knows that they cannot make metaphysics seem impossible, incoherent, or immoral. And thus the ironist also knows that they cannot make it impossible that the metaphysician may find a way after all to impose metaphysics as an obligation, thus bringing ironism to an end. In other words, the ironist is not, and cannot be, interested in winning once and for all. They are steadfastly unwilling to enforce the impossibility of a return of metaphysics. 111

Colin Koopman

Understanding this helps us see why the fate of ironism is bound up with the fate of liberalism. It helps us grasp why the crucial first handle of Contingency, Rorty’s distinction between irony and metaphysics, is made more usable and attractive by its combination with the book’s crucial second handle, namely Rorty’s use of the familiar liberal distinction between public and private.49 For the ironist’s desire to insulate philosophy, as well as the rest of culture, from metaphysics cannot take the form of an authoritarian stance that would forbid metaphysics. Rorty uses liberalism to avoid the metaphysical forbidding of metaphysics – substituting for it instead a liberal, perhaps even a critical, limiting of metaphysics. Recall that the ironist is the figure who is, at core, antiauthoritarian, the figure about whom Rorty says, “He managed to debunk authority without setting himself up as authority, to debunk the ambitions of the powerful without sharing them.”50 The most that the ironist is willing to do is to insure that those metaphysical aspirations that involve inflicting cruelty and suffering on the innocent are frustrated so far as is possible. The ironist would not make metaphysics impossible. The ironist would rather seek to help make possible a culture in which metaphysics is unlikely to lead to unnecessary harms. This is why the ironist is perfectly suited to the liberal, whose distinguishing cut between the public and the private gives the ironist a way of protecting culture from metaphysical urges without having to engage in a metaphysical refutation of metaphysics itself. In short, metaphysics can persist as private, but cannot be secured any standing in public other than what it earns there on a same footing with all other contenders for public standing (including not only ethics, religion, and science, but also baseball, punk rock, and deer hunting). In making use of the distinction between public and private in Contingency Rorty found a way to help mount his metaphilosophical distinction between ironism and metaphysics. For the distinction in liberal cultural morality between public and private helps the ironist to take an ironic stance on metaphysics, rather than a metaphysical stance on metaphysics. Recall that this is for Rorty “the problem of ironist theory.”51 A metaphysical stance on metaphysics would involve the idea that we are under an obligation to eschew any (or, alternately, to adopt some) metaphysics. An ironist stance is enabled by the more historicist idea of leaving everything up to time and chance. The ironist maintains the possibility of metaphysics in private and also insures thereby that metaphysics could return to its former standing in public should it satisfy any pressing needs there. The ironist refuses to rule out metaphysics. Why? Because the gesture of finally ruling out anything is itself not in keeping with the ironist attitude. Such a gesture is just one more attempt at a metaphysics. “Ironists should,” Rorty thus recommends, “reconcile themselves to a private‐public split within their final vocabularies, to the fact that resolution of doubts about one’s final vocabulary has nothing in particular to do with attempts to save other people from pain and humiliation.”52 This means that ironists should be willing to face up to the contingency of their own views. It also means that ironists should not set themselves up as metaphysical arbiters who hold the one right or single best answer to the question of how culture, in all its messy and incomprehensible vitality, should be legislated. This means that ironists should never rule out metaphysics, but only rather stick to their ironist commitment that metaphysics ought not be forwarded as an intellectual or moral 112

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

obligation. In the general context of a liberal culture this idea is now everyday for most. It is the common sense expressed by anyone who has gone before a lower‐court judge and reasonably expected that the decision that will be handed down will not be made on the basis of quotations from a purported holy book or divinations from a purported order in the stars. It is the common sense of the increasingly typical assumption in liberal societies that controversial metaphysical views should not be inflicted on schoolchildren without exposure to a whole variety of such controversial views, even if this common sense involves a great many practical questions that are difficult (though certainly not impossible) to answer. Since these familiar strategies are already common sense for most we should hesitate to conclude that Rorty’s primary contribution is designed as a liberal political theory. There may be an implicit liberal pragmatist political theory in Rorty, but his most important contributions as a liberal are not as a theorist or systematizer of such liberal pragmatist political intuitions. Rorty’s use of the liberal distinction between public and private is better seen as a metaphilosophical use of a familiar political distinction by virtue of which the ironist makes sense of their peculiar relationship to metaphysics and especially to postmetaphysical philosophy. For, as I noted above, surely the most interesting context in which ironism operates is the philosophical one. Ironism as an all‐purpose attitude toward cultural problematics will be more or less useful in different contexts. It will probably be at least a little useful in most contexts. But there are some contexts (such as dentistry) where it will surely seem as obtuse as a blatant metaphysics. And so without generalizing to all contexts, we can surely still recognize that one context where ironism seems to have particular purchase today is in philosophy. Indeed, the value of ironism today may once again be increasing insofar as recent philosophy, and especially “theory” more broadly, has witnessed a notable gain of attention to speculative metaphysics in the work of a handful of thinkers of both “analytic” and “continental” persuasions. In short, now that speculative interest in metaphysics is putting a premium on speculative philosophy itself, a healthy dose of ironism may be helpful once again in keeping wild philosophical ambitions in check. Ironism can maintain its foothold in the philosophical context by relying on the familiar liberal distinction between public and private. To the extent that much of philosophy is conducted as internecine squabbles over relatively isolated cultural enclaves, it is entirely sensible that philosophers be left free to do what they feel a passion for in private, so long as there is no enormous public cost in their doing it. To the extent that such philosophical debates might set intellectual wildfires in some dry tinder region of culture, as many philosophers of course hope for, then it will prove valuable to be able to keep philosophy in check where those fires begin to consume public resources. The metaphysicians often want to transform culture – indeed most metaphysicians spend much of their time insisting that culture must be transformed in some way or another. A standard menu of liberal practices helps us keep the metaphysicians cordoned off in private in those cases where their transformative impulses might otherwise do significant public damage. But those same liberal practices are also devoted to maintaining the possibility that the metaphysicians might come to transform culture yet if they are able to garner sufficient public support for their ideas without producing unjustifiable harms in so doing. 113

Colin Koopman

All that the liberal insists upon is that public relevance is something that needs be achieved rather than assumed at the outset – just because some metaphysician is absolutely convinced that their view is right does nothing (indeed nothing at all!) to support the claim that there is any wrong involved in refusing to implement their view without first gaining for it the public support that any view needs for it to even be considered as a candidate for implementation. There is, of course, already much in philosophy that is of recognizable public utility (even if much of mainstream philosophy continues to sideline these relevant bits). The ironist is able to make use of the familiar liberal distinction between public and private to help distinguish these forms of philosophy from those that claim to be right but do little to convince others that they would actually produce much in the way of wider social value. It should go without saying that it is never easy in practice to carve up exactly what is publicly useful and what should be allowed to persist in private insofar as it leads to no public harms. Since liberalism is persistently criticized for failing on this point, I should like to make explicit that this is in fact a feature, and not a defect, of liberalism. Any first‐time reader of Mill’s On Liberty recognizes how open‐ended is the concept of harm that Mill uses to organize the public–private distinction. This open‐endedness is a virtue. For we should not want any philosopher to define once and for all the unabiding content of concepts like harm and cruelty. It is an achievement of liberal societies that we take it that the content of these concepts must be filled in through ongoing debate as we engage in new practices and take on new problems. It is an achievement of liberal society that the terms of the distinction between public and private are always up for grabs and constantly in transition. As Rorty noted in the London Review of Books version of his Northcliffe lectures (which later became the first three chapters of Contingency): “what counts as cruelty and injustice is a matter of … redescription rather than discovery … a matter of changing vocabularies rather than of stripping away the veil of appearance from an objective reality.”53 Seen in this way, liberalism is immune to the persistent criticism that it begs the question concerning what counts as cruelty. For that criticism misses the transformative spirit that should always be affirmed as the animating impulse of liberalism. That being said, it must be admitted that Rorty himself offered little reflection on how transformative redescription takes place in liberal contexts. Rorty chose to neither develop a wholesale theory of public transformation nor to even give more than small hints concerning retail cases of past and present transformations. Rorty’s postmetaphysical project ushers philosophy into cultural criticism but the legacy of his work is much more in the style of a provocation than a program.54 This underdevelopment noted, it must be immediately affirmed that there is nothing in Rorty that stands in the way of furthering such reflection today. And indeed Rorty did much to motivate those of us who would follow him in this project.55 If Rorty’s liberalism makes his ironism more practicable, then his ironism also offers clues as to how his liberalism is transformative.56 Setting liberalism into motion with ironism helps make vivid why, as Rorty wrote in draft notes for Contingency, “tolerance for philosophical divergence makes, so to speak, a virtue out of contingency.”57 Ironism helps us see that one point of the distinction between public and private is that it should never be easy to make the distinction. Only the metaphysicians believe that liberal categories are, as it were, self‐interpreting (for instance, because of their companion belief 114

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

that social reality always comes to us already cut up into discrete public and private parts). Eschewing this metaphysical impulse, the point of liberalism should be that this is a distinction that we ought to strive to make so that we do not otherwise assume that some things are inevitably the concern of all or some things inevitably not all our concern. Liberalism should, and could, give us something to strive for that we do not already have such that the metaphysical finalization of any liberal vocabulary already seems decidedly antiliberal, indeed conservative. The most important insight of Contingency boils down to this: liberalism and ironism together give us something to strive for that the metaphysician would otherwise take as settled. For the liberal and the ironist both understand culture as contested and unsettled, indeed as always contestable and inveterately unsettleable, because always subject to the vicissitudes of time and chance. Rorty’s liberal ironist is the figure who is excited by the wild unruliness of all that unsettling while also appropriately cautious about their own exuberance for it.58

Notes 1 Rorty (2010b, 17). 2 I make use of a set of rough draft notes for the 1986 Northcliffe Lectures and 1987 Clark Lectures available at the Rorty Archives at University College Irvine under the title “Some topics for Northcliffe or Clark Lectures.” As Rorty notes in the book’s preface, these two lecture series were the occasion for an early version of much of the material that later became Contingency (1989, xi). The Northcliffe lectures (but not the Clarks) were published in a series in the London Review of Books (LRB) beginning in the spring of 1986. The LRB material differs from the Contingency material (where it forms Chapters 1 thru 3) mostly in the form of small stylistic changes and the addition of a few sentences here and there. The only substantive change I note is that the lengthy discussion of Foucault and Habermas in Contingency (Rorty 1989, 61–8) replaced a very brief concluding discussion of liberty of thought and changeability of vocabularies that appears at the end of the LRB version (Rorty 1986, 14). 3 Rorty spells this out in terms of “trying to relate the Rawlsian conception of justice and liberal freedom as respect for alternative views about the nature of the good to the two‐ dimensional self envisaged by Davidson” (Rorty Archives, n.d., Box 28, Folder 2, 2). 4 Rorty (1999, 3–5) is one example. 5 Rorty (1989, xv). 6 Rorty (1989, 197). 7 Rorty (1989, xvi). 8 Rorty (1989, 5). 9 Rorty (1989, 5). 10 Rorty (1989, 5). 11 “Chapter four is the central chapter of the book” (Rorty 1979, 10). 12 Rorty (1979, 180). 13 Rorty (1979, 182–205). 14 See Rorty (1979, 205–9). 15 For a fuller treatment of the arguments of Chapter 4 of Mirror see Gascoigne (2008, 123– 30), Tartaglia (2007, 112–33), and my interpretation in Koopman (2011). 16 Rorty (1979, 209).

115

Colin Koopman

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51

116

Rorty (1979, 211). Rorty (1979, 5); but see the qualification at Rorty (1979, 7). Rorty (1979, 180). Rorty (1979, 181). Rorty (1979, 6). Rorty (1989, 14). Davidson (1984 [1974], 194). Rorty (1989, 22). Rorty (1989, 9); notable is the resonance with Dewey’s self‐described rhetoric at the outset of Experience and Nature when he writes that the view he opposes “cannot be dealt with argumentatively” such that he will instead work to “disclose the meanings” of his own view in order to “insensibly produce” what he a calls “a change in the significations” of inherited terminology (Dewey 1958 [1925], 1a, 2a). Rorty (1989, 39, 44, 52). Rorty (1989, 73). Rorty (1989, 73). Rorty (1989, 74). Rorty (1989, 78). Rorty (1989, 78). Rorty (1989, 78). Rorty (1989, 79). Rorty (1989, 79). Rorty Archives (n.d., Box 30, Folder 2, letter to Jonathan Lear dated Nov. 1981). Rorty (2007, ix). Rorty (1989, 80, 81). Rorty (1989, 80). Rorty Archives (n.d., Box 28, Folder 2, 7). Rorty (1989, 78). Rorty (1989, 105). There are instructive historiographical resonances in Rorty’s argument via Kant and Hegel to the contemporaneous argument developed by Habermas in his version of “postmetaphysical thinking” (1985, 1–44 and 1988, part I). Rorty (1989, 98–108). Rorty (1989, 108–21). Rorty (1989, 122–37). Rorty himself came to express some doubts about his early presentations of the figure of the ironist late in life in reply to some criticisms by his longtime interlocutor and friend Jerome Schneewind. Rorty’s self‐doubts interestingly help clarify the sense in which ironism is best treated not as an all‐purpose insight concerning the death of metaphysics but rather as a discipline‐specific contribution concerning the work of philosophy after metaphysics. Distinguishing ironism from anti‐metaphysics, Rorty encourages his fellow ironists to not “wring our hands over the absence of the moral absolutes that our ancestors invoked” (2010a, 507). I thank Wojciech Małecki for drawing my attention to Schneewind’s criticism and to Rorty’s reply. Rorty once wrote that “philosophy will last as long as cultural change does” (2000, 218). Rorty (1989, xvi). On this much‐disputed distinction’s place in Rorty’s thought see Malachowski (2002, 121– 5), Voparil (2006, 113–43), and Bacon (2007, 79–106). Rorty (1989, 103). Rorty (1989, 105).

THE USES OF PHILOSOPHY AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF METAPHYSICS

52 Rorty (1989, 120). 53 LRB essays in Rorty (1986, 14). 54 I elaborate on the details of Rorty’s positive postmetaphysical cultural‐critical philosophy in Koopman (2013). My claims there are consistent with my conclusion here that Rorty offers more in the way of motivation than actual implementation of this project. For we might see these matters in terms of the two‐sided coin of Rorty’s negative thrust against foundationalism paired with his positive postfoundational cultural‐critical project. My view is that the first side of the coin is better developed by Rorty than the second, but that the first is indeed developed in a way that pushes us (Rorty’s readers) into the second. This is why it is crucial that Rorty’s negative thrust is decidedly not an argument against the continuation of philosophy itself. For helpful discussion of these points I thank Christopher Voparil. 55 For a discussion pursuing related themes in Rorty, see Lara (2014). 56 While liberalism thus helps make attractive ironism in philosophy, it is also the case that philosophical ironism facilitates the attractiveness of liberalism. For the liberal split between public and private not only helps ironism maintain itself in a philosophical context. It is also an expression, in moral and political terms, of many of the same ideas that ironism expresses in philosophical terms. Although Rorty is not arguing from pragmatist and ironist commitments to liberal politics, he is showing how pragmatist philosophy and liberal politics fit hand in glove. Without doubt there are other gloves to fit on the hand, and other hands to fit in the glove, but that does not detract from the snugness, warmth, and grip facilitated by this particular combination. Rorty’s point is not that one has to be a pragmatist ironist in order to be a liberal, nor that one has to be a liberal in order to be a pragmatist ironist. His claim is rather that these two together form a particularly attractive combination, and especially for those who through contingent circumstances happen to find themselves negotiating the history of philosophy in the context of a historically liberal society. If these are both central to the contingencies that have led you to who you are today, then Rorty’s liberal ironist may just be more central to, and more viable for, the particular form of life you find yourself immersed in than many of us are otherwise inclined to think. 57 Rorty Archives (n.d., Box 28, Folder 2, 14). 58 For comments on an earlier version of this paper I thank Christopher Voparil, Wojciech Małecki, and other contributors to the conversation at the inaugural meeting of the Richard Rorty Society at Stony Brook University in May of 2014.

References Bacon, Michael. 2007. Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Davidson, Donald. 1984 [1974]. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 183–98. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dewey, John. 1958 [1925]. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Books. Foucault, Michel. 2013 [1971]. Lectures on the Will to Know: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1970–1971, edited by Arnold Davidson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gascoigne, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: Liberalism, Irony, and the Ends of Philosophy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —. 1988. Postmetaphysical Thinking. Translated by William Mark Hohengarten. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

117

Colin Koopman

Koopman, Colin. 2011. “Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to Philosophy.” Contemporary Pragmatism, 8(1): 61–84. —. 2013. “Challenging Philosophy: Locating Rorty’s Positive Conception of Philosophy.” In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics, edited by Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 75–106. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Lara, María Pía. 2014. “Richard Rorty: Becoming a Contemporary Political Philosopher.” Contemporary Pragmatism, 11(1): 69–82. Malachowski, Alan. 2002. Richard Rorty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1986. “The Contingency of Language,” “The Contingency of Selfhood” and “The Contingency of Community.” Essay series in London Review of Books, April–July. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, 3–22. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2000. “Response to Williams.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 213–19. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2007. “Preface” to Rorty, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010a. “Reply to J. B. Schneewind” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall Auxier and Lewis Hahn, 506–8. Chicago: Open Court. —. 2010b. “Intellectual Autobiography” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall Auxier and Lewis Hahn. Chicago: Open Court. —. n.d. “Some Topics for Northcliffe or Clark Lectures” In Richard Rorty Archives, UC Irvine, MS‐C017, Box 28, Folder 2. Tartaglia, James. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. New York: Routledge. Voparil, Christopher. 2006. Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

118

7 Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist WILLIAM M. CURTIS

[Rorty’s] style, which rests upon scholarly erudition and literary flair, ingeniously combines critical expository analysis and illuminating historical narrative. It moves from technical argumentation to cultural commentary with ease and wit. Never deceptive, and more than clever, Rorty’s style leaves the reader always enlightened and exhilarated, yet also with a quirky feeling that one has been seduced rather than persuaded, talked into Rorty’s perspective rather than talked out of one’s own position. West (1989, 197) Rorty’s stirring prose is one of his supreme philosophical achievements. Kelly (2008, 78)

In its July 2007 obituary for Richard Rorty, Prospect Magazine dubbed him “the greatest philosophical essayist of his time.” This was meant as praise, of course, yet the label of “essayist” is not something that a pukka Anglophone academic philosopher prizes. After all, if there is anything to Samuel Johnson’s definition of the essay as “a loose sally of the mind; an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular, orderly performance,” then today’s professional philosopher wants to avoid penning essays at all costs (Johnson 2005, 167). Presenting a “loose sally of the mind” at an American Philosophical Association (APA) conference would be like flinging chum to sharks. Indeed, the writers of the Western philosophical tradition who are most associated with the essay form are currently pretty marginal to the discipline. Montaigne, we all know, would not get tenure today, and nor would Emerson (whereas Descartes would be a shoo‐in, and Locke too, though Johnson would find his Essay Concerning Human Understanding mistitled; Kant would be president of the APA). To be primarily an essayist would seem to condemn one to being a poor or unserious philosopher according to contemporary academic standards. As Susan Sontag observes, “The culture administered by universities has always regarded the essay with suspicion, as a kind of writing that is too subjective, too accessible, merely belle‐lettristic. An interloper in the solemn worlds of philosophy and polemic, the essay introduces digressiveness, exaggeration, mischief ” (Sontag 2012 [1992], 149). Anticipating her conclusion that it is a professional “demotion” for a A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

119

William M. Curtis

­ hilosopher to be deemed an essayist, Argentinian intellectual Enrique Anderson p Imbert writes in 1946: “I lament emphasizing philosophy, but I have no other choice: philosophy professors are those I have seen – with their very high eyebrows – disdaining essayists” (Imbert 2012 [1946], 68). That Rorty gained a reputation as a consummate essayist is, unsurprisingly, of a piece with his much‐discussed alienation from his native academic discipline. It is no coincidence that he finished his career in Stanford’s Comparative Literature Department. Since Rorty’s essayistic style is, to borrow from Sontag, a conspicuous “interloper” in contemporary philosophy, it attracts an inordinate amount of commentary. Friends and enemies alike describe Rorty’s writing in terms – such as, “disarmingly chatty and colloquial” (Mendieta 2005, xiv) and “almost folksy” (Horton 2001, 16)  –  that one cannot imagine applying to the normally dense prose of today’s academic philosophical writing. Rorty’s longtime friend and critic, philosopher Daniel Dennett, colorfully characterizes Rorty as “Peter Pan on the page, swashbuckling and enthusiastic” (Dennett 2007). Stanley Fish, however, offers a contrasting description that Rorty’s readers will also recognize, which attests to Rorty’s versatility: “When reading Rorty, one always hears the voice – deep, low, a bit gravelly, world‐weary, and so deadpan that it seems indifferent to the sentences it is uttering; sentences that are limpidly aphoristic and appearing not to do much; although in succession, like perfectly rounded bullet beads on a string, they acquire the force of a locomotive” (Fish 2007). Richard J. Bernstein confirms that there are few philosophers who write with “as much wit, humor, playfulness, and seductive eloquence” as Rorty (Bernstein 1986, 46). Predictably, critics complain that his engaging style leads readers to believe that they have understood difficult concepts and arguments when in fact they have not (Kuipers 2013, 3). Rorty is guilty of “dumbing things down,” of mischaracterizing important debates and philosophical positions, and also of being a showboat who is all flash and little substance. Indeed, even Dennett recommends, only half‐jokingly, the hermeneutical principle he calls the “Rorty Factor” to save his friend’s work from its own rhetorical excesses: Multiply anything Rorty says by .673 and you will get the truth (Ryerson 2006, 4). The epigraph from Cornell West nicely expresses the troubling ambivalence that Rorty’s style causes some readers to experience when encountering his work. Others find Rorty’s cavalier verbiage downright annoying, smug, and frivolous. In a discipline that expects its practitioners to write as transparently and precisely as possible in sober (boring?) prose, it is easy to conclude that Rorty’s poor standing in analytic philosophy is of his own doing. But why did he do it? After all, he demonstrated in his earliest articles (back when he was respectable), as well as in passages in his later work, that he is perfectly capable of producing the dry, technical sentences that analytic philosophy cherishes. To understand what Rorty is up to, we have to recognize that his vast and multifarious writings serve a robustly normative goal: encouraging the development of his ideal liberal society, which he calls, with a whiff of irony, “liberal utopia.” Rorty’s liberalism is unique because he insists that we should understand liberal values and practices as based on nothing but the historically contingent social solidarity of the liberal community. We should eschew the traditional philosophical enterprise of trying to define and justify liberalism on the basis of metaphysical premises that invoke nonhuman 120

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

authorities, like natural law, universal reason, or God. There is no essence to liberalism; it is simply the evolving language‐game‐cum‐way‐of‐life that originated in, as Rorty would say, the rich North Atlantic democracies. We should stop asking if the moral premises of liberal practices are true, and instead pragmatically ask whether those practices are enabling us to live good and happy lives, in our own best judgment, relative to plausible alternatives. Rorty exhorts us to drop the traditional language of metaphysics because its pretense to identify necessary truth is rhetorically authoritarian and thus oppressive of the freedom and pluralism that liberalism should ideally foster and protect. The consequence of adopting this pragmatic view of liberalism, Rorty hopes, will be “a global commonwealth in which human rights are respected, equality of opportunity is assured, and the chances of human happiness are thereby increased” (Rorty 2007, 73–4). Once we grasp the pragmatic liberal impetus of Rorty’s project, we realize that Rorty couldn’t not write essays (that is an ugly transition, but stick with me). What I mean to say is that the essay form is a particularly apt vehicle for Rorty’s efforts, for it is a pragmatic literary form. Like Rorty’s pragmatism, the essay is anti‐essentialist, anti‐ method, experimentalist, and purposefully provocative. As Christy Wampole writes in a passage that is Deweyan to the core, the essay “is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the world’s inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be” (2013). In his jazzy exposition, Brian Doyle writes, “The essay is a jackdaw, a magpie, a raven. It picks up everything and uses it. It borrows everything and bends everything to its nefarious porpoises” (2013, 13). This playful riff is not only a wonderful example of Rorty’s Davidsonian theory of metaphor  –  including malapropisms  –  as unfamiliar uses of familiar words to produce an effect on the reader, but also describes Rorty’s inventive, eclectic approach to the philosophical tradition and, indeed, even captures Rorty’s own professional persona! Doyle’s essay on the essay is, of course, self‐referential, swinging from literal assertions that contrive to nail down the quiddity of the essay, to poetic tropes that sweep the legs out from under such attempts. Here is another way to place the essay: imagine a linguistic continuum with the ideals of logic and transparent, literal language at one pole, and the unorthodox flights of poetry that challenge the very boundaries of sense at the opposite pole. Our tradition going back to Plato sees the territory between the two poles as a no man’s land in the grand quarrel between philosophy and poetry. Yet the essay springs out from this war‐ torn middle as a self‐consciously rhetorical genre aimed at persuasion and edification, not demonstrative proof or sublime awe. Indeed, the essayist can utilize language from both poles in her rhetorical endeavor; she can interweave logic and poetry, literalness and metaphor, truisms and irony, argumentation and conversation to further her ends. The essay is thus a highly flexible tool that Rorty deploys in his practice of cultural politics, which is what he thinks important philosophy amounts to: the redescription and recontextualization of stale patterns of thought and language in order to, in Dewey’s phrase, “break the crust of convention” and get past current social conundrums. “[The essay] genre and its spirit,” Wampole agrees, “provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America” (2013). 121

William M. Curtis

Hanging the essay label on Rorty’s writings confirms for hard‐bitten acolytes of analytic philosophy that his work is slipshod, that he is a philosophical poseur, like his enfant terrible pal, Jacques Derrida, who misuses his intellectual chops to distort the good names of the tradition’s heroes. But Rorty can be flanked on the other side, as well (fortunately, as a political target of both the Left and the Right, he is, like the essay genre itself, at home in a crossfire). Aficionados of the essay can protest that Rorty does not write genuine essays. His work is too professional and specialized; he writes scholarly articles. Carl H. Klaus notes that “The most striking and significant consensus can be seen in the tendency of essayists in every period and culture to define the essay by contrasting it with conventionalized and systematized forms of writing, such as rhetorical, scholarly, or journalistic discourse” (2012, xv). This consensus thus follows Johnson in its conception of the essay, but finds the essay’s lack of system and precise purpose a feature, not a bug. William Gass is a stalwart of this camp, insisting that “The essayist is an amateur,” as opposed to a “Professor” who writes “that awful object, ‘the article,’” for “immediate burial in a Journal” (2012 [1982], 106–7). Walter Murdoch complains that “Half the things that masquerade as essays are really dissertations,” and goes so far as to strip Emerson of his essayist credentials for writing sermons, not essays (2012 [1938], 66). Proper essays must be more meandering and spontaneous, more personal, less goal‐oriented, and certainly less academic than Rorty’s offerings. There are several things to say in defense of Rorty’s bona fides as an essayist (whether one thinks it a demotion from “philosopher” or not). First, Rorty, unlike most academics, did write popular pieces on a range of topics for an educated lay audience, which cemented his status as a public intellectual. The immediate place to turn for some examples is his 1999 volume, Philosophy and Social Hope, though this only contains a small fraction of the many writings and book reviews that Rorty published in newspapers and nonacademic magazines. Tellingly, Philosophy and Social Hope contains the piece among Rorty’s work that has the strongest claim for “essayhood”: his autobiographical “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” which is indeed perhaps the most accessible key to Rorty’s sprawling intellectual endeavor (1999, 3–20). In it, Rorty effectively strikes a personal tone, narrating elements from his upbringing and education that brought him to his current, idiosyncratic positions. He confesses that he is “hurt” when his colleagues dismiss his views as weird and frivolous and accuse him of being merely a self‐ promoting provocateur (p. 5). In response, he invites us into his personal story with the hope that, at the very least, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner. When I originally began to contemplate drafting our present discussion, my assumption was that I should focus on the Philosophy and Social Hope writings in pursuit of a “Rorty as popular writer” angle, leaving his highly academic (“non‐essayistic?”) work aside. Such a treatment would thus rest on a distinction between Rorty the essayist, who writes for a “general audience” often on “political or semi‐political topics” (Rorty 1999, xii), and Rorty the author of scholarly articles that are abstruse and smell of the lamp. Parsing Rorty’s opus this way and emphasizing his most accessible writings might more readily convince doubters that Rorty merits the title of “essayist.” Yet one of the lessons I have learned from Rorty’s pragmatism is to scrutinize distinctions if they create problems. While Rorty’s more popular writings perhaps share a greater family resemblance with traditional exemplars of the essay genre, much of the commentary on Rorty’s famous style actually focuses on his academic work. In other words, the distinction 122

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

does not hold because Rorty is conspicuously essayistic even in his scholarly articles, and arguably became increasingly so as his career progressed; therein lies the scandal, which caused him to become such a controversial figure in analytic philosophy. Rorty is more interesting (he is more Rorty) if we reject any clear division of his work and instead see him as always producing essays, some pitched at a general audience and others at his fellow specialists. Moreover, as wise defenders of the essay admit, it is difficult to convincingly define the genre in order to exclude plausible contenders. As O. B. Hardison remarks, “Of all literary forms, the essay most successfully resists the effort to pin it down, which is like trying to bind Proteus” (1989, 11). Wampole writes, “I have generally found that for every rule I could establish about the essay, a dozen exceptions scuttle up” (2013). The essay’s indefinability has been evident since its inception. Both Hardison and Wampole point to the signature differences between the writing styles our two hallowed progenitors of the genre: Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon. Hardison elaborates: Even in its infancy, the essay shows its Protean heritage. Montaigne’s essays are associative, discursive, informal, meandering, and slovenly. Being the first of their kind, they ought to have at least become models for what followed, in the same way that even disreputable people – muggers, prostitutes, con men, and so forth – will become models if they are really good at what they do. They did not. Bacon’s essays were inspired by Montaigne’s, but are, if anything, anti‐Montaignian. Especially in their 1597 form, they are aphoristic, staccato, assertive, hortatory, abrasive. (Hardison 1989, 15)

Wampole (2013) confirms, “the discrepancy in style and substance between the texts of Michel and Francis was, like the English Channel that separated them, deep enough to drown in.” This mixed provenance of the essay makes it all the easier to claim that even Rorty’s articles bearing ponderously academic titles, like “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti‐Dualist Account of Interpretation” (Rorty 1991a), qualify for inclusion in this expansive, mongrelized genre. In this piece, Rorty urges us to see inquiry not as discovering the true essence of reality but rather as imaginatively seeing things in new and useful contexts, of “reweaving beliefs rather than discovering the natures of objects” (Rorty 1991a, 98). Conceiving of inquiry, whether scientific, historical, or philosophical, in this way enables us to be more properly anti‐essentialist and pragmatically liberal. Here are the essay’s final five sentences; decide for yourself if they sound essayistic: From an ethico‐political angle, however, one can say that what is characteristic, not of the human species but merely of its most advanced, sophisticated subspecies – the well‐read, tolerant, conversable inhabitants of a free society – is the desire to dream up as many new contexts as possible. This is the desire to be as polymorphous in our adjustments as possible, to recontextualize for the hell of it. This desire is manifested in art and literature more than in the natural sciences, and so I find it tempting to think of our culture as an increasingly poeticized one, and to say that we are gradually emerging from the scientism which [Charles] Taylor dislikes into something else, something better. But as a good antiessentialist, I have no deep premises to draw on from which to infer that it is, in fact, better – nor to demonstrate our own superiority over the past, or the non‐Western present. All I can do is

123

William M. Curtis

recontextualize various developments in philosophy and elsewhere so as to make them look like stages in a story of poeticizing and progress. (Rorty 1991a, 110)

Even if difficult to follow because this tail has been detached from its body, and in spite of some of the specialized terms, the reader can sense something of the “swashbuckling” quality of Rorty’s prose in the sweeping, thought‐provoking suggestions he makes. Although they insist that we cannot describe with any precision what makes an essay an essay, Wampole, Hardison, and others still pragmatically offer provisional working definitions. Wampole’s, for instance, is: “short nonfiction prose with a meditative subject at its center and a tendency away from certitude” (2013). Imbert renders a “scholarly approximation” of a definition: “a composition in prose, discursive but artistic enough through its richness in anecdotes and descriptions, brief enough that we can read it in one sitting” (2012 [1946], 70). Hardison’s entire piece, “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay,” grapples with the development of the genre from many angles and offers as one of his conclusions that the essay “is an enactment of the process of accommodation between the world and the ‘I,’ and thus it is consciousness realizing itself ” (1989, 16). (Readers familiar with classical pragmatism will recognize in this sentence a distinctly Deweyan‐Meadian ring.) Taking my cues from these writers, I highlight some of the essayistic features that Rorty’s work habitually displays, including: (1) its conversational voice; (2) its use of quotation; (3) its “literary” quality and use of metaphor; (4) its pragmatic skepticism; and (5) and its playful experimentalism in the face of postmodern uncertainty. (1) Reading a good essay is like having a conversation with a perceptive, knowledgeable, and gregarious interlocutor about a topic we find interesting (though perhaps we did not know it before we picked up the essay!). The successful essayist creates an authentic voice of a real person in her pages with whom the reader can have a personal relationship. Jeff Porter observes, “The trademark of the essay is its intimacy, the human voice addressing an imagined audience” (2012, ix). Montaigne, as usual, is the model; lovers of his oeuvre feel they know Michel as a friend. Nineteenth‐century British essayist, Charles Lamb, confirms this relationship which, like friendship, can be agonistic, in his review of William Hazlitt’s Table Talk essays: “[t]he tone of them is uniformly conversational … You fancy that a disputant is always present, and feel a disposition to take up the cudgels yourself [o]n behalf of the other side of the question” (Lamb 2012 [1821], 19, 22). Emerson, “arguably America’s greatest essayist” (Klaus and Stuckey‐French 2012, 23), pace Murdoch, writes that the language of the essay “is the language of conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive” (Emerson 2012 [1850], 24). And in the last century, Hilloc Bellaire likewise refers to the conversational aspect of the genre: “These modern essays of ours may be compared to conversation, without which mankind has never been satisfied, which is ever diverse (though continually moving through the same themes), and which finds in the unending multiplicity of the world unending matter for discussion and contemplation” (Bellaire 2012 [1929], 52). It only makes sense that Rorty would use our most conversational genre of writing in his attempt to nudge philosophy and wider culture to become more conversational and 124

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

less dogmatic. He memorably tells us that liberal citizens may have to “josh” each other out of our absolutist positions in order to have a healthy liberal politics (Rorty 1991a, 193). In his essay, “Analytic and Conversational Philosophy,” Rorty draws a contrast between the former – philosophy that takes natural science as the gold standard for real knowledge – and the latter, which is historicist and thus more relativistic about what counts as knowledge (Rorty 2007, 120–30). “The hope to get something right, once and for all, just as natural scientists do, is very precious to most analytic philosophers,” who vehemently reject any reduction of their serious inquiry to “mere conversation” (p. 127). Conversational philosophers, however, are inclined to think that philosophy makes progress not by solving problems but by replacing old problems with new problems – problems created by one use of words with problems created by another use of words. This historicist outlook makes them dubious of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that philosophy’s goal is “complete clarity” – an unproblematic grasp of the way things really are. (Rorty 2007, 127)

Rorty writes, “I prefer conversational to analytic philosophy, so defined, because I prefer philosophers who are sufficiently historicist as to think of themselves as taking part in a conversation rather than as practicing a quasi‐scientific discipline” (2007, 126). Understanding philosophy and knowledge as conversational helps us appreciate the contingency of knowledge, which makes us more tolerant and open to new ways of seeing things. It helps us realize that, by changing our cultural conversation and the social practices associated with it, we can be more prolific and flexible in our approaches to the challenges of the human condition. As Rorty puts it in the final sentence of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation” (Rorty 1979, 394). (2) Artful quotation of and adroit reference to other writers and sages is a hallmark of the great essayists. “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote,” writes Emerson (2010, 94). Gass tells us that “The apt quotation is one of the essayists greatest gifts … You know you are reading an excellent essay when you find yourself relishing the quotations as much as the text that contains them, as one welcomes the chips of chocolate in those overcelebrated cookies” (Gass 2012 [1982], 109). Phillip Lopate adds that “The whole modern essay tradition sprang from quotation” (2012 [1989], 136). Rorty is an inveterate name‐dropper and virtuoso quoter. In his liberal utopia, philosophers and other literary intellectuals eschew “the search for theories that get at real essence” (Rorty 1989, 88) and instead don the mantle of “cultural critic” to become the sort of “all‐purpose intellectual” who passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to the present situation in Southeast Asia to Ghandi to Sophocles. He is a name‐dropper, who uses names such as these to refer to sets of descriptions, symbol‐systems, ways of seeing. His specialty is seeing similarities and differences between great big pictures, between attempts to see how things hang together. (Rorty 1982, xl–xli)

125

William M. Curtis

Quoting is, of course, literally an exercise in “recontextualization”: taking the ideas, insights, bon mots, platitudes, and metaphors of others out of their original contexts and placing them in the new context of one’s essay and time. For Rorty, the ability to imaginatively juxtapose and synthesize disparate ideas is crucial to conceptual innovation and problem‐solving in all areas of culture. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley note that Rorty practices what he preaches “fearlessly and with considerable panache.” Like other great essayists, He writes with self‐effacing charm, a quick and biting wit, a dizzying capacity for broad analogy, and a way of dividing through diverse thinkers in a single sentence that in less skilled hands would be mere pastiche … Rorty seems to read everything. He moves easily from Wittgenstein to Heidegger or from Dewey to Derrida, but he is as apt to draw from a Philip Larkin poem, from Proust, or from a Nabokov novel as from Kant or Nietzsche. (Guignon and Hiley 2003, 2–3)

From Rorty’s pragmatic perspective, if philosophers want to play a meaningful role in establishing an innovative, liberal society, they should follow his lead and write provocative essays that redescribe and reconcile old sets of concepts that stand in the way of progressive change. They will become “polypragmatic, Socratic intermediar[ies] between various discourses” (Rorty 1979, 317). (3) Good essays unabashedly employ metaphorical, “literary” language to achieve their effect (Atwan 1996, 21–37). Mariano Picón‐Salas, consistent with my contention that the essay lives a hybrid existence between philosophy and poetry, writes, “The function of the essayist – one like Carlyle, Emerson, Santayana, or Unamuno – would seem to be to reconcile poetry and philosophy, to offer a strange bridge between the world of images and that of concepts, warning the reader of the dark turns of the labyrinth and hoping to help him seek an opening through which to pass” (Picón‐Salas 2012 [1954], 75). Imbert similarly remarks that “the essay’s very noble function consists of poeticizing the plain exercise of the writer’s intelligence and fantasy, in prose. The essay is a conceptually constructed work of art; it is a logical structure, but one where logic begins to sing” (Imbert 2012 [1946], 70). Max Bense confirms, “in every essay those wonderful sentences show up which are like seeds of the whole thing, from which the essay can replenish itself again and again. I mean those enticing prose sentences, in which one can see that there is no perfect border to poetry here” (Bense 2012 [1947], 72). Like the essay genre itself, Rorty seeks to blur the line between philosophy and poetry (Rorty 1991b, 85–106). He famously insists that we think of philosophy as a literary genre, that we embrace Shelley’s revelation that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and that progress in all areas of culture depends on the continual generation of new metaphors that challenge conventional language games (Rorty 1989, 5–22). We should cease to see epistemological progress as the philosophical tradition has: a matter of achieving increasingly accurate mental representations of reality until we finally possess the unvarnished truth at the end of inquiry. Instead, we should take a Kuhnian view of culture and see our standards of justification as historically shifting paradigms of language and behavior. With luck, we will describe these shifts as a process of improvement – things getting better than they were in the past; for 126

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

liberals, this means that freedom, peace, prosperity, and perhaps even that elusive variable of human happiness are all on the rise. When a paradigm, or “vocabulary,” as Rorty would say, of an area of culture is stable – when the once‐revolutionary metaphors that constitute it have become literalized and hence no longer metaphorical – inquiry is conducted in the dominant literal language, and there is broad consensus on the standards for what counts as progress in addressing the problems generated within the paradigm. Those who attempt to challenge this consensus by offering new standards will normally be marginalized; their neologisms will seem wrongheaded and nonsensical. But when, on Kuhn’s story, enough practitioners come to see the problems of the paradigm as fundamental and damning, the practice and its standards become unstable; inquiry becomes “revolutionary” as the community of inquirers creatively seeks to build a new consensus on new terms. Suddenly, a novel set of metaphors catches on and is seen as a leap forward, beyond the old problems, to a novel way of understanding the area of inquiry (Rorty 1991b, 88–9). Thus, for example, Copernican heliocentrism becomes no longer thought of as simply a useful, though literally false (and perhaps theologically dangerous), metaphor on the background of the literal Ptolemaic truth. Instead, it becomes the new literal truth as Ptolemaic cosmology is dispensed with. For Rorty, much of contemporary philosophy has become an esoteric, scholastic enterprise with little social relevance. He aims to challenge its paradigm in the hope that it can become a force – a source of new metaphors – for challenging old social paradigms to push culture in a pragmatically liberal direction. As he puts it, “Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half‐formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things” (Rorty 1989, 9). Since the new vocabulary does not fit the criteria for literal truth possessed by the old one, it will be challenged initially as being “merely” metaphorical (literary or poetic). But, Rorty insists, “Important, revolutionary physics, and metaphysics, has always been ‘literary’ in the sense that it has faced the problem of introducing new jargon and nudging aside the language‐games currently in place” (1991b, 99). Indeed, this is why Rorty’s believes that literary efforts will often be more effective in creating progressive liberal political consensus than theoretical arguments adhering to established forensic canons. This process of coming to see other human beings as “one of us” rather than as “them” is a matter of detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like. This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel. Fiction like that of Dickens, Olive Schreiner, or Richard Wright gives us details about the kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we had previously not attended. Fiction like that of Choderlos de Laclos, Henry James, or Nabokov gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves. That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress. (Rorty 1989, xvi)

Although Rorty follows the Romantics in his insistence that it is the imaginative, literary, and artistic that move the world, Áine Kelly questions whether Rorty’s writing 127

William M. Curtis

lives up to his own prescriptions. She writes, “Although it transcends the scientism of the analytic school, it is unclear whether one could describe Rorty’s writing as ‘poetic’ or ‘literary’ in any strict sense” (Kelly 2008, 88). In her view, Rorty’s writing has a low “metaphorical density” with the result that “There is a major discrepancy, it seems, between Rorty’s claims for the literary and the ‘non‐literariness’ of his own enterprise” (p. 89). Kelly, however, resolves this “discrepancy” correctly, recognizing that the answer lies in his public – as opposed to private – rhetorical goal of practical cultural change. “On this view, the eminently readable nature of his prose is illustrative not of the ‘non‐literariness’ of an avowed literary enterprise (or an insoluble tension between theory and practice) but of Rorty’s desire to keep his strong poet conversant with the members of his liberal utopia” (p. 90). Kelly’s initial criticism misses its mark because it misunderstands Rorty’s self‐designation: he does not aspire to be a novelist but rather a literary critic who specializes in the genre of philosophical writing.1 He is the Lionel Trilling of philosophy, and, indeed, he shares much with Trilling, including his commitment to liberalism, his literary erudition, and his oft‐noted rhetorical use of the second‐person plural: “we liberals.” Literary critics do not argue with the novelists whose work they engage; they do not attempt to refute the validity of clear propositions that they locate in novels. Rather, the literary critic discusses a novel’s aspects and meanings, and makes aesthetic and even moral judgments about it, by placing it in the context of other works of literature. To be able to do this skillfully and creatively make connections between different works, the critic must be steeped in lots literature. And, I need hardly add, literary critics use the essay form. This is Rorty’s approach, and it is one of the reasons his fellow philosophers get irate with him (much like, I suppose, novelists get irate with their critics). Instead of methodically refuting the details of their arguments, he uses philosophical works and their authors to stand as representatives of broad, influential positions in philosophy that he then compares and contrasts. Soaring above the philosophical landscape like one of his beloved kestrels, Rorty appears to miss the trees which, his critics allege, leads him to misrepresent the forest (though it is usually quite clear, often through almost causal, off‐hand remarks, that he knows the trees pretty well, which is what makes him especially challenging). Given his pragmatic liberal project, however, this meta‐approach is justified; the important question concerns what ultimate effects prominent strands of the philosophical genre might have on liberal culture, and these effects will be normally a matter general intellectual trends (the forest), not a matter of the specific details of individual works (the trees). Although society does not currently pay any attention to the debates of contemporary philosophers, it is important to track them because history has shown, as Keynes famously observed, that today’s politics are often deeply influenced by yesterday’s “academic scribblers,” their ideas having percolated from the ivory tower into the broader culture. While perhaps not as manifestly influential as novelists, screenplay writers, and journalists, philosophers have this important “literary critic” role to play in ushering in liberal utopia. (4) Pragmatism entails a practical skepticism about means and ends, a willingness to be open to questioning both in order to solve or at least cope with problems. Because “skepticism,” since Descartes, has become associated with the radical philosophical position that we face a deep problem because we cannot prove that we know anything about the world, Hilary Putnam wants to distance pragmatic skepticism from this by 128

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

using the term “fallibilism.” He writes that pragmatists are anti‐Cartesian skepticism in the sense that they hold “that doubt requires justification just as much as belief,” and “that there are no metaphysical guarantees to be had that even our most firmly held beliefs will never need revision. That one can be both fallibilistic and antisceptical is perhaps the basic insight of American Pragmatism” (Putnam 1994, 20–1). The essay, too, has long been associated with practical skepticism. Montaigne, with his famous motto “Que sais‐je?” (“What do I know?”), draws on ancient skepticism to cultivate an open, more tolerant mind in order to live a better, richer, more humane life. As he confesses in “On Repentance,” “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial” (Montaigne 1957, 611). We can contrast this with the Cartesian project – which set the agenda for modern philosophy – that reacts to skepticism with a determination to defeat it by discovering a systematic, foolproof method for identifying apodictic truth. But what about our other inventor of the essay, Bacon, who, as a father of the scientific method, might seem closer to Descartes than to Montaigne? True, Bacon’s skepticism has a very different feel than Montaigne’s; he is much more confident and hopeful about the potential of human knowledge, and thus his essays tend to be more, as Hardison noted above, assertive and exhortatory. Yet, in another way, Bacon’s project is indubitably pragmatic: armed with an attitude of practical skepticism, he aimed to undermine the reigning epistemological paradigm based on scholasticism and superstition (the “idols of the mind”) and replace it with a cooperative, systematic, experimental study of nature for the wholly pragmatic end of bettering mankind’s material lot. While one can perhaps trace modern scientism back to Bacon’s work and its aspirations for what would become modern science, he is still far too much the renaissance humanist to be accurately labeled a logical positivist avant la lettre. From these roots, a pragmatic skepticism that challenges conventional wisdom for purposes of edification and “growth” (Dewey’s term for “progress”) has become virtually a sine qua non of the essay genre. The essayist is a sacred cow kicker and deflator of absolute truths; she points out the ever‐present lacunae in our understanding of things; she produces and creatively wrestles with doubt. Klaus and Stuckey‐French observe that Emerson turns again and again to Montaigne, “who was for him a ‘representative man,’ representative of the skepticism that lay at the center of essay writing” (2012, 23). Along these lines, these two prominent Frankfurt Schoolers discuss the essay form in terms that are strikingly simpatico with Rorty’s pragmatism. Georg Lukács writes, The essayist dismisses his own proud hopes which sometimes lead him to believe that he has come close to the ultimate: he has, after all, no more to offer than explanations of the poems of others, or at best his own ideas. But he ironically adapts himself to this smallness  –  the eternal smallness of the most profound work of the intellect in the face of life – and even emphasizes it with ironic modesty. (2010, 25)

Irony is, of course, a master concept for Rorty, his term for the disposition of creative fallibilism that liberal intellectuals and, in a different sense, even liberal citizens should ideally possess (Rorty 1989 and Curtis 2015, 93–100). Also, like Lukács, Rorty exhorts us to embrace our finitude and forgo efforts to achieve a spiritual or epistemological 129

William M. Curtis

union with the Eternal. This “would give new resonance to Blake’s dictum that ‘All deities reside within the human breast.’” Yeats alluded to, and improved upon, Blake when he wrote, “Whatever flames upon the night / Man’s own resinous heart had fed’” (Rorty 2007, 119). Theodor Adorno’s brilliant meditation, “The Essay as Form,” simply abounds with Rortian themes. Adorno argues that the essay form is opposed to metaphysics, essentialism, scientism, and the modern rationalist‐empiricist concept of “method.” Rather, it embraces and gives us hope in the face of historical contingency, uncertainty, open‐ endedness, and pluralism. Indeed, Adorno emphasizes the antiauthoritarianism of the essay, concluding his piece with the assertion that “the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy” that transgresses “the orthodoxy of thought” (Adorno 1984, 171). If we tone down the Frankfurt School jargon and add some American idiom and references to Dewey, Davidson, and Sellars, one could be forgiven for thinking that Adorno’s essay is one of Rorty’s. Adorno writes, “[The essay] revolts above all against the doctrine – deeply rooted since Plato – that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy … The essay shies away from the violence of dogma” (1984, 158). “In the emphatic essay, thought gets rid of the traditional idea of truth. The essay simultaneously suspends the traditional concept of method … [T]he essay denies any primeval givens” (p. 159). This latter clause brings to mind Sellars’s attack on the empiricist “Myth of the Given” that Rorty champions. Adorno continues, “The essay gently defies the ideals of clara et distinctia perceptio and of absolute certainty. On the whole it could be interpreted as a protest against the four rules that Descartes’s Discourse on Method sets up at the beginning of modern Western science and its theory” (p. 161). “Just as such learning remains exposed to error, so does the essay form; it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death” (p. 161, emphasis added). This final quotation is felicitous not only because it is reminiscent of the famous Nietzschean sentiment that Rorty connects to pragmatism: that we must learn to live without “metaphysical comfort” (Rorty 1982, 166). The “learning” that Adorno refers to in the italicized clause is that “of a man who is obliged, in a foreign country, to speak that country’s language instead of patching it together from its elements, as he did in school. He will read without a dictionary” (p. 161). Through trial and error, the man muddles through and eventually acquires the practical skill of speaking the foreign language. This scenario is, of course, the same as Quine’s famous “field linguist” example, which he uses to suggest the indeterminacy of translation (Quine 1960, 26–79). Rorty uses Quine’s field linguist to assimilate Davidson’s work to pragmatism because the field linguist illustrates Davidson’s contention that language is not a medium of representation but is rather (relatively sophisticated) behavior that, with luck, helps us coordinate our activities (Rorty 1991a, 132–43). This pragmatic naturalization of language is important for Rorty because it enables us to dismiss the philosophical impulse to identify a theory of truth that gives us criteria for when language is properly representing (“mirroring”) reality; it is anti‐Cartesian and anti‐representationalist. This saves us from much philosophical mischief by undermining both dogmatic assertions that one is in possession of the true representation of reality, and the unpragmatic skeptical worry 130

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

that one’s concepts might utterly fail to represent reality (as would be the case if, for instance, one were the proverbial brain in a vat). (5) Another German‐speaking writer, this time of Austrian extraction, novelist Robert Musil, introduces a Lebensphilosophie based on the essay genre in his unfinished masterpiece, A Man Without Qualities. He calls it Essayismus, or “essayism,” which Alan Wall describes as: the necessary mode of modern thought. Essayism is characterized by an aversion to the axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the possibilities of intellectual adventure and discovery which Musil liked to call “possibilitarian.” In the face of ruin or ossification of so many axiomatic schemata, so many ideologies, Musil asks, what is there left to us but provisionality, that testing of theory and practice which is conveyed by the word “essay”? (2014)

Essayism thus involves a playful experimentalist disposition, a willingness to explore, to try something new. This point is bolstered by the etymology of the word “essay” which, of course, hails from the French verb “essayer,” “to try.” Musil writes: Whoever has [a sense of possibility] does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a disposition can be remarkable, and may, regrettably, often make what people admire seem wrong, and what is taboo permissible, or, also, make both a matter of indifference. Such possibilists are said to inhabit a more delicate medium, a hazy medium of mist, fantasy, daydreams, and the subjunctive mood. Children who show this tendency are dealt with firmly and warned that such persons are cranks, dreamers, weaklings, know‐it‐alls, or troublemakers. (1996, 10)

While Musil’s possibilitarian man without qualities has more of the air of German existentialism about him than does Rorty’s liberal pragmatist, Musil’s discussion of “possibilitarianism” bears a striking resemblance to the pragmatist’s acceptance of historical contingency. We see a similar emphasis on the exploration of the possible in Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s musings about the essay. Essays are “science minus the explicit proof ” in which the essayist should “eliminate from his work all apodictic appearance” (Ortega y Gasset 2012 [1914], 38). Ortega y Gasset writes, “I only offer modi res considerandi, possible new ways of looking at things. I invite the reader to test them for himself, to see if, in fact, they provide fertile visions” (p. 39). Rorty’s philosopher is Ortega y Gasset’s essayist: “I think that ‘philosopher’ is the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture – who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among various large areas of human activity” (Rorty 1999, 175). In Rorty’s poeticized liberal culture, “There would be less talk about rigor and more about originality” (2007, 125). Indeed, in his merging of Kuhn’s conception of the successful revolutionary scientist with Bloom’s conception of the “strong poet” who causes us to change the way we view the world, even “The image of the great scientist would not be 131

William M. Curtis

of somebody who got it right but somebody who made it new” (Rorty 1991a, 44). Revolutionary science, like progress in moral and politics, requires Musil’s essayism. Rorty’s adoption of the essay form is itself, of course, an exercise in “essayism,” of trying something new that runs against the grain of contemporary philosophy. It is not a facile act of rebellion against established opinion but rather a deeply informed and articulate rhetorical challenge to status quo thinking, aimed at getting us to be more pragmatically liberal. His essays are, as Christopher Voparil suggests, a type of Bildungsroman that both recommend and exemplify Rorty’s ethical ideal (2005). He wants us (“we liberals”) to join him in adopting the pragmatic, essayistic disposition that avoids dogmatism and accepts contingency, hopeful experimentalism, and the commitment to perpetual conversation to find solutions to our problems. Becoming more essayistic will bring us another step closer to liberal utopia.

Note 1 Isaiah Berlin comes to mind as another liberal philosopher who takes a similar approach to the history of political thought and is both a renowned essayist and ignored by analytic philosophers. It is no surprise that Rorty is a fan who cites Berlin’s work frequently. For a discussion of Berlin as an essayist, see Ferrell (2012).

References Adorno, Theodor. 1984. “The Essay as Form.” New German Critique, 32: 151–71. Atwan, Robert. 1996. “The Essay – Is It Literature?” In What Do I Know? Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Essay, edited by Janis Forman, 21–37. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Bellaire, Hilloc. 2012 [1929]. “An Essay Upon Essays Upon Essays.” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 51–4. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Bense, Max. 2012 [1947]. “From ‘On the Essay and Its Prose.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 71–4. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Bernstein, Richard J. 1986. Philosophical Profiles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvanian Press. Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 2007. “Richard Rorty: What Made Him a Crucial American Philosopher?” edited by Stephen Metcalf. Slate Magazine, June 18. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2007/06/richard_rorty.html (accessed July 24, 2015). Doyle, Brian. 2013. “Playfulnessness: A Note.” River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfictional Narrative, 15: 11–17. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 2012 [1850]. “From ‘Montaigne, or the Skeptic.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 23–4. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. —. 2010. “Quotation and Originality.” In The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims, edited by Ronald A. Bosco, Glen M. Johnson, and Joel Myerson, Vol. 8, 93–107. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

132

Rhetoric Between Philosophy and Poetry: Rorty as Essayist

Ferrell, Jason. 2012. “Isaiah Berlin as Essayist.” Political Theory, 40: 602–28. Fish, Stanley. 2007. “Richard Rorty: What Made Him a Crucial American Philosopher?” Edited by Stephen Metcalf. Slate Magazine, June 18. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/ culturebox/2007/06/richard_rorty.html (accessed July 24, 2015). Gass, William H. 2012 [1982]. “From ‘Emerson and the Essay.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 106–9. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Guignon, Charles and David R. Hiley. 2003. “Introduction: Richard Rorty and Contemporary Philosophy.” In Richard Rorty, edited by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 1–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hardison, O. B. 1989. “Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay.” In Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, edited by Alexander J. Burtrym. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Horton, John. 2001. “Irony and Commitment: An Irreconcilable Dualism of Modernity.” In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, edited by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 15–28. Cambridge: Polity Press. Imbert, Enrique Anderson. 2012 [1946]. “From ‘In Defense of the Essay.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 68–70. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Johnson, Samuel. 2005. Johnson’s Dictionary: A Modern Selection, edited by E. L. McAdam and George Milne. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Kelly, Áine. 2008. “The Provocative Polemics of Richard Rorty.” Minerva, 12: 78–101. Klaus, Carl H. 2012. “Toward a Collective Poetics of the Essay.” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, xv–xxvii. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Klaus, Carl H. and Ned Stuckey‐French, eds. 2012. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kuipers, Ronald. 2013. Richard Rorty. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Lamb, Charles. 2012 [1821]. “From an Unpublished Review of William Hazlitt’s Table Talk.” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 19–22. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Lopate, Philip. 2012 [1989]. “What Happened to the Personal Essay?” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 132–41. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Lukács, Georg. 2010. “On the Nature and Form of the Essay.” In Soul and Form, edited by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, translated by Anna Bostock, 16–34. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Mendieta, Eduardo. 2005. Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Montaigne, Michel. 1957. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Translated by Donald Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Murdoch, Walter. 2012 [1938]. “From ‘The Essay.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 65–7. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Musil, Robert. 1996. A Man Without Qualities: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails. Translated by Sophie Wilkins, Vol. 1. New York: Vintage. Ortega y Gasset, José. 2012 [1914]. “From ‘To the Reader.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 38–9. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Picón‐Salas, Mariano. 2012 [1954]. “From ‘On the Essay.’” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 75–7. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

133

William M. Curtis

Porter, Jeff. 2012. “Introduction: ‘A History and Poetics of the Essay.’” In Understanding the Essay, edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter, ix–xxiv. Buffalo, NY: Broadview Press. Prospect Magazine. 2007. “Remembering Rorty,” July 28. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ magazine/rememberingrorty (accessed July 24, 2015). Putnam, Hilary. 1994. Pragmatism: An Open Question. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991a. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991b. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryerson, James. 2006. “The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty’s Pilgrimage.” In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 1–17. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sontag, Susan. 2012 [1992]. “Introduction to The Best American Essays.” In Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, edited by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey‐French, 147–52. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Voparil, Christopher. 2005. “On the Idea of Philosophy as Bildungsroman: Rorty and His Critics.” Contemporary Pragmatism, 2: 115–33. Wall, Alan. 2014. “Essayism and Modernity.” Fortnightly Review, May 29. http://fortnightlyreview. co.uk/2014/05/wall‐essayism‐modernity/ (accessed July 24, 2015). Wampole, Christy. 2013. “The Essayification of Everything.” New York Times, May 26. http:// opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/the‐essayification‐of‐everything/?_r=0 (accessed July, 24, 2015). West, Cornell. 1989. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

134

8 Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN

In his recent writings, Richard Rorty has interspersed autobiographical reflections in order to situate himself and explain where he is “coming from.” If we want to grasp how Rorty thinks about liberalism, his patriotic identification with the democratic aspirations of America, and his projection of liberal utopia, then it is essential to understand his life experiences and the narrative that he tells about the vicissitudes of Leftist thought in America. In Achieving Our Country, Rorty pauses to explain what it was like to be “a red diaper anticommunist baby” and to become a “teenage Cold War liberal.” His parents were loyal fellow travelers of the Communist Party until 1932 (the year after Rorty was born). They broke sharply with the party when they realized the extent to which it was directed by Moscow. But Rorty’s parents (and many relatives and friends) always thought of themselves as Left intellectuals who were associated with a variety of anticommunist socialist and radical democratic causes. So Rorty grew up in a political atmosphere in which there was a great concern with social justice. Most of the people who wrote for Leftist journals at the time (many of whom visited his home) “had no doubt that America was a great, noble, and progressive country in which justice would eventually triumph. By ‘justice’ they all meant pretty much the same thing – decent wages and working conditions, and the end of racial prejudice” (AOC 59). The young Rorty was steeped in a progressive, reformist, radically liberal political ambiance. His maternal grandfather was the Social Gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, who preached against “the servants of Mammon … who drain their fellow men for gain, … who have made us ashamed of our dear country by their defilements … [and] who have cloaked their extortion with the gospel of Christ” (AOC 59). Growing up during the Great Depression, the burning issues of the day were working for decent wages and shorter working hours, alleviating the misery of the poor, strengthening unions, increasing the government’s responsibility for unemployment compensation, and instituting social Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism,” from Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, pp. 124–138. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

135

Richard J. Bernstein

welfare programs (including Social Security). Many of Rorty’s relatives helped to write or administer progressive New Deal legislation. And for the circle of ­relatives and friends in which he grew up, the great villain, the most serious threat to liberal reformist American democracy, was Stalin and his communist “thugs.” Rorty has always been proud of his Leftist (anticommunist) legacy. At a time when it was unfashionable to be an anticommunist Leftist, when it was thought that all fervent anticommunists were conservatives or reactionaries, Rorty held to his Leftist reformist liberal commitments and his anticommunism. He certainly doesn’t want to gloss over the violence, the racial hatred, the hypocrisy, and the unrestrained greed that have marked much of American history. But for him, Leftist leanings are not at all incompatible with a sense of patriotism and pride in the promise of the story of the displacement of a “discredited older Left” by the New Left that was told by Christopher Lasch in The Agony of the American Left. He thinks it is a disaster that this influential narrative of the alleged failure and “sellout” of reformist intellectuals is still taken as authoritative. Sometimes Rorty traces his democratic reformist legacy back to Thomas Jefferson, but in Achieving Our Country he singles out Walt Whitman and John Dewey as the poet and prophet of a progressive liberal democratic society – “a classless and casteless society” – “the sort of society that American Leftists have spent the twentieth century trying to construct” (AOC 30). It makes perfect sense, given the progressive, reformist environment in which Rorty was nurtured, that his great hero is John Dewey. What Rorty most deeply responds to in Dewey is his conviction that human agency can always make a difference in bringing about a more humane and just society. The achievement of the promise of democracy was always Dewey’s central concern. Rorty (like Dewey) is scornful of fashionable professions of pessimism and cynicism. And Dewey (like Rorty) combined the sharpest criticism of the failures of America to live up to its professed ideals with pride in the democratic promise of America. The task for a democratic Left is to try to foster specific projects of liberal reform. “Real politics” (which Rorty contrasts with “Cultural Politics”) doesn’t give up on what New Leftists once called the “system.” A Leftist politics should work toward instituting the types of legislation and social policies that can really make a difference in ameliorating human misery and should strive to lessen the gap between the rich and the poor – a politics that would discourage the wanton greed of the superrich. Now when Rorty speaks of liberalism, it is this image of progressive, reformist politics that is always the background informing what he cherishes and wants to foster. What is most needed today is not “theorizing” or “problematics,” but a return to the tradition of reformist Leftist liberal politics in which intellectuals and workers join together to effect social change. “Return” is not quite accurate, because Rorty isn’t backward‐looking. He is calling for a new alliance of progressive intellectuals and workers to deal with the horrendous problems of racism, economic inequality, and poverty that still confront our country. There once was a time in the Progressive Era and during the height of the New Deal when the Left effectively acted as a goad and a conscience for the country – and this is the model of the type of Leftist politics that Rorty hopes to see arise again. It is something of a scandal that “conservatives” have been so effective in distorting the meaning of “liberal” that politicians shy away from calling themselves liberals. It is an even greater scandal that the Democratic Party has abandoned its own progressive, reformist, liberal program. But why has this happened? How are we to account for what Rorty calls the “Eclipse of the Reformist Left” (a phrase that echoes John Dewey’s “The Eclipse of the Public”)? 136

Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

In part, Rorty is convinced that academic intellectuals must bear some of the responsibility for this demise. A crucial turning point has been the unfortunate legacy of the 1960s. Rorty is certainly not one of those (like so many neoconservatives and reactionaries) who attribute all our current ills to the excess of the New Left. The civil rights movement of the early 1960s was one of the great achievements of Leftist liberal politics in the twentieth century – a movement that eventually led to the passing of civil rights legislation in the United States. Rorty has never wavered in his condemnation of the Vietnam War. “America,” he tells us, “will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972. We do not know what our country would be like today, had that rage not been felt. But we can be pretty certain that it would be a much worse place than it is” (AOC 68). He also praises the cultural achievements of the feminist, gay, and lesbian movements, as well as the growing sensitivity to racism. But the heirs of the Old Left and the heirs of the New Left have never been reconciled. We should not harp on the failures of the reformist Left and the New Left, but rather “all of us should take pride in a country whose historians will someday honor the achievements of both of these Lefts” (AOC 71). Nevertheless, what has come to replace the older reformist Left and the New Left is what Rorty labels a “Cultural Left.” And from his perspective, this has been nothing less than a disaster. “The heirs of the New Left and the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘policies of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed” (AOC 77). What is distressing about this new cultural Left is not its concern with the pernicious forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia, but its almost total blindness to the economic issues of class. Rorty wants to shout at his Leftist academic colleagues: “Hey, Stupid, it’s the economy.” He accuses the cultural Left of giving up on specific programs of political and legislative reform, of failing to reach out and ally itself with workers and the poor. The cultural Left is more concerned with what the sixties called “naming the system” than with reforming bad laws. It is convinced that “real politics” in the United States is so corrupt and phony, so beneath contempt that it doesn’t want to dirty its hands with real political action. The “postmodern cultural Left” spends more energy fighting over what texts should be included in literature courses than it does in dealing with the economic problems of the homeless or creating decent housing and jobs. Rorty concedes that one positive result of the cultural Left has been making college graduates much more aware of the forms of sexual, homophobic, and racial humiliation. “The American academy has done as much to overcome sadism during the last thirty years as it did to overcome selfishness in the previous seventy” (AOC 82). Nevertheless, there is a dark side to this success. “During the same period in which socially accepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased” (AOC 83). Rorty calls for a reaffirmation of democratic liberal reform. But the truth is that Rorty is much more effective in ridiculing the cultural Left than he is in coming up with feasible practical alternatives. If the situation is as bad as Rorty describes it, then his “positive” suggestions to get the present cultural Left to transform itself, and to open relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, are quite feeble. “I have two suggestions about how to effect this transition. 137

Richard J. Bernstein

The first is that the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit. The second is that the Left should try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans” (AOC 91–2). I believe that the preceding is a fair portrait of Rorty’s Leftist liberal political convictions, his criticism of the cultural Left, and his hopes for the future. But there is a strange irony (for someone who thinks of himself as a liberal ironist) in this portrait. Rorty’s political allegiances were virtually unknown until the 1980s. Using the distinction that he makes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity between the “private” and the “public,” we might even say that his political views were relatively private – those of a private citizen. His public persona was that of a professional philosopher who, initially attracted to metaphysics and the history of philosophy, had been converted to analytic philosophy. Subsequently, in his controversial but influential book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), he devastatingly criticized the excess and pretensions of analytic philosophy and modern epistemology. There were a few vague hints about Rorty’s political leanings in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but nothing like the explicit acknowledgments that he made in his writings of the 1980s and the 1990s. There is another irony. Because Rorty wrote favorably about such continental thinkers as Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard, he has been taken to be one of those “postmodern” thinkers who became so important for the cultural Left. Rorty himself was horrified by this turn. He was shocked that his anticommunism was mistaken as an endorsement for conservatives and neoconservatives. This misreading of his intentions was a stimulus for a much more forthright and explicit statement of his political liberal allegiances. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty sought to set the record straight. He argued that we can read philosophers like Derrida, Nietzsche, and Heidegger for our own private enjoyment. We should read them the way we read a good novel – for sheer pleasure. We can all be ironists in the privacy of our own libraries. But it is an illusion to think that such thinkers were of any use whatsoever in thinking about our public political lives. If one wants to read philosophers who might help us think about politics and social justice, it is better to turn to John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. Rorty’s forte as a philosopher has always been his metaphilosophical critiques – pointing out the foibles, illusions, and self‐deceptions of philosophers in their self‐understanding of what they are doing. He has been especially critical of the attempts by philosophers to rationally justify their positions (including their political position) by appealing to foundations. So in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty criticizes what he calls “liberal metaphysicians.” Liberal metaphysicians (which includes most contemporary liberal philosophers except Rorty) are those who think they can justify their basic claims about justice, rights, and liberty. What is wrong with liberal metaphysicians is not their liberalism but their metaphilosophy, their conviction that they can support their claims by appeals to noncircular arguments that are well‐grounded and based upon solid foundations. In contrast, the figure that he wants to defend is the “liberal ironist.” This is the person who knows that her “final vocabulary” – the words human beings “employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives” (CIS 73) – cannot itself be justified by any appeal to more ultimate rational foundations. The ironist knows that there are always alternatives and does not think that 138

Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

somehow her final vocabulary “is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself ” (CIS 73). Now to many critics of Rorty, this championing of the liberal ironist  –  when unmasked – is nothing more than unabashed “bad” nihilistic relativism. Rorty has been battling this criticism for more than twenty years. He is convinced that the charge of relativism is a “bugbear.” He claims that the accusation that he is some sort of bad relativist is made by those who still hold to the belief that there are (or ought to be) solid theoretical rational foundations. We would all be better off if we simply dropped all talk of “relativism,” “objectivism,” “realism,” and so on, if we gave up on the idea that deep down in all human beings there is some real essence that can serve to justify our liberal convictions. Rorty’s deepest philosophic antagonism is toward what he sometimes calls “Platonism” and at other times “Kantianism.” By this he means the “set of philosophical distinctions (appearance–reality, matter–mind, made–found, sensible–intellectual, etc.)” (PSH xii) that have for so long obsessed philosophers. Ever since the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty has been urging his fellow philosophers to drop these distinctions and to bring about a post‐philosophical culture where we can turn our attention to the discussion of our social hopes rather than knowing what is really “out there.” In his most recent collection of articles, Philosophy and Social Hope, he writes: “Most of what I have written in the last decade consists of attempts to tie my social hopes – hopes for a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society – with my antagonism towards Platonism. These attempts have been encouraged by the thought that the same antagonism lay behind many of the writings of my principal philosophical hero, John Dewey” (PSH xii). Rorty unabashedly defends the appropriateness of rhetoric and what he calls “redescription” in order to make his liberal convictions as attractive as possible. Given his liberal reformist convictions, it makes eminently good sense that he endorses Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal as someone who thinks that cruelty is the worst thing we do. He is also in basic agreement with Avishai Margalit, who argues that a decent society is one that seeks to eliminate (or at least minimize) institutional humiliation. Although Rorty – when he wants to – can be a match for almost any sophisticated philosopher in thinking up ingenious arguments, he denigrates the privileged role that argument has been given in analytic philosophy. But he pays a heavy price in his impatience with argumentation and detailed explication  –  and this shows up in his own defense and articulation of liberalism. He admires the care, detail, and finesse of Rawls and Habermas in articulating and defending their own liberal convictions. The power of Rawls’s theory of justice and Habermas’s discourse ethics is to be found in the details – in carefully working out their projects. Each of them (in different ways) seeks to treat the variety of complex issues concerning rights, law, civil disobedience, constitutions, and so on in working out his theory of justice. But if one turns to Rorty’s discussion of them, this is rarely what concerns him. He is more interested in their metaphilosophical positions. He praises Rawls because he thinks that in the course of his development during the past thirty years, Rawls (like Dewey) has become less Kantian – and more explicitly historicist. This fits well with Rorty’s own historicist bias. The emergence of liberal societies in the West is a happy accident – a historical contingency. Rorty rejects all grand ­narratives that suggest that there is an inevitability or a destiny in the eventual triumph of liberal 139

Richard J. Bernstein

freedom. He keeps criticizing Habermas (whom he greatly admires as a public democratic intellectual) because he still – according to Rorty – has a hankering for something like Kantian foundations and universal validity claims. Whenever Habermas talks about context‐transcendent universal norms, Rorty pulls out his “critical” knife. He sharpens his polemic against this unnecessary vestige of Platonism and Kantianism. He is deeply suspicious about anything that even looks like a “theory” or a “rational justification,” and he elaborates his own redescriptions with broad, sweeping brush strokes. Although he frequently speaks about a commitment to social justice, he rarely spells out what precisely he means – except for a few general catchy phrases. Philosophers tend to think that there are important and consequential differences in the liberal positions advocated by J. S. Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. But Rorty thinks that, as liberals, they are all more or less saying pretty much the same thing. He goes even further. At one point in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he impatiently declares: Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word. Discoveries about who is being made to suffer can be left to the workings of a free press, free universities, and enlightening public opinion. (CIS 63)

The passage is revealing for several reasons. He claims that we don’t need more theoretical work about the nature and basis of liberalism – the kind of theoretical work that preoccupies political liberal philosophers and legal theorists. We should focus on how to improve the institutions that already exist in liberal societies. If we ask Rorty questions like “What really counts as cruelty and humiliation?”, “Are there criteria for determining what are acceptable and unacceptable forms of humiliation?”, “What are we to do about protecting free speech even when it protects the type of hate speech that humiliates?” and “How are we to decide hard cases where there are serious conflicts?” Rorty grows restless and impatient. He thinks it is not that these are unimportant questions, but they tempt us to think that we ought to be able to give them philosophical answers. This is the kind of “theorizing” that isn’t helpful for coping, and it is distracting. He is perfectly forthright about his skepticism that any sort of theory can help us to justify liberal convictions or can help us resolve real moral dilemmas. For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” – no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. Nor is there an answer to the question “How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when you devote yourself to private projects and self‐creation?” This question strikes liberal ironists as just as hopeless as the questions “Is it right to deliver n innocents over to be tortured to save the lives of m × n other innocents? If so, what are the correct values of n and m?” or the question “When may one favor members of one’s family, or one’s community, over other, randomly chosen, human beings?” Anybody who thinks that there are well grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question – algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort – is still, in his heart, a theologian or metaphysician. He believes in an order beyond

140

Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities. (CIS xv)

Powerful novels (like Charles Dickens’s) and muckraking journalism (like Upton Sinclair’s) are far more effective in getting people to do something about horrendous social injustices than the academic tracts of philosophers and those infatuated with “theorizing.” There once was a time when the work of liberal metaphysicians and theorists was important, especially when liberalism was a novelty and liberal societies were just coming into existence. But that time has long passed. The primary problem now is one of motivation and implementation – to get political coalitions together that are dedicated to reforming institutions, laws, and policies. Rorty is very sympathetic to a view that he attributes to Hegel and Dewey – “that universal moral principles [are] useful only insofar as they [are] the outgrowth of the historical development of a particular society – a society whose institutions [give] content to the otherwise empty shell of principle” (PSH xxxi). He admires the liberal political theorist Michael Walzer because he argues that “we should not think of the customs and institutions of particular societies as accidental accretions around a common core of universal moral rationality, the transcendental moral law. Rather, we should think of the thick set of customs and institutions as prior, as what commands moral allegiance” (PSH xxxi). So instead of better and more sophisticated liberal and democratic theory, the right sorts of novels, muckraking journalism, and op‐ed articles may accomplish more to strengthen and improve liberal institutions than endless academic tracts of political philosophers. This fits in with another of Rorty’s deepest convictions. Liberal societies depend on a sense of solidarity with and sympathy for one’s fellow human beings. It makes little sense to speak about universal sympathy, for this is frequently quite empty. Moral and liberal progress involves enlarging our sense of sympathy for suffering human beings and those who are institutionally humiliated. This is accomplished by the literary skills of novelists and the reporting skills of journalists who are able to arouse our sense of injustice, our indignation at outrageous forms of humiliation. Rorty’s understanding of human sympathy and solidarity helps clarify another controversial feature of his thinking. He has been deliberately provocative in labeling his position “ethnocentric.” But in doing so, he wants to call attention to the fact that solidarity begins “at home” – that it is typically a local phenomenon that can only gradually be extended. Moral progress comes about when our sense of solidarity, our sympathy with those who are institutionally humiliated, is extended and deepened. So Rorty’s ethnocentrism, his localism, his concern to start with building up a new American pride is not incompatible with the social hope for achieving a global cosmopolitan liberal utopia. I said earlier that as a liberal, Rorty is primarily concerned with issues of motivation and implementation. One might ask: what role can intellectuals play in this process? There is no mystery about Rorty’s sympathies. His ideal is someone like Herbert Croly, a leading liberal intellectual of the Progressive movement. Croly’s The Promise of American Life “is filled with the same national pride that filled [Walt Whitman’s] Democratic Vistas, but Corly makes an important distinction that Whitman rarely made: that between America before and after the coming of industrial capitalism” (AOC 46). Corly recognized that “immiseration would occur whenever the capitalists became able to maintain

141

Richard J. Bernstein

a reserve army of unemployed, and thus to pay starvation wages to those they hire” (AOC 46–7). Rorty totally endorses both the tone and the content of Croly’s claim that “So long as the great majority of the poor in any country are inert and laboring without any hope in this world, the whole associated life of that community rests on an equivocal foundation. Its moral and social order is tied to an economic system which starves and mutilates the great majority of the population, and under such conditions its religion necessarily becomes a spiritual drug, administered for the purpose of subduing the popular discontent and relieving the popular misery” (quoted in AOC 47). And Rorty hopes that there will be a revival of this type of liberal reformist commitment, that the cultural Left will wake up and grow weary of its obsession with theorizing – that they will join with the workers and the vestiges of the reformist Left to form a revitalized Left dedicated to effective liberal reform. Why does Rorty harp on the issue of national pride and patriotism at a time when these seem so unfashionable, at least among academic intellectuals? Because he is convinced that “a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself – unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it.” Rorty knows that “such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals” (PSH 253). The call to his fellow academic intellectuals to take pride in their country, to dedicate themselves to “Achieving our Country,” to achieve the democratic promise of America, is a necessary condition for the possibility of a revival of reform politics. Sometimes Rorty (like John Dewey) is dismissed by his critics for being naïvely optimistic about the prospects for America and liberal societies. He is accused of having a superficial understanding of the depravity of human nature – what Christians have always recognized as the sinfulness and fallen condition of human beings. It is certainly true that Rorty has little sympathy for those who appeal to sinfulness as a meaningful political category. In the battle over this issue that took place between John Dewey and Reinhold Neibuhr concerning the political significance of sinfulness and the problem of evil, Rorty is clearly on the side of Dewey. We do not need theological categories in order to confront the horrors that exist in the world. Furthermore, Rorty is suspicious of those who adopt a spectatorial attitude of global pessimism – an attitude that diverts us from enlisting collective agency to ameliorate human misery. He fully endorses John Dewey’s view of evil. Rorty thinks that Andrew Delbanco (who has strong critical reservations about Dewey) “gets Dewey exactly right when he says that for him ‘evil was the failure of imagination to reach beyond itself,’ the human failure to open oneself to a spirit that both chastises one for confidence in one’s own righteousness and promises the enduring comfort and reciprocal love. There is a sense in which all of Dewey’s thought was an extended commentary on Emerson’s remark ‘the only sin is limitation’” (AOC 34). Rorty challenges those who think this understanding of evil is a sign of Dewey’s naiveté and superficiality. On the contrary, it is a mark of Dewey’s “intellectual courage.” Furthermore, it is simply false to claim that Rorty is blithely optimistic about the prospects of America as a liberal society. Recent economic trends show that America is rapidly becoming a class and caste society, that the disparity between the small elite group of financially powerful superrich and the large group of poor is becoming more and more exacerbated. In the concluding remarks of Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty 142

Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

gives a number of good reasons why it is “abruptly improbable” that we will ever have a “global liberal utopia” – the type of liberal utopia that he envisions. There are even reasons “for believing that neither democratic freedom nor philosophical pluralism will survive the next century.” In a hundred years’ time, pragmatism, democratic freedom, and liberalism may only be a faint memory. “For very few unexpurgated libraries may exist then, and very few people may ever have heard of Mill, Nietzsche, James and Dewey, anymore than of free trade nations, a free press and democratic elections” (PSH 274). These are not the words of a happy‐go‐lucky optimist who is convinced that bourgeois liberalism is destined to triumph. But this doesn’t mean that Rorty thinks there is anything wrong with these hopes – that we should abandon them. On the contrary, his warnings bring home what he has always emphasized. The emergence of liberal societies in the West is a historical contingency. Just as circumstances that brought about the existence of liberal societies and institutions were a “happy accident,” there is no reason for thinking that liberal societies will continue to exist. There is no historical necessity, no destiny, no enduring human essence that ensures that the freedom of democratic liberal societies will prevail. Indeed, present economic trends suggest that there may be a collapse of liberalism and pragmatism in America. (See his fantasy “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096” in Philosophy and Social Hope.) This is not reason to retreat into the spectator stance of cultural pessimism – to become a doomsayer, a herald for what Heidegger called the epoch of Gestell (Enframing). Rather, the contingency of liberal democracy highlights the importance of human agency – of the need to keep working to reform and improve liberal democratic institutions – to keep alive the promise of a classless and casteless liberal utopia. There is much to admire but also much to criticize in Rorty’s “inspirational” liberalism. As long as one stays on an abstract rhetorical level, one can hardly object to calling for social justice and the end of racial prejudice. Rorty acknowledges that national pride and patriotism can easily degenerate into nationalist and isolationist jingoism. But he doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge how the rhetoric of national pride can become empty and sentimental. Sometimes Rorty sounds like a speech writer for one of our politicians who dress up their campaign speeches with talk about the “promise of American democracy” and then use their political power to further the economic interests of their superrich campaign contributors. Of course, we do make distinctions between phony patriotism and the real thing. But “the real thing” (to use an expression that Rorty favors) depends upon directing one’s energies toward concrete proposals for the reform of bad laws and policies. Rorty is frequently brilliant in calling the bluff of those who believe that their sophisticated theorizing is required for politics today. But if we apply to Rorty the same tough pragmatic standards that he applies to others, there is very little concrete payoff. It may be inspiring and stirring to talk of limiting greed and lessening the gap between the rich and the poor. But Rorty doesn’t provide us with the foggiest idea of how this is to be accomplished. How are we to descend from Rorty’s lofty rhetoric to the effective liberal reforms? I don’t see that Rorty has much that is useful to contribute to this type of pragmatic activity. Although I also admire John Dewey as much as Rorty does, I think that Rorty suffers from the same defect that plagued Dewey. Like Rorty, Dewey was much better at chiding his fellow intellectuals about their failure to deal with the “problems of men” than he was in developing concrete ways for solving these problems. 143

Richard J. Bernstein

There is another way of seeing what is missing in Rorty’s inspirational liberalism. Suppose we ask why Rorty is so impatient with theory when it comes to dealing with political matters and questions of liberalism. His objections boil down to two complaints. Insofar as theories seek to justify liberalism by appeal to solid foundations and Archimedean resting points, they are doomed to failure. We need to get rid of the excessive “rationalism” that pervades so much of political theory today. It is this rationalism that is the bad legacy of the Enlightenment. Isaiah Berlin was right when he endorsed Joseph Schumpeter’s remark: “To realize the relative validity of one’s convictions and yet stand for them unflinchingly is what distinguished a civilized man from a barbarian.” Rorty also approves of Berlin’s comment about this remark: “To demand more than this is perhaps a deep incurable metaphysical need: but to allow it to determine one’s practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity” (CIS 46). But Rorty doesn’t think that the other kind of theorizing – postmodern, nonfoundational theorizing of the cultural Left – is much better. It gets so tangled up in its own sophisticated, dazzling jargon that it becomes the intellectual’s narcissistic indulgence  –  it fails to connect with “real politics.” But it is terribly misleading to suggest that these are the only two viable ways of thinking about the role of political and social theory: either misguided foundational theory or self‐indulgent postmodern theorizing. Suppose we consider the type of liberal democratic reform that Rorty considers to be exemplary – the New Deal social welfare legislation. It is a gross distortion to think (as Rorty sometimes suggests) that a bunch of patriotic Left Americans decided that the government simply had to take some initiative to ameliorate human misery and then instituted reform legislation. There were extensive theoretical debates about the causes of the Great Depression and what economic and social measures could help bring the country out of it. And these theoretical debates involved competing normative claims about what should be given priority in shaping America. In this sense, theory informs concrete programs of action. And such theory is not simply the technical theory of neutral experts, for it requires specifying the social injustices to be rectified. Without a modicum of theoretical analysis and debate, liberal reform can too easily degenerate into mindless activism or the search for quick fixes. There doesn’t seem to be a place in Rorty’s scheme of things for this type of responsible social and political theory – theory that is neither foundational nor postmodern but that is intended to help us understand the complex situations that we confront in order to figure out what reform is likely to be effective. Sometimes Rorty writes as if this sort of theory is better left to social scientists. But I find little evidence that social scientists are carrying on the type of social theorizing that Dewey thought was necessary for intelligent social reform. Rorty, like many others, is worried about the economic consequences of globalization, especially in regard to its effect on the working populations when multinational corporations can so easily and efficiently manufacture goods almost anyplace in the world where wages are lowest. But suppose we ask Rorty: What is to be done about it? What types of reforms should be instituted? One needs some (theoretical) account of what precisely are the dynamics of globalization, of what we are even talking about when we use this all too fashionable expression. Sometimes Rorty writes as if we don’t need any more sophisticated theoretical categories than “greed,” “superrich,” “thugs,” 144

Rorty’s Inspirational Liberalism

and so on. Now, while this may be rhetorically uplifting, it isn’t very illuminating in helping us to figure out what is to be done. In response to some criticisms pressed against his understanding of politics by Simon Critchley, Rorty sharply replies: “I see politics, at least in democratic countries, as something to be conducted in as plain, public, easy‐to‐ handle language as possible. I see the enemies of human happiness as just greed, sloth and hypocrisy, and I don’t see the need for philosophical depth charges in dealing with such surface enemies.”1 Now if one uses the same sort of “plain,” blunt talk that Rorty favors and presses the same sorts of tough questions he keeps pressing against others, then one might reply: “Hey Rorty, your high‐flatutin’ talk about ‘redescription’ is nothing more than what we in the political real world call ‘spin.’ And if one is clever enough (has good handlers), one can give almost any remark an effective ‘spin.’ Let’s face it, what you call ‘greed’ is nothing but good American entrepreneurship, what you call ‘sloth’ (a word nobody uses today except theologians) is the creative use of leisure that keeps the economy growing, and what you call ‘hypocrisy’ is only a way of referring to the type of business acumen that makes this such a great country. You should take some pride in those characteristics that have made our democracy so great, powerful, and resilient!” The trouble with Rorty’s “inspirational” liberalism is that, at best, it tends to become merely inspirational and sentimental, without much bite. “Where’s the beef?” At worst, it is a rhetorical smokescreen that obfuscates the type of serious thinking and action required to bring about liberal reform that he envisions. Inspirational liberalism without detailed, concrete plans for action tends to become empty, just as quick fixes without overall vision and careful theoretical reflection tend to become blind. I have been arguing that we should raise the tough pragmatic questions about what is to be done, and how to do it, that Rorty keeps raising about others. But, still, we should recognize that Rorty is attempting to create a space for a different way of thinking about liberalism – an alternative to the rights‐obsessed liberalism that preoccupies so many academics today. In the concluding pages of his splendid book on John Dewey, Alan Ryan notes that the characteristic literary product of John Dewey when he deals with social and political issues is the “lay sermon.” And, despite Rorty’s professed secularism, his characteristic style in calling for renewed national pride and patriotism is also a type of lay sermon. Ryan raises the question of whether the lay sermon is an apt style for a modern liberal. This is his answer: More nearly than one might think. A great deal of recent social and political writing has operated at one or the other of two extremes: a concentration on the legal framework of politics or a narrow focus on policy. This has left a substantial hole in the middle ground where Dewey operated. The lay sermon is at home in this middle ground; between pure philosophy and a policy paper lies the terrain of intelligent persuasion.2

Ryan then goes on to summarize Dewey’s liberalism. His eloquent summary might also serve to describe the Dewey legacy that Rorty seeks to invigorate. Deweyan liberalism is different. It is a genuine liberalism, unequivocally committed to progress and the expansion of human tastes, needs, and interests; its focus is on self development and autonomy of the individual; it is, if not rationalist in outlook, certainly

145

Richard J. Bernstein

committed to the rule of intelligence. … What makes it an optimistic and expansive liberalism is its insistence that the individual whom liberalism wants to encourage is neither the rip‐off artist favored by the economic changes of the 1980s, nor the narcissist bewailing (or for that matter celebrating) the state of his or her psyche. The individual it celebrates is someone who is thoroughly engaged with his or her work, family, local community and its politics, who has not been coerced, bullied, or dragged into these interests but sees them as fields for a self‐expression quite consistent with losing himself or herself in the risk at hand.3

Inspirational liberalism may be a healthy antidote to legalistic rights‐based liberalism and to the abuses of the infatuation with theorizing by postmodern cultural critics. But without pragmatic toughness and a concrete program for reform, patriotic inspirational liberalism too easily degenerates into an empty rhetorical hand waving.

Notes 1 Reply to Simon Critchley, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 45. 2 Alan Ryan, John Dewey and the High Tide of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1995), p. 366. 3 Ibid., p. 367.

146

Part III

Themes

9 Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats? PASCAL ENGEL

1 Introduction Many pragmatists, from Dewey to Rorty, hold that their views provide a defense of democracy or are consonant with it. They diverge, however, on the role that truth ought to play in this defense: Deweyan pragmatists consider that truth has nothing to do with democracy, whereas Jamesian and Peircean pragmatists insist that we cannot do without truth in a democratic state. In this respect their debate mirrors the opposition between Rawls’s conception of political liberalism, according to which there is no room for truth in democracy, and Joshua Cohen and others, for whom it is indispensable. I want here to bring together these two debates, and to try to defend, against the pragmatists, both Deweyan and Peircean, the claim that we cannot get rid of truth if we want to defend democratic politics. In order to get a grip on these debates, however, we need to make two distinctions. The first is between a theory of truth and a conception of truth’s importance for various purposes, epistemic, practical, or political. It is one thing to hold that truth is such and such a property, or concept, and another to say whether it is good or bad for various objectives, among which democratic politics. The second is between different theories of truth, in particular between substantive theories of truth, such as the correspondence, the coherentist, or the pragmatist theories, on the one hand, and so‐called deflationist or minimalist theories of truth, which say that truth is a very “thin” notion which carries no metaphysical import, on the other hand. These distinctions are important because it is not always clear in these discussions whether enemies or friends of truth talk about whether a certain metaphysical conception of truth matters or does not matter for democracy, or whether they defend only a shallow conception. I proceed here as follows. I shall first spell out the distinction between various views of truth and explain which ones are supposed to matter, and in what sense, for a defense of democracy if one is a pragmatist. Then I shall try to show that pragmatism fails to

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

149

Pascal Engel

provide an adequate defense of democracy whether or not it eschews truth. This will be premised both on the view that we need a robust conception of truth as correspondence and that such a conception is the one that we need for democracy. The aim of this chapter is limited. It deals only with the kind of role and justification that pragmatists give to truth within democracy. It does not take into account arguments about democratic procedures, such as voting and the justification of the majority rule.

2  Truth: Substantive or Shallow? To the notion of truth are attached a number of truisms or platitudes (Wright 1993): that it is true that p is equivalent to p, that p is true if and only if things are the way p says they are, that truth is objective, that a proposition can be justified without being true, and that truth is the norm or goal of inquiry. According to most classical philosophers, from Aristotle to Russell, and according to many contemporary philosophers, these truisms, although they give a “nominal” definition of truth (Kant), are not sufficient to define it, and should be associated to a substantial theory of truth as correspondence to facts or external reality, or as a form of coherence of our thought, as the identity of thought and reality, or as the ideal limit of our inquiries (Engel 2002). According to other philosophers, such substantive theories of truth stumble on unsurmountable difficulties, and truth cannot be defined. It is not a deep metaphysical property, but a very shallow one, which can be reduced to the logical behavior of the truth predicate, and as a device of assertion. According to such “deflationist” or minimalist theories, there is no more to truth than the fact that “‘p’ is true iff p,” and to the fact that asserting that p and asserting that p is true are equivalent, and all the so‐called substantive properties reduce to these ones (Horwich 1991). Ramsey’s “redundancy” theory (Dokic and Engel 2002), Tarski’s “semantic conception” of truth, and Quine and Davidson’s “disquotational” theory of truth belong to the deflationist family. What is the pragmatist’s stance toward these different notions of truth? Here there are delicate matters of interpretation, but most commentators agree with the following crude map (for an extended map, see Tiercelin 2014). All pragmatists recognize the truisms of the nominal notion of truth (who doesn’t?). Where they differ is whether one should adopt a substantive or a deflationary view. Classical pragmatists like Peirce hold that truth is the ideal limit of our inquiries, which amounts to a form of ideal coherence theory (Peirce). James often defends a view of this sort, but he associates truth with the practical success of our inquiries. It is not clear that he defends the “crude” form of pragmatism which is often associated to his name, which says that truth is nothing else than the practical effects that our conceptions have, but he most often comes close to it. Dewey defends something which is closer to a verificationist conception: truth is “warranted assertibility” (Dewey 1941). Most classical pragmatist conceptions of truth are epistemic or antirealistic: they take truth to be the ideal limit of our beliefs and inquiries (Peirce), or a property of the practical success or our beliefs (James), not a property of their correspondence to reality.1 More recent versions of the view, such as Putnam’s “internal realism” which he often calls a “kind of pragmatism” (Putnam 1990) also take truth to be ideal rational acceptability, hence an epistemic property. 150

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

Richard Rorty is almost unique among the pragmatist in defending a form of deflationism about truth. He argues that the notion of truth has no explanatory use, and does not involve any essence, or any deep metaphysical property or object (the True). In particular he holds that the traditional realist view of truth as correspondence of our thoughts, judgments, or sentences with reality is meaningless, and that, in consequence, all the debates about realism and antirealism in philosophy are empty. According to Rorty, there is no more to truth than the fact that our statements are justified, where justification is agreement between the members of a community. The fact that truth is nothing but justification, for Rorty, does not imply that truth can be defined as an epistemic property of our beliefs. Being justified is not an epistemic status, actual or ideal, but just a property of our assertions when they are, so to say, mutualized. According to Rorty, we first agree on some statements, and then approve them as true. As he says “‘True’ is just a little “rhetorical tap” that we give on the back of our assertions when we like them and find that they concord with what our peers accept. This is a version of the view, once defended by Strawson (1949), according to which true is a predicate which serves to express our approbation of our assertions. Along with this performative use of the notion of truth, Rorty lists its disquotational use, and its “cautionary” use. According to Rorty this use allows us to distinguish truth from justification: “Your theory is justified but it is not true” does not mean that truth outstrips justification or that there is a reality which could undermine your local justification, but only that there is a further justification, possibly held by another, more comprehensive group; it does not mean that there is a reality which could undermine. All these uses, according to Rorty, imply that there is no hidden essence of truth: truth is just the addition of these uses, which are contextual, community bound and culture bound. Truth can neither be the ideal rational acceptability nor a norm (Rorty 1995). It is merely a matter of linguistic devices and of the utility of assertions within a community. Given that it pays to talk about mountains, as it certainly does, one of the obvious truths about mountains is that they were here before we talked about them. If you do not believe that, you probably do not know how to play the usual language‐games which employ the word “mountain.” But the utility of those language games has nothing to do with the question of whether Reality as It Is In Itself, apart from the way it is handy for human beings to describe it, has mountains in it. (Rorty 1982)

It is often hard to distinguish Rorty and other similar views of truth from straight relativism or skepticism. But even if we do not ascribe to him such sweeping consequences, most of his arguments in favor of his version of the deflationist theory are weak. It is not the place here to rehearse these (Rorty and Engel 2005), but the main objections to Rorty’s conceptual claims about truth are the following. First it is just not true to say that truth is merely a device of assertion, for to assert that p is true is not just to assert p; it is also to express one’s belief that p is true, and that p is true in a sense which exceeds the fact that one believes it, namely that p is objectively true (Price 1998; Engel 2013). Rorty’s eliminativism about truth makes no room for this. Second there are conceptual ties between justification and truth, but these ties do not amount to an identity. To be justified in believing that p entails that one is justified in believing that p is true, but that does not entail that “justified” and “true” mean the same thing. Third 151

Pascal Engel

“justified” and, according to Rorty, “true” do not mean “justified (true) for a community.” If we happened to be brainwashed, or victims of an evil demon, would we say that our beliefs are justified for one audience (that of brains in a vat) but not for another (that of those who manipulate the Matrix). No, it seems that we would say that our beliefs are justified, but false.

3  The Pragmatists on Truth and Democracy A deflationary theory of truth does not say that “truth” is an empty word or a mere fiction, as it is claimed by Nietzscheans and postmodernists. It says that truth has a use in our language and in our lives, but not a significant one. There is no direct implication between a deflationary theory of truth or of the concept of truth and a deflationary view of the importance of truth for the practical, the ethical or the political domains, for one can hold that the nature of truth is one thing and its consequences or significance in these domains another thing. Thus – and paradigmatically – Rawls (1996) holds that whatever view we hold about truth, political liberalism “does without the concept of truth.”2 The unimportance of truth for the political realm is, for Rawls, perfectly compatible with the claim that a substantive conception of truth is correct. Rorty’s view has often been compared to Rawls, in that both hold not only that truth has no relevance for democracy, and that it is unwelcome and dangerous to invoke truth in the context of political deliberation and in the context of assessing the justification of democracy. The difference is that Rawls accepts that truth could have, metaphysically speaking, such and such a nature, although it is irrelevant. He nevertheless claims that a traditional correspondence conception of truth, according to which truth is adequacy to an external reality, should not be invoked in discussing theories of justice and our conceptions of the good, but only the reasonableness of our conceptions. Rawls certainly means by “reasonableness” something more substantial than what Rorty means by “justification” – he has in mind a standard of justification which has a chance of being objective, which, in his view, means that it has a good chance to meet a kind of consensus. But, on the one hand, Rawls accepts that consensus is not the same as truth and, on the other hand, he holds that political pluralism does not command that there should be, on any matter of public policy, a consensus. There can be irreducible disagreements, which are part of a pluralistic democratic society, and their existence is precisely the reason why a substantive notion of truth ought to be replaced by a notion of reasonableness. Once we accept the fact that reasonable pluralism is a permanent condition of public culture under free institutions, the idea of the reasonable is more suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a constitutional regime than the idea of moral truth. Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis for public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division. (Rawls 1996, 129)

Rawls is clear that democracy does not need, but also ought to avoid as a matter of principle, invocation of a substantive notion of truth. He does not tell us whether his 152

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

view is compatible with a deflationary view, but he also makes clear that his view is not based on general doubts about truth as such, but only on a concern for truth’s role in political debates. He holds that no substantive judgment can be applied in the public space of reason, even though one may admit that such substantive judgments are there to be had.3 Rorty’s rejection of the relevance of truth in democracy is not based on the same kind of grounds as Rawls’s. For Rorty truth does not matter in the first place because there is no substantive concept of truth to be had. A fortiori4 the notion of truth cannot play any role in democracy or in any other political regime. It cannot play any role for the justification of democracy and it cannot play any role in the democratic politics in general. The reason is that democracy, for Rorty, cannot be justified, because no political view can be justified. Democracy is not a set of principles, ethical or political, which are in need of some kind of metaethical or philosophical justification. It is a way of life, our way of life in the contemporary world. Political philosophy ought not to be based on ideals of justice, but on “social hope.” Democracy “can get along without philosophical presuppositions” (Rorty 1989). In his ideal culture of “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” (Rorty 1983), agreement to democracy is not an agreement on a set of principles but the product of purely contingent facts about history, geography, and socialization. There is no sense in which tyranny is better than democracy; we stand up for it without having any reason to think it is better than other political configurations. That is Rortian ironism (Rorty 1989). Rorty is no Hobbes. He does not say that auctoritas non veritas fecit legem, since not only he does he deny that truth has any authority, but he also denies that there are any normative truths at all, even about the foundations of authority. There is, however, a line of argument which is, on the face of it, less radical than this eliminativist stance, and which sometimes surfaces in Rorty’s writings. It is a minimalist stance: although we can do without substantive truth, we cannot do without assertions – assertions have all the minimal properties that substantive truths have (disquotation etc.)  –  and so we can keep the functions of truth without postulating any substantive concept of truth. To say that p is true is just to say that p can be asserted with enough warrant. It is a verificationist stance: since any appeal to truth would amount to a form of Platonism, the best we can do is to side for justification. This stance is present, for instance, in Rorty’s review of Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness (Rorty 2002). Pragmatists try to coalesce the quest for truth and the quest for justification by trotting out what Williams labels “the indistinguishability argument.” They claim that the activity of reaching agreement with others about what to believe looks exactly like the activity of trying to acquire true beliefs, and that there is no point in postulating two distinct aims for a single enterprise. Williams says that the basic objection to this argument is that “a justified belief is one that is arrived at by a method, or supported by considerations, that favour it, not simply by making it more appealing or whatever, but in the specific sense of giving reason to think that it is true.” Brainwashing often brings agreement, as do exchanges between scientists in meetings of the Royal Society, but only the latter counts as acquiring truth. So, Williams says, “the pragmatist owes us an answer” to the question of how we tell methods for acquiring truth from other methods of producing consensus.

153

Pascal Engel

As he rightly suggests, the only answer the pragmatist can give to this question is that the procedures we use for justifying beliefs to one another are among the things that we try to justify to one another. We used to think that Scripture was a good way of settling astronomical questions, and pontifical pronouncements a good way of resolving moral dilemmas, but we argued ourselves out of both convictions. But suppose we now ask: were the arguments we offered for changing our approach to these matters good arguments, or were they just a form of brainwashing? At this point, pragmatists think, our spade is turned. For we have, as Williams himself says in the passage that I quoted above, no way to compare our representations as a whole with the way things are in themselves. (Rorty 2002)

Rorty’s line here is close to Dewey’s verificationism. Rorty often claims to be Deweyan. And indeed Dewey claims that democracy is a “way of life” (Dewey 1969– 91, LW 13, 155) rather than a kind of state or a collection of political institutions (LW 2, 325). On Dewey’s view, democracy is a mode of social organization that “must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion” (LW 2, 325), and a set of values held in common. Democracy is deep because it has an ethical meaning which is characterized by the fact that its ultimate aim is growth, and perfection. It is a form of perfectionism (Talisse 2010). If so, it receives a certain kind of justification, which is not based on any epistemic property, such as truth or justification, but on a moral claim: the institutions which are best are those which serve the aim of human flourishing. Dewey does not defend a deflationist conception of truth, but a form of verificationism. Truth is the property of those of our assertions which are best warranted at a given time. No assertions, however, are immune to revision and infallible. On the contrary we ought to presuppose that we could be wrong, on the model of the experimental method in science. Dewey, as Anderson (2006) notes, imported this fallibilistic and experimentalist model (which he borrowed from Peirce) into his thinking about democracy, which according to him is based on the diversity of opinions, their capacity to be renewed if proved not verified. As many critics have noted (Misak 2008; Talisse 2010) there are tensions within Dewey’s views. On the one hand, democracy is not based on intellectual principles, even less on truths. On the other hand, it has at least to be based on one substantial conception, which is the ideal of human flourishing. In this sense, there must at least be one truth, about the good for humans. This precludes pluralism, and implies that one must reject the views of those who believe that growth and human perfectibility is not the only moral end. Another tension is between the claim that democracy is a way of life and the claim that democracy favors a form of experimental method. The former implies an opposition to the idea that democracy ought to rely on any epistemic property such as truth and justification, whereas the latter relies on the idea that epistemic properties, such as the fact that certain procedures have tested, do matter for democracy. In this sense, Anderson suggests that Dewey had a kind of epistemic model of democracy: Dewey’s experimentalist model of democracy helps us see the epistemic import of several democratic institutions that sustain its dynamism, its capacity for change: periodic elections, a free press skeptical of state power, petitions to government, public opinion polling,

154

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

protests, public comment on proposed regulations of administrative agencies. In Dewey’s model, these are mechanisms of feedback and accountability that function to institutionalize fallibilism and an experimental attitude with respect to state policies. They push governments to revise their policies in light of evidence – public complaints, as expressed in both votes and discussion  –  that they are not working, or expected not to work. On Dewey’s model, votes and talk reinforce one another, the votes helping to insure that government officials take citizens’ verbal feedback seriously, the talk helping to define and articulate the message conveyed by votes. (Anderson 2006, 14)

On the one hand, Dewey associates democracy to the existence of legal and political arrangements such as representation and elections. On the other hand, he associates it with something broader, a certain kind of attitude and spirit: “The future of democracy is allied with the spread of the scientific attitude” toward practical affairs (Dewey LW, 14, 167). Anderson takes Dewey’s stress on deliberation and the capacity to dissent from one’s fellow citizens to show his adherence to an “epistemic model” of democracy. But this is dubious, for Dewey does not stop saying that his model of scientific progress and of knowledge is not the progress of the acquisition of certain beliefs and not a form of intellectual progress in general, but a progress in the acquisition of certain practices. It is not a progress toward the truth of certain views, or toward certain political arrangements guaranteed through decisions which would make them justified, but a progress toward a certain kind of life. This ambiguity is still present today among the advocates of the so‐called “deep democracy” which is very much inspired by Dewey’s thought: they both insist that democracy is a matter of being able to disagree and on the fact that it is a matter of participating to a common way of life.5 But is there room in such a model for arrangements which are usually taken to be typical of democracy, such as minority dissent, where a group of citizens has the right to disagree from the choices of a majority? If these citizens dissent, how can they do so without saying that they dissent on the truth of certain claims? If they dissent only on the basis of their sharing a certain kind of life or that they make common “assertions,” how can they disagree on the fact that the majority’s assertions are wrong? The tensions have led recent defenders of pragmatism in normative politics to a criticism of Dewey and of his radical disciple, Rorty, and to adopt a more full‐fledged deliberative conception which they also call “epistemic.” Thus Talisse has proposed a “Peircean”6 conception of democracy based on the following argument (1) To believe that p is to hold that p is true. (2) To hold that p is true is to hold that p “is a belief that cannot be improved upon, a belief that would forever meet the challenges of reason, argument, and evidence.” (3) To hold that a belief would meet such challenges is to commit to the project of justifying one’s belief, what Peirce called “inquiry.” (4) The project of squaring one’s beliefs with reasons and evidence is an ongoing social endeavor that requires participation in a “community of inquiry.” (Talisse 2010, 111; emphases in original)

Talisse pretends to derive from these claims “an epistemic argument for democracy”: one should endorse a democratic political order because only in a democracy can one live up to one’s epistemic commitments. If being someone capable of having beliefs 155

Pascal Engel

entails being someone capable of giving reasons and justification, and if in turns this entails that one is committed to the social enterprise of examining, testing, and challenging one’s reasons, then one can satisfy one’s commitments qua believer only within a political context in which it is possible to be an inquirer. Inquiry requires that characteristically democratic norms obtain; in order to inquire, there must be norms of equality, free speech, a freedom of information, open debate, protected dissent, access to decision‐making institutions, and so on. Moreover, since the project of justification involves testing one’s beliefs against the broadest possible pool of reasons, experiences, and considerations, inquiry requires more radically democratic norms, such as participation, inclusion, and recognition. (Talisse 2010, 111–12)

In insisting that democracy entails certain kinds of epistemic commitments, the Peircean fully acknowledges that it has to rely on the notion of truth. For if one insists on the expression of one’s beliefs in assertions, one is bound to insist on our assertions being (potentially) true, and rejected if proved false. One must be able to distinguish between thinking that one is right and being right, and if one is to dissent from others, and to criticize their beliefs and their actions, one must accept a certain notion of truth. Now this notion of truth, the Peircean argues, is not the correspondence or realist notion, but the ideal limit of inquiry or ideal rational acceptability conception. If one accepted a full‐blown realist notion of truth, according to which truth can go beyond what our best inquiry can do, one would go beyond what human capacities can do, and no dispute could ever be resolved. Correspondence realist truth is not only the product of a spurious metaphysics, it is also a non‐starter for democratic public reason (Misak 2008, 98). Peircean pragmatists (such as Misak and Talisse) and Deweyan pragmatists (like Dewey and Rorty) both agree that realist truth has no place in democratic deliberation. But they part company when it comes to accepting a substantive theory of truth. Peircean accept an ideal limit theory of an epistemic sort, whereas Deweyans reject outright the notion of truth. As I remarked above, Rorty’s eliminative stance on truth does not allow him to make room for a deliberative model of democracy, and for the need to adjudicate claims that arise within diverse communities. Disagreement is not disagreement on the truth of certain claims, but only a matter of not sharing enough background beliefs with other communities. “Right” means only what your community agrees upon, and the agreement is not based on shared judgments, but on shared practices or “ways of life.” In spite of Dewey’s insistence on equating democracy with a scientific attitude and to the capacity of disagree, it is not clear that he can make room for truth within public reason. Peirceans, in contrast, claim to make sense of truth. They full acknowledge truth’s importance for public reason. But do they make room for the concept of truth? They make room for the idea that political claims can be justified if they stand up to reason and to evidence, and to a surrogate of realist truth – the idea that a claim is true only if it would, in an ideal state of inquiry, resist our best efforts to refute it. They also make room for the view that one can reason and argue the public space, and that such reasoning and argument can be good or bad in the sense of valid or invalid, correct or not. But can they make sense for the idea (which I listed above among the truisms about 156

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

truth) that truth is supposed to be objective and independent from justification? Can they make sense of the fact that assertion is not only the expression of belief, but also the expression a belief which is supposed to be true, and objectively so? In fact what they propose is more a form of ersatz truth, which is a kind of ideal reasonableness (in this respect they are not very far from Rawls, who also wants to substitute reasonableness to realist truth). But do they have the means to distinguish between good and bad deliberation? When do we know that deliberation has been sufficiently comprehensive and reasonable, and how do we distinguish it from deliberation which is not reasonable and comprehensive enough? It is hard to see how this can be done without a full‐blown and objectivist – indeed realist – concept of truth. Alternatively, as I suggested above in the case of Rorty, Peircean pragmatists can retreat to a minimalist conception of truth, according to which all there is to truth is to respect in one’s discourse the truth platitudes. And indeed the commitments (1)–(4) above listed by Talisse come close to these platitudes. But then their views will come close to those of Joshua Cohen’s on the role of truth in public reason, to which I now turn.

4  Can We Do Without Realist Truth in Democratic Politics? If truth is to play not only a role, but a dominant role within public reason and in a democratic state, it has to be the case that it satisfies three conditions at least, those of being: (I)  a substantive notion, capable of carrying the implication that truth claims are genuinely objective and susceptible of being mistaken; (II)  an important notion, which has a genuine role with democratic politics; (III)  that it can be the basis of a justification of democracy. I have argued that pragmatists accounts, from Dewey to Rorty and to more recent writers, do not provide any of these three conditions, even less two of them or the three of them. An ideal rational acceptability account of truth, and falls short of satisfying the condition of giving us a substantive notion of truth, and most pragmatist accounts go no further than the minimalist concept. Dewey and the Peircean do stand up for (ii), although Rorty does not. The philosopher who is the closest to the view that there can be a justification of democracy is Dewey, but he bases his democratic principles on a notion of the good which is closer to a form of Aristotelian eudaimonistic ethics of the good than to a theory of truth. Against such views a number of philosophers have reacted in defense of both the importance of the concept of truth within public reason and for the foundation of democracy. Their views are not literally pragmatist but they share with the pragmatists the idea that if truth is to play a role within democratic politics, it should rest on a definitely non‐metaphysical and non‐realist notion. There is a permanent ambiguity, both in the philosophical debates about truth and in the political debates about its importance, between two kinds of truths or, on the one hand, deep and doctrinal truths, such as truths about religious, ethical, or metaphysical 157

Pascal Engel

matters, which generally are associated with firm convictions, and, on the other hand, factual or humdrum truths, which do not carry heavyweight beliefs. One of the main reasons for which Rawls and Rorty shun truth away from the public sphere is that doctrinal truths, if affirmed as such in this sphere, look sectarian: Holding a political conception as true, and for that reason alone the one suitable basis of public reason, is exclusive, even sectarian, and so likely to foster political division. (Rawls 1996, 129)

This may be correct. But why should it follow that humdrum truths could not be the object of consideration? They form in fact the largest body of truths that we use in everyday life and they can become all important: factual truths about whether the terrorists are still in town, whether there are weapons of mass destruction, or whether the prime minister had a bank account in Panama. Why should we distrust the concept of truth to the extent that we would deprive ourselves to invoke it in such ordinary cases?7 They are not normally susceptible to prompt public debate when they are proven; but when they are not, they lie at the center of public debate and can be tied up to many deep convictions (think, for instance, of the “humdrum” belief that “Dreyfus was guilty”). Nobody, however, is going to dispute or lead a public debate about whether the president’s has lost eight pounds after a diet. The problem is that some factual truth can become important, such as how much money the president’s counselor spends on his shoes. The no‐truth theorists here can argue that any such homely truth can become important, and involve heavy weight beliefs which may enter in the public debate. Inclusion of such homely truth is one of the reasons why Joshua Cohen (2009) holds that we can accept a reasonably non‐committal concept of truth for the purposes of public reason. This concept, he tells us, is not the metaphysical concept of truth, but a minimal concept which is available as part of a shared ground of argument. We should not exclude the concept, but we need not incorporate a philosophical theory of truth, any more than we incorporate a philosophical theory of reason when we include an account of reasonableness. We have an understanding that serves the purposes of public political argument, but does not go beyond those purposes. (Cohen 2009, 29)

According to Cohen, we can maintain talk of truth and use of the concept provided we limit it to the space of reasons within the public debate, without letting in the heavyweight convictions: Recall that democracy’s public reason is a terrain of argument, and it may suffice, when challenged, to present a case for liberty of conscience, for example, that lies on common ground, with shared premises. If the premises are assumed to be true, then nothing more is needed to make a case for the assertion that that proposition is true. An assertion about truth need not be understood as committing the speaker to presenting a full display, any more than the assertion that justice requires liberty of conscience needs to be understood that way. Even if assertions commit a speaker to presenting a justification, they need not express commitments to depth. (Cohen 2009, 36)

158

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

With such “political” conception of truth, which combines a minimalist concept of truth with a defense of the importance of truth for the public debate, Cohen tells us that he is able to reintroduce the concept of truth which Rorty and Rawls had rejected from the public space, through restraining its use to only those commitments which do not carry strong doctrinal weight. The objective, he tells, is reaching enough consensus. To the no‐truth theorist objection that even truth in a restricted domain can lead to a larger display of doctrinal convictions, he answers: Even if claims about truth do invite a full display, there may be nothing objectionable about presenting a full display of a doctrine that leads one onto common ground. I might say that I have a case, founded on a broader doctrine that underwrites my view that a principle of equal basic liberties is true. At the same time, I am fully aware that others disagree with the doctrine, and have their own reasons for endorsing the liberty principle. What we share is an understanding of what justice requires, and a conviction about the truth of that requirement. I understand that others endorse that requirement and assert it to be true for reasons different from mine. A full display need not be divisive, then, but may involve my presenting my reasons for accepting the common ground we are all assumed to occupy. Of course, the full display will not provide a public justification, but it may nevertheless play a constructive role. (Cohen 2009, 37)

The problem is that, although truth is on this view advertised as indispensable for public reason, it rests both on a minimalist account of truth (for public reason to function, it is enough that the concept of truth embodies the truisms of the deflationist conception). For political reason to function we only need, Cohen says, a concept of truth, not a theory of truth. This concept of truth is not anti‐metaphysical, but it is non‐metaphysical. It is neutral. Controversies about the nature of truth have no place in it, for they are politically idle (Cohen 2009, 15). On Cohen’s view truth concerns matter in public reason, but only if they are insulated from other concerns than those of public reason, where the concerns of public reason are defined, as in Rawls’ account, by the existence of a space of reflections and judgments where equal persons, drawn to conflicting issues can reasonably be expected to occupy. Rawls denies that truth has a place in this space. Cohen lets it in the space, and rejects what Raz (1990) called “epistemic restraint” in Rawls view. But just as Rawls insulates the domain of the reasonable from the domain of truth, circumscribing the realm of truth to the domain of public reason seems to be practicing insularity just as much. In other words, why should the application of the concept of truth be restricted and why does it not apply across the board? Cohen’s defense of a “non‐metaphysical” and neutral concept of truth, together with his claim that it has to be restricted only to concerns of the public space occupies a very narrow space between a deflationist view and a Rawlsian view. It raises three sorts of question. First, how do we know that philosophical debates about the nature of truth do not impinge the domain of political reason? Can’t the idea that there is a fact of the matter as to whether an embryo becomes a person count in public debate? Or can’t the claim that truth comes from revelation be questioned? Second, what justifies the inclusion or the exclusion of a claim within or without public reason? This amount to disqualifying as politically illegitimate some reasons without denying that they are good 159

Pascal Engel

reasons. This comes very close to Rawls doctrine of epistemic restraint. So it is not clear that Cohen has really reinstated truth in its place within democracy. Third, why should we avoid commitment to a heavier concept of truth than the minimalist one, in particular the realist concept? Assertion that p is assertion of the truth of p. Disagreement about p is disagreement about the truth of p. But if one does not presuppose that there is a fact of the matter as whether p, and that one can be right or wrong about p absolutely, how can public discussion go on? The fear, of course, of these Rawls inspired views, is that sectarianism looms, and that consensus could never be attained. It is perfectly open for a theorist of democracy that the best that we can do is to achieve ­consensus. But why should we say that consensus is, or amounts, to truth? A second conception, which I shall touch only briefly, which purports to reject Rawls’s epistemic restraint views, is Estlund’s (2008). Estlund is no more a pragmatist than Cohen. But like the Peircean pragmatists, he relies on a notion of truth as ideal acceptability. Estlund, like Cohen, refuses to go without truth and epistemic concerns when it comes to the justification of democracy. But he does not want to go only with it. For reasons similar to Rawls, he holds that we cannot rely only on certain claims to be true in order to justify democracy. Like Rawls he considers that we need to appeal to a concept of reasonableness. According to Estlund, democracy exercises legitimate authority in virtue of possessing a modest epistemic power: its decisions are the product of procedures that tend to produce just laws at a better than chance rate, and better than any other type of government that is justifiable within the terms of public reason. Democratic principles are thus justified on the basis of a correct procedure, and Estlund’s view is a species of proceduralism. We need some requirement, distinct from truth, to validate our principles. Estlund calls it a qualified acceptability requirement. It is a requirement the role of which is to limit the role of truth in public decisions. In particular, it rules out a government of experts, what he calls epistocracy: we cannot let all decisions be made by the knowers of the good, because even though there are truths there, and people who know more than others, there is bound to be disagreement between them. So, the main epistemic requirement, according to Estlund, for the justification of democracy is not truth, but acceptability. What is this requirement? We say that it must be such that it can be justified in terms acceptable to all qualified points of view (Estlund 2008, 45). But this has the same effect as Cohen’s version of restraint to political reason: the qualified acceptability requirement disqualifies as politically illegitimate some reasons – those that are not justifiable to all qualified persons – without denying that they are good reasons.8

5 Conclusion I have here tried to show that no pragmatist conception of democracy gives a proper place to truth in democracy, either because, like Rorty, it rejects it outright, or because it does not give a proper substitute or ersatz to it. The only concept of truth which is available, both for democracy and in other domains (science, ethics, epistemology) is a realist concept, which does not equate truth and justification, even ideal justification, and which does not take truth to have an epistemic nature. But even those theorists who intend to restore truth within democratic politics and claim to justify it “epistemically” adopt an epistemic concept of truth, and “fly from substance.” 160

Are Pragmatists About Truth True Democrats?

Notes 1 With the possible exception of Peirce, see Tiercelin (2014). Ramsey’s conception of truth as success is critical of James (Dokic and Engel 2002). 2 Political liberalism “does not use (or deny) the concept of truth; nor does it question that concept, nor could it say that the concept of truth and its idea of the reasonable are the same. Rather, within itself, the political conception does without the concept of truth” (Rawls 1996, 127). 3 As Cohen (2009, 8) notes. Cohen usefully distinguishes the “no substantive judgment” view (which I here ascribe to Rawls) and the “no concept view” which says that the concept of truth is just absent from public debates because there is no such concept, which I ascribe to Rorty. 4 The Philosophical Lexicon has this definition as A rortiori: “for even more obscure and fashionable Continental reasons.” 5 To see how divergent from Anderson’ epistemic reading of Dewey can be among “deep democracy” theorists, see, for example, such declarations by Sandra Laugier and Albert Ogien, who when asked how the kind of political practices that they recommend imply, answer: “Elles induisent l’idée que chacun a la même compétence politique – d’autant plus s’il est spécifiquement concerné par une question qui travaille sa vie quotidienne, ordinaire. En ce sens, nous nous réclamons du pragmatisme de Dewey, qui exige que “l’enquête” démocratique, ce que nous appellerions aujourd’hui l’expertise citoyenne, ne relève pas d’une compétence scientifique réservée, d’un privilège épistémologique.” This is the crux of the matter: if every citizen becomes an “expert,” how can one distinguish good from bad experts? http://www.regards.fr/ web/article/sandra‐laugier‐renouer‐avec‐la. 6 It is very unlikely that such an account is actually Peirce’s account. Peirce has little interest in politics, although he developed an ethics of belief and truth. 7 Cohen (2009) quoted Hanna Arendt as a case of someone who does not even allow such truths: “Factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that deal with truth, if seen from a political perspective, are necessarily domineering; they do not take into account other people’s opinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all strictly political thinking.” 8 See Enoch (2009) on this objection.

References Anderson, E. 2006. “The Epistemology of Democracy.” Episteme 3(1): 8–22. Cohen, J. 2009. “Truth and Public Reason.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37(1): 2–42. Dewey, J. 1969–91. The Collected Works of John Dewey: The Early Works [EW], The Middle Works [MW], The Later Works [LW], edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 37 vols. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1998 [1941]. “Propositions, Warranted Assertibility, and Truth,” In The Essential Dewey, edited by Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexancer, Vol. 2, 201–12. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dokic, J. and P. Engel. 2002. Ramsey, Truth and Success. London: Routledge. Engel, P. 2002. Truth. Chesham, UK: Acumen. —. 2013. “Alethic Functionalism and the Norm of Belief.” In Truth and Pluralism, edited by N. J. L. L. Pedersen and C. Wright, 69–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

161

Pascal Engel

Enoch, D. 2009. “Review of Estlund 2008.” Iyyun, The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly 58: 35–48. Estlund, D. 2008. Democratic Authority. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horwich, P. 1991. Truth. Oxford: Blackwell. Misak, C. J. 2008. “A Culture of Justification: The Pragmatist’s Epistemic Argument for Democracy.” Episteme, 5(1): 94–105. Price, H. 1998. “Three Norms of Assertibility, or How the MOA Became Extinct.” Philosophical Perspectives 12: 41–54. Putnam, H. 1990. Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J. 1996. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Raz, J. 1990. “Facing Diversity: The Case of Epistemic Abstinence.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 19(1): 3–46. Rorty, R. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1983. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995. “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Davidson vs. Wright.” The Philosophical Quarterly 45(180): 281–300. —. 2002. “To the Sunlit Uplands.” The London Review of Books 24(21): 13–15. Rorty, R. and P. Engel. 2005. What’s the Use of Truth? New York: Columbia University Press. Strawson, P. F. 1949. “Truth.” Analysis 9(6): 83–97. Talisse, R. 2010. “Peirce and Pragmatist Democratic Theory.” In Ideas in Action: Proceedings of the Applying Peirce Conference, edited by M. Bergman, S. Paavola, A.‐V. Pietarinen, and H. Rydenfelt, 105–16. Helsinki: Nordic Pragmatism Network. Tiercelin, C. 2014. Pragmatism and the Human Logic of Truth. Paris: Collège de France. http:// books.openedition.org/cdf/3652. Wright, C. 1993. Truth and Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Dworkin, R. 1996. “Objectivity and Truth: You’d Better Believe It.” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25(2): 87–139. Engel, P. 2010. “La vérité peut‐elle survivre à la démocratie?” Agone 44: 31–56. Estlund, D. 1998. “The Insularity of the Reasonable: Why Political Liberalism Must Admit the Truth.” Ethics 108: 252–75. Girard, C. 2014. La règle de majorité en démocratie: Équité ou vérité? Raisons politiques, 53(1): 107. James, W. 1907. Pragmatism. London: Longman. Landemore, E. 2013. Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Levi, I. 1997. The Covenant of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lynch, M. 2012. In Praise of Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Misak, C. J., ed. 1999. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. London: Routledge. Rorty, R. 2000. “Universality and Truth.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 1–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Talisse, R. 2008. A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy. London: Routledge. —. 2014. “Pragmatist Political Philosophy.” Philosophy Compass 9(2): 123–30.

162

10 Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?) DAVID MACARTHUR

The best hope for philosophy is not to practice Philosophy. Rorty, Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, xv)

In an interview conducted in 1995, Rorty was asked to explain his idea of a “post‐ metaphysical culture” to which he replied, A poeticized or post‐metaphysical culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one’s thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one’s time and place – has dried up and blown away. It would be a culture in which people thought of human beings as creating their own life‐world, rather than as being responsible to God or “the nature of reality,” which tells them what kind it is. (Rorty 1995a, 59)

This is a fine example of Rorty’s eloquent advocacy of an anti‐metaphysical outlook in philosophy, according to which we are enjoined to put the long history of metaphysical speculation and theorizing behind us as unproductive and unfruitful – a project that once promised life but has long since “dried up.” Rorty’s neo‐pragmatism aims to replace the hopeless and ancient metaphysical search for “an ahistorical transcultural matrix” – key exemplars of which are Plato’s Forms and Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge – with a different self‐image for philosophy. In the imagined “postmetaphysical culture” philosophy will be reconceived as a literary genre, something Rorty calls “cultural politics” (Rorty 2007). The only legitimate role for philosophers is the creation of new vocabularies, providing fruitful redescriptions in order to culturally mediate between the past and future for larger democratic ends. One way to assess a philosopher’s originality and power is to ask, what their relation is to the problem of metaphysics? Another is to ask, what their relation is to the problem of skepticism? – assuming this is a different problem from that of metaphysics. In this chapter, I shall critically examine Rorty’s response to the first problem. The results of A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

163

David Macarthur

this investigation are surprising. Despite being a staunch and vocal anti‐metaphysician with strong antiscientistic proclivities, Rorty remains committed to key elements of scientific metaphysics. And despite being a political “realist” in the sense that Raymond Guess has articulated, Rorty is unrealistically quixotic in his advocacy of an end to metaphysics within the culture as a whole (Guess 2008).

1  What Was Metaphysics? Looking back at the history of philosophy from the vantage of Rorty’s pragmatism, metaphysics was an a priori search for necessary truths that are both universal and eternal. In Rorty’s characterization the two key aspects of metaphysics are: (1) its attempt to escape time, to view the universe sub specie aeternitatis; and (2) its institution of a theoretically loaded distinction between “Appearance” and “Reality” – with capitals to indicate its unobviousness and explanatory pretentions. Metaphysics concerns the apparently irredeemable quest to escape time. It is for that reason that Plato deemed his forms “eternal” and Kant supposed he had discovered “atemporal conditions of the possibility of temporal phenomena” (Rorty 1995b, 197). Temporal phenomena are part of the Appearances; atemporality characterizes what philosophers like to think of as the really Real which is presumed to explain them. This metaphysical use of the term “Real” – which pictures reality as having “an intrinsic structure” (Rorty 2007, 101–5) discoverable by metaphysical inquiry  –  diverges considerably from what we call real in everyday life, for example, colors, cream, the motion of the stars, Rolex watches. The point of calling attention to this distinction between real and “Real” is that the former neither intimates nor requires the latter for its ordinary operation. And the only “argument” for the latter is a priori, highly abstract, and, as Peirce pejoratively notes, a matter of taste (Peirce 1955, 17). Alternatively, part of the seductive power of metaphysics is that, in Plato’s vision at least, the discovery of the really Real is associated with moral redemption. The Form of the Good plays a preeminent role in the theory of all Forms. As Rorty sees it, traditional metaphysics requires a supernatural notion of the human that straddles two worlds: a vision according to which we have a natural aspect (say, the body and its organs); and a supernatural aspect, namely, reason or mind. Although there have been intellectual forces working to undermine this picture in the past, Rorty suggests that these came to a head in the nineteenth century through the combined efforts of Hegel and Darwin, who historicized and naturalized our conception of the human. This is not to say Rorty is an orthodox (scientific) naturalist.1 Far from it. Rorty is a strong and vocal critic of scientism and of the widespread tendency (conspicuous in, e.g. Quine’s writings) to fold philosophy into science (Rorty 1991b, 9). He does not think scientific knowledge or understanding is all the knowledge or understanding we have. Nor does he think a scientific ontology provides an exhaustive “scientific image” of the world that problematizes the “place” of the “manifest image.”2 Indeed the very idea of “ontology” as a legitimate intellectual discipline is one that Rorty rejects, remarking “cultural politics should replace ontology” (Rorty 2007, 5). Science has no monopoly on rationality; and there is no special “scientific method” of discovery. Rather, “the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human 164

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

solidarity” (Rorty 1991a, 39) – in other words, science is laudable for providing an institutional setting for the formation of “unforced agreement.” In the history of Western culture, according to Rorty, metaphysics and religion attempted to picture the human as responsible to something nonhuman: “the nature of reality” and God, respectively. He argues that pragmatism is a standpoint that allows us to put this picture of the human behind us in favor of a conception according to which the only thing for which humans are responsible is each other. From this vantage Rorty argues that we should resist the widespread tendency to treat science as a secular version of the older metaphysical and religious tradition – a tendency Rorty associates with thinking of science as discovering “‘hard,’ ‘objective’ truth: truth as correspondence with reality, the only sort of truth worthy of the name” (Rorty 1991a, 35). He sums up this line of thought by remarking, “it was a mistake to try to make the natural scientist into a new sort of priest, a link between the human and the nonhuman” (Rorty 1991a, 37). Rorty accepts that humans are causally linked to the nonhuman world; what he rejects is the idea that we are answerable or responsible to it in its philosophical guise as the really Real, that is, to the intrinsic nature of reality.

2  A Pragmatic Metaphysical Quietist One problem with Rorty’s characterization of himself as an “anti‐metaphysician” is the ambiguity of this label. It can mislead one into supposing that Rorty has fallen into a dialectical trap, hopelessly attempting to adopt an anti‐metaphysical stance in the form of a negative metaphysics; a commitment to the metaphysical thesis that there are, say, no essences in nature. If this were Rorty’s position, we would be forced to regard him as a metaphysician despite his official position. Rorty is well aware of the problem, remarking, [Pragmatists who reject essentialism] are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear what it would mean to affirm his existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the language of theology is one we ought to be using. (Rorty 1982, xiv)

So, too, Rorty’s anti‐essentialism is not to be understood as a metaphysical thesis that denies, say, essentialism. Negative metaphysics is still metaphysics just as atheism is still a religious position in the argument over God’s existence. In order to avoid this dialectical trap, Rorty is better understood as a quietist about metaphysics: regarding the question of essentialism, he rejects all talk about metaphysical “essences,” whether pro or con, altogether. Quietism is not, as many suppose, an end of philosophy stance but a new vision of therapeutic philosophy. It can be global (e.g. ancient Pyrrhonism) or local (e.g. Kant on speculative metaphysics). Rorty’s is an example of local quietism whose target is metaphysics. We can think of quietist therapy as involving two moments: (1) a diagnostic moment; and (2) a moment of reconceptualization. Let me briefly explain these stages of therapy continuing to use metaphysical quietism as our example.3 165

David Macarthur

The diagnostic moment involves uncovering the sources, motivations, and presuppositions of the metaphysical problem at issue with the aim of showing that the problem is ill‐formulated or misconceived, and, on that ground, does not require a straight answer. That means that the quietist does not attempt to solve or resolve the philosophical problem by argumentative means according to the standard rules of argumentation (e.g. one is not to beg the question against one’s interlocutor). But nor does it mean that a metaphysical quietist has nothing to say about what metaphysicians were doing in the past. For that very reason there is also (2) a moment of reconceptualization, whereby the quietist reconceives or reformulates the problem in order to explain why it was found gripping in the first place. Here the aim is to recover some genuine insight in the problem even if it is not the original “insight” (or the illusion of such) that struck the metaphysician. Although Rorty has done some notable work on the diagnostic side of things (e.g. tracing modern epistemology to the grip of the idea that the mind is a “mirror of nature” producing representations that can be assessed for accuracy), most of his energy is devoted to reconceptualization, especially giving a redescription of metaphysical (and epistemological) problems in cultural political terms. Rorty’s quietism is a form of pragmatic metaphysical quietism since the basis of his refusal to take sides in metaphysical debates (e.g. realism vs. antirealism, essentialism vs. anti‐essentialism, theism vs. atheism) is their interminable irresolution, their perennial fruitlessness. Simply put, metaphysical disputes “do not get us anywhere” so metaphysics falls foul of the pragmatist maxim that “what does not make a difference to practice should not make a difference to philosophers” (Rorty 2007, 149). Rorty’s pragmatist approach to metaphysics is built on his appreciation of the failure of the Platonic project of metaphysics to produce any solid results in over 2,500 years of investigation. That is, metaphysics has yet to secure a consensus of metaphysicians regarding any solid results that the discipline has achieved – a criterion of success that applies in the sciences, mathematics, and logic. In this vein he writes: Pragmatists think the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise … They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t … pragmatist see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. (Rorty 1982, xiv)

However, Rorty’s point about lack of progress can be countered if the metaphysician is prepared to say that in philosophy there is no time limit on progress  –  which is something many philosophers apparently are prepared to say. One might also claim that we have made a kind of negative progress in uncovering the errors and oversights in past metaphysical systems. As Crispin Wright remarks: “[philosophers] tend to be much better at confounding the argumentative constructs of their colleagues than at construction that actually works. But this lack of progress is not usually seen as a challenge to the [traditional] picture of philosophy” (Wright 2001, 435). In sharp contrast to Wittgenstein’s semantic quietism – which questions the intelligibility of metaphysical pronouncements – Rorty is willing to accept their intelligibility at face value. His main criticism is not that metaphysics lack sense but that it is useless: it leads to irresolvable disputes of which neither side can explain what they presume to 166

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

explain (Rorty 1998, 26). From this it is a short step to the view of his pragmatist hero, Dewey, that “nobody needs a metaphysics” (Rorty 1982, 72–89). As a consequence, Rorty refuses to argumentatively engage – except for therapeutic purposes4 – with the two most influential metaphysical systems in the history of late modern philosophy: (1) the metaphysics of German idealism and (2) the materialism that was a reaction against it. With the demise of these systems, philosophy must reconceive its self‐image: “Materialist metaphysics … is philosophy’s last hurrah, its last attempt to avoid being demoted to the status of a literary genre” (Rorty 2007, 96). Bjørn Ramberg has helpfully articulated a popular argument (not, however, one that he endorses) for the claim that Rorty’s quietism is a nonstarter (Ramberg 2008).5 He writes that from the perspective of contemporary mainstream Anglophone philosophy, “The fight against metaphysics has been futile, and it is by now well established that metaphysics, like capitalism, co‐opts all opposition … metaphysics is pretty much inevitable” (Ramberg 2008, 430).6 On a strong interpretation this inevitability thesis, as I shall call it, is equivalent to the claim that being involved constructively in metaphysical theorizing is inevitable for anyone who engages in philosophy. Of course, such a claim would surely be a big surprise to many people both inside the field of academic philosophy and outside it – since philosophy is not to be limited to its academic manifestations. If the inevitability thesis is to be sustained it would need to be established how one can actively engage in providing metaphysical explanations of phenomena without intending to be doing so; and without even realizing that that is what one is doing. The problem is even more acute with regard to metaphysical quietists, such as Wittgenstein, who deliberatively disown metaphysical pronouncement and spend a great deal of effort criticizing metaphysical theories and their explanatory pretensions (see Wittgenstein 2009). Without a compelling explanation of why arguing against taking metaphysical positions is futile, quietism remains a viable option. Support for the strong inevitability thesis, in Ramberg’s presentation, comes from a specific and highly dubious understanding of metaphysics from which it follows that any philosophical inquiry will inevitably involve metaphysical commitments: [Metaphysics is] an inquiry into the non‐empirical presuppositions of knowing and doing, an inquiry where we will presumably continue to make progress, by continuing to correct our mistakes and misconceptions. (Ramberg 2008, 441)

The problem with this defense of the inevitability thesis is that it rests on an overblown conception of metaphysics as “non‐empirical presuppositions” which fails to distinguish the metaphysical use of concepts for extraordinary explanatory purposes from a laying out of conceptual connections within the everyday use of language. Describing concept use is distinct from presuming to explain things from a metaphysical point of view. Once the distinction between metaphysical explanations and conceptual descriptions is in place, however, we have the materials for a denial of the strong inevitability thesis as well as a defense of the autonomy of philosophy from the sciences. It is worth noting that, according to Ramberg, Rorty has another better conception of metaphysics: namely, “[it] is … the wish to entrench … autonomy” (Ramberg 2008, 445). This conception involves a dogmatic or authoritarian a priori since the metaphysician thinks he has the requisite 167

David Macarthur

authority, and freedom from encroachment of other disciplines, to revise ordinary ways of thinking and talking. Presumably, Ramberg’s thought is that metaphysics is “autonomy/authority” is the most plausible of Rorty’s characterizations since it is the only one that is consistent with anti‐essentialism. But accepting the autonomy of philosophy does not imply that philosophy must take the form of metaphysical reflection; nor does it imply a claim to authority. Wittgenstein’s philosophy provides a telling example. His investigation of conceptual connections is autonomous from the findings of the sciences  –  since it is a matter of one’s own sense of what makes sense on specific occasions – but he does not assume any authority for his results. His philosophical practice depends on the ability to recount criteria for the application of concepts of objects, an ability he shares equally with other native speakers of the same language. So a philosopher cannot assume to be speaking from a higher level than anyone else since mastery of language in the relevant sense is not a matter of expertise. It is knowing such things as what counts as rain, or a tree, a chair, a handshake, or a smile. Rorty argues from the “fact” that there is no distinction between language and the world, to the conclusion that the autonomy thesis is broken backed (Rorty 2007, x). But one can draw a distinction between the conceptual and the empirical in order to work, for philosophical purposes, on the conceptual side of it – even if one admits that this distinction is flexible and occasion‐sensitive. Rorty’s good point, as I understand it, is that there is no drawing such a distinction once and for all; but that still leaves it open so that the distinction can be drawn and re‐drawn as the need arises. Philosophy has, one might say, relative conceptual autonomy. The failure to distinguish metaphysical explanation and conceptual geography leads to the failure to distinguish metaphysical autonomy (which fully deserves Rorty’s criticism) from (relative) conceptual autonomy. And it is only the former that is authoritarianism; plotting conceptual connections is a non‐authoritarian activity given that the philosopher has no special authority about, nor any special access to, ordinary concept use. The assimilation of conceptual description and dogmatic metaphysics we have been considering is traceable to Peter Strawson’s highly influential – but, I take it, seriously misguided  –  distinction between revisionary metaphysics and descriptive metaphysics, which he explains as follows: Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure. (Strawson 1959)

Traditional or revisionary metaphysics concerns the a priori discovery of a hidden, fixed and unchangeable Reality not of our making set over against the so‐called Appearances. These familiar terms are capitalized to register the fact that they are being given a metaphysical interpretation, from which it follows that the dualism of Appearance/Reality is no mere product of the grammar of the terms “reality” and “appearance” as we use them in everyday life. That is the point of calling it revisionary metaphysics.7 Ordinary forms of thought and talk do not put us in mind of this dualism so the metaphysician is motivated to revise ordinary practice to bring it more into alignment with what is really Real, and to treat what we (misleadingly, from this perspective) call “real” in daily life as empty or trivial. 168

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

As Strawson describes it, “descriptive metaphysics” is so different from “revisionary metaphysics” that it does not deserve to share a common name. It is nothing other than a description of “the most general features of our conceptual structure” on the basis of an examination of something that lies open to view, namely, how we ordinarily use words and, somewhat less conspicuously, what is presupposed in such use. Although this examination is not straightforwardly empirical it is also not a priori in the traditional sense associated with metaphysics since it depends upon the contingencies of one’s past experience of language use within the linguistic community in which one has been inculcated as a child. That is to say, knowledge of language is a new unheralded kind of knowledge neither to be assimilated to a priori metaphysical knowledge nor empirical knowledge. A further difference from metaphysics proper is that “descriptive metaphysics” concerns conceptual matters which are changeable and artifactual, products of human communicative interactions, and bound up with certain human needs, interests, and desires – none of which characterized metaphysics.8 We have been considering a strong reading of the inevitability thesis. We will return to consider another more plausible weaker interpretation of it when we consider the question of the end of metaphysics.

3  Rorty’s Metaphysical Eggshells Wittgenstein once remarked, “It will be hard to follow my portrayal: for it says something new, but still has eggshells of the old material sticking to it” (Wittgenstein 1998, 51). The same conundrum afflicts Rorty’s writing. Rorty has been one of the most influential and rhetorically powerful advocates of metaphysical quietism in contemporary philosophy.9 At a time when analytic metaphysics is in the ascendancy Rory stands as a light on the hill for those who are suspicious or skeptical of metaphysical theorizing. Indeed, since 2000 Rorty goes so far as to want to do without the term “metaphysics” even when recounting the history of philosophy – a position which he admits is at variance with his own practice in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and many other publications – on the ground that he has no useful definition of “metaphysics” to offer and that there is no interesting way of capturing all the things philosophers have deemed “metaphysical” within a single discipline (Rorty 2000, 214–15). But this seems to make the mistake of supposing that an anti‐essentialist about X is barred from offering philosophically useful definitions of X. What is at issue here is a rerun of a well‐known debate in aesthetics about whether there can be a philosophical definition of art. Morris Weitz famously argued that since there can be no definition of (the “essence” of) art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions then we must conclude that the “contention that ‘art’ is amenable to real or any kind of true definition is false” (Weitz 1956, 28). But this argument misfires on the ground that it simply assimilates the notions of a true definition and an essentialist definition. An anti‐essentialism about key terms of philosophy (e.g. art, language, knowledge, justice) need not share Weitz’s or Rorty’s general pessimism about philosophically fruitful definitions. Such a definition may only presume to capture important and characteristic features of the definiendum without assuming any (metaphysical) “essence,” that is, a set of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient. 169

David Macarthur

Relatedly, it is a mistake to think that because metaphysics has no essence then it cannot be eliminated but only, say, transformed. The thought seems to be that since metaphysics has no essence, any attempt to reject it will fail, since there will always be new forms of metaphysics that escape one’s current characterization. Some such idea informs Ramberg’s misinterpretation (as I take it) of Rorty as one who keeps metaphysics alive by “transform[ing it into] … a species of cultural politics” (Ramberg 2011, 137). Here Ramberg is guilty of an excessively profligate use of the term “metaphysics”  –  one that forgets the relative unifying power of what Wittgenstein calls a “family resemblance” in characterizing the pattern of applications of a concept that lacks an essence (Wittgenstein 2009, sect. 67). And even if we admit there is no single characterization of all the forms metaphysics can take, the quietist only needs to diagnose and reconceive each expression of metaphysical thinking as it arises or as it poses a problem that stymies one’s thinking. The quietist need not suppose that their work will ever be over. In light of Rorty’s metaphysical quietism it is surprising and paradoxical to realize that there are several aspects of Rorty’s own thinking that we might think of as vestigial remnants (or, in Wittgenstein’s metaphor, eggshells) of the scientific metaphysics that he officially repudiates.10 Consider, to give one significant example, that there is textual and interpretative evidence for attributing to Rorty a commitment to causal fundamentalism, the idea that there is something called “the causal order” at the physical level of description (Rorty 2007, 16).11 What is in question here is the misguided idea – part of a package of views often held by contemporary physicalists – that there is a single causal order in nature, namely, physical causation, despite a wide variety of causal idioms being used at many different levels of explanation, for example, across all of the natural and social sciences.12 Three further pieces of evidence for this attribution to Rorty are: (1) that he regards all causes as “naturalistically explicable,” by which he appears to mean explicable by appeal to the sciences (Rorty 1991b, 52); (2) that he follows Quine in characterizing language in physicalized terms as the use of “marks and noises” to achieve certain ends – as if that description were somehow better, or more apposite, than talking as we ordinarily do about meaningful occurrences of words and sentences in communicative situations;13 and (3) Rorty relies on Davidson’s transcendental argument against external world skepticism, an argument that explicitly involves the idea that we can determine the contents of a speaker’s thought and talk by triangulating the interpreter, the interpreted and perceptually salient physico‐causal objects that are taken to supply truth‐conditions for the utterances that the speaker is prompted to make in their presence (i.e. sentences held true apparently about salient causal objects).14 Physical causation is assumed to have a certain primacy in this account.15 And a commitment to causal fundamentalism fits well with Rorty’s general methodological adoption of a 3rd‐p perspective on meaning and mind inherited from Quine and Davidson (Ramberg 2008, 432). Furthermore, it is worth noting that Rorty’s physicalized understanding of language as “marks and noises” depends on conceiving the relevant 3rd‐p perspective as modeled on the stance of the physical scientist (i.e. a natural scientific or disengaged 3rd‐p). Here it is important to note that there is another 3rd‐p perspective, within the 2nd‐p space of human linguistic interactions which we might call an engaged 3rd‐p: namely, the 170

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

intersubjective perspective of a person observing a conversation between others who speak the same language. That Rorty adopts the disengaged “objective” 3rd‐p of the natural sciences is a curious oversight when one considers that he is officially committed to replacing objectivity with intersubjectivity. Indeed one might think of this not simply as residual metaphysics but residual scientism which is of a piece with occasional remarks that call not for a rejection of metaphysics (the official view) but a misguided attempt to interpret science as a form of metaphysics: “one’s categories in metaphysics should be the categories of the sciences of one’s day” (Rorty 2010, 499).

4  The Myth of a Postmetaphysical Culture I will not press the problem of residual metaphysics any further here. Instead I would like to turn to consider a more important and pressing problem with Rorty’s approach to the problem of metaphysics. Rorty is committed to the idea that one can adopt a postmetaphysical position in philosophy by simply dropping metaphysics. In historical terms the idea is that the rise of the pragmatist critique of metaphysics as outmoded intellectualism has put us in a position to “change the subject” so that we can be rid of metaphysics once and for all by refusing to ask metaphysical questions (Rorty 1982, xiv). We can bring metaphysics to an end by refusing to talk about it any more. As a counter to Rorty’s conception of an end of metaphysics I would like to recall a view shared by both Kant and Wittgenstein: namely, that the urge to metaphysical thinking – to “deep” explanations of things in general “from the armchair” without the need to conduct any specific empirical investigations – is ubiquitous and deeply human. Kant writes: There has always existed in the world, and there will always continue to exist, some kind of metaphysics, and with it the dialectic that is natural to pure reason. It is therefore the first and most important task of philosophy to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its injurious influence, by attacking its errors at their source. (Kant 1929, xxxi)16

Metaphysics, for Kant, arises naturally from the dialectic internal to the operations of pure reason, a capacity with which every rational agent is endowed. Similarly, Wittgenstein remarks, People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in. (Wittgenstein 1993, 185)

Wittgenstein is here talking about “philosophy” in his sense, that is, a form of inquiry concerned with diagnosing and treating grammatical confusions. His aim in philosophy is to “bring back words from their metaphysical to their everyday use”; returning us from metaphysical fantasies (Luftgebaude, air castles) back to reality (Wittgenstein 2009, sects. 116, 118). The metaphysical problems of traditional philosophy are, for Wittgenstein, a product of a misconstrual of grammar whereby features of grammar (i.e. the logic of language) 171

David Macarthur

are reified and projected onto the world. Consequently, we can take Wittgenstein to be saying that people are deeply imbedded in metaphysical problems. Note, too, that these problems (and the grammatical confusions that give rise to them) are not limited to philosophy professors working in the academy but are attributable to people, or language‐ speakers, in general. A good example is the problem of essentialism. It is well known that one can find essentialist thinking expressed in the sophisticated metaphysical theorizing that characterizes academic philosophy, for example, Aristotle’s metaphysics, Locke’s scientific metaphysics, phenomenology, and analytic philosophy.17 But what tends to escape notice in much mainstream philosophy is that one can also find essentialist thinking in popular culture and political debate, in relatively unreflective and often prejudicial attitudes toward race, gender, sex, intelligence, age, and so on.18 This last point is devastating to Rorty’s conception of a postmetaphysical culture. The idea of such a culture is a utopian dream. From this perspective a new (weaker) and more promising interpretation of the inevitability thesis suggests itself, one that does justice to the outlooks of Kant and Wittgenstein concerning the pervasiveness of metaphysics.19 That is, the inevitability thesis can be reinterpreted as the claim that the urge to metaphysical thinking is a basic characteristic of human thought and talk in general that has manifested itself in a wide variety of ways, sophisticated and unsophisticated, throughout human history and will continue to do so. In this sense, even a metaphysical quietist could agree that metaphysics is inevitable: indeed the interest of this form of quietism might be thought to actually depend on this being so (see Macarthur 2017). Of course, to admit the ubiquity of the urge to metaphysical reflection is not at all the same thing as accepting that the fight against metaphysics – as a system of “deep” or “hidden” explanations of Appearances – is futile. The wise quietist aims to undermine the pretensions of constructive metaphysical theorizing, but need not, as in Rorty, suppose that the urge to engage in such thinking can be overcome once and for all by a mere act of enlightened choice.20 If we accept the weaker interpretation of it, as I am suggesting, then it follows that every human culture will inevitably be mired in metaphysics; or, at least, it cannot be assumed to be free of metaphysical thinking – which in contrast to the explicit theoretically elaborated metaphysics of the academy may be inchoate, more or less unconscious, and perhaps not even recognized under the label of “metaphysics,” On this version of the inevitability thesis, Rorty’s post‐metaphysical conception of philosophy as cultural politics appears as mythology in so far as any form of inquiry – including cultural politics itself – will inevitably find itself implicated in the general human tendency to think in metaphysical ways.21 In Wittgenstein’s metaphor, we are all in the fly bottle – or perhaps different fly bottles for different people – and the job of the philosopher, at least his kind of philosopher, is to help us to find our (or perhaps only his) way out – which need not mean out of all fly bottles all at once, but just the one you are currently in, and then the next; and so on.22 Let us continue to prosecute the argument over the possibility of a postmetaphysical culture in terms of the different attitudes Rorty and Wittgenstein take toward the problem of metaphysics. A key issue is what one regards as the source of metaphysical thinking since that will to a large extent determine whether one believes an end of metaphysics is possible. Rorty regards metaphysics as a product of an immature and optional choice to make one’s thinking responsible to something nonhuman, that is, the 172

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

intrinsic nature of reality, or God. Ironically, the motivation for this choice is the all‐too‐ human desire to shed ourselves of responsibility since, on this picture, we are mere spectators of the nonhuman, something over which we have no control, so that our reactions are passive and outside the bounds of criticism, or praise and blame. Wittgenstein’s view of the source of metaphysics is more plausible if for no other reason than that it explains the relative insensitivity of metaphysics to reason, the familiar fact that argument, by itself, has little impact on a philosopher’s allegiance to his or her core metaphysical commitments. For Wittgenstein, as for Hume and William James before him, the grip of a metaphysical Weltanshauung has its home in the imagination, not reason – which is not to deny that reason typically plays a very significant role in the theoretical elaboration of a metaphysical system; as well as in the philosophical discussion of metaphysics which tends not to be about core commitments. If we are to explain the role of imagination here we must complexify the account so far provided of Wittgenstein’s diagnostic claim that metaphysics is really a product of grammatical confusions. The more detailed account is that what mediates the relation between grammar and the world are simple and schematic “pictures” of things: for example, “the picture of the earth as a ball floating free in space,” the picture of the essence of language as combinations of words that name objects, the picture of guessing the time as reading off an “inner” clock (Wittgenstein 2008, sect. 146; 2009, sects. 1, 605). The imagination has the tendency to generate such pictures as a way of the handling highly complex phenomena that confront us in our dealings with the world, others and ourselves. Given that “Grammar tells what kind of object anything is” we can regard imaginative pictures of things as pictures of the grammar of the concepts for such things (Wittgenstein 2009, sect. 373). It is in fact these pictures of grammar, as Wittgenstein calls them, that we tend to reify and project onto the world.23 Since a picture is a mode of representation, the basic source of metaphysical chimeras is that “One predicates of the thing what lies in the mode of representation (Wittgenstein 2009, sect. 104).” Rorty would presumably not want to accept this account of the source of metaphysics because he favors a romantic valorization of imagination over reason. He wants to see imagination as an unmitigated good, as he explains, We need to think of reason not as a truth‐tracking faculty but as a social practice – the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of marks and noises … We should try to think of the imagination not as a faculty that generates mental images but the ability to change social practices by advantageous new uses of marks and noises. (Rorty 2007, 107)

Reason merely enforces social norms of language use; imagination changes them for the better. But, as so often in Rorty, when he proposes a schema of thinking of the form “Not A but B” one wants to know why not “A and B”? In the present case why not accept that the imagination generates mental images, which count as pictures in Wittgenstein’s sense, as well as creatively adapting social practices through new uses of language? To admit this complexity in the account of the imagination would be to see the imagination as having a more equivocal value: advantageous in many important ways; but, nonetheless, disadvantageous in others. Metaphysics itself is a new use of words; so 173

David Macarthur

why deny that it is a product of the imagination simply because these new uses are deemed disadvantageous? Nonetheless, Rorty’s hope for a postmetaphysical culture can be reformulated as a more restricted, less quixotic hope for the academic discipline of philosophy largely situated in universities: namely, the hope that it might come to see the fruitlessness and retrograde authoritarianism of constructive metaphysics as a reason to become metaphysical quietists and social activists in a pragmatist vein. Then the most important task will be what Rorty calls re‐description; and the most important aim, the realization of a better more democratic culture. Rorty’s attempt to replace the vision of the philosopher as metaphysical seer with that of the philosopher as a prophet of democracy is one that Ramberg rightly celebrates. I want to join in the applause for the many lucid passages that express this uplifting vision, two of which are:24 What I like about Dewey and pragmatism is the anti‐metaphysical claim that there is no court of appeal higher than a democratic consensus. (Rorty interview with Stossel 1998) Every culture, no matter how parochial, contains material which can be woven into utopian images of a planetwide democratic community. (Rorty 1995b, 204)

Acknowledgment Thanks to Bjørn Ramberg for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes 1 Rorty has a heterodox understanding of “naturalism”: “I shall define ‘naturalism’ as the view that anything could have been otherwise, that there can be no conditionless conditions” (Rorty 1991b, 54). 2 The claim that the scientific image is a complete image of the world gives rise to so‐called placement problems for items apparently in the manifest image. 3 For further discussion, see Macarthur (2008). 4 Part of the work of metaphysical quietism is explaining how metaphysical problems get a grip on us. On this matter Rorty is content to follow Dewey’s lead and treat the history of metaphysics “as a series of reactions to events taking place outside of philosophy”  –  that is, to certain noteworthy social and political circumstances (Rorty 2000, 214). 5 Ramberg’s main aim is to explain how Rorty can appeal to Davidson in his critique of representationalist metaphysics when Davidson has, by his own lights, a “method of metaphysics.” 6 Although Ramberg is skeptical of “positive metaphysics” (as an armchair search for Reality) he thinks that questioning the viability of positive metaphysics from a distinctively philosophy perspective is “default metaphysics.” This simply rules out by fiat the possibility of a metaphysical quietism, that is, philosophical skepticism of the entire enterprise of metaphysical theorizing. 7 Metaphysics is often thought to conflict with “commonsense beliefs” but it is arguable that the very idea that there are such common sense beliefs is itself a product of metaphysics (say,

174

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

8

9 10

11 12

13

14

15

16

17 18 19

20

a misfiring attempt to defend ordinary thinking and practice from metaphysical assault). Stanley Cavell (1969) argues that we should see metaphysics as attacking not commonsense beliefs but ordinary criteria for the application of concepts of (generic) “objects.” Even core aspects of our “conceptual structure” change. For example, humans throughout human history have, in one way or another, been aware that physical objects such as trees, rocks and chairs are in causal interaction with one another but our idea of what a cause is has changed significantly over time. For further discussion of Rorty’s quietism, see David Macarthur (2017). Perhaps this residual scientism is less surprising when one considers that there is a rather direct line of influence extending from the scientistic philosophy of Quine into the 3rd‐p approach to language and mind that one finds in Davidson and Rorty. Rorty uses the phrase without qualification in a sympathetic interpretation of Brandom. Ironically the only possible exception to this is physics itself since the equations of fundamental physics (e.g. quantum mechanics) do not seem to instantiate any asymmetrical direction for time evolution. See, for example, David Papineau (2016) for an argument for strict physicalism from causal fundamentalism. Having referred to himself as a nominalist Rorty then remarks, “Nominalists see language as just human beings using marks and noises to get what they want” (Rorty 1991b, 126). It is worth noting that one can find the same physicalized conception of linguistic data in Davidson (1983, 277). Assuming that this account is correct, Rorty is no doubt encouraged to accept causal fundamentalism on the ground that it is part of Davidson’s outlook as Kim (2003, 132) explains: “Davidson’s strict law requirement on causation, combined with his view that strict laws can only be found in basic physics appears to give the physical domain a special role in shaping the causal structure of the world.” It is also interesting to observe that when Rorty mentions levels of causation these are all levels of physical causation: “scientists dig down to ever deeper levels of causal conditions (molecules behind tables, atoms behind molecules, quarks behind atoms …)” (Rorty 1991b, 124). The recognition of levels of physical causation does not count against causal fundamentalism. Consider this remark of Quine (1964, 44): “Positing does not stop with macroscopic physical objects. Objects at atomic level are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, simpler and more manageable.” So, causation at the atomic level can explain causation at the physical level but not vice versa. Kant is not calling here for an end to metaphysics but for a critique of metaphysics from which a new critical metaphysics will emerge to supersede the speculative metaphysics of the past. In the case of analytic philosophy, the aim is to find the logical essence of some problematic philosophical notion, for example, knowledge. There are, of course, exceptions such as Ian Hacking and Sally Haslanger. Another prominent example is Hilary Putnam (1990, 19), who writes, “A simple induction from this history of thought suggests that metaphysical discussion is not going to disappear as long as reflective people remain in the world.” Note how the expression “metaphysical discussion” is ambiguous between the inchoate metaphysical talk that runs through everyday speech and the explicit and sophisticated metaphysical theorizing of professional philosophers. Despite much textual evidence to the contrary, Ramberg resists the idea that Rorty is an end‐of‐metaphysics philosopher on the ground that “successful therapy creates conditions for further systematic construction” (Ramberg 2008, 433). As a reading of Rorty I demur: see, for example, Rorty’s dismissive attitude to metaphysics in the seminal paper “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (Rorty 2010, 71–83). While I accept that therapy does not insulate one from

175

David Macarthur

21

22 23

24

the urge to metaphysics, I see no reason why one cannot resist building a metaphysical explanatory system (i.e. “construction”). For this reason, I oppose defining metaphysics in a way that excludes this possibility. Consider, for example, Ramberg’s remark, “metaphysics is the idea of philosophy as separable from questions of cultural politics” from which it follows (dogmatically!) that a philosophy that either is, or includes, cultural politics cannot be metaphysics (Ramberg 2011, 137). It is also worth noting that this conception of metaphysics is in tension with Ramberg’s further idea of cultural politics as a continuation (through transformation) of metaphysics (p. 137). Wittgenstein remarks, “What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle” (Wittgenstein 2009, sect. 305). Wittgenstein explains, “Indeed, when we look into ourselves as we do philosophy, we often get to see just such a picture. Virtually a pictorial representation of our grammar. Not facts; but, as it were, illustrated turns of speech” (2009, sect. 295). Ramberg refuses to accept the appositeness of the label “metaphysical quietist” for Rorty but this is based on a misconstrual of quietism as a passive refusal to engage in metaphysics, as if the quietist offers no diagnosis or reconceptualization of the problem.

References Cavell, Stanley. 1969. “Knowing and Acknowledging.” In Must We Mean What We Say? 220–45. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, Donald. 1983. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Guess, Raymond. 2008. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1929. The Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by N. Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan. Kim, Jaegwon. 2003. “Philosophy of Mind and Psychology.” In Donald Davidson, edited by Kirk Ludwig, 113–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macarthur, David. 2008. “Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism and the Problem of Normativity.” Philosophical Topics 36(1): 193–207. —. 2017. “On Metaphysical Quietism and Everyday Life” In The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, edited by G. D’Oro and S. Overgaard, 270–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Papineau, David. 2016. “Naturalism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, winter edn. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/naturalism Peirce, C. S. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by Justus Buchler. New York: Dover. Putnam, Hilary. 1990. Realism with a Human Face, edited by J. Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W. V. O. 1964. From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ramberg, Bjørn. 2008. “Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America.” In The Handbook of American Philosophy, edited by Cheryl Misak, 430–48. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2011. “Method and Metaphysics: Pragmatist Doubts.” In Dialogues with Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding, edited by Jeff Malpas, 129–46. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, Richard. 1982. “Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy.” In Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1991a. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

176

Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?)

—. 1991b. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995a. “Interview: Towards a Post‐Metaphysical Culture.” Harvard Review of Philosophy Spring: 58–66. —. 1995b. “Philosophy and the Future.” In Rorty and Pragmatism, edited by H. K. Saatkamp Jr., 197–205. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000. “Response to Williams.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 213–19. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell. Stossel, Scott. 1998. “The Next Left” [Richard Rorty interview with Scott Stossel]. The Atlantic April. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/04/the‐next‐left/306010 Strawson, P. F. 1959. Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London: Methuen. Weitz, Morris. 1956. “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15(1): 27–35. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1993. Philosophical Occasions, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann. Indianapolis: Hackett. —. 1998. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch, rev. edn. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2008. On Certainty, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and D. Paul. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Peter Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, 4th edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Wright, Crispin. 2001. Rails to Infinity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

177

11 Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope MARJORIE C. MILLER

Of course, talking about pragmatist ethics is difficult because Richard Rorty and earlier pragmatists deny that ethics, at least in the way the canonical philosophers have discussed it, is the sort of thing about which one should have views. Ethics, understood as the philosophic inquiry which looks into the meanings, foundations, and legitimacy of such terms as good, right, obligation, and so forth, is just the sort of enterprise which we pragmatists lament. Such philosophic inquiry, as Rorty so clearly points out, goes with conceptions entailing universality, a‐historicity, divine sanction, and conceptions of sin, all of which we pragmatists reject. Rorty, at least, does not reject them in favor of alternative conceptions. He simply wants to change the conversation about how to cope with ourselves and each other. But another “of course,” he uses such terms as good, better, morality, wrong, “worst thing we can do,” all the time. So we had better explore how and why and when he uses such language, how it is continuous (or discontinuous) with the ways in which other pragmatists have used such language. And we pragmatists had better decide whether we want to continue the particular conversation his work invited us to join. In order to explore and decide, I should begin by quickly reviewing Rorty’s reasons for wanting to change the subject (I suspect this will have been more thoroughly developed in other sections of this book). Second, I want to see why and how Rorty separates the private and the public, and what the consequences of this separation are. Then, third, since Rorty claims to base his conversation on the conversations of William James and John Dewey, I will look more closely at what these earlier thinkers had to say on these subjects – how their conversation goes. Finally, I intend to talk about hope  –  and about why we pragmatists think hope is indeed a moral matter.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

178

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

I So, to changing the subject. Since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty 1979), Rorty has been steadily developing the claim that we cannot settle philosophic disputes by appealing to the facts of the case. It is precisely the notion that there are “facts of the case” – some state of the world which our claims more or less, for better or worse, copy or reflect  –  which his works dispute. But dispute is clearly a problem in such a situation  –  it implies that he wants to establish a view which reflects some different “fact,” or state of things, to support an alternative view. He does not want to do so. He thinks one cannot do so. The only way to avoid fruitless dispute is to “redescribe” what one is interested in, in a way which persuades others to take up the “new” vocabulary used in one’s redescription. And Rorty’s redescription has indeed provoked conversation which utilizes his vocabulary. From “The World Well Lost” (Rorty 1972) through the most recent collection of his work, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Rorty 2007), published posthumously. Rorty has been formulating and reformulating the conversation in ways which take the agent point of view,1 ways which emphasize that we are significantly participant in the world we inhabit, not mere spectators of it. He gestures to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (among the many, many others he mentions) as well as James and Dewey, in denying us Truths, or a Way Things Are, or a Divine standard or model. As we participate there is no standard, he argues, except the agreement of other people.2 When we disagree, we must redescribe and persuade. Is it all a matter of Mad Men then? Should we all get training in marketing so that our vocabularies will be persuasive? I don’t think this is at all Rorty’s point. Right now, I look out my window and see the misty palisades rising above the blue‐gray Hudson River, beyond the rich green treetops spread out beneath my cliffside home, just beyond the colorful flowers planted in my window box. This view is neither mirage nor hallucination nor dream. It is what you would see if you were beside me here. Its validity is precisely in the fact that you, and she, and he – were you all here with me – would agree that this is indeed the view from my window. Our agreement is what allows me to point out the yearling deer in the meadow below, and you to mention the hummingbird just arriving at the feeder we’ve hung. If either of our pointings‐out is disputed, we would change our positions or look harder or describe more clearly what we see. Our agreement certifies our description – not some arcane notion of what is really there, or some divine vision, or some analytic account of the relations between terms or a parsing of the hidden meanings of our concepts. The criterion of our language is found in its usefulness: in our ability to direct each other to the features of the landscape which we are enjoying. But usefulness is here, and generally speaking, usefulness in a given situation. It is useful with respect to responding to some problem or issue or event which actually arises in the course of human interactions. And this usefulness in providing the basis of our conversation about the view is the same usefulness Rorty points out as the upshot of moral judgments – what is true in judgments about the landscape is what is better for us to think if we want to reach agreement about what we are seeing. And what is good about moral judgments is what is useful if we want to create the conditions in which we can go on working toward agreement about what we see. As I will develop below, Rorty describes morality between us as that which promotes solidarity. There is much more to be said about this, but let’s 179

Marjorie C. Miller

start with this as the basis of our new conversation. It is no longer about the Platonic notion of an independent and singular and trans‐empirical Good, True, and Beautiful. Nor is it about the Abrahamic God and what He (or She, or It) wants of us or for us. Nor is it about a fixed human nature which determines of what our True Happiness would consist. Nor, finally, is it about a Kantian search for a categorical requirement determined by Reason and entailing Universal obligation. Our conversation is simply about what it is better for us to do here and now, in this situation, as the individuals we are, in the time and circumstances and culture we find ourselves in, in creating the conditions for solidarity with one another.

II The solidarity which arises out of agreement and which enables us to forge further agreements with one another is part of what Rorty talks of as public good, public morality. I’ll examine it in greater detail below, but there is a quite different dimension of morality which Rorty speaks of: private morality. Private morality, dependent on the recognition of contingency, is initially identified as irony  –  the ironic stance of the individual who understands contingency but commits herself to the creation of herself on the basis of her own “final vocabulary.”3 Here is the morality of the strong poet.4 Having been criticized on the grounds that only a very few of us are capable of becoming “strong poets” (since few of us have the intelligence and creativity to create final vocabularies powerful enough to influence the turns of culture and conversation), this ironic stance, while never discarded, becomes less emphasized in Rorty’s later work. What takes the place of the emphasis on irony is the emphasis on self‐creation. Self‐creation can be accomplished by everyone, and each self creates itself after its own image – though those images are initially described in the vocabularies of our inherited culture. Further, Rorty is as clear as we will see that Dewey is in insisting that all of us, and all things, and all language, and all positions, are held in relation to others (see Rorty 1999, 50). There is no intrinsic self, as there is no unrelated anything. Coming from all sorts of causes we have both conscious and unconscious selves involved in the self we are creating. We have many and diverse images, many and diverse senses of what we are, were, and want to become, and this diversity is precisely what makes the process of self‐creation, of reweaving the vocabularies which we inherit and imagine, both interesting and a process of private morality. We each take our stands, and Rorty claims that it is no one’s business what selves each of us create – what we depend on, what matters to us, what we take our stands on – as long as the selves we create do not impinge on others’ self‐ creation. This process (as Rorty’s own devotion to wild orchids exemplifies; see Rorty 1993) may hinge on all sorts of wonderful and strange things  –  including religious ideals and arcane sexual practices or fetishes. The crucial thing is to let private morality be private – to let each individual pursue her own happiness so long as her happiness does not reduce others’ chances to pursue their own. Why should (yup, that word does come in!) we let private morality be private? For Rorty the only answer is that, only if it remains private can we engage in solidarity with our fellows. It is only where our interests intersect and impinge on others that we need to cultivate solidarity – that fellow‐feeling that preserves the space in which to conduct our lives in (generally speaking) peace. The pursuit of private happiness can only be 180

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

fruitful, can only produce public happiness, if we work together to preserve the room and the opportunity for each to pursue her own. And happiness is the only thing that can matter.5 As Aristotle pointed out long ago, all people agree that happiness is the good. But Aristotle then proceeded to try to define what happiness is for man.6 Rorty says that that is just the problem – Aristotle’s version of what would best express human excellence and function as happiness in life assumes that there is a way humans ARE. And Rorty specifically denies this – he argues that happiness is what matters to me, and that that differs from what matters to you. There is no way humans are, no essential nature, there are just the stories we tell about ourselves, and each of us tells our own story, or stories. Of course there are multiple, overlapping stories we tell ourselves. Creating some coherence out of stories is part of the task of creating identity – but such coherence is never absolutely complete. We decide what to do based on what we think we can live with – what actions will cohere sufficiently with the story we tell ourselves. Some actions are the sorts which cannot cohere – they, Rorty argues, are the sorts of things we would rather die than do. For Rorty, that choice is the bottom line, the spade that is turned, the final vocabulary in which we tell our story. And, he says, there is nothing more to it. No other basis on which to judge our actions – no separate standard of God, or reason, or human nature. It is in private morality that we may tell our stories of spirituality, of religious feeling and concern. But religion, writes Rorty, can never be part of public morality  –  our spiritual concerns will differ and would undermine our sense of fellow‐feeling. Our spiritual concerns are our own, and, when made public, are clear “conversation stoppers” (see e.g. Rorty 1999, 168–75). The public conversation must go on, and the public conversation needs to focus on what enables each individual to pursue their own ultimate concerns in peace – this, Rorty says, is justice. Though he develops that by asking: would it be a good idea to treat “justice” as the name for loyalty to a certain very large group, the name for our largest current loyalty, rather than the name of something distinct from loyalty? Could we replace the notion of “justice” with that of loyalty to that group? (Rorty 2007, 44)

His response suggests that justice/loyalty/solidarity are what public morality amounts to. But he insists that we continue to enlarge the group to which we are loyal, with which we feel solidarity, and which we treat as “we.” It is what our solidarity, our fellow‐feeling entails: the widening of that very fellow‐ feeling, the expansion of “we” consciousness. Rorty claims, drawing on Dewey, “Moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as a whole, is a matter of re‐marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves” (Rorty 1999, 79).7 That is, the feeling of others as part of what we are undermines the appositeness of talking about morality – since our obligations to those we consider “us” is felt as part of our obligation to our selves, it undermines the distinction between morality and prudence. Note that the vocabulary here draws more on feeling than on principle. Rorty talks of his approval of Annette Baier. He particularly approves of her treatment of the Humeian importance of sentiment, of the development of our emotional sensitivity to the pain of others, as replacing Kantian universal or universalizable judgments (Rorty 181

Marjorie C. Miller

1999, 79). For both our public morality and our private morality, feelings matter. Though we must remember that for we pragmatists, the sharp distinction between rational principle and feelings is a mistake to begin with. The importance of the pain of others lies behind Rorty’s claim, following Judith Shklar, that liberalism consists of the understanding that “cruelty is the worst thing we do.”8 It is our feeling of others’ pain that demands our solidarity – what, in Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty describes as “clinging together against the dark” (1982, 166). But we should note, here, that our feelings are couched in the vocabulary of the culture to which we belong. We appeal to one another in solidarity by appealing to the very “we” feeling which our culture makes possible: common valuings and common “clinging” articulated in the vocabulary we share. Rorty claims, of course, that socialization (and language) “goes all the way down.” So we have no alternative to which to appeal – but our education, especially poetry and novels and drama, can increase the “reach” of our “we” feeling. It is imaginative exercises and acquaintance with imaginative use of new vocabularies and redescriptions which enlarge our ability to feel others’ pain. It is not philosophy, writes Rorty, which increases our public morality so much as it is creative imagination which makes us better. But there is more. In a later essay he reads that creative imagination is a form of love. He holds that there is a further distinction to be drawn: that between justice and love. He holds, in his response to Clifford Geertz in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, that “the moral tasks of a liberal democracy are divided between the agents of love and the agents of justice. In other words, such a democracy employs and empowers both connoisseurs of diversity and guardians of universality” (Rorty 1991, 206). He holds that love is that which helps us to notice those we’ve neglected, and justice insists that those whom we have recognized as part of “us” are “treated just like all the rest of us” (ibid.).9

III Time to look at traditional pragmatism to explore some of the roots and sources of the view Rorty develops. Let’s look first to James. He does not make the distinction between private and public morality which Rorty does, but, indeed, one can see some of the roots of this distinction in James’s ethics as evident in the trilogy of essays: “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” and “What Makes a Life Significant.”10 In the introductory paragraph of “What Makes a Life Significant,” James summarizes “On a Certain Blindness” as having, tried to make you feel how soaked and shot‐through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view. The meanings are there for others, but they are not there for us.

And he continues that [this] is the basis of all our tolerance, social, religious and political … The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non‐interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours. No one has insight into all the

182

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

ideals. No one should presume to judge them off‐hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep. (James 1978, 645)

Clearly, this is the basis for Rorty’s position developing private morality. But if we turn to “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” we find James taking a slightly different position from that which Rorty develops. In this essay James reiterates what is said above, but he goes further. Since “the essence of good is simply to satisfy demand” and The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those of physics are … No single abstract principle can be so used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale … If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the best imaginable system of goods he would indeed have an easy task; for all demands as such are primâ facie respectable, and the best simply imaginary world would be one in which every demand was gratified as soon as made … [but] The actually possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded; and there is always a pinch between the ideal and the actual which can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind … Some part of ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a tragic situation … with which he has to deal. […] Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy … be simply to satisfy at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act … which makes for the best whole … those ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by whose realization the least possible number of other ideals are destroyed … Invent some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands  –  that and that only is the path of peace! (James 1978, 621–3; emphasis in original)

I want to draw attention to two features of these long quotes: first that the situation is “tragic.” James does not, absolutely does not, see this as something which can be overcome in a world we create. There is always the “pinch” between the ideal and the actual, and each decision we make involves the “butchering” of some ideals. The second thing I want to point out is that the “invention” James stresses, even (and especially?) in respect to one’s own ideals, is not simply self‐creation or generating one’s own story. Rather it is inventing a way of satisfying one’s own ideals that does so while recognizing the ideals of others. Not just those with whom one is in solidarity, but the “alien” ideals. One tries to create the richest possible universe, the “best whole,” through one’s choices and actions. James also argues that the “conventionally recognized good” is the best guide to action in most cases. That is, he anticipates Rorty’s emphasis on our own culture and history as providing the vocabulary and the ideals which guide our choices. (It is this feature which Rorty terms his “ethnocentrism.”) These current and particular conventions are the result of historical evolution, evolution which has produced ideas of what “works” to create the richest possible universe we know of, so far. But conventions will change, will continue to evolve: And although a man always risks much when he breaks away from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that

183

Marjorie C. Miller

it is at all times open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake his life and character upon the throw. [ …] In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no non‐moral goods; and the highest ethical life – however few may be called to bear its burdens – consists at all times in the breaking of rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case. (James 1978, 624–6)

James argues that we break such “grown too narrow” rules as we become more sensitive to the “cries of the wounded” which will inform us if we have made “a bad mistake” (James 1978, 626). Like Rorty after him, James points out that it is literature: novels, poetry and dramas, and books “on social and economic reform” which will be the most valuable to one who is struggling to lead a moral life. Such books are “confessedly tentative and suggestive” rather than dogmatic in their import (p. 626). Dewey is a bit more complicated. Rather than having us choose “in fear and trembling” “the very largest total universe of good which we can foresee” (James 1978, 626), Dewey asks us to undertake to understand psychology, sociology, and anthropology in order to understand how Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey 2008a, 14:1–12) actually works. Dewey wanted us to recognize the ways in which the initial activities (instinctual activities of the species and of the human infant) become modified, by gratifications and resistances, to become desires. And further, how desires become modified to become values, and finally become embodied in habits – which themselves are not fully attended to in consciousness. Finally, our habits constitute our characters, our habitual ways of functioning, and they function to fulfill our modified desires, our tastes, and our values  –  until they don’t! Changing circumstances, conditions, conflicts bring us up short; we find ourselves in a problematic situation, one requiring deliberation and encouraging resolution through intelligent action. Since situations, culture, problems, selves, and actions are always subject to change, there is no way to decide moral problems according to the traditional categories and concepts of ethics. Like Rorty, Dewey does change the subject – dealing with individuals and contexts within which evaluation can be conducted not on the basis of universal ends or commands, but rather in terms of the effectiveness of action in the widest context appropriate to the decision‐making in question. Instead of fixed rules, there is experimental inquiry carried on throughout life activity. There is not a unique moral arena, but an arena for intelligent action in which decisions, choices, and patterns of action are evaluated and stabilized (Dewey 2008a, 12:174). Intelligent action is based on the widest and deepest possible understanding of causes and consequences of behavior relevant to the situations in which we find ourselves. Social science is understood as that sort of human activity which is most useful in helping us to manage behavior, to make good decisions, decisions which are effective in helping us to further growth. Habits shape not only the character of individuals, but also culture’s ways of habitually conceptualizing and valuing problems. Value judgments are the tools enabling us to redirect conduct when habit becomes blocked or up for question. Habits are instruments for coping, and are valuable in so far as they achieve the results they are intended to achieve and enable us to cope effectively. Language is the central cultural habit. But 184

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

Dewey recognizes how difficult it is to overcome entrenched habits, even when it becomes clear that they do not work. Because habits are not fully conscious, and our existing language shapes our imagination and our reflections, as well as our affective responses, we cannot simply will our habits to be different. To change our habits we must change the conditions in which they operate: we cannot simply will a new end, we must replace existing habits with new habits – new courses of action leading to new ends‐in‐view. Nevertheless, it is precisely in evaluating the effectiveness of our actions and using those valuations to determine intelligent conduct (i.e. conduct informed by reflective evaluation of habits of action in the above sense) that moral maturity is achieved. The evaluation of habits is not simply the acceptance of preconceived or preexisting ends. Rather, it is the examination of alternative courses of action – means leading to ends‐in‐view, that enables us to restructure the whole course of action – ends‐in‐view and the means used to get to them. The means imply an end in view; an end always implies a course of action leading to it. Means and ends are continuous – not separable objects to be evaluated. Examining a course of action requires us to go through what Dewey calls “imaginative rehearsal”11 to understand both what the action is likely to produce or result in, and to accept our own character as valuable in undertaking the course of the activity (Dewey 1988, 13:210–19; 2008a, 13:4–7). What we approve of when we have investigated causes, consequences, and context and rehearsed the result, is what is good. But this good is fallible, never final. It may, when played out, or in changing conditions, prove to have been mistaken. And then the habit which produced it is again blocked and must be re‐evaluated to allow for continuous effective activity (Dewey and Tufts 1932; Dewey 2008a, 8:41–2; 2008b, 7:193–4, 213). Since it is the ways infants are treated, the ways in which infants encounter their environments, that are central to the ways in which habits are formed; and since it is adults whose habits are already formed by cultures who respond to the infants, what is the mechanism to change cultures and values? For Dewey it is democracy and education which are crucial. Why democracy? Because, for Dewey, the main stimulus to reflective action is not meditating in private but rather the voices and criticism of others.12 When we talk about blocked action we are usually talking about some sort of disagreement or difference, and the task is to negotiate that difference by reevaluating one’s habits of action in light of the disagreement and in concert with those with whom one is disagreeing. It indeed requires that there be others, and that the exchange of views and valuings is what continuously changes the conditions of living and doing. Insight into values comes from many quarters, and the more inclusive the exchanges the better the insights which can be incorporated. The more mutually responsive people are, the more inclusive the democracy which organizes their exchanges, the more intelligent and satisfactory will be the resulting structurings of social norms, customs, and habits. Such mutuality requires wide sympathy and wide, imaginative experience of the consequences shared by all. That sympathy, along with more flexible intelligence and judgment are to be developed through changed systems of education. Dewey’s emphasis on democracy and education are central to understanding his analysis of the moral life and the restructuring which makes it possible to continually grow. But it is crucial to add that such restructuring is never a final restructuring. There can be no final utopia. 185

Marjorie C. Miller

There is always history, always growth, always the need for new restructuring. To imagine anything else is to imagine an end to life (Dewey 2008a, 14:194–202). But there is even more to it. For Dewey, individuality is not something apart from democratic life – it is a consequence of democratic life, furthered by an adequate education which, through its structures and policies, helps to develop creative intelligence. Dewey criticizes what he calls “old individuality” as found in classic liberal individualism. He argues that social institutions are not a matter of protecting the rights of preexisting individuals. They are not “means for obtaining something for individuals. They are means for creating individuals” (Dewey 2008a, 12:12; emphasis in original). And he argues that the alternative view, traditional liberalism, makes the crucial mistake of separating the individual and society: a separation that can be made for some analytic purposes, but one which hypostasizes the subjects of analysis, subjects found only in continual relation with one another, inappropriately. This error is compounded when democratic freedom, the freedom to participate in the direction of circumstances in order to become an individual, is misunderstood as freedom from interference, a merely negative view. It would seem that Rorty was being unpragmatic here in making the separation and judgment he made. But, again, there is a context for Rorty’s separation of public and private morality – the problem he was trying to solve did not require him to “hypostatize” the subjects of analysis. Rather, as he makes quite clear, he was presenting a view, stemming from his own early desire to “hold self‐creation and justice, private perfection and human solidarity, in a single vision” (Rorty 1989, xiv). That is, to combine his love of wild orchids with his commitment to Trotsky’s vision of equality and social justice. Rorty introduces Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by writing: This book tries to show how things look if we drop the demand for a theory which unifies the public and private, and are content to treat the demands of self‐creation and of human solidarity as equally valid, yet forever incommensurable. (1989, xv)

IV So, we pragmatists come to the matter of hope. An interesting term. One of the most common criticisms of pragmatists (following Ayer’s discussion and, more recently, Cornel West’s) is that we pragmatists are a shallow bunch – overly optimistic, lacking a tragic sense of life. I think this is just false. Each of the pragmatists had known and dealt with tragedy in his or her life. But, strangely, it is just in the face of tragedy that the pragmatists argue for the moral value of hope. The conception of meliorism, that the situations in which we find ourselves can be made better, is central to James’s views13 and to his own ability to rise out of the deep depressions with which he struggled. For Dewey, the notion of intelligent action as problem‐solving requires that we be able to restructure confusing and recalcitrant situations in order to envision a course of action to be undertaken toward an end in view. For each of them there is not only no guarantee that a better world will result from one’s action, but even more – the conviction that history and change are such that the problems we solve today will give rise to new problems tomorrow. Neither Dewey nor James 186

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

accepts a vision of the achievement of any sort of final solution. There is no conception of the best – James’s ideal world in which all desires are satisfied simultaneously is, he declares, a physical impossibility (even for a single person – I cannot have my cake and eat it too). Dewey’s conception of the Great Community – a community of communities in which communication is free and ongoing, is not a vision of what orderings or social institutions would finally embody the end of the need to go on communicating, or even the best sort of communication! For each of these, what matters is that we can do better, not that we can achieve the best. The notion of “best” is the sort of notion that implies an absolute standard, outside of time and history, against which the best could be established. The better is always a judgment in relation to evaluated alternatives, arising in a context, addressing a particular problem at a particular time. Rorty, of course, understands these two earlier thinkers when he develops his own pragmatism, but he has a tendency to focus on the advantages of utopian hope as the realizable ideal of social hope, as what is required to Achieve Our Country. Utopia is a tricky word to stress. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, following Professor Patrick Geddes, “Sir Thomas More was an inveterate punster, and Utopia is a mock‐name for either Outopia, which means no‐place, or Eutopia – the good place” (Mumford 1922, 266–7). I don’t want to argue that the term “utopia” never appears in the corpus of earlier pragmatic writing – it does so appear. But there was much criticism, especially in Dewey, of having faith in pie‐in‐the‐sky, nowhere utopias, or as ends separated from the hard work of political intelligence required to envision them as ends‐in‐view rather than as disembodied ends. James is much less focused on such political work. His moral interests focused on the expansion of our awareness of others’ ideals and our increasing respect for them, as we develop imaginative ways of pursuing our own ideals while minimizing the ideals which must be “butchered” in the pinch of a real world. But his insistence that there cannot be an ideal world, that we “vote, in fear and trembling, for the richest possible universe which we can foresee,” is still a long way from utopia. Rorty, on the other hand, begins pretty early in his work to stress the importance of what he terms “utopian politics.”14 Solidarity, the loyalty we feel to “we,” Rorty’s central public moral value, is very different from the creative private morality he develops so richly. The separation between public and private morality is very different from Dewey’s democratic community and the ways it creates and grows individuals as they create and grow the community. Such growth cannot succeed without belief in the possibility that our contributions will make a positive difference, but the hope Dewey expresses is different from the hope Rorty envisions. In his chapter, “Looking Backward from the Year 2096” (1999, ch. 18), which, of course, he intends as a fable, Rorty seems hopeful that disasters in the early collapse of the twenty‐first century will be overcome by the end of that century. Dewey sees progress, but progress made in the context of the constant tension between the precarious and the stable. No final resolution, final settling on the “right” path is envisioned by him. The end of growth, the end of real change, would be the end of life. I want to turn to a closer look at Rorty’s terms: public morality, social hope, solidarity, and utopia. First, public morality. For Rorty, this amounts to the claim that there is no “social goal more important than avoiding cruelty” (1989, 65). He claims that “we shall call ‘true’ or ‘good’ whatever is the outcome of free discussion – that if we take care 187

Marjorie C. Miller

of political freedom, truth and goodness will take care of themselves” (1989, 84).15 Further, he fleshes this out by saying: The social glue holding together the ideal liberal society … consists in little more than a consensus that the point of social organization is to let everybody have a chance at self‐ creation to the best of his or her abilities, and that that goal requires besides peace and wealth, the standard “bourgeois freedoms” … In such an ideal society, discussion of public affairs will revolve around (1) how to balance the needs for peace, wealth, and freedom when conditions require that one of these goals be sacrificed to one of the others and (2) how to equalize opportunities for self‐creation and then leave people alone to use, or neglect, their opportunities. (Rorty 1989, 84–5)

This seems a bit like James’s impossible ideal – but I don’t think Rorty means it this way. He sees it as a description, I take it, of public morality. This is what public morality consists of. It is a pretty thin description, but such a thin description is indeed what he wants. The focus is on avoiding cruelty and making room for individual self‐creation. Interestingly, only a page further on, Rorty writes, What binds societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes. The vocabularies are, typically, parasitic on the hopes – in the sense that the principal function of the vocabularies is to tell stories about future outcomes which compensate for present sacrifices. (1989, 86)

The claim of common hopes is much closer to what Dewey sees as central to communities  –  common purposes, in the development and implementation of which each member of the community has a role. I am not sure “common hopes” does as much work as the thicker Deweyan version of “common purposes” and its interactive relation to the individuals who are individuated through their participation and determination of the life of the community. But I take it this is what Rorty has in the background. The hope which is to be the glue is, as Rorty points out, increasingly difficult to maintain  –  not because of a lack of philosophic sophistication or theorizing, but because contingent circumstances (he points out the USSR, the greed of the surviving democracies, population explosions, starvation in the southern hemisphere – we would certainly update this list!) have made it more difficult to hope that the stories we tell about our progress toward the ideal are likely to become true. We’ll return to hope in a moment, but first, to continue to hope requires, as Rorty writes, “that we have a moral obligation to feel a sense of solidarity with all other human beings” (1989, 190). He builds this obligation out of Wilfred Sellars’s “analysis of moral obligation in terms of ‘we‐intentions’” (Rorty 1989, 190). Rorty claims that “our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us,’ where ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the human race” (1989, 191). But he develops the notion that moral progress is the expansion of the sense of “we.” Our sense of “we” expands when we fully encounter the ability of others to feel pain and humiliation as we are subject to, which is made most evident to us through novels, ethnographies and drama. Solidarity is something created, not something found – not something founded on an intrinsic humanness or respect or … It is a recognition of the vulnerability to pain and humiliation and the commitment to the 188

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

ungrounded liberalism which states that cruelty is the worst thing we do. It is the public morality which differs from the ironist’s private morality, quite appropriately according to Rorty. James, and especially Dewey, would not make this distinction. But, as I noted earlier, when Rorty makes it he is not making a substantive individual self different from a substantive public. Rather, he is talking about two incommensurable demands made on action: the demand for self‐creation and the demand for justice. It is especially for the latter that hope counts. Dewey and James would undoubtedly agree with Rorty that hope matters, that hope is central – even if they would not separate the public and the private, nor stress utopian politics as he does. But hope is central to the moral stand we pragmatists take. Hope is absolutely not certainty of outcomes. Hope is not dependent on the truth of one’s foundations. Hope is not held without the awareness of the serious dimensions of tragedy (see the quote from James above). Hope is in no way a guarantee of success. It is nevertheless a crucial element of pragmatist ethics. In James’s hands it is based on the claim that “The inmost nature of the reality is congenial to powers you possess” (James 1978, 86). John McDermott says of this view: Behind the consistent cadences of a rich and future‐oriented prose, there lurked a well‐­ controlled but omnipresent sense of despair. James was neither an optimist nor a cynic; he was a man of moral courage, who knew all too well, the ambiguity and precariousness of the human condition. (McDermott 1978, xxxvii)

The moral courage McDermott identifies is precisely the courage to hope – to find reason to keep trying, to keep creating, to keep listening to the cries of the wounded to enlarge his sense of the choices which would bring about the richest possible universe. To make a commitment to the belief that the changes one makes can be for the better – even in the face “of the ambiguity and precariousness of the human condition.” For Dewey as well, we can see the courage of his hope. Rorty quotes Sidney Hook, from an essay called “Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life,” who wrote: “Pragmatism … is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control. It may be a lost cause. I do not know of a better one” (Hook 1974, quoted in Rorty 1982, 70). Hook’s line draws on Dewey’s own statement in an article of 1930, in which Dewey discusses the many reasons for the loss of Victorian faith in progress, and argues that there is a possibility for a new faith in a philosophy not based on eternal truths but one based on the full use of science and art. Dewey says that “A philosophic faith, being a tendency to action, can be tried and tested only in action. I know of no viable alternative in the present day to such a philosophy as has been indicated” (Dewey 1998, 28) So, Dewey clearly believes in the value of testing the ideas he is developing. He believes in the importance of hope, of philosophic faith as a tendency to action, to bring about increased growth and fulfillment and satisfaction. But there is an interesting set of caveats for Dewey: among the faiths he holds dearest (descriptions which are parts of his final vocabulary) is the faith in democracy, which is also the faith in community (“Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself ” [Dewey 1998, 295]). He carefully develops the ideas of democracy and community, and then says: 189

Marjorie C. Miller

democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements … Only when we start from a community as a fact, grasp the fact in thought so as to clarify and enhance its constituent elements, can we reach an idea of democracy which is not utopian. (Dewey 1998, 295)

Dewey hopes, but his hope is carefully distinguished from a utopian hope. He develops the ways in which symbols, vocabulary, enable us to do much more than merely to recognize and sympathize and empathize with others who are capable of feeling pain and being humiliated, and hence are one of us. Dewey’s claim is that our morality is not just in solidarity, but in “the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.” This, he writes, “is the meaning of the statement that the problem is a moral one dependent on intelligence and education” (Dewey 1998, 297; emphasis added). As to freedom, he would agree with Rorty on the value of pluralism and diversity in our community, but he writes: No man and no mind was ever emancipated merely by being left alone. Removal of formal limitations is but a negative condition; positive freedom is not a state but an act which involves methods and instrumentalities for control of conditions … a belief in intellectual freedom where it does not exist contributes only to complacency in virtual enslavement, to sloppiness, superficiality and recourse to sensations as a substitute for ideas: marked traits of our present estate with respect to social knowledge. (Dewey 1998, 301)

In the essay I have been focusing on, Dewey continues to articulate the importance of shared, fully accessible, and fully utilizable, knowledge of the causes and conditions of community life. He concludes, however, with a very hopeful picture of how the Great Society might become a Great Community. Indeed, he too contrasts the existent distortions of our ways of life with the idealized development of what he hopes for, “a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication” (Dewey 1998, 307). Morality, the moral life, is intimately tied to political life – for Dewey the connection depends on inquiry, intelligence, communication, and hope. For Rorty the connection depends on what he calls solidarity, social hope and utopian politics. There are important differences. But the moral value of hope and its relation to shared life rather than to some Thing, or some Being, beyond our quotidian life is crucial to we pragmatists. It is crucial because hope, what James and Dewey called meliorism, is the belief that the situations we find ourselves in, the contexts of our actions, may be made better by our actions. Though there is no certainty that they will be made better, without hope there can be no democracy, no community. If community and democracy entail shared purposes in which all affected by change participate in bringing about that change, we participants must commit ourselves to acting toward those purposes, organizing activity in terms of those purposes, finding ourselves remade by action toward those purposes. We do need to share in the purposes, but we must hope that the actions we undertake will be effective in bringing the purposes – purposings which envision a future – into what will become our present experiences. 190

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

Remember that William James said that what constitutes pragmatism is attention to last things rather than first things, to the future rather than the past, to consequences rather than preconditions.16 James argued that truth is made, not found. When Rorty asks for hope rather than knowledge, I take it that he is simply finding a more provocative way to articulate James’s point. Our hope is that anticipated consequences will be borne out in our social practices – that changes we foresee will by our actions become realities with which we can deal, that our hoped‐for world will be one in which we can continue the conversations we are undertaking. James and Dewey and Rorty all foresaw that without the imagination to foresee possibilities, no possibilities can be actualized. And without imagining a future for communities, for democracy, for our own cultural traditions, those communities and democracy and traditions will simply disappear. And they may. They are even likely to disappear. What are young adults seeing and reading today? Certainly not utopian visions. Contemporary popular culture and literature are primarily dystopian, apocalyptic, and post‐apocalyptic fantasies. To meliorate, we must both accept and criticize. But to assume the future will be disastrous is to reject and abstain. It is to become passive in the face of malevolent forces which we do not imagine we can control. If we cannot imagine a positive alternative to the negatives popular culture is providing us, we cannot invent ways of satisfying our own demands that do not butcher the demands of others. Pragmatism insists that we face the conditions we are in, envision alternatives, and weigh the means‐end continua which constitute these alternatives. In the end, this is the ethics to which Rorty’s pragmatism amounts. As he writes: “A turn away from narration and utopian dreams toward philosophy seems to me a gesture of despair” (Rorty 1999, 232).

Notes 1 Mentioned in Achieving Our Country, Rorty attributes this phrase to Hilary Putnam, who, Rorty says, used it “defining the essence of pragmatism” (1998, 27). 2 Rorty says this in several ways in many places. One version of it is developed in the context of his discussion of Habermas, pointing out that they agree in thinking that: “A liberal society is one which is content to call ‘true’(or ‘right’ or ‘just’) whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter” (1989, 67). 3 “All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for our enemies, our long‐term projects, our deepest self‐doubts, and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives. I shall call these words a person’s ‘final vocabulary.’” (Rorty 1989, 73). 4 This notion of the strong poet emerges most fully in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) in Rorty’s discussions of Bloom’s views. But he makes use of the notion in other places as well. 5 See, for example, Rorty’s discussion of Mill in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999, 267).

191

Marjorie C. Miller

6 Of course, it was the masculine that Aristotle was most interested in, and he did not think that women or children or slaves could be fully happy. 7 The expansion of the relationships which constitute the self is an expansion of the sense of what is part of me – what is part of first‐person activity: we. 8 Rorty uses Shklar’s definition in many places, but I believe he first offers it in the “Introduction” to Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, xv). Alan Malachowski, in his “Preface and Acknowledgements” to Richard Rorty (2002, xii), says “Reading Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices helped explain the choice of emphasis.” 9 It is interesting to note an objection to this position developed in a well‐argued book by Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind (1995). In this book, Geras tries to show that although Rorty’s discussion is interesting and persuasive, it cannot account for the actual, recorded words of those who risked pain and death to save Jews during the Holocaust. Geras’s point is that although many of such people could be accommodated by Rorty’s notions of having come to see themselves as “we” inclusive of Jews, many (too many) of them did actually not feel this way. They saw the Jews as “they” – but nevertheless as human beings, human beings who must be treated as human beings, even if not one of us. Geras is arguing that it was precisely the assumption of some universal essence of humanity which was appealed to by those who were moved to risk a very great deal in sheltering or assisting Jews. His argument is that Rorty, by denying such an essence, denies the legitimacy of the sacrifices undertaken. Geras uses this argument as a jumping‐off point to attack Rorty’s “relativism” and failure to recognize the importance of truth claims, and other failures he develops. The full argument can certainly be addressed, but its initial point remains an interesting one. 10 These were presented as “Talks to Teachers” originally in James (1899). The essays in question were reprinted in The Writings of William James (1978). 11 There are several locations in which Dewey discusses imaginative rehearsal or dramatic rehearsal. Some examples are the Ethics in Middle Works (2008a, 5:293), Ethics in Later Works (2008b, 7:275), and Human Nature and Conduct in Middle Works (2008a, 14:13–23). For more discussion of this subject see Fesmire (1999). 12 See Rorty’s early discussion of the “strong poet,” drawing on Philip Larkin’s poem, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, 23–5) in which Rorty roots individuality in the “lading list” of what is in one’s own mind, in one’s ability to impress “one’s mark on the language.” Rorty even follows Bloom in calling it “success in what Bloom calls ‘giving birth to oneself ’” (1989, 29). Though of course this needs tempering with his discussion (p. 41), which dedivinizes romanticism after having talked of other dedivinizations. Here Rorty praises Bloom’s reminder that “just as even the strongest poet is parasitic on her precursors, just as even she can give birth only to a small part of herself, so she is dependent on the kindness of all those strangers out there in the future.” 13 There are several discussions, but an interesting one is in “Lecture VIII: Pragmatism and Religion” in James (1907). 14 See Rorty (1989, 52), where Rorty stresses that it is not science which is the interesting part of culture, but that we should switch attention to “areas which are at the forefront of culture … namely art and utopian politics” (emphasis in original). 15 Rorty’s footnote here makes clear that this is not truth in the Peircean sense of “what will be believed at the end of inquiry” (see p. 84n5). 16 The wording here is: “No particular results then, in so far, but only an attitude of orientation is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities, and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James 1907).

192

Rorty, Pragmatism, and Ethics: The Value of Hope

References Dewey, John. 1988. The Later Works, 1925–1953. Volume 13: 1938–1939, Experience and Education, Freedom and Culture, Theory of Valuation and Essays, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1998. The Essential Dewey. Volume 1: Pragmatism, Education, Democracy, edited by Larry A. Hickman and Thomas M. Alexander. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. —. 2008a. The Middle Works, 1899–1924, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, vols. 5, 8, 12, 13, 14. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 2008b. The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Vols. 7, 13. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dewey, John and James H. Tufts. 1932. Ethics, rev. edn. New York: Holt. Fesmire, Steven. 1999. “The Art of Moral Imagination.” In Dewey Reconfigured: Essays in Deweyan Pragmatism, edited by Casey Haskins and David I. Seiple, 133–50. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Geras, Norman. 1995. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. London: Verso. Hook, Sidney. 1974. Pragmatism and the Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Basic Books. James, William. 1899. Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt. —. 1907. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Project Gutenberg eBook. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116‐h/5116‐h.htm. —. 1978. The Writings of William James, edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Malachowski, Alan. 2002. Richard Rorty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McDermott, John J. 1978. “Introduction.” In The Writings of William James, edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mumford, Lewis. 1922. The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright. http://sacred‐texts. com/utopia/sou/index.htm. Rorty, Richard. 1972. “The World Well Lost.” The Journal of Philosophy 69(19): 649–65. Reprinted in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, pp. 3–19). —. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” In Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities, edited by Mark Edmundson, 29–50. New York: Viking. Republished in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). —. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth‐century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

193

12 The Center and Circumference of Knowledge: Rorty on Pragmatism and Romanticism ISAAC NEVO

1  Romantic Vistas Richard Rorty’s discussions of “romanticism,” a term by which he means a set of general philosophical themes, not merely a body of literary and philosophical work of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, are not univocal in their approach.1 In their duality, they offer us an opportunity to follow two of the various conflicting, though persistent, voices – a Nietzschean and a Hegelian voice – in the chorus of readings and interpretations that constitutes Rorty’s writings. In one of these voices, philosophy – seen as irremediably committed to stale metaphysical speculations – is offered “honorable terms of surrender” (Rorty 1989, 26) on behalf of poetry; in another, those terms of surrender are recognized (with Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche) as offering merely an “inversion” of Platonism (Rorty 1989, 33), and a higher ground is sought on which to include both sides – the philosophical and the literary – while neutralizing their conflict. The aim of this chapter is to highlight this inner conflict, or wavering, on Rorty’s part, and to discuss what I take to be his failure in reaching a stable view. The term “romanticism” is vague and open to multiple interpretations; so much so that many scholars deny that there is a consistent theme that could be gleaned from the works of those who are taken to be included in its reference. Nevertheless, the grouping of romantic poets and thinkers together has never been purely extensional, or arbitrary, and various accounts have been offered of the term’s intension, or connotation, including some by those who have most vociferously objected to its thematic use. Famously, Arthur O. Lovejoy went so far as claiming that “The word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing. It has ceased to perform the function of a verbal sign” (Lovejoy 1924, 232). In later work, though, while still deploring “romanticism” as an abstract universal, Lovejoy offers thematic accounts of “the intellectual revolution of the romantic period” (Lovejoy 1941). On this account, the distinction with “classicism,” namely, the arts of classical Greece, suggests an

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

194

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

emphasis on both world and self as “infinite,” that is, unlimited or boundless, and in due course this emphasis had developed into the ideas of “organicism,” “dynamism,” and “diversitarianism” that found political expression in “the tragic spectacle of Europe in 1940” (Lovejoy 1941, 278). In what follows, I shall use the term as a Wittgensteinian “family resemblance” term, that is, thematically, but without any claim to express any single unifying “essence” common to all and only instances of the term. With Wittgenstein’s help we may admit all the differences that scholars like Lovejoy are keen to highlight without having the term lose its function as a verbal sign. There are various strands in the use of the term “romanticism.” The distinction from “Classicism” suggests, as noted, relief from the demands of classical standards of (aesthetic) judgment, namely, standards requiring subordination to independently existing forms. In Lovejoy’s terminology, these classical standards are suggestive of clarity, objectivity, unity, and serenity. What replaces them is a preoccupation with the “infinite,” or the unlimited, along with a preference for “mystery, otherworldliness, an awareness of the duality of man’s constitution, a preoccupation with the inner life, and a sense of man’s inner corruption” (Lovejoy 1941, 267). The distinction from “Enlightenment” suggests, more radically, relief from the demands of reason, or at least from the centrality of reason in both cognition and practice. The point has been highlighted by Isaiah Berlin. In his terminology, Enlightenment’s rational demands, namely the demands of consistency, harmony, and objectivity, cannot exhaustively capture a living, striving, willful, unconscious, and constantly changing reality, cognition of which must consequently be understood as the creative activity of artists rather than that of theoretical and systematic scientists (Berlin 1999). The distinction from “Mechanism,” or “Newtonian science,” suggests relief from static and mathematically fixed conceptions of nature and “man” in favor of a dynamic and organic conception. As suggested by Northrop Frye, with reference to Blake, “admiring the mechanisms of the sky leads to establishing human life in mechanical patterns too” (Frye 1970, 302), much to the horror of those seeking a more intimate perspective on both world and life as an organic whole. Common to all these views is a conception of the rational, the ideal or the conscious as not merely dogmatic, or mistaken, but also as positively oppressive, that is, as an imposition of totalitarian order that aims at leaving nothing outside its rule. Romanticism reverses Enlightenment’s emancipatory priorities, viewing its offer of liberation by means of reason as a suffocating confinement, an enslavement or imprisonment in which a truer, more genuine reality, including the human self, finds itself unable to express its creative singularity. In its own emancipatory claim, romanticism calls for a different kind of liberation, namely, liberation from the universal, the rational, the objective, or the formal on behalf of inwardness, creativity, and difference. It is this normative aspect of romanticism that accounts for what I take to be a narrower characteristic, or marker, of that movement, namely, its tendency to inflate its distinction with classicism, or rationalism, into a set of unbridgeable dichotomies, for example, that between reason and imagination, as if one has to choose one or the other. As an intellectual stance, romanticism involves viewing the rational as essentially formal and static, and thus inadequate for an essentially changing and limitless world. Seeing reason as oppression, romanticism does not move from the unlimited, or organic, nature of reality, or selfhood, to a similarly unlimited and organic conception of reason 195

Isaac Nevo

or science (such as we find, for instance, in Hegel’s historicism, and much later in Wittgenstein’s lebensformen, and even in Quine’s epistemological holism). Rather than offering such a correction, it builds up a set of dichotomies. Insisting on a static view of reason along with a dynamic view of world and self, it has to construct its alternative faculties, imagination, the unconscious, and so on, not as aids to reason but as radically different, liberating “principles” in opposition to it. Thus, in romanticism reason is not offered a corrective, more flexible account; rather it is seen as an alien and oppressive presence to be replaced wholesale. In “Toward a Theory of Romanticism” (1951), Morse Peckham, for example, defines romanticism as follows: What then is Romanticism? Whether philosophic, theological, or aesthetic, it is the revolution in the European mind against thinking in terms of static mechanism and the redirection of the mind to thinking in terms of dynamic organicism. Its values are change, imperfection, growth, diversity, the creative imagination, the unconscious. (Peckham 1951, 14)

The underlying inference from “organic” views of the universe to romanticism as the prioritizing of creative imagination, or the unconscious, is that reason, being essentially a formal, timeless structure of logical laws and methodological rules, is inadequate to capture, or fully represent, a non‐static, evolving, organic reality. Hence, some other faculty must do the job, and imagination seems to be best suited for it, being unconstrained by such requirements as correspondence and consistency. On this picture, romanticism is a combination of an organicist ontology and a formalist/representationalist epistemology, which reflects a normative disdain for the epistemological side as inadequate and suffocating. Similarly, Berlin sums up the bases of romanticism in the following terms: These are the fundamental bases of romanticism: will, the fact that there is no structure to things … and therefore opposition to any view which tried to represent reality as having some kind of form which could be studied … and in other respects treated in a scientific manner. (Berlin 1999, 127)

Here, too, the inference is clearly made from the striving, willing, nature of reality to its inaccessibility to scientific study that is thought of as essentially formal and static. Furthermore, this scientific inaccessibility of reality to science, or reason, is emancipatory with respect to the creative functions of reality as an organic whole which would otherwise suffocate under unchanging forms. These assumptions could well be disputed. Since Hume’s analytical conception of reason, with all its skeptical consequences, reason has been accounted for in more flexible ways, as transcendental (Kant), dialectical (Hegel), custom‐dependent (late Wittgenstein), or holistic (Quine). Dissatisfaction with formalist doctrines of reason, or representationalist epistemologies, could lead toward much less static or mechanistic views of the world, closer in certain respects to the organic view, but not hostile to reason. On such views, reason and imagination would be viewed as productively

196

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

intertwined, stability and change as inter‐related, science and poetry as held in dialogue, that is, as components of a single culture (not uncommunicating agents of “two cultures”). But that is not the romantic view. As we shall see, Richard Rorty endorses romanticism within an overall antirealistic view that he interprets as “pragmatism.” He has his own anti‐metaphysical reasons for accepting the dichotomies favored by romanticism. However, he does not accept the metaphysical side of romanticism and he sees its dichotomizing tendencies as running the risk of maintaining what Heidegger called an “inverted Platonism.” In his attempted resolution he does not abandon romanticism, nor its inverted form of metaphysics, but offers to “privatize” their excesses, eliminating any “public” claim to authoritative truth on behalf of such counter‐rational agencies as the will or the imagination, and allowing them as instruments in search of “private perfection.” The outcome is a form of dichotomous romanticism that cannot fully endorse its own metaphysical inversions, and resorts to irony as a way of undoing the commitments involved.

2  Romanticism and Rortian Pragmatism In “A Defense of Poetry,”2 P. B. Shelley argues for poetry as “the center and circumference of knowledge” (Shelley 1965, 70), and for poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley 1965, 80). His argument for these exalted claims is that poetry, being an expression of inspiration, or imagination, rather than calculation, can and does give us access to realms not given to reasoning. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship – what were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit; what were our consolations on this side of the grave – and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl‐winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar? (Shelley 1965, 70)

Responding to T. L. Peacock’s dismissal of poetry in the name of modernity – “a poet in our time,” says Peacock, “is a semi‐barbarian in a civilized community” (1965, 17)  –  Shelley opposes imagination to calculation, claiming metaphysical, moral and aesthetic knowledge, on behalf of the former as expressed in poetry which cannot be reached by mere reasoning. Poetry ascends to eternal regions. By way of an argument, Shelley identifies reason with analysis (“contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another”), while assigning the imagination the role of synthesis (“mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light” [Shelley 1965, 25]). In this scheme, “the principle of analysis” includes “relations of things,” or what Hume would have called “matters of fact,” while the “the principle of synthesis,” involves as its objects “forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself ” (Shelley 1965, 26). The term “synthesis” is clearly a Kantian term, but contrary to Kant’s view Shelley denigrates reason back to Humean proportions (i.e. relations of ideas and matters of fact) so as to claim synthetic powers on behalf of the imagination that go well

197

Isaac Nevo

beyond those claimed by Kant on behalf of reason, either theoretical or practical. In Shelley’s words, again: Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; imagination is the perception of value of those quantities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. (Shelley 1965, 26)

With Kant, so it appears, Shelley portrays a noumenal reality of virtue and beauty as underlying the mundane world of appearances and things; what were the one, he asks rhetorically, without the other. But unlike Kant he assigns poetry the task of catching an actual glimpse (“light and fire”) of that world, not merely positing its existence as grounds of phenomenal possibility, or even as postulate of pure practical reason. Turning poetry into the “center and circumference of knowledge,” and poets into “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” Shelley expands knowledge beyond its Kantian limits, replacing “transcendental deductions” with the deliverances of inspiration as his ultimate basis. Like other romantics and transcendentalists of his age, Shelley seems to be dissatisfied with Kant’s sharp separation of the noumenal from the phenomenal, that is, with the limits Kant places on knowledge, and seeks to establish a bridge between them, overcoming those limits. Dissatisfaction with Kant’s dualism of the phenomenal and the noumenal has led metaphysically oriented philosophers in different and opposing directions. Some have rejected the dualism altogether, moving toward one form or another of a unifying idealism, rationalist or phenomenalist. Others have retained the dualism, but rejected the separation between its poles, allowing phenomenal access to the noumenal through faculties other than reason. Shelley’s view is clearly of the latter kind. On this line of reasoning – and this I take to be the core of romanticism – an alternative to reason is required, since reason’s calculative strait‐jacket is inadequate for knowledge of a world whose laws are given by poets. The romantic seeks an alternative to reason, a new “center and circumference of knowledge,” rather than an expansion of the powers of reason or a less limited view of what it can do. Of course, Kant himself had been dissatisfied with the sharp noumena/phenomena division and sought to overcome it by means of the morally inspired thesis of the primacy of practical reason, along with its presuppositions of pure practical reason as a metaphysically free agency that gives laws to itself. The romantic appeal to imagination bypasses this particular bridge to the noumenal, replacing it with an inflated faculty of imagination while severing the notion of freedom from its Kantian connection with reason and the moral law. In some respects, Richard Rorty’s view of romanticism is diametrically opposed to Shelley’s, for although Rorty invokes Shelley’s appeal to poetry as “center and circumference,” he has no interest in providing any access to a noumenal world. On the other hand, Rorty does retain many of the dichotomies dear to the romantic heart, especially the science/poetry dichotomy. Rorty sees romanticism as one with pragmatism in rejecting any notion of reality, organic as well as static, beyond or above the human. His is a complete rejection of the Kantian dualism, or any earlier distinction between appearances and reality, mostly on naturalist grounds. Nevertheless, He quotes Shelley with approval, agreeing with his assessment of poetry. 198

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

At the heart of pragmatism is the refusal to accept the correspondence theory of truth and the idea that true beliefs are accurate representations of reality. At the heart of romanticism is the thesis of the priority of the imagination over reason – the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has broken. These two movements are both reactions against the idea that there is something non‐human out there with which human beings need to get in touch. In this chapter I want to trace the connections between James’ and Dewey’s repudiation of what Heidegger called “the Western ontotheological tradition” and Shelley’s claim that poetry “is at once the center and circumference of knowledge. (Rorty 2007, 105)

Where Shelley sees reason as an illusory veil, and the inspiration of poets as a direct revelation of reality as it is beyond the veil, Rorty takes reason (or truth) as an illusory bridge to a nonexistent reality beyond, and inspiration, or imagination as setting reason its cultural limits. Far from repudiating the so called “ontotheological” tradition, Shelley’s argument reproduces it, against Kantian limits, by transferring the power of synthesis from reason to the imagination, thereby vastly expanding its scope. Rorty, by contrast, denies reason a central role in knowledge as part of a still positivist denial of any higher reality. At the heart of Rorty’s claim is his acceptance of natural science as the final authority on the real, and his appeal to poetry challenges the cultural importance of this fact, but not its truth. Shelley has loftier, nineteenth‐century aspirations: All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipient … But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions. And whether it spreads its own figured curtain, or withdraws life’s dark veil from before the scene of things, it equally creates for us a being within our being. It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chaos. (Shelley 1965, 7)

Again, for Shelley poetry becomes central to knowledge because it withdraws “life’s darkest veil” and creates for us “a being within our being,” that is, a truer self for which the deliverances of inspiration are binding. For Rorty, by contrast, poetry is central because there is nothing for reason to reveal or to hide, beyond the facts of science, and so it loses its importance as a guide beyond these facts, namely, as a cultural guide. Nor is Shelley alone in this view among romantic thinkers. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge describes the “primary imagination,” as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception,” and as “repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (1903, 144). The epistemological role of that Coleridgean faculty (the imagination), is described by the critic Earl R. Wasserman in Kantian terms as “reconciling the phenomenal world of the understanding with the noumenal world of the reason” (Wasserman 1970, 342). Here, too, the imagination is taken to overcome the limits placed by Kant on the synthetic powers of reason, so as to gain access to a noumenal world that Kant had left beyond the possibility of cognition, and which changes to become expressible through creative activity. Was Rorty simply blind to his difference with Shelley, whose words he quotes with such approval? Or is there a hidden dialectic in his assimilation of romanticism to pragmatism (and of both to a complete rejection of “nonhuman” constraints). In fact, there is such a dialectic. Playing Quine to Shelley’s Brentano,3 Rorty argues (in effect) that one can accept the epistemological centrality of poetry (namely, the irreducibility of 199

Isaac Nevo

knowledge to science) either as Shelley did, that is, by taking it to reveal a deeper, more creative reality, or else, as he does, by denying any such reality beyond human constructions, and placing poetry at the center of all such constructive activity. In other words, Rorty’s claim is that if poetry is to be accepted as the “center and circumference of knowledge,” then knowledge had better not be construed as making any contact with realities independent of human construction. Rather, it is to be assimilated to culture. For Rorty, imagination is a noncognitive faculty, a faculty of (mere) expression, not a Shelleyan/Coleridgean bridge between the phenomenal world of sensation and a noumenal world of one kind or another. Unlike his romantic predecessors, Rorty deflates knowledge by “poeticizing” it. Similarly, reason is deflated by becoming the handmaiden of the imagination. If Shelley and Coleridge expand the reach of knowledge by tying it with the imagination, rather than with reason, Rorty turns around and diminishes that reach, even below the Kantian realm of synthesis (Synthetic a priori judgments), by denying any residual nonhuman constraint, or imagined “thing‐in‐itself.” With logical positivism of the twentieth century, Rorty seems to presuppose that “eliminating metaphysics,” where metaphysics would be any appeal to a reality beyond appearances, is not only possible, but highly desirable from an intellectual point of view. Rorty sees the appeal to such a reality as an appeal to something “nonhuman,” that is, something that lies beyond the different ways human beings see and interpret what appears before their eyes. For him, such an appeal to “nonhuman” reality is analogous to, perhaps even a continuation of the theistic appeal to God, and as such, a failure of complete secularization. He takes both appeals to be equally unnecessary for securing political and moral order in society. But whereas the positivists, including Quine, wished to replace metaphysics with science, Rorty offers to replace it with literature (and politics), invoking romanticism for that purpose. The shift requires not only that scientism, or naturalism, be rejected as insufficient for the purpose at hand, but also that romanticism be stripped of its metaphysical aspirations. Whether or not metaphysics can be entirely eliminated on a metaphysically neutral basis is a general question that is well worth pondering. Rorty, it seems, is in this respect closer to positivism than Shelley would have been. Notice, however, that despite its deflationary shift, Rorty’s argument does fully share the dichotomous tendencies of romanticism. Rorty is generally hostile to reconstructive, or rehabilitative, accounts of truth, or objectivity, which try to separate these notions from metaphysically realist assumptions. From his perspective, such reconstructed notion threatens to preserve a nonromantic, scientifically centered order of discussion, through which the marginalization of literature in contemporary culture would go on as if nothing had changed since Plato. Thus, we are still left with a science/poetry dichotomy, as competing “centers” of culture. We cannot have both. The view emerging from this interpretation of Rorty’s assimilation of romanticism to pragmatism could be seen as a noncognitive, deflationary romanticism, a romanticism deployed not in the sphere of knowledge, but rather in the wider sphere of culture, where the claims of knowledge, or science, are not inflated to include metaphysical knowledge, that is, knowledge of a nonhuman, though organic, realm, but rather marginalized in relation to other forms of discursive and conversational activity. The romantic “thesis” of the priority of the imagination over reason is thereby reinterpreted in social and cultural terms, while still preserving its dichotomous nature. Reason is 200

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

thought of “not as a truth‐tracking faculty but as a social practice  –  the practice of enforcing social norms on the use of marks and noises” (Rorty 2007, 107). The role of the imagination now appears to be the creation of new social norms through “the ability to change social practices by proposing advantageous new uses of marks and noises” (Rorty 2007, 107). But there is another side to Rorty’s discussions of romanticism. At times, Rorty shows acute awareness of a greater complexity regarding the metaphysical residues of romantically inspired attempts at overcoming metaphysics with reference to a counter‐ rationalist faculty such as the imagination. With Heidegger, Rorty recognizes Nietzsche’s romantic attempt to replace reason with will (to power), or truth with interpretation, as not free of an “inverted” kind of metaphysics: “that side of Nietzsche which Heidegger rightly condemned as one more example of inverted Platonism – the romantic attempt to exalt the flesh over the spirit, the heart over the head, a mythical faculty called ‘will’ over an equally mythical one called ‘reason’” (Rorty 1989, 33). And, clearly, the point can be generalized. Indeed, such an inversion is already apparent in Shelley and Coleridge, as quoted above. If imagination replaces reason, and if willful construction, or interpretation, go all the way down, that still leaves us with an ultimate constructive, or interpretive source – a first turtle, as it were – from which the chain has to begin, or be left hanging in midair, and the metaphysical status of which has to be clarified. Furthermore, Rorty also recognizes that all such attempts at “overcoming” metaphysics, the doctrine to which he tries to assimilate romanticism, necessarily leave potent metaphysical residues. Such “overcoming” (the phrase, again, is Heidegger’s) requires unifying (on some basis) all past metaphysics, all past, or even all possible, views of what reality, as opposed to appearances, is like, and then moving on to some further perspective which is neutral with respect to all such views. If the essence of metaphysics is to aspire to a view on reality as a whole, which is, at one and the same time external to that reality (as an independent perspective) and internal to it (as real itself), the overcoming of metaphysics appears to share that essence. In dismissing all possible views on reality as a whole, it still aspires to one such final view from which to pronounce its finality. Thus, the anti‐metaphysical position to which Rorty’s romanticism is assimilated is very much still a metaphysical position. It follows that the poeticizing of knowledge cannot so easily be seen as compatible with the rejection of all metaphysics, or the whole of the ontotheological tradition. Rorty accepts this complexity. He sees it as inherent in “ironist theorizing.” In particular, Rorty quotes Heidegger’s attempt to both articulate the problem and evade it, as follows: The motto of ironist theorizing was provided by the old Heidegger, who ended his 1962 lecture “Time and Being” by saying, “A regard to metaphysics still prevails even in the intention to overcome metaphysics. Therefore our task is to cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself.” Heidegger was vividly aware of a possibility which was eventually actualized in the work of Derrida – that Heidegger would be treated as he himself treated Nietzsche, as one (the last) rung in a ladder which must be cast away. (Rorty 1989, 97n)4

What Heidegger seems to recognize in this passage is that it is not really possible to remove metaphysics entirely on metaphysically neutral ground. As long as the rejection 201

Isaac Nevo

of metaphysics is theoretical in nature, the theory on which it rests will itself be implicated in metaphysical assumptions and presuppositions. Hence, the worry articulated by Rorty that the eliminator of metaphysics would be unified in someone else’s theoretical perspective as merely the last (or latest) metaphysician, that the “overcoming” is really a continuation, and that what appears as rejection of metaphysics in its entirety is really just an appeal to another metaphysical view. If this is the case, the overcoming of metaphysics is an illusory theoretical step to take, and attributing it to romanticism, or pragmatism, is a questionable attribution. Heidegger offers a resolution in the phrase “leave metaphysics to itself ” that Rorty capitalizes on in his notion of irony. To leave metaphysic to itself is to overcome metaphysics in a non‐theoretical way, so as not to leave metaphysical residues. It is to ignore metaphysics, while still producing it. Rorty’s ironism is a development of that theme. The reasonability of this complex move  –  recognizing a theoretical impossibility while seeking to “retain” its content, is an issue to which I shall return. In Rorty’s case, the move is described utilizing Wittgenstein’s Tractarian image of kicking the ladder after climbing on top of it: “Ironist theory is thus a ladder which is to be thrown away as soon as one has figured out what it was that drove one’s predecessors to theorize” (Rorty 1989, 97). In Wittgenstein’s case, the picture theory of meaning is found to be too restrictive to include itself as meaningful, so rather than rejecting the theory on grounds of this counterexample, it is accepted, somehow, while being thrown away. What makes this possible is a further distinction that serves to neutralize the paradox, namely, Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing, which “allows” Wittgenstein to speak in two voices. In Rorty’s case, too, the overcoming of metaphysics by theoretical means serves as its own counterexample, since that theoretical perspective, too, has inverted metaphysical residues. Rather than confront the consequences of their being no theoretically viable rejection of metaphysics in its entirety, the theoretical perspective is accepted while somehow being thrown away. Again, this requires some distinction, some higher ground, on which the ladder paradox is to be resolved, and in Rorty’s case the distinction invoked is that between private perfection and public authority. The ironist theoretician can accept ironist theory, namely the (impossible) rejection of all metaphysics, as long as the acceptance is ironical, that is, without claim to any ultimate foundation, or objective truth, but solely for the purpose of the ironist’s private perfection (where perfection is understood as complete autonomy relative to inherited vocabularies). For Rorty, that perfection and autonomy amount to an incessant introduction of novelty. The ironist is happiest when judged by his own standards alone, by a final vocabulary wholly invented by himself. His perfection is the uniqueness of individuality, the incommensurability of creating something totally new while dismissing all that went before. In William Blake’s terminology, also quoted by Rorty, it is creating one’s own system so as not to be enslaved by another’s (see Blake 1966, 629, plate 10, line 20). To accept ironism theoretically is also to accept it ironically. Rorty is forced to speak in two incompatible voices, a theoretical and an ironic voice, at one and the same time. Similarly, Wittgenstein had to say what could only be shown, to talk and remain silent at one and the same time. The position is inherently unstable, and the duality is inherited into Rorty’s discussions of romanticism. It is, on the one hand, identified with pragmatism as a rejection of metaphysics, but on the other hand, it is transmuted into irony 202

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

and paradox with Rorty’s Heideggerian recognition that what he is straightforwardly offering cannot really be taken at face value. Thus, Rorty’s discussions of romanticism admit of two voices, a sectarian romantic voice, wishing to defeat philosophy, once and for all, in favor of poetry, and also a more inclusive historicist voice, which sees the futility of any such one sided claim of victory and seeks a higher ground, a place where the romantic could have his inverted metaphysics for her own private perfection without becoming a public metaphysician, that is, without claiming any binding truth to her new language and set of metaphors. But each of these voices comes with its own difficulties, and it is not clear that they can be successfully combined.

3  Pragmatism as Inverted Metaphysics One move in the arsenal of traditional philosophy from which much metaphysics proceeds, is the attempt to fashion a rational viewpoint on reality as such, the whole of reality, leaving nothing unaccounted for, as if from the outside. The reality/appearances distinction comes as an afterthought, when it turns out, as it always does, that what appears to be rationally real from that viewpoint is very different from what we normally see around us. Much of the history of Western metaphysics can be told in terms of these distinctions (the rational vs. the ordinary viewpoint; reality vs. appearances). It goes without saying that this is a very problematic endeavor, and it has been criticized over and over again. But criticism of this type of metaphysics, let’s call it reality/ appearances metaphysics, can take various, and conflicting, forms, and Rorty’s is one form such criticism takes. More specifically, it is possible to attack the very idea of a rational viewpoint from which reality can be seen as a whole, or as such. Indeed, such a viewpoint would have to be, per impossibile, both inside reality (as it is not nothing) and outside of it (as having to capture all of it). Philosophers who take this line insist that we always begin in medias res, not from any place “outside,” and as we are in the midst of things, their outer limits must remain blurry for us and not fully specifiable. These philosophers scorn the idea of a viewpoint so pure as to be entirely disengaged from reality. Quine’s figure of the “cosmic exile” (1960, 275–6) and Wittgenstein’s image of “crystalline purity” (1953, 46e) are two well‐known examples of this approach. Both these philosopher highlight the impossibility of the metaphysical viewpoint, and the need to incorporate philosophy within a more humble perspective. But the traditional metaphysical view has also been criticized from an opposite perspective, fundamentally a skeptical one. In this line of reasoning, the critic occupies the rational position presumed for metaphysics, and goes on to argue that nothing that is seen from that perspective can be anything but appearances, that reality as such is not visible to it. Here the criticism is against the reality/appearances distinction without questioning the rational/ordinary viewpoint distinction. Once occupying the alleged viewpoint of a rational observer, a viewpoint entirely disengaged from reality, the critic goes on to point out that reality itself remain forever locked out, and that there is no further viewpoint (no “criterion”) from which the deliverances of our disengaged viewpoint could be compared with what is outside it. The point is familiar from the Pyrrhonist, skeptical tradition, but it has modern and contemporary adherents, most notably in Rorty’s pragmatism. 203

Isaac Nevo

For, indeed, what does the claim that there are no constraints on inquiry (save conversational ones) rest on? It rests on the very traditional argument that non‐conversational constraints, or as Rorty puts it, constraints that rest on something “nonhuman,” remain forever inaccessible to us, so they might as well be dropped altogether. They remain inaccessible because to get epistemological access to them we must get outside our own skin and compare the products of our own disengaged viewpoint with the viewpoint of reality itself. This argument first identifies “our own skin” with the disengaged viewpoint required for philosophy, and then worries about comparing its products (the objects seen within it) with reality itself. It’s way with the reality/ appearance distinction is to reverse its judgments, but not to eliminate the distinction; our most rational view of reality gives us only appearances, and these both stand in need, but cannot receive, certification from reality “itself.” This is Rorty’s basic viewpoint, and to this his notion of “contingency” is subordinated. Contingency, of course, is a notion serviceable within the Quinean‐Wittgensteinian perspective as well. Our contingent starting point is our starting point in medias res; but Rorty seems to subordinate contingency to the perspectives of skepticism. For him, our contingent starting point is our disconnectedness, our disengagement from “nonhuman” reality. An illuminating and fruitful debate regarding these issues can be found in the exchanges between Rorty and Putnam (see, in particular, Putnam 1990, 1994, 2000; Rorty 1998, 2000). The debate highlights the difference between those who respond to reality/appearance metaphysics by denying, primarily, that there is a privileged viewpoint, a God’s eye‐view, from which to draw the distinction, and those who deny, primarily, that there is a reality, a way the world is in itself, to be viewed from any such privileged position. The latter, unlike the former, argue against the very notions of representation and truth as exemplifying the belief in such a reality. They take these notions to be unreconstructible; essentially implicated in an empty notion of reality as such. The former do not wish to deny that although there is no “mirror of nature” as such, there are mirrors in nature, along with minds and thoughts, whose relation to their environment needs philosophical accounts, ones in which such notions as truth and reference can be rehabilitated. In “Putnam and the Relativist Menace” Rorty presents himself as being in agreement with five theses articulated by Putnam. These are: (I) that there is no view from nowhere to underlie realism (and in a different way relativism); (II) that there is no non‐interested view of the world; (III) that Quinean radical translation is interest‐relative rather than “absolutely” indeterminate; (IV) that there is a supremacy of the agent’s point of view in pragmatism; and (V) that there is no absolute conception of the world. As Rorty reads these pragmatist claims they imply his view regarding the emptiness of every notion of “independent” reality, “nonhuman” constraint, or “substantial” truth, which leave only “sociological” views of justification and correctness. The following is Rorty’s summation of the difference: This is how I would try to confirm my preliminary suggestion that what Putnam and I really disagree about is how much can be saved from the realist tradition once we affirm positions (I)–(V). Putnam thinks that these positions leave room for something like the Apel‐Habermas notion of a “universal validity claim,” something like the nonlocal and nontransient rightness with which religion and realist philosophy provide us. I think that

204

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

these propositions are of interest only in so far as they call on us to do without that notion, to experiment with what Sartre called “a consistent atheism” – with an image of ourselves (i.e., as wet liberals) as just as local and transient as any other species of animal, yet none the worse for that. (Rorty 1998, 61–2)

Rorty’s claim is an overstatement. Propositions (I)–(V) have an alternative, and no less interesting reading to the effect that such notions as truth and justification (and their correlates, reference, representation, warrant, etc.) do not depend on a God’s eye‐ view perspective on reality as a whole, and although they have traditionally been discussed by philosophers in those terms they are perfectly reconstructible without that traditional framework. Thus, we need not be pushed, on the strength of these propositions into a mere “sociological” notion of correctness and warrant, whether relativist or, as Rorty prefers, “ethnocentric,” that seem simply to throw away the “warrant and correctness” baby with the “view from nowhere” bathwater. The point I wish to emphasize is that Rorty is hostile to any non‐sociological reconstruction of truth and justification because (and this connects to his romanticist leanings) he worries that by bringing reality back they inevitably bring back a theoretical order of priorities that marginalizes, or oppresses, the literary in favor of some God’s eye‐view. But this blinds him to philosophical options of the kind urged upon him by Putnam, namely, philosophical options that move from (I)–(V) to forms of realism that are not committed to the God’s eye‐view and can better give sense to the staying power of much of the philosophical tradition, despite its excesses. Indeed, the difficulty with Rorty’s “sociological” accounts of truth and justification, his welcoming of the loss of the world, is that it is, in the end, as highly metaphysical as the philosophical tradition has always been. For if the world is lost, and well lost, where does all that solidarity and sociology take place? Is it an environment‐less human world? And is not an environment‐less human world just another version of the view from nowhere, namely, the Parmenidean–Platonic viewpoint which aims at capturing the whole of reality from a perspective that must, by its own logic, remain outside that reality? Rorty’s assumption that “sociology” can take place as an account of human interaction in complete abstraction from the “nonhuman” world in which that human interaction is to take place is a form of naiveté regarding sociology, and regarding the assumptions it has to make in order to get going. Similarly, and this has been pointed out by Putnam (1994, 345), the notion that “speakers” and their “dispositions” can be described without reference to some previous reality (in the case of “dispositions,” to counterfactual truths as well) is again a naiveté – Putnam calls it “irresponsibility” – that cannot be sustained. What is most important for my present purposes is to point out that Rorty’s radical pragmatism, if that is the right term for his position, invites an inverted metaphysics of which Rorty seems to be oblivious. His denial of the world as an ultimate reality beyond all human contact reinforces the human/nonhuman dichotomy, as if the human, that is, the conversational world studied by sociology, can exist in abstraction from an environment of a nonhuman reality. Rorty tends to dismiss this point by denying that he is committed to a denial of the empirical world, the world of mountains and elementary particles. His point is that that world exerts merely a causal impact on our inquiries, not a justificatory one. But the question persists in another form, for he is committed to the 205

Isaac Nevo

view that all those empirical mountains and elementary particles, in so far as we know about them, are within the sphere of the human, of what humans have access to. Thus, Rorty tells us two stories regarding the world of our surroundings, a phenomenalist story and a naturalist one. The former is a story about how we know only what we are justified by our peers to assert, including our empirical knowledge that comes to us via that conversational medium. The latter is a naturalist story regarding the merely causal effect that empirical reality has on us as evolving organisms. These are very different stories, and Rorty constantly shifts his grounds from one to the other. He is a phenomenalist when he says that there are no constraints on inquiry but conversational ones, and that there is nothing nonhuman for human knowledge to be accountable for; he is a naturalist when he turns around to tell us that this conclusion is not so bad, and has no idealist consequences, since the nonhuman world still exerts a causal influence on us. The resulting view is perhaps best characterized as transcendental phenomenalism and empirical naturalism, but that combination is an inverted metaphysical view, an inverted Kantianism, if not an inverted Platonism, in precisely the sense Rorty dismisses in others (Nietzsche), since the element of phenomenalism begs for an alternative subject, namely, imagination, or will, if not reason, to be rooted in. Rorty’s view of romanticism, in its more sectarian form, is interwoven with his radical conception of pragmatism, the view that there are no external, nonhuman constraints on inquiry, and no necessity stemming from any such constraints. Contingency is the fundamental condition of inquiry, and has to be accepted as such. Consequently, being constrained merely by conversational constraints, inquiry does not underlie any priority to reason over the imagination, science over poetry, or truth over human solidarity. Any such priority – any attempt to reconstruct these traditional epistemological notions, can only serve to bring back the “nonhuman” as a source of epistemological authority, a move no better justified than attempts to bring theological considerations back as sources of ethical authority. But the ontotheological tradition, so Rorty argues, can and should be rejected in whole. Whether it can be so rejected, or whether the attempt merely brings back, or open the door to, inverted metaphysical claims, is a point on which Rorty’s critics have pounced. It is the view of the present writer that metaphysics cannot in principle be eliminated on a neutral, non‐metaphysical basis, and so the appearance of an inverted metaphysics in Rorty’s attempt is hardly surprising. But Rorty tends to begin, quite uncritically, with hostility to metaphysics, which is identified with the idea of a reality “in itself ” that exists beyond appearances and can hold us (humans) epistemologically accountable. Denying such a reality, Rorty occupies the very position, or viewpoint (from nowhere) such metaphysicians have fancied, and thus his denial falls within the metaphysical positions he wants to reject. Still, assuming the eliminability of metaphysics, he is not fully, or not always, aware of his own vulnerability to it.

4  Blake’s Strategy: Romanticism as Ironism Blake’s strategy of creating a philosophical system for the sole purpose of not being enslaved by another’s, but without any further justification or claim to truth, offers Rorty a way out of the paradoxes of inverted Platonism and self‐reference. In particular, 206

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

Rorty incorporates this strategy in his notion of ironist theory. Eschewing objectivity, while admitting inverted metaphysical residues in this claim itself, Rorty allows his ironists to pursue their final vocabulary, along with its residues, solely for the purpose of their private autonomy, or perfection, but without any further claim to objective justification. With Blake, Rorty’s ironists care only for their own autonomy. Their worry is to be enslaved by someone else’s “system,” so their only care is for the originality of their own self‐expression. As for the public, Rorty favors a form of liberalism that distributes Blakean liberty on an equal basis throughout an ever expanding circle of “solidarity.” In this way, Rorty effects a rapprochement between romanticism as liberalism, grafting a romantic ideal of autonomous self‐expression on a contemporary democratic standard of liberal equality, which is, of course, another legacy of the Enlightenment. Let us then look more carefully into this ingenious, if tenuous, dialectic. Given the paradoxes of self‐reference and inverted metaphysics, the Rortian romantic could go in either of two ways. She could compromise her rejection of metaphysics and move on to endorse an inverted metaphysics, projecting as real such entities as the will, in either its collective or individual manifestation. She would, in other words, fall back on more traditional forms of romanticism. Alternatively, the Rortian romantic could stick with her rejection of all metaphysics at the price of admitting that even that rejection, namely, her affirmation of “contingency,” could not be taken at face value, and could not be claimed objectively as truth. The claim of contingency, along with all that went into substantiating it, can only be a ladder which has to be kicked off. In the end, no objective claim could ever be made. Nevertheless, the Rortian romantic insists that this may not be as bad as critics make it out to be. For although no claim could be made objectively, many claims could be made ironically, serving not truth but private autonomy. In short, the Rortian romanticist shifts from Shelley’s strategy to Blake’s; rather than being the metaphysically inverted center and circumference of knowledge, poetic self‐expression becomes an ideal of liberty. Following Aristotle, Putnam charges that “if you really believe that language is about Nothing, that may give you a certain frisson, but I cannot take you seriously … As Aristotle long ago pointed out, if a philosopher’s doctrine won’t allow him to say anything, then you don’t have to refute him. And if he goes on not saying anything, he’s ‘no better than a plant’” (Putnam 1994, 349). Putnam is suspicious about such philosophers who nevertheless go on to privilege a sociological, or behavioral “story” in lieu of an objective truth, since such alternative stories are no less metaphysical than the realist story that had been rejected. But Rorty’s ironism may offer us something more than an inverted metaphysical picture. It is an inverted metaphysical picture held ironically, that is, not for the purpose of truth but only for the purpose of autonomous self‐ expression. For Putnam and Aristotle, discourse is primarily cognitive discourse, or as J. L. Austin might have put it, it consists mainly of constative utterances. Consequently, if language is “about nothing,” that is, its statements express no truths and correspond to no humanly independent facts, nothing is being said. Such a language loses its main function. But Rorty’s ironist finds ways of saying lots of things despite their being, semantically speaking, about nothing, since for her language is not primarily cognitive, or constative. She is, thus, protected against the Aristotelian charge by a display of discourse, partly performative, partly poetic, through which much that is human, and humanistic, is preserved. A far cry from being no better than a plant. Indeed, ironic 207

Isaac Nevo

discourse is at one and the same time constative in assertorically using a certain final vocabulary, and partly performative, in undermining the normal conditions of such assertoric use. To the claim that nothing, or nothing “serious,” is being said, the ironist responds by an ironic performance of saying things discursively while disclaiming any conditions of objectivity. Dialectically, this Blakean, or ironist, strategy does not answer the Aristotle‐Putnam line philosophically, or theoretically. Any such answer would clearly be inconsistent. Rather, it deflects the philosophers’ charge in a practical sense. It simply creates for the anti‐philosophical skeptic a larger space to express themselves. The Aristotelians of this world will continue to think of such ironists as no better than plants, but the “plants” in question will have a larger cultural arena in which to experience their autonomy. Rorty tends to think that this is the direction modern democratic culture tends to anyway. Postmodern bourgeois liberals  –  the dominant citizens of the West  –  will care about their autonomy and self‐expression more than they will care for truth and objectivity. The sciences will be taken for granted as aids to beneficial technology, but will otherwise inspire only a few. With Hegel, Rorty takes philosophical thinking to be its time, namely, its historical moment, held in thought, and the historical moment of Rorty’s thinking, the 1980s and 1990s had seen the West emerging victorious in the Cold War, its socioeconomic principles appearing globally expansive, its political system of liberal democracy seeming to be without any serious alternative or challenge. What some have seen as the end of history, Rorty sees as the end of metaphysics in the aspirations of contemporary intellectuals. The issues that exercised previous generations of intellectuals, for example, the threat of totalitarianism, will no longer be of much importance and will not motivate Rorty’s contemporaries to oppose truth to power in quite the same way as before. Thus, Rorty incorporates Blake’s romanticism, the preference for creative autonomy over truth, into a historicist philosophical perspective which seems to reflect its own historical moment. Unfortunately, this ironist‐historicist strategy for incorporating romanticism into philosophy is inherently unstable. This is so especially for someone like Rorty, who spoils to give philosophy, as traditionally (and analytically) conceived – the ontotheological tradition – a final blow, or in Rorty’s phrase, to serve it ultimate terms of surrender and see it defeated. That urge is more Shelleyan, or Nietzschean, in character. It asserts the death of philosophy and attempts to justify it by argument. To the extent it proceeds by denying truth, or rejecting reason, it is either self‐referentially absurd or tacitly metaphysical in an inverted way. The ironist can escape the Aristotelian dilemma by declining to make any claim, except with irony, but that will not defeat the philosopher, as traditionally conceived. To defeat that kind of philosopher, the philosopher who prioritizes reason and truth over discourse and history, one would need a counter‐philosophy, an inverted metaphysics, which replaces reason with volition, being with becoming, objectivity with historicism. But that move cannot satisfy Rorty’s sense of leaving all metaphysics behind. Given Rorty’s ultimate aim, it is not surprising that Rorty’s romantic idol will have his metaphysics up his sleeve. Rorty will nudge her to an ironist position, the better to defend herself, but in doing so the aim of defeating philosophy will be lost sight off. So the Rortian romantic shuttles back and forth between these priorities, but there can be no final resolution of the difficulty she must face. The Rortian romantic can survive the 208

THE CENTER AND CIRCUMFERENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

attack of traditional philosophers; she can go literary and performative, and ironic, employing Blake’s strategy in pursuit of autonomy rather than truth. But she cannot, as Rorty hopes, defeat philosophy at its own turf. It cannot offer philosophy terms of surrender on behalf of poetry, for every attempt to do so, namely, to overcome the ontotheological tradition, would end up as just another chapter in that ongoing tradition. In this Platonic battle, philosophy lives to fight another day, as does poetry as well.

Notes 1 For Rorty’s discussion, see: “The Contingency of Selfhood” and “Self‐creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger,” in Rorty (1989, 23–43 and 96–121); “Pragmatism and Romantic Polytheism,” and “Pragmatism and Romanticism” in Rorty (2007, 27–41 and 105–19). 2 First published posthumously in 1840, Shelley’s essay had been written 19 years earlier in 1821. The John E. Jordan edited version includes references previously omitted to the essay by Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,” to which Shelley’s piece is a polemical response, as well as Peacock’s essay itself. 3 Analogously, Quine argued that Brentano’s thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional could be taken either, as Brentano intended, to establish “the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intentions,” or as Quine prefers, on grounds of the indeterminacy of translation, “as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention (Quine 1960, 221). 4 The Heidegger quote is from Heidegger (1972, 24).

References Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. The Roots of Romanticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blake, William. 1966. “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion.” In The Complete Writings of William Blake, edited by Geoffrey Keynes, 620–747. London: Oxford University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1903. Biographia Literaria. London: George Bell & Sons. Frye, Northrop. 1970. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism.” In Romanticism: Points of View, edited by Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, 2nd edn., 299– 313. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Heidegger, Martin. 1972. On Time and Being. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1924. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA 39(2): 229–53. —. 1941. “The Meaning of Romanticism for the Historian of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2(3): 257–78. Peacock, T. L. 1965. “The Four Ages of Poetry.” In Shelley and Peacock: A Defense of Poetry/The Four Ages of Poetry, edited by John E. Jordan. Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill. Peckham, Morse. 1951. “Toward a Theory of Romanticism.” PMLA 66(2): 5–23. Putnam, Hilary. 1990. “Realism with a Human Face.” In Realism with a Human Face, edited by James Conant, 3–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1994. “A Comparison of Something with Something Else.” In Words and Life, edited by James Conant, 330–50. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2000. “Richard Rorty on Reality and Justification.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 81–6. Oxford: Blackwell.

209

Isaac Nevo

Quine, W. V. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace.” In Truth and Progress, 43–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2000. “Response to Putnam.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 87–90. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shelley, P. B. 1965. “A Defense of Poetry.” In Shelley and Peacock: A Defense of Poetry/The Four Ages of Poetry, edited by John E. Jordan. Indianapolis: Bobbs‐Merrill. Wasserman, Earl R. 1970. “The English Romantics: The Grounds of Knowledge.” In Romanticism: Points of View, edited by Robert F. Gleckner and Gerald E. Enscoe, 2nd edn., 331–46. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.

210

13 Rorty and Analytic Philosophy GARY GUTTING

Richard Rorty was an analytic philosopher, in the sense that his work is an important moment in the historical development that began with Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna circle; continued through Quine, Sellars, and Davidson; and eventually produced Kripke, Brandom, and Dennett (to cite the figures that most attracted Rorty). In his “Intellectual Autobiography” Rorty notes that his work depended particularly (he says, “was parasitic on”) that of Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, and Brandom, who in turn required an understanding of the analytic philosophers they reacted against: Russell, Carnap, and Ayer (Rorty 2010). His earliest interests, however, were not in standard analytic problems but in the historical and metaphilosophical issues emphasized by Richard McKeon’s philosophy department at the University of Chicago, where Rorty matriculated at age 15 under Robert Hutchins’s program of early admission for bright high school students. This training encouraged his penchant for metaphilosophical efforts to compare and combine apparently disparate views. His adolescent effort to find a shared truth in Plato and Nietzsche first stimulated his interest in philosophy, and his earliest professional interest was in “synthesizing” analytic work with metaphysics (particularly Whitehead’s) and pragmatism (particularly Peirce’s and Dewey’s). During his doctoral studies at Yale and especially when on tenure‐track at Princeton, he came to focus increasingly on current analytic philosophy, both because of an attraction to its clarity and rigor and because he realized that this was the best path to professional success. This led to a number of journal articles in a standard analytic mode, most importantly on the mind‐body problem, defending a version of eliminative materialism. Even here, though, he based his work on Sellars, whom he saw as combining the technical virtuosity of analytic philosophy with an acute historical sensibility and a flair for imaginative systematization. He soon, however, came back to metaphilosophy, focusing on the “linguistic turn” that seemed to be the characteristic method of analytic philosophers. The long introduction to his anthology on this topic worked through with analytic care and precision the

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

211

Gary Gutting

debate between the rival methodologies of “ordinary‐language” analysis and “ideal‐ language” analysis. But, following the volume’s publication, Rorty’s eventual conclusion was that “the whole idea of ‘linguistic method in philosophy’ was misguided,” just one of many by‐products of trying, like Kant, to put philosophy on the “secure path of a science” (Rorty 2010, 12). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature develops a detailed metaphilosophical analysis and critique of analytic philosophy. The book is, however, distinctive first for its grounding in and contribution to major topics of current analytic philosophy. Rorty’s goal was an internal critique that questioned the project of analytic philosophy on the basis of positions developed in recent debates in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Second, although current analytic philosophers paid little attention to history, Rorty puts their enterprise into historical context, particularly relating it to Locke, Descartes, and Kant: the founders of philosophy as a modern discipline. Rorty tells us that he learned early on from Richard McKeon and Robert Brumbaugh at Chicago “to view the history of philosophy as a series, not of alternative solutions to the same problems, but of quite different sets of problems” (Rorty 1979, xiii). As he saw it, the distinctive problem‐set of the “modern philosophy” that began with Locke and Descartes primarily concerned the foundations of knowledge. For the moderns knowledge was a matter of forming in the mind accurate representations of reality. The task of philosophy was to provide a general theory of representation that would discover the mental processes that produce accurate representations, thereby revealing the foundations of knowledge. As a result, philosophy became the judge determining the cognitive authority of all other disciplines, dividing “culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all (despite their pretense of doing so)” (Rorty 1979, 3). This conception of philosophy as epistemologically foundational came to full fruition in Kant and his neo‐ Kantian followers. But it was based on the metaphysical view of the mind, particularly associated with Descartes, as an entity, somehow distinct from the body, in which the mental processes of representation occur. Philosophy thus became “the area of culture where one touched bottom, where one found the vocabulary and the convictions which permitted one to explain and justify one’s activity as an intellectual, and thus to discover the significance of one’s life” (Rorty 1979, 4). According to Rorty, twentieth‐century philosophy that emphasized rigor and scientificity accepted this modern view of philosophy. This included phenomenology as practiced by Husserl (although Heidegger’s took things in a quite different direction) and, especially, analytic philosophy (although Wittgenstein after the Tractatus dissented). Rorty found little of interest in Husserl, and his fascination with Heidegger was just developing when he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN). But he thought that analytic philosophers like Quine, Sellars, and Davidson showed the way to an internal critique of the foundationalism and representationalism on which the modern analytic project was based. In Part I of PMN, Rorty develops these ideas through an extended discussion of the mind‐body problem. The problem arises because we have intuitions suggesting that we are not just material bodies. In particular, it seems obvious that the (physical) brain processes that correlate with our thinking cannot themselves be thoughts, which are mental, not physical. Rorty, however, points out that such intuitions make sense only if 212

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

there is some way to differentiate the “mental” from the “physical.” So we need to cite a feature or features that distinguish the mental from the physical. But, Rorty maintains, any intuitions that there are such features will themselves be based on a dualistic view of human beings, and so will beg the question against materialism. Suppose, for example, that we propose that the mental, unlike the physical, is not spatially located. This makes sense if we assume that we have both a mind that is entirely mental and a body that is entirely physical. But this amounts to assuming Descartes’s claim that a human being is the union of two substances, one mental and the other physical. Assuming this, however, begs the question posed by the mind‐body problem in favor of dualism. Moreover, Rorty claims, Strawson and others have shown that there are no ways of identifying our minds without referring to our bodies. To avoid assuming Descartes’s substance dualism, we need to begin by merely thinking of ourselves as persons who have both mental and physical properties. The question then is what distinguishes these two sorts of properties. Rorty suggests that the most obvious answer is that the physical is spatial whereas the mental is not. Neural processes, for example, have specific locations in the brain, whereas any corresponding thoughts do not. But Rorty points out that this won’t do, since, for example, my build and my health are both physical although they have no specific spatial location. Defenders of dualism have two other candidates for the distinctiveness of mental states: their intentionality (by which they are “directed toward” or are “about” something) and their phenomenal quality (the feature whereby there is something it is “like” to be in such a state). Neither characterization applies to all mental states: a phenomenal quality like feeling pain is not about anything; and it does not “feel like” anything to believe – even when we don’t think about it – that Dobos torte is a Hungarian dessert). But there are mental items that do have both qualities, for example, a mental image of a forest fire or my current thought that Obama is president. Why not take the items that are both intentional and phenomenal as paradigm examples of the mental, and include those with just one of these features in the category in virtue of their family resemblance to the paradigm examples? Then we might argue that nothing physical could be either intentional or phenomenal, and so conclude that the mental cannot be physical. Rorty, however, maintains that showing that either the intentional or the phenomenal cannot be physical requires assuming, if not Descartes’s substance dualism, then at least a Cartesian dualism of mental and physical properties. Take first the case of intentionality, which corresponds to various senses of meaning (including especially sense and reference). At least since Wittgenstein (if not Saussure) we have had an account of meaning in terms of the use of language. On this account, meaning is not an intrinsic characteristic of a linguistic expression but a matter of the linguistic rules governing the use of the expressions. Viewed this way, physical objects – for example, an inscription on a monument or the ink printed on a page – can have meaning (intentionality). As Rorty points out, given a use‐account of meaning, if, à la Leibniz, the brain were expanded to the size of a mill, we could see the meaning of the neuronal structures and processes, as long as we knew the relevant linguistic rules. The only way to avoid this materialistic conclusion would be to claim that only the mental can properly have meaning and that so‐called physical meanings can be ­recognized only if we already grasp the mental thoughts to which inscriptions or ink‐ marks correspond. But, Rorty asks, why think this unless we already assume a Cartesian 213

Gary Gutting

distinction between the mental and the physical that privileges the mental as the sole bearer of meaning? Some dualists agree with Rorty, accepting a materialist view of intentionality but maintaining that there is no plausible materialist account of the phenomenal aspect of experience. Why not? Because, they say, a phenomenal quality is simply what it appears to be – there is no distinction between the appearance of a pain and its reality. By contrast, anything material may appear to be different than it is. Rorty agrees with this claim as an epistemological point: we have a “special access” to pains that allows for no deceptive appearances; if it seems to me that I am in pain, then I am in pain. But, he asks, why should this epistemological difference imply an ontological difference? His answer is that it does so only if we hypostatize painful feelings, treating them nor as properties of persons but as entities in their own right: “The neo‐dualist who identifies a pain with how it feels to be in pain is hypostatizing a property – painfulness – into a special sort of particular, a particular of that special sort whose esse is percipi and whose reality is exhausted in our initial acquaintance with it.” As a result, “the neo‐dualist is no longer talking about how people feel but about feelings as little self‐subsistent entities, floating free of people in the way in which universals float free of the instantiations” (Rorty 1979, 30). But talking this way simply assumes, once again, that the mental corresponds to a separate immaterial substance (now a particularized universal, like a Platonic form). At this point, Rorty says that he can fairly claim to have “dissolved” the mind‐body problem by having shown that it doesn’t arise as long as we “refuse firmly to hypostatize individual properties” (Rorty 1979, 32); that is, remain steadfast nominalists. Then we have no need to ground the intentional in the phenomenal, since we can understand it functionally, as merely a matter of how words (inscriptions or sounds) are used. Similarly, as long as we eschew Platonic/Cartesian metaphysics, we can, he says, explain the special status of the phenomenal in terms of linguistic use: the rules of our language‐game stipulate that we accept as true speakers’ sincere reports about how things appear to them. These points dissolve the mind‐body problem in the sense that they show that it arises only within a language‐game (that of philosophy since Descartes) that we have no need to play. The above discussion summarizes what Rorty calls his “fast dissolution” of the mind‐ body problem. Readers will note that his approach here is essentially a matter of deploying standard analytic modes of argumentation. He provides counterexamples, suggests alternative explanations, and uncovers presuppositions. He criticizes what he sees as a dubious view of the mind shared by most analytic philosophers, one that motivates much work on the metaphysics of consciousness. But he accepts the logical tools characteristic of analytic philosophy. The challenge is not to the analytic enterprise as such, but to what Rorty sees as a confusion that can be eliminated by clearer analytic thinking. In the rest of chapter 1, Rorty complements this analytic argument with an historical discussion designed to show just how the confusions leading to the mind‐body problem arose, maintaining that, as in the case of psychoanalysis, what’s needed to effect a “cure” is not a list of our mistakes and confusions but an understanding of just how we fell into them (Rorty 1979, 33). Here he goes beyond the ahistorical approach 214

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

of many analytic discussions, but remains faithful to the techniques of the analytic historians (e.g. Anthony Kenny and Margaret Wilson) on whom he relies. In any case, he returns in chapter 2 to ahistorical analytic philosophizing to fill a key logical gap in his dissolution of the mind‐body problem: the lack of a positive account of how we could treat our privileged access to the mental as arising from the rules of our language‐game. Here his approach is through the prototypical analytic technique of a thought‐experiment, asking us to imagine a distant planet inhabited by rational beings very like us, except that they have no notion of “mind” at all but instead think and speak entirely in terms of neurological states. (Parents, for example, seeing a child reaching for a hot stove, will shout, “You’ll stimulate your C‐fibers.”) Rorty develops his thought‐ experiment with considerable detail and complexity by further imagining an encounter between these “Antipodeans” (recalling the Australian materialist school) and philosophers from Earth (Terrans). The upshot, according to Rorty, is that “no predictive or explanatory or descriptive power would be lost if we had spoken Antipodean all our lives” (Rorty 1979, 120), so that there is no need in principle to talk about a metaphysically distinctive realm of mental sensations. Rorty realizes, however, that dualists are not likely to be convinced, but will argue that he has either built materialist assumptions into his description of the Antipodeans or that his description is not logically coherent. They may, for example, argue that Rorty can give no coherent detailed account of how the Antipodeans could have initially learned to speak entirely in neurophysiological terms without assuming that that they originally experienced first‐person sensations that they later correlated with such terms. Or, more generally (following a formulation by John Searle): the Antipodeans either have pains (in our sense of subjective feelings) or they don’t. If they do, then, they pose no threat to dualism. If they don’t, they are not sufficiently similar to make them relevant to the mind‐body problem. Rorty’s reply to such ways of thinking is to point out that they all rely on an assumption (which he calls “Principle P”): “Whenever we make an incorrigible report on a state of ourselves, there must be a property we are presented with which induces us to make the report” (Rorty 1979, 84). His alternative to P is the claim that reports are incorrigible only because it’s a rule of our language‐game that we cannot question someone’s sincere report of “how things seem to me.” According to Rorty, the problem with Principle P (at least as it is used in debates about the mind‐body problem) is that it involves two assumptions: (1) that some but not all things are directly knowable and (2) that what is directly knowable is most real (Rorty 1979, 105). These assumptions are at the heart of the Cartesian dualistic view that only the mind is directly knowable and that, accordingly, the mind has a higher degree of reality than the body. But they also enter into anti‐Cartesian views of the mind‐body problem. Behaviorists hold that only macroscopic material objects are directly knowable and so are more real than mental entities, which either do not exist or exist only as epiphenomena. Identity‐theory materialists say that macro‐objects are really just congeries of micro‐objects and so in fact are what we directly know, while eliminative materialists simply deny the existence of macro‐objects. Rorty has specific arguments against all of these responses to the mind‐body problem  –  including the eliminative materialism he himself had earlier proposed. But he realizes that as long as 215

Gary Gutting

we aim at finding a privileged mode of knowing that will establish what is “really real,” there will be no end to the debate. The Cartesian picture underlying the arguments will always allow for further logical twists and turns that will find new, unrefuted versions of controversial claims. The ultimate dissolution of the problem requires realizing that there is no way of settling ultimate ontological questions about what is really real. The only relevant questions are about which ontologies are most fruitful in talking about specific issues of human significance. The final judgment about ontology concerns which ways of talking are best suited to advance the values we cherish. In Rorty’s view, the modern mind‐body problem has at root been a quarrel between those who think we need a materialist ontology to uphold the privileged cognitive standing of modern science and those who think we need an immaterialist ontology to uphold the privileged moral standing of humans. But once we give up the search for ultimate ontological foundations, we can let the cognitive success of modern science and the moral success of modern humanism (e.g. democracy) themselves support their central role in our thinking. The conclusion of part I of PMN, therefore, is that metaphysical disputes about the status of consciousness are irrelevant to questions about the value of reason and the value of persons. But it may seem that other domains of modern philosophy – say, epistemology and ethics – are essential to ensuring the value of reason and of persons. In part II Rorty focuses on the problem of reason, which analytic philosophers treat as the problem of the rational basis (justification) for our claims to know – the central issue of epistemology. Taken by itself, Rorty’s discussion of the mind‐body problem could leave the impression that he is challenging the significance of just this one problem. The discussion of epistemology – which he says is the key part of the book – makes it utterly clear that the stakes are much higher. As with the mind‐body problem, there is a level on which Rorty can be read as merely offering a new answer to the question of how to justify knowledge‐ claims. Standard responses – from Locke and Descartes, through Kant, and to the present – have appealed to some relation between what’s in the mind and what’s in the world, a relation guaranteeing that the mind correctly represents the world. Much philosophical blood, sweat, and tears have been spilt trying to characterize this relation and to explain how it is brought about. We can read Rorty as suggesting a quite different approach: forget about the vain effort of intellectual pipe‐fitting and instead think of justification as simply a matter of giving convincing reasons for accepting a claim. No doubt the process of coming to know something involves who‐knows‐what complex of physical and/or mental elements and interactions. But, Rorty maintains, whether the result of this process is a justified belief depends not on any claim about what in fact happened but on a normative claim that we are required or entitled to hold the belief. Any such claim belongs to what Sellars called “the space of reasons,” not to the space of physical or mental descriptions. The space of reasons is precisely the domain in which we try to convince one another of our claims, and doing this successfully is all there is to justification. Rorty primarily supports this view by appealing to Sellars’s critique of the Myth of the Given and Quine’s critique of the analytic‐synthetic distinction. Sellars questions the empiricist view that claims about the material world can be justified by experiences of the objects they are about. This idea, he says, arises from a confusion (originating 216

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

with Locke) that identifies knowing a red triangle (e.g. a piece of red plastic with a triangular shape) and having a sense impression of a red triangle. Having an impression of a red triangle is a factual state of a mind and/or a brain often causally produced by a red triangle. Knowledge of a red triangle is a relation between the knower and a proposition (“that the triangle is red”), and the claim that the knower is justified in believing the proposition is a normative claim, not a factual claim about a red impression’s relation to the knower’s mind or brain. The empiricist view, Sellars concludes, is an epistemological parallel to the naturalistic fallacy in ethics. Rationalists will cite intellectual experiences as direct support of knowledge; for example that (mathematical) triangles have three sides. Here the knowledge is regarded as conceptual and necessary, not about the empirical world. But the basic idea is the same as the empiricist’s: knowledge is justified by a special sort of experience that puts us into direct contact with what is known. Quine, of course, questioned the assumption that there is any fundamental difference between the empiricist’s and the rationalist’s example, asking how we can distinguish between so‐called empirical (synthetic) knowledge and so‐called conceptual (analytic) knowledge. His case is essentially a challenge‐argument, showing the failure of various ways of drawing an analytic‐synthetic distinction and leaving it to proponents of the distinction to do a better job. Rorty’s critique of standard views of justification need not rely on undermining the analytic‐synthetic distinction. He could in any case appeal to a Sellarsian‐style critique of conceptual knowledge, pointing out that the fact of my finding a mathematical claim compelling does not supply a normative justification of the claim. Rorty’s interest is more in Quine’s alternative picture of knowledge as a “web of belief,” where fitting in new beliefs may involve revisions in any part of the web, even parts that have seemed immutable. He could readily take Quine’s constantly evolving web as the social nexus of the linguistic practices that justify our beliefs.1 So far, then, Rorty might be viewed as merely proposing a new epistemological view of rational justification. This would seem even less radical than his approach to the mind‐body problem, since he isn’t trying to dissolve the problem, just offer another solution to it. In fact, however, Rorty sees his view as a rejection of the very project of analytic philosophy. This is because he regards analytic philosophy as essentially a continuation of Kant’s epistemological project of finding the criteria needed to judge the claims of any discipline, thereby giving philosophy a foundational role for all knowledge. Kant’s idea, he thinks, was that there is a distinctive knowledge of the mind that will reveal these criteria. This knowledge cannot be achieved by empirical science but only by a “transcendental” method available only through philosophical reflection. Analytic philosophers rejected Kant’s transcendental method, but thought that a more rigorous method, based on recent discoveries in mathematical logic, could do the job. Rorty, however, sees Kant and his analytic successors as equally in the grip of the representationalist view of the mind that Locke and Kant developed at the beginning of the modern era. Kant understood knowledge as a synthesis of empiricist intuitions and rationalist concepts that separately were inadequate to ground knowledge, whereas analytic philosophy was a logicized revival of empiricist ideas (logical empiricism). But on Rorty’s reading, as we have seen, this new empiricist program eventually imploded 217

Gary Gutting

in the work of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, thereby undermining the representationalist picture and leaving no place for analytic philosophy as a distinctive domain of knowledge. As Rorty puts it in PMN, analytic philosophy requires at least one of Kant’s two great distinctions: the given (intuitions) versus the non‐given (concepts) or the analytic (the necessary) versus the synthetic (the contingent). “If there are no intuitions into which to resolve concepts (in the manner of the Aufbau) nor any internal relations among concepts to make possible ‘grammatical discoveries’ (in the manner of ‘Oxford philosophy’), then indeed it is hard to imagine what an ‘analysis’ might be” (Rorty 1979, 172). Analytic philosophers, Rorty says, have carried on only by, at least implicitly, holding on to one or another of the Kantian distinctions. Even Quine and Sellars continued to rely on the distinction that the other had demolished. By undermining the analytic‐ synthetic distinction, Quine had shown that “there is no line between science and philosophy” (at least when philosophy is understood as the analysis of concepts) and “tends to assume that he has thereby shown that science can replace philosophy.” But then Quine gives an account of science based on a distinction between “stimuli” and “posits,” which “seems to lend aid and comfort to the old intuition‐concept distinction” (Rorty 1979, 171). He goes on to admit that even sensory stimuli are really posits, but this admission leaves him with no basis for his scientific naturalism, which singles out science as a privileged source of knowledge about the world.2 Unless science works from stimuli that give its posits a privileged status, it’s not “clear why natural science, rather than the arts, or politics, or religion, should take over the area left vacant” by philosophy. Similarly, Rorty says, “despite courteous acknowledgment of Quine’s triumph over analyticity, Sellars’ writing is still permeated with the notion of ‘giving the analysis’ of various terms or sentences, and with a tacit use of the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the structural and the empirical, the philosophical and the scientific” (Rorty 1979, 171). Rorty’s conclusion, then, is that there no longer “exists anything identifiable as ‘analytic philosophy’ except in some … stylistic or sociological way.” The analytic “style” is that of young philosophers modeling their writing on the Philosophical Review articles their teachers so often assigned them. The “sociological way” refers to the “fact that analytic philosophy is now, in several countries, the entrenched school of thought. Thus in these countries anything done by philosophers who employ a certain style, or mention certain topics, counts … as continuing the work begun by Russell and Carnap” (Rorty 1979, 172). Those who are part of the “entrenched school of thought” may well respond to this conclusion with a Rortian “So what?” Even if the post‐Kantian project Rorty describes has dead‐ended (supposing it ever was all that those following Russell and Carnap were doing), it doesn’t follow that current work in the analytic style isn’t worthwhile. In particular, what about Kripke, whom many see as having revived and revolutionized analytic philosophy? Rorty responded to this question, a little over two years before his death, in his review of Scott Soames’s Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century. He first reiterates his view from 1979 (in PMN): “The confluence of Quinean and Wittgensteinian lines of thought  –  found, for example, in the work of Donald Davidson  –  created a 218

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

philosophical climate in which the very idea of ‘necessary truth’ was viewed with skepticism” (Rorty 2005). But, he acknowledges, after Kripke’s 1970 Princeton lectures, “the climate suddenly changed.” Kripke, it was generally acknowledged, had undermined Quine’s skepticism about necessity by showing that there were necessary truths that were, nonetheless, known only from experience (a posteriori). For example, scientific investigation is needed to reveal that water is H2O, but once we know this, we also know that water must be composed of H2O (that is, is H2O in any possible world in which it exists). Soames thinks that this result was of enormous significance, since after Quine (at least) almost all analytic philosophers had thought that there were no essences in the sense that Aristotle, for example, had thought there were: features that were metaphysically necessary for certain kinds of things to be what they were. According to Kripke, necessary truths of this sort were not discoverable by conceptual analysis, but only by empirical studies. But nor were they, as the accepted view had it, merely “nominal” truths, due to the conventions of our use of language, not to the intrinsic nature of things. Kripke had made essentialist metaphysics once more viable and so opened up important new domains of philosophical inquiry. Rorty is willing to grant Kripke’s point: to “abjure the claim that necessity is, if anything, analyticity” and admit that it’s a “natural necessity” that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen molecules and that whales are mammals. But he doesn’t see why this is a big deal. He asks, “So what? What follows? What have you done except alter our use of the term ‘necessity’ so that we now sound a bit less paradoxical?” (Rorty 2005, 13). Kripke’s result doesn’t, for example, provide a new way for philosophers to discover necessary truths, since support for necessary a posteriori claims must come from empirical science, not from philosophical reflection or argument. Further, as Soames insists, contemporary analytic philosophy is, more and more, divided into large numbers of sharply focused specializations. Given this, Rorty asks why a result in the theory of reference should make a difference much beyond that narrow domain. On this last point, however, Rorty is simply wrong. Kripke’s ideas have had a major influence in almost every area of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, philosophy of science – in fact everywhere except normative domains such as ethics and political philosophy. Rorty in fact implicitly admits this when he says that Kripke excited philosophers because he cast new light on the debate over “whether truth is correspondence to reality,” a topic that he says “philosophers are still, just as they were in Russell’s day, very worried about” (Rorty 2005, 13). It’s hard to see how Rorty could deny the general relevance of this topic, since it derives from the representationalism he regards as fundamental for all of modern philosophy. More surprising, however, is the fact that  –  contrary to everything he argued in PMN – Rorty does not say that this interest in correspondence is a dead‐end. Instead, he remarks that “the controversy between realists, who think that the notion of truth as correspondence to reality can be saved, and pragmatists, who regard it as hopeless, seems to me much more fruitful than the question of whether ‘Water is H2O’ is a necessary truth.” We might think this is the ironic Rorty, damning realism with the faintest of praise while consigning Kripke’s essentialism to an even lower circle of his 219

Gary Gutting

philosophical Hell. But instead he stuns us by concluding with a conciliatory skepticism about the prospects of analytic philosophy: It is anybody’s guess whether analytic philosophy will burst the boundaries of the English‐ speaking world and become dominant in universities around the globe, or whether the work of some synoptic visionary will persuade young philosophers in Britain and the US to turn their backs on the movement that Russell initiated. Someday  –  but not for quite a while – intellectual historians will be in a position to render judgment on the question of whether that movement succeeded in bringing quasi‐scientific rigour to philosophy, or instead ran out into the sands. (Rorty 2005, 13)

It seems that Kripke’s surprising success shook Rorty’s complacent certainty that analytic philosophy was on its way out. In fact, this thought had occurred to Rorty in his review, seven years earlier, of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. There Rorty marveled at Kripke’s attack on the Kantian assumptions of analytic philosophy through a revival of Aristotelian essentialism. On the dominant Kantian view, any necessity in the world derived from the concepts we use to describe it. To use Rorty’s example, “if you describe Aristotle as ‘the author of the Metaphysics,’ then it is essential to him that he was literate and accidental that he was male, whereas if you describe him as the father of Nicomachus the converse will be true” (Rorty 1980, 4). But according to Kripke, referring to Aristotle is not a matter of describing him as having one or another set of qualities. Referring derives from an initial “baptism” whereby someone designated (e.g. by pointing) that entity as Aristotle; our referring to Aristotle is just the latest in a historical chain of references going back to the initial baptism. Since referring to Aristotle requires no descriptions, the question of just what terms do properly describe Aristotle  –  and whether any of them are necessary for being Aristotle – requires empirical investigation. Such investigation reveals, for example, that he is necessarily male (since that’s in his DNA) but only contingently literate. Where Rorty (in PMN) had seen the Kantian presuppositions of analytic philosophy eroding from the pragmatic challenges of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, Kripke attacked both Kantianism and pragmatism in the name of a revived Aristotelian essentialism. In his review of Kripke, Rorty noted that Kripke and Kant, for all their differences, both offer theories of how the mind relates to the world – Kant saying that we construct it via our concepts and Kripke saying that we discover it via our intuitions of its essences. If, as Rorty suspects will happen, debates over these two radically different answers to the mind‐world question end in an impasse, philosophers may conclude that the question is merely a “technical” one with no substantive consequences. Then, Rorty hopes, they may return to a Davidsonian pragmatism that “eschews theories of how language either structures or copies the world” and instead merely “presents itself as an empirical theory of linguistic behavior” (Rorty 1980, 5). But he acknowledges that such speculations may be premature and that Kripke’s intervention may prove genuinely revolutionary. His review of Soames’s history seven years later came to much the same conclusion. Nonetheless, Rorty’s final view was that it mattered little whether analytic philosophy as a professional specialization lived or died. The Rorty of PMN may well have had hopes of furthering a more fruitful direction in analytic philosophy, fueled by what he 220

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

saw as the pragmatic turn in the work of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. But professional philosophers’ strongly negative reception of PMN – combined with the “decadent scholasticism” he saw following the initial excitement of Kripke’s revolution  –  made him conclude that analytic philosophy as a professionalized intellectual industry offered little of value. As he said in his 2002 discussion with Pascal Engel at the Sorbonne: “There was indeed a time when I thought that analytic philosophy was the wave of the future. But now I think it has run out of gas. Apart from the work of a handful iconoclastic geniuses – I’m thinking of Kripke, Davidson, and Brandom – the analytic philosophy of recent decades appears to me to be rather rebarbative and pointless” (Engel and Rorty 2007, 31). This explains the striking claim at the end of his “Intellectual Autobiography” that the question of whether analytic philosophy will “win” or “wither away” is not important. “Should,” he says, “analytic philosophy wither away, the amount of sterile scholasticism in British and American philosophy would, I suspect, remain approximately the same.” Conversely, “should analytic philosophy take over every philosophy department in the world, the amount of fruitful intellectual work done in those department would neither increase nor diminish.” In either case, “the proportion of original minds to unoriginal placeholders will remain constant,” and “the products of original minds will be rediscovered and devoured as long as intellectual freedom exists.” Further, “it does not matter in which academic departments books are studied, as long as students find some teacher … with whom to discuss whatever books they find interesting and puzzling” (Rorty 2010, 19). To properly understand and assess Rorty’s sunny insouciance about the fate of analytic philosophy, we need to look at it in the context of his general metaphilosopy – his view on the value of philosophical reflection of any sort. Here I turn to what I see as Rorty’s clearest and most detailed presentation of his metaphilosophy, the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. Rorty starts with the idea that philosophy is at root concerned with truth. He also mentions goodness, but the focus is on truth, and presumably his views about moral commendations would parallel his views on epistemic commendations. Our general view of philosophy will, then, depend on our general view of truth. Most philosophers have thought that truth is something about which we need a theory, telling us what it is and how to go about achieving it. Such a theory will, first, show us how to answer the fundamental questions about human existence that are distinctly philosophical and, second, allow us to judge whether other domains of knowledge are employing the correct methods to find their less fundamental truths. The core of Rorty’s metaphilosophy, which he calls “pragmatism,” is that “truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have an interesting philosophical theory about.” He supports this claim by pointing to the spectacular lack of success of the historical effort, starting with Plato, to provide such a theory. From this he concludes that “the Platonic tradition has outlived its usefulness” (Rorty 1982, xiv). He also insists that pragmatism is not a continuation of the Platonic tradition, giving “a non‐Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions” (e.g. “There is no truth” or “Truth is relative”). Rather, the pragmatist thinks it’s no longer worth trying to answer such questions and suggests changing the subject. Does this mean that Rorty thinks we should just abandon philosophy, as we have abandoned the search for the Philosopher’s Stone? No, he says, because there is 221

Gary Gutting

Philosophy and philosophy. Uppercase “Philosophy” is the Platonic project of seeking the ultimate truth (i.e. Truth) that will give us absolute knowledge of reality in itself. Abandoning Philosophy does not mean abandoning philosophy in a more modest lowercase sense, expressed, Rorty says, by Sellars’s famous phrase: trying to “understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Unlike Sellars, however, Rorty means that we should continue to work out comprehensive accounts of everything in our world, not to learn how things “really are” (Plato’s ontos on) but to find an account that makes the best sense of the concerns and commitments that define our particular historical mode of existence. This, Rorty often remarks, is Hegel’s view of philosophy as “its own time apprehended in thought”; or as Dewey puts it in another passage Rorty likes to cite, “the task of future philosophy is to clarify men’s ideas as to the social and moral strife of their day” (Dewey 1920, 20). Rorty’s own formulation is: “finding a description of all the things characteristic of your time of which you most approve and with which you unflinchingly identify, a description … of the end toward which the historical developments which led up to your time were means” (Rorty 1989, 55). In this sense, of course, “Blake is as much a philosopher as Fichte, Henry Adams more of a philosopher than Frege” (Rorty 1982, xv). Rorty was trained in the history of Philosophy and early on made his professional reputation working on problems of analytic Philosophy. This background partly explains why he continued to work out of the Philosophical tradition, even after he pledged allegiance to mere philosophy. But the deeper reason was that he came to see Philosophy itself as leading to the triumph of philosophy. There was, as we have seen, the path through analytic Philosophy that culminated in Quine, Sellars, and Davidson. But there was also the path that led from the pragmatic Philosophy of Pierce and James to Dewey, who according to Rorty made pragmatism into philosophy. Finally, there was the path in European thought that Rorty, beginning with part III of PMN, saw as leading from Hegel and Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, whom Rorty endorsed as spearheads of a third front in the internal assault on Philosophy. As we have noted, Rorty quickly saw Kripke’s new realism as a counter‐challenge to the pragmatic attack on Philosophy. In the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism he formulates the conflict between realism and pragmatism as a disagreement about the role of intuitions. He first discusses “technical realism,” which claims that the Sellars‐Quine‐Davidson critique of the correspondence theory of truth is refuted by logical analyzes of truth inspired by either Kripke’s or Dummett’s philosophy of language. On Rorty’s reading, these “refutations” are based on the assumption that pragmatists are putting forward a theory of truth. Kripkeans (like Hartry Field) take pragmatists to be defining truth in terms of some sort of social consensus rather than correspondence with the world. They refute pragmatism by arguing that a sentence that meets the conditions of its definition (e.g. is universally accepted by all competent judges, or would be the ultimate outcome of indefinitely extended inquiry) still might not be true. Dummett, on the other hand, thinks pragmatists hold a theory of truth that denies the principle of bivalence (that every statement is either true or false). Dummett thinks the question of realism requires separate treatment for various domains of inquiry; realism holds for a domain if and only if the principle of bivalence does. In his 222

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

view, there’s room for sensible debate about where realism holds and when it doesn’t – some might say it holds in physics but not in ethics, others might think the opposite. But the pragmatist goes wrong by asserting across the board that bivalence never holds and so is “antirealist” about all domains without having examined them in detail. Rorty’s response to both lines of realist criticism is that pragmatism does not hold any theory of truth and instead maintains that there is no useful purpose served by constructing such theories – as two millennia of philosophy amply illustrate. The realist, of course, will respond that past failures don’t exclude future success and may well point to a formulation in, say, a recent Journal of Philosophy article, which is very promising indeed. Pragmatists, of course, maintain subscriptions to the Journal of Philosophy to see just how long it will take to refute the realist’s current formulation. The realist in turn will not be surprised when this happens but will still stoutly maintain that it’s worth pursuing the definition of truth no matter how long success may take – or even if we are never successful. In the end, the difference between realists and pragmatists is just that they have different intuitions about whether the project of philosophy is worth continuing. Rorty therefore concludes that technical realism is just one variety of intuitive realism. Rorty’s main opponents, therefore, turn out to be realists who point not to the success of philosophy but who value pursuing philosophy even if there is no prospect of success. Here his main interlocutor is Thomas Nagel. Rorty quotes Nagel’s succinct formulation of his position: It may be true that some philosophical problems have no solution. I suspect that this is true of the deepest and oldest of them. They show us the limits of our understanding. In that case such insight as we can achieve depends on maintaining a strong grasp of the problem instead of abandoning it, and coming to understand the failure of each new attempt at a solution, and of earlier attempts. (That is why we study the works of philosophers like Plato and Berkeley, whose views are accepted by no one.) Unsolvable problems are not for that reason unreal. (Nagel 1979, xii, cited in Rorty 1982, xxi)

Nagel notably defends this view regarding traditional Philosophical problems about subjectivity, most centrally the mind‐body – the very problem that started us on this metaphilosophical journey. Nagel’s starting point is the intuition that there is a fundamental difference between what we experience from a (personal) first‐person, subjective perspective (e.g. feeling pain) and a (scientific) third‐person, objective perspective (e.g. observing the stimulation of C‐fibers). This, as we have seen, leads to the problem of how to reconcile the subjective perspective with the objective perspective. Rorty’s response, we recall, was that we can interpret apparently compelling intuitions about the distinctive character of subjectivity (e.g. indubitability) as simply an artifact of linguistic conventions (e.g. that sincere first‐person reports are to be accepted). Nagel, however, would urge that this gets it backward: the indubitability (and the corresponding linguistic convention) is itself grounded in our intuitive experience of what pain (and other subjective experiences) is like. 223

Gary Gutting

Rorty points out that in the analytic debates about the mind‐body problem, the final defense against dualism has been simply to say that we shouldn’t pay any attention to our intuitions. He cites Dennett’s particularly blunt assertion of this view: I recommend giving up incorrigibility with regard to pain altogether, in fact giving up all “essential” features of pain, and letting pain states be whatever “natural kind” states the brain scientists find (if they ever do find any) that normally produce all the normal effects … One of our intuitions about pain is that whether or not one is in pain is a brute fact, not a matter of decision to serve the convenience of the theorist. I recommend against trying to preserve that intuition. (Dennett 1978, 228, cited in Rorty 1982, xxxiv)

Dennett’s recommendation is his response to the fact that we see no way of making sense of Nagel’s intuition given what we know about neuroscience. All the ways we can think of for giving a satisfactory philosophical account that accepts the intuition – substance dualism, double‐aspect theory, epiphenomenalism, and so on  –  have failed. Continuing to accept the intuition amount to treating consciousness as an ultimate mystery, something we may well never understand. Nagel’s response is, as Rorty puts it, “that there is a kind of awareness of facts which is not expressible in language and which no argument could render dubious” (Rorty 1982, xxxv). Our first‐person awareness of our conscious states is such a fact. If we ignore this fact, we will lose sight of perhaps the most important truth about ourselves: that we have an inner life that makes everything that we experience “ours” in the deepest sense. If all this experience amounts to nothing more than unconscious behavior and molecular motions, then human life has no real value. Not to care whether this is so – or even, like Dennett, to cheerfully accept acting as if it is so – would be to renounce our humanity. Rorty, of course, would try to de‐dramatize this response. What the realist calls “renouncing our humanity” is just a matter of giving up – as we’ve often done in the past – an historically contingent description of ourselves. It’s no different from no longer saying that we are children of the gods or immortal souls or Cartesian mental substances. All that’s going on, according to Rorty, is “the process of playing vocabularies and cultures off against each other, [whereby] we produce new and better ways of talking and acting – not better by reference to a previously known standard, but just better in the sense that they come to seem clearly better than their predecessors” (Rorty 1982, xxxvii). This is not the place to evaluate Rorty’s preference for philosophy over Philosophy. My topic is Rorty and analytic philosophy, so I will limit myself to asking what becomes of analytic philosophy given Rorty’s metaphilosophical view. In other words, what role might there be for analytic philosophy in Rorty’s dream of what he calls “a Post‐ Philosophical culture”? For one thing, there will be no room for any analytic work that seeks ultimate Truth  –  neither for a positivism that sees such truth in science, nor for an anti‐positivism that sees truth as beyond the grasp of science. But we have so far neglected another way of understanding analytic philosophy: as a way of philosophizing that gives a central role to the sort of logical and conceptual rigor that mathematics and some sciences exhibit, without a permanent commitment to any presuppositions about 224

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

philosophical truth. (I say “permanent commitment” because it may well be that rigorous thinking will, at a given point, require some assumptions that are unquestioned. But rigorous thinking will always, like science, be open to revising any such assumptions.) Would there be any role for such merely philosophical thinking in Rorty’s post‐ philosophical paradise? Rorty’s description of the post‐philosophical philosophy suggests a negative answer. All that philosophy will be is “a study of the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the various ways of talking which our race has invented. It looks, in short, much like what is sometimes called ‘culture criticism’ in our current Western world.” A philosopher, therefore, will be an “all‐purpose intellectual” who “feels free to comment on anything at all” and who “passes rapidly from Hemingway to Proust to Hitler to Marx to Foucault to Mary Douglas to the present situation in Southeast Asia to Gandhi to Sophocles” (Rorty 1982, xl). Such an intellectual will survey all the available “big pictures” (comprehensive vocabularies) and may even come up with a new and exciting picture. But the excitement will eventually pass, as the new picture becomes just another item for later philosophers to take account of. Philosophy, then, will become “the inconclusive comparison and contrast of vocabularies (with everybody trying to aufheben everybody else’s way of putting everything) characteristic of the literary culture” (Rorty 1982, xii). As Rorty sees it, philosophy in this sense will not require analytic rigor because “comparisons and contrasts between vocabularies issue, usually, in new, synthetic vocabularies [whereas] rigorous argumentation issues in agreement in propositions” (Rorty 1982, xli). Philosophers as “literary intellectuals” will have a characteristic “inability to engage in such argumentation” because they will not be able to agree on what would count as resolving disputes, on the criteria to which all sides must appeal. Rigorous argumentation is great when you can agree on premises and criteria for successful argument from them. But in philosophical comparisons of alternative vocabularies, rigorous arguments are out of the question “because one of the things which the various vocabularies for describing things differ about is the purpose of describing things.” As a result, the philosopher will not want “to beg the question between these various descriptions in advance” (Rorty 1982, xlii) and so will not have access to agreed on premises and criteria for argumentative success. There will, therefore, be no room for a discipline of people highly trained in constructing and evaluating arguments about philosophical questions. There will be no place for the discipline of analytic philosophy. Here, however, I think Rorty is ignoring the power of analytic philosophy. He thinks there is no value in it unless we hold out the hope of finding definitive solutions to clearly understood questions. But rigorous arguments have value even if we have no such hope. Most reflective people have fundamental beliefs regarding what life is all about or at least about some of the “big questions” that philosophers debate. Most such people are also rational, probably not in the sense of thinking that they need decisive proofs of their fundamental beliefs, but at least in the sense of wanting some clarity about whether their beliefs are consistent with one another, what important consequences (e.g. about how they should act) follow from their beliefs, and how they can defend their beliefs against objections posed by people who don’t share their views. There are, for example, many people who have strong religious, ethical, or political convictions, along with the conviction that such beliefs shouldn’t just be taken at face 225

Gary Gutting

value but require rational development and defense. Such people very much need to draw on the ideas and skills of analytic philosophers who are well versed in thinking and arguing about fundamental beliefs. Think, for example, of a convinced Christian who reads Richard Dawkins and starts to worry about whether evolution pose a threat to belief in a God who designed the universe; or of a life‐long atheist who comes on what seem plausible theistic arguments from fine‐turning. Or think of a woman committed to abortion rights who begins to worry she’s planning an abortion for selfish reasons; or a pro‐life advocate who’s faced with the prospect of having a severely deformed child. Or a proponent of laissez‐faire capitalism who doesn’t know how to respond to a child back from college arguing for socialism; or a student raised on left‐wing ideology who’s surprisingly impressed while reading an assigned essay by Milton Friedman. These people don’t need literary intellectuals who will sketch radically imaginative alternatives to their overall worldviews. They need ways of thinking hard and carefully about specific fundamental questions. They are, in other words, not hoping to slough off outdated convictions but hoping to develop and maintain those they have. They seek not intellectual revolution but intellectual maintenance.3 Philosophers who know the back‐and‐forth dialectic of rigorous discussions of such questions are precisely what they need. Rorty presents “redescription” as the alterative to rigorous argument in his post‐ Philosophical world. But plausible redescription itself requires techniques of rigorous argument; it is not just a matter of deploying a new vocabulary in the hopes that others will decide to pick it up. Presentation of the new vocabulary must be accompanied by a logical commentary, making distinctions to show that it does not contradict itself or require conclusions that are obviously false, and in general responding to any objections a skeptical interlocutor might make. In sum, the case for a new vocabulary consists in showing how it can hold its own in the face of criticism. Making such a case is not a matter of proving the claims of the new vocabulary from mutually accepted premises. But it does involve showing that those claims cannot be refuted (or shown highly unlikely) by arguments from premises the proponent of the new vocabulary accepts. Doing this requires detailed understanding of the issues under discussion as well as considerable logical acuity. When the redescription is challenging traditional philosophical views, supporting it will require the kind of understanding and skills that are found to the highest degree in analytic philosophy. Of course, those without extensive philosophical training will not profit from a full technical discussion of the issues. But any discussion of proposals to redescribe accepted philosophical views will require conceptual distinctions and modes of argument that have been developed and improved by the long tradition of philosophical analysis. Non‐experts’ conclusions from such discussions will be more useful and more sustainable to the extent that they grasp the results of such analysis. Rorty ignores the argumentative dimension of redescription because of his understanding of the “liberal ironism” that he sees as the moral attitude particularly appropriate in his post‐philosophical culture. Liberal ironism takes two forms, corresponding to Rorty’s distinction between the public and the private spheres. As to public morality (the morality that applies to governmental policies), Rorty is content with standard liberalism: “J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to 226

Rorty and Analytic Philosophy

me pretty much the last word” (Rorty 1989, 63). Liberal private morality, on the other hand, consists of whatever values individuals use to guide their lives apart from the limits set by public morality. Ironism consists in the realization – pervasive in a post‐ philosophical world – that both private and public values are contingent features of our lives and cannot be rationally established by appeal to any more fundamental principle. None of this, however, excludes a role for philosophical discussions of our basic commitments. As we’ve seen, there’s always need for intellectual maintenance (development of consequences, defenses against objections) even for beliefs that need no justification. But Rorty takes a further step in characterizing the values of the liberal ironist. The ironist, he says, “has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses” (Rorty 1989, 73). This is because she is familiar with alternative vocabularies that have impressed but not fully convinced her. As a result, she continually seeks challenges to her current vocabulary, and ideas for forming a new vocabulary. As a result, a society of liberal ironists “would take as its goal the creation of ever more various” vocabularies (Rorty 1989, 54). If we conceive of the liberal ironist (in her private sphere) as fundamentally committed to the proliferation of new ways of thinking and behaving, then it may well be that she has no need for rigorous philosophical analysis and development of her vocabulary. Such philosophizing might just keep her from the joys of a new vocabulary, so she may well, as Rorty says, take “literary critics as moral advisors” because “they have read more books and are thus in a better position not to get trapped in the vocabulary of any single book” (Rorty 1989, 80–1). But a liberal society will surely include many people who are not interested in projects of continual self‐transformation. Such people will prefer living in accord with a traditional religion or moral code, or will be dedicated to life within a stable circle of family and friends, or committed to the values of an established profession. They, in effect, will have chosen to live the life of a single “book,” a single vision of a good life, and, for that very reason, will have a deep interest in thinking long and hard about issues posed by that book. They will particularly need the intellectual maintenance available from philosophical analysis. Rorty is also on thin ice regarding the values of the public sphere. Even if we are unanimously committed to Mill’s fundamental liberal principle, there remain numerous questions about the precise formulation and implications of that principle. There is every reason to think that Rorty’s post‐philosophical world would still require works such as Rawls’s A Theory of Justice and that such works would occasion just as much analysis (based on the philosophical tradition) as that book has. Once again, there is no basis for Rorty’s move from no‐need‐for‐philosophical justification to no‐need‐for‐philosophical analysis. Provided we continue to do it well – and continue to live in a free society, the future of analytic philosophy as it has been practiced from Plato on seems assured.

Notes 1 Rorty also makes extensive use of Donald Davidson’s work in the philosophy of language because of its thoroughgoing anti‐representationalism. I have discussed Rorty’s use of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson in much more detail in Gutting (1999).

227

Gary Gutting

2 As Quine (1981, 21) puts it: “it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.” 3 I’ve developed this notion of intellectual maintenance in Gutting (2009) and popularly in Gutting (2015).

References Dennett, Daniel. 1978. Brainstorms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books. Dewey, John. 1920. Reconstruction in Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt. Engel, Pascal and Richard Rorty. 2007. What’s the Use of Truth? New York: Columbia University Press. Gutting, Gary. 1999. Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2009. What Philosophers Know. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2015. What Philosophy Can Do. New York: W. W. Norton. Nagel, Thomas. 1979. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W. V. 1981. Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1980. “Kripke versus Kant.” London Review of Books 2(17): 4–5. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2005. “How Many Grains Make a Heap?” London Review of Books 27(2): 12–13. —. 2010. “Intellectual Autobiography,” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randell E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 3–24. Chicago: Open Court.

228

14 Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy PAUL TREMBATH

1  Genealogy and Transvaluative Reading The concept of genealogy is ambivalent in Nietzsche, and this has not been elucidated well, or at least not with any creative precision, by critics and philosophers. “Genealogy” implies two ways of doing philosophy, or rather two philosophical powers and urgencies: one is historicist and the other is transvaluative. By “historicist” I am referring to the work of Foucault‐inspired cultural materialists, although the last term derives from Raymond Williams; I am not using the word in the pejorative sense of “hermeneutics,” as phenomenologists and other philosophers sometimes do. By “transvaluative” I am referring to the creative (rather than exegetical or epistemological) power of philosophy that was the primary emphasis of Nietzsche’s work, exemplified by his conceptual invention, if not practice, of genealogical historicism. The transvaluative powers of philosophy, however, in contrast with the historicism he invents to discredit their prohibition, were central both to Nietzsche’s theory and his practice. He both enacted and theorized such transvaluative powers  –  theorized transvaluation and its merits while demonstrating the transvaluative power of philosophy in situ. No doubt Nietzsche is singular in this respect. His is an act that nobody can follow, but this is true in a way of all real philosophical contributions: they happen once and once only, and if they return it is with a difference. Transvaluation is Nietzsche’s name for philosophical action that creates such differences. The rest is critical application, although applications can create transformations in academic fields of study (where they often do) and sometimes in broader sociopolitical spheres (where they rarely do). At a certain point in his philosophical development, Richard Rorty referred to continental antifoundationalists as “Post‐Nietzschean” philosophers. What might this mean? The coinage is ambiguous at best, or at least its use is not finally reducible to what Rorty may have intended for it in Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 (1991a). Its sense

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

229

Paul Trembath

in that collection, however, is clear. Disclaiming his previous use of the term “postmodern,” Rorty writes: it seems best to think of Heidegger and Derrida simply as post‐Nietzschean philosophers – to assign them places in a conversational sequence which runs from Descartes through Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche and beyond … If all you are interested in is epistemology and philosophy of language, as opposed to moral and social philosophy, it will not make much difference to your subsequent conduct whether you read Nietzsche or the classical pragmatists. Further, it is easy to graft the latter, linguistified pragmatists – Quine, Putnam, Davidson – onto Nietzsche as it is to graft them onto Dewey. Indeed, when you switch over from Deweyan experience to Quinean‐Davidsonian talk of sentences, it becomes easier to get to the point of Nietzsche’s famous remark that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors.”

He goes on to add: If one treats it simply as a reminder, rather than as a metaphysics, then I think the following is a good way of bringing together the upshot of both the Quine‐Putnam‐Davidson tradition and the Heidegger‐Derrida tradition of post‐Nietzschean thought. Consider sentences as strings of marks and noises emitted by organisms, strings capable of being paired off with the strings we ourselves utter (in the way we call “translating”). Consider beliefs, desires, and intentions – sentential attitudes generally – as entities posited to help predict the behavior of these organisms. Now think of those organisms as gradually evolving as a result of producing longer and more complicated strings, strings which enable them to do things they had been able to do with the aid of shorter and simpler strings. Now think of us as examples of such highly evolved organisms, of our highest hopes and deepest fears as made possible by, among other things, our ability to produce the particular strings that we do. Then think of the four sentences that precede this one as further examples of such strings. Penultimately, think of the five sentences that precede this one as a sketch for a redesigned house of Being, a new dwelling for us shepherds of Being. Finally, think of the last six sentences as yet another example of the play of signifiers, one way in which meaning is endlessly alterable through the recontextualization of signs. (Rorty 1991a, 5)

These passages show that a certain Nietzschean hyperbolism is at work in Rorty’s transvaluative reading of the two philosophical traditions. The conceptual content of Rorty’s “negotiation,” whether we align ourselves with his position or not, is interesting to consider for the sheer economy of its execution (that is, for Rorty’s precision of formulation, and never more than when we take him to be generalizing, which he often does), as well as for the broad reach of what Rorty’s philosophy sets in conceptual motion (that is, for the potential consequences of his thought in relation to philosophy and understanding generally). But we can also see that Rorty’s philosophical procedures, carefully crafted to add a difference to the world it describes, are somehow similar to Nietzsche’s, despite the differences in content between their philosophies and what immediately seem to be their dissimilar social sympathies. In this chapter, I will show how the paradoxical Rorty, because of his “inexistant” if not simply literal investment in Deweyan “liberalism” (which is variously legible) can be read as a transvaluative reader. 230

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

2  Rorty and Post‐Nietzschean Philosophy Rorty is interested in Nietzsche for many reasons, but foremost among them is his desire to escape the rhetorico‐Kantian confines of an antifoundationalism that must investigate conditions, whether these conditions are internal to “the mind” (faculties) or external to it (Being, differance, the ideological state apparatus, power/knowledge, the difference between differentiation and differenciation, the differend, Otherness, etc.). Rorty’s hyperbolic association of “antifoundationalism” with “Dewey” and “liberal pluralism” provides him with the rhetorical means. Quite simply, Rorty wants to affirm antifoundationalism in a different and transvaluated way, and sign the transvaluation. His metonymic way of doing so is Nietzschean (as we shall see, “where” you find Plato, Christ, and wissenschaft in Nietzsche you find resentment, ascetic idealism, and unconscious nihilism). Yet the nature of Rorty’s content, as any philosopher will be quick to point out, has little if anything in common with Nietzsche’s. The question then becomes: How Nietzschean can Rorty really be? How Nietzschean is it? That Rorty might be read as a Nietzschean in regard to his stylistics and transvaluative objectives is not often addressed, and to articulate Rorty as such has its obvious problems. The point is, our reflexive reservations about such claims are obvious, too. Is there a way around them, that is, a way to transvaluate them? The purpose of this chapter is to answer “yes” to this question – a question that did not interest Rorty in any topical register, but which I hope will have implications for thought and creative practice beyond our subject here. My purpose is not to “defend Rorty” – although I am surprised to find myself doing so, since normally my reservations about Rorty are the expected leftist/poststructuralist ones – but to open up a way of thinking about transvaluative reading that is irreducible to the received categories and procedures of philosophical, artistic, and cultural‐critical practice. And Rorty’s invocation of Nietzsche in his introduction to Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, is my first move toward this tentative end. Such transvaluations of terms or “vocabularies,” as Rorty calls them, are not always allowed by philosophers who adhere, however inventively, to the strict formulations of their areas of study (say, phenomenology or transcendental empiricism), even where they invent continuities between officially discontinuous philosophical problems. We might ask: how stringent must these dis/continuities be if one is doing philosophy? Are the “rules” of transvaluative practice more or less received or invented, and according to what perspectival criteria? What are the yields, both pro and con, considering the contingent perspectives in question? These are Nietzschean questions, and their answers are forever open. What we can conclude, as does Nietzsche, is that the more a perspective relies provisionally on some image of necessity to legitimate its procedures and lexicon, the less open to transvaluative hyperbole it is, even where such necessity presents itself as an affirmation of contingency. For a Nietzschean, of course, liberalism is an operative form of nihilism. It is what nihilism has become, a new kind of ascetic idealism, precisely the kind of duplicitous affirmation I refer to above. In this regard, Rorty becomes the most paradoxical thing of all: a transvaluative nihilist, which cannot simply be impossible (or if so, only conceptually), because that is what he is. I am using the word “nihilist” here in the Nietzschean sense of one who literally “believes in nothing” (i.e. who believes in metaphysics, in 231

Paul Trembath

Judeo‐Christianity, and now secular liberalism). This complicates Rorty’s antifoundationalist relation to the continentals even further – to a point of incoherence that not even a Deleuzian Adorno (another impossible fantasy) could aphorize, and which I address later under the rubric of “il/legibility.” The ultimate Nietzschean gesture would be to affirm all the conundrums with the knowledge that no final procedure – whether critical, demonstrative, descriptive, logical, and so on – can resolve them. In a way, this “knowledge” is Rortian as well, which brings challenging new horrors to the very possibility of what Nietzsche calls tragic gaiety, since it would require an altogether unknown “capacity” for tragic gaiety to affirm (in the “monstrous” Derridian and Deleuzian sense). But enough.

3  Rorty and Speculative Realism? In the mid‐1980s, I had the good fortune to study with Rorty at the University of Virginia while obtaining my PhD in English. I took one of his classes and sat in on another. The class in which I was formally enrolled was called “The Meaning of the Text.” Rorty had recently submitted his essay “Deconstruction and Circumvention” (1991a, 85–106) to Critical Inquiry, and we read and discussed the piece in class. The crux of the course, as I recall, involved select readings of Derrida and of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We also read and discussed his response, then a hot topic, to Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp’s essay “Against Theory” (1982) where the two attempted to “out‐pragmatize” Stanley Fish, who was clearly influenced by Rorty’s work, and with whom Rorty, as his rhetoric would famously have it, was often “in agreement.” The actual readings were of secondary importance. It was Rorty. At the time, since Rorty was then an unexpected kind of antifoundationalist in the “theory” scene, that was all that mattered. I recall one exchange that I had with him in particular. It has stuck in my head for years, and Rorty’s response to one of my questions is the precondition for this section of my chapter. The class was discussing Wittgenstein on language games. We had already gone over Derrida’s legendary “Différance” (1982) essay, but Rorty seemed to prefer Wittgenstein’s views over Derrida’s because of a residual Kantianism he detected in the latter (I am convinced, as are many readers, that Wittgenstein, given his particular kind of philosophical puritanism, would have had no patience for either Derrida or Rorty). I asked, trying to be smart in a way that might interest Rorty – he liked conceptual sparring if he didn’t find it too obvious and thus tedious – “Wouldn’t Derrida argue that differance is the condition of possibility for any language game?” I was treading tedious waters. Rorty’s deadpan response: “The discussion of conditions of possibility is the oldest thing in the Kantian metaphysical tradition.” Game over. That I refer here to philosophy as a “game”  –  a game, moreover, that I was in no condition to “bring” to Rorty’s court, then or now – is in no way to trivialize its formidable conceptual (and socially exigent) range of powers, which Rorty’s critics often feel he fails to engage seriously. I have mixed feelings about this typical response to Rorty. Although I generally agree with it, it has a repressive content that misses something, and it has taken me years to figure out what it is. If I learned anything from Rorty, it is that philosophy always involves a certain “coming to terms,” and I have finally come to 232

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

selective terms with Rorty’s pragmatism. But to do so I have had to allow Rorty’s thought to resonate with some unexpected companion texts and even fields, often in ways that received wisdom would find incompatible given the conceptual differences on obvious display. I have simply found it impossible to make “interesting” sense of Rorty, to use his own word, if I approached his thinking in any other way. Of course, one can come to terms with many things in different ways, but for philosophers such terms can be distinctly problematic, since “problems” for philosophers are a passion. Deleuze’s view of philosophy as a vital capacity to “problematize” or transform life by virtue of its own powers – what Deleuze refers to as a “health” – affirms and demonstrates this with consistency. That Rorty and Deleuze have little in common almost goes without saying, and not least because of the unmistakable tone of each signatory, which in either case is enough to establish them as unbridgeable. Moreover, each one says or implies as much of the other, but only, as it were, in preemptive passing (although as we’ll see, Deleuze’s comments on Rorty are acerbic in a way that Rorty’s analytic dismissiveness can approximate in force but not tenor, making their haste to be done with each other their only telling commonality). Both philosophers claim to be “pluralists,” for instance, but Rorty does so in the standard secular sense of a plurality of “subjects” (although he never attempts to theorize the latter, attempting instead to not theorize it and consequently get around it). Deleuze in contrast develops a pluralism that is “paradoxically” a Spinozist monism, with “substance” revolving around the “modes” rather than the obverse, which is different than most readings of Spinoza, and thus arguably “transvaluative” in the way that I use the word here. That said, Rorty’s seemingly quotidian use of the phrase “liberal pluralism” – as well as its real‐life referent – is not simply an instance of Rorty getting behind standard liberal values, as simplistic readings of Rorty assume. Readers who enact such readings are what Paul De Man referred to as “literalists,” although Rorty is not at all being “deconstructive” with the term “liberalism.” Rorty simply moves back and forth from received understandings of the term to the transvaluative role it plays in grafting the “neo‐” prefix onto “pragmatism,” which no poststructuralist could have done in their wildest dreams (or have seen reason to). The “Nietzsche” in Rorty is attempting to be more untimely in his antifoundationalism than Kantian or “transcendental” continentals such as Derrida and Foucault, who were then the literary‐theoretical (soon to be “cultural‐critical”) rage of north Atlantic critical antifoundationalism and anti‐essentialism. The way that Rorty realizes his untimely agenda, however, is to recontextualize a commonsensical term – a term, moreover, that many critics of a historicist or Marxist persuasion take to be the apex symptom of social misrecognition – so he can overcome the Kantian dimension of deconstructive and emerging historicist antifoundationalisms. If we consider the angle that Rorty is working here, it becomes evident that Rorty’s seemingly simple endorsement of liberal pluralism is as critically complex as Deleuze’s Spinozist version, but only if we understand the transvaluative work it is doing on philosophical problems with otherwise commonplace topologies. Similarly, Deleuze often references the pragmatist William James, a Rorty favorite, sometimes calling his own transcendental empiricism “radical” empiricism. Deleuze seems to have enjoyed presenting himself to his French contemporaries as a renegade Americanist. (“On the Superiority of Anglo‐American Literature” anyone? Imagine US  canon revisionists, postcolonial theorists, and transnational literary critics of an 233

Paul Trembath

anti‐metropolitan persuasion reading that title in Dialogues in the 1980s and 1990s, having just discovered, to their Bakhtinian dismay, that there is no dialogue in the book at all. One could probably make a good argument for Deleuze’s un/timely asynchronies as well as for Rorty’s.) Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari, in their individual as well as coauthored works, use the word “pragmatics” in a way that is interchangeable with the “rhizomatics” of A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), and Deleuze refers to Spinoza’s Ethics as “practical philosophy” in a book by the same name. In every instance, his uses of such terms are as different from Rorty’s as their reasons for invoking “pluralism” are different. We must keep this in mind if we are to understand that there are different kinds of transvaluative reading, just as there are differences between theories of transvaluation and transvaluative practices (which may not theorize or use the word “transvaluation,” although the invention of theories can be a transvaluative practice, too). For now, let us remember in advance of my final section that Deleuze develops a theory of transvaluation in his philosophy and that Rorty does not, and consider a quotation that can illuminate the way I intend to approach Rorty’s thinking. Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? (1994) begins with a beautiful passage about a kind of freedom that “old age” brings to philosophers and artists. When I first read the text, one of the last people I would have thought could be described in such terms was Rorty, who at the time was not terribly old and whose academic and philosophical reputation would not have seemed a good fit for “eternal youth” and “sovereign freedom” that Deleuze and Guattari associate with Kant and Turner. “There are times,” they write when old age produces not eternal youth but a sovereign Freedom … In old age Turner acquired the right to take painting down a deserted path of no return that is indistinguishable from a final question … [and] in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is an unrestrained work of old age, which his successors have still not caught up with. All the mind’s faculties overcome their limits, the very limits that Kant had so carefully laid down in the works of his prime. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 1–2; emphasis added)

These early limits “laid down” by Kant, as well at the rhetorical patterns with which they coincide (and which are familiar to all readers of the locution “always already,” which is presently an object of “exaggerated” disdain) are precisely what Rorty wants to avoid and deemphasize in the presentation of his antifoundationalist position. He does so, as I explain, by describing Kant’s philosophy of conditions, and critical philosophy generally, as part of a philosophical “conversation” or as a kind of “narrative.” This is obviously hyperbole, and you either accept hyperbole as a workable means of doing philosophy – that is, you accept that hyperbole is a genuine philosophical power that can be used toward transvaluative ends – or you do not, and I doubt that any manner of “argument” can guarantee changed investments in this regard. Whether or not and to what qualitative degree the hyperbole in question produces transvaluative effects (and upon what in particular) is another matter. Rorty is not alone in his hyperbolic procedures, and there are more recent developments in philosophy, as I am about to show, that rely on hyperbole. Of course, philosophy has always involved degrees of hyperbole (if not as self‐consciously as we find in Nietzsche, who with mock arrogance draws attention to his dispensation with enough 234

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

forethought to neutralize audiences before they exist), although this reliance is usually ignored or disavowed. Let us address the unlikely example of speculative realism, which unconsciously has both its Nietzschean and Rortian dimensions. Needless to say, such a claim will make realists balk, but there is some literal truth to my statement. All speculative realism, however different the version in question, makes itself legible and believable from the perspective of an exaggerated anti‐Kantianism. For purposes of brevity (and hyperbole) let me refer quickly to a passage by Levi R. Bryant in The Speculative Turn (1991). Bryant writes: Traditionally, and especially since the seventeenth century, philosophy has been obsessed with questions of where to begin in thought. In particular, this question of beginnings has taken the form of questions about foundations. Since philosophy aims at a particular sort of knowledge, it has been natural since Descartes and Locke to begin philosophical investigation with an inquiry into the nature, conditions, and limits of knowledge. The thesis here would be that prior to any claims about the nature of reality, prior to any speculation about objects or being, we must first secure a foundation for knowledge and our access to beings. Philosophy, the story goes, must begin with the analysis of ourselves. By way of analogy, what could be more obvious than first examining the fitness or suitability of our tools before building something? Where, for Aristotle, metaphysics was first philosophy, for us Moderns and Post‐Moderns, epistemology has become first philosophy. Indeed, “metaphysics” itself has become a dirty word. Philosophy thus becomes the project of critique, occupied primarily with questions of access or of the conditions under which knowledge is possible. […] [But] what if we were to imagine ourselves as proceeding naively and pre‐critically as first philosophers, pretending that the last three hundred years of philosophy had not taken place or that the proper point of entry into philosophical speculation was not the question of access? … [T]his experiment would refuse the imperative to begin with the project of critique. (Bryant 1991, 261–3)

The hyperbole that coordinates Levy Bryant’s passage here has its origins in the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, which I will address shortly, and was initially characterized in terms of “access,” to my knowledge, by the object‐oriented ontologist Graham Harman. Critics might be quick to point out, at their selective discretion, that the angle that Bryant is developing here is a “reductive” one (and it is, as are all such “angles,” including the ones we like), but for my purposes here and at this point, “reductions” are not automatically bad things, and can operate as emphases that coordinate discursive material, as well as our understanding of the things to which they refer, in transvaluative ways. In the case of Bryant’s passage and others that similarly frame the disparate body of work known as “speculative realist,” phenomenology, Heideggerian ontology, deconstruction, genealogical historicism, and neopragmatism are all “redescribed,” to use Rorty’s term, as recent symptoms of an older philosophical subservience to Kant’s transcendental conditions – that is, to those “faculties of mind” that supposedly “limit” what we can know of the world beyond their constitutive range. If this is not hyperbole, I don’t know what is. In fact, if “the textbook problems of philosophy” that Rorty constantly references were in fact self‐consciously published as such, and if something called “transvaluative reading” became a problem for some 235

Paul Trembath

c­ onstituency of philosophers, speculative realism would equal anything in the running as its textbook illustration. And this would be true regardless of the transcendent status of its powers of representation, insofar as received differences are suddenly made to look like examples of the same thing (and I am not simply declaring all transcendent representation impossible, as I will soon show). A lot of what is recognized as speculative realism (which as a unified movement only exists as hyperbole) proceeds from the above “narrative” about Kant’s hegemonic influence, and it reminds me most forcefully of “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” which to this day is my favorite Rorty piece. Meillassoux’s 300‐year encapsulation of philosophy is small potatoes, a veritable failure of imagination, compared to the 2,300 that Nietzsche, Heidegger, and finally Derrida give us to consider. The history of philosophy as “conversation,” “narrative,” and, in one instance, “writing” that Rorty’s work implies could in theory out‐distance even that, to say nothing of Jean Francois Lyotard’s claim, in his introduction to Joseph Kosuth’s Art After Philosophy and After (1991), that the distinction between writing and drawing did not yet exist for those who made cave inscriptions that we generally classify as “artworks,” although nowadays critics influenced by Foucault’s Nietzschean historicism are careful not to do so. My immediate point regarding speculative realism, all other considerations aside, is that without the narrative about Kant, speculative realism is philosophically incoherent, or at least philosophically unimportant – that is, it literally makes no pertinent sense (despite how true its “truth claims” may or may not be) in the legible continuity of philosophical urgencies. Many philosophers dismiss it immediately for this reason. It is not my purpose to do so here, because I do not expect philosophy to have to do something other than hyperbolize in order to “count” as philosophy. However, I do expect philosophy to have a conceptual yield that can challenge the presentisms in both critical and commonsensical thinking. That common sense thinks at all is debatable. But “critical” thinking – and I am using the word loosely – has habituated “limits” of its own, and transvaluative reading can introduce thoughts that disrupt them, even if in Rorty’s case it invokes common sense in uncommon ways to do so. Speculative realists have produced a few notable disruptions of their own since the famed conference of 2007, and both the speculative materialism of Meillassoux and the eliminative nihilism of Ray Brassier can be read as instance of the transvaluative reading I associate with Nietzsche and Rorty. Needless to say, both philosophers have serious problems with Nietzsche that Rorty’s work exacerbates a hundredfold, given that neorealism defines itself in antagonistic relation to the language‐based philosophy of twentieth‐century discursive materialisms and antifoundationalisms, which they argue are idealisms. This, of course, is another feature of the above narrative, what I might call its conclusive value. As critics of idealism, Meillassoux and Brassier are thus making a claim for their status as materialists, and a larger claim for what should count as philosophical materialism, that Rorty had no interest in after his eliminative phase. Both philosophers also want to distance themselves as much as possible from what we generally call poststructuralism in the United States, and in particular from the “literary theory” and “cultural criticism” that follows from deconstruction’s reception in US literature concentrations. They have thus become part of the history of antagonisms that characterizes the “cutting‐edge” of critical academe, in which Rorty’s work played a 236

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

major role from the 1980s on, and for which his controversial position received much conflicted attention. Let’s begin with Meillassoux’s philosophy and then briefly address Brassier. Each philosopher demonstrates a certain power of transvaluative reading that Rorty shares (and never more than when Brassier brings his anti‐Nietzschean image of nihilism to the philosophical table). It is Meillassoux, however, who coined the defining term of speculative realism, without which its presiding hyperbole would go up in smoke. The term in question makes it possible to transvaluate the pertinence of the term “realism” in contemporary debate, and this accounts for the fame of the movement in general. With Bruno Latour and Reality in synchronous attendance (if not agreement), all language antifoundationalists – which by implication includes Rorty – were called “correlationists” by Meillassoux, who was a student of Alain Badiou. All poststructuralists and cultural materialists became concerned only with questions of access (i.e. with investigating the “conditions” of access that coordinate our knowledge and understanding). Never mind the difference between the interiority of conditions (Kant’s faculties) and the exteriority of conditions (writing in Derrida, power/knowledge in Foucault, etc.) Every “realist position” from object‐oriented ontology to eliminative nihilism, proceeds professionally from the premise that philosophy of language is a subset of correlationism, and this subset assumes language to be the limit of all that is knowable. The invention of this taxonomy and the coordinates it establishes for philosophy is Meillassoux’s contribution to future thinking, despite the specificity of the projects that follow, whether they are Meillassoux’s or those of philosophers who proceed from his shorthand. Without the proper “briefing,” however, readers of Meillassoux’s After Finitude: The Necessity of Contingency (2010) can be forgiven for thinking that Meillassoux opens the floodgates, despite his transcendent rationalism, for sophistries on a par with those associated with the “anything goes” version of postmodernism, with which Rorty also sometimes associated. The briefing that the book provides, however, tells another story. Meillassoux’s claim that we can think the absolute by rational means that circumvent the requirements of sufficient reason (Aristotle) and of transcendent constitution (Kant and critique) while strictly adhering to the law of noncontradiction (Artistotle once again, but selectively) would have been unthinkably reactionary in the heyday of deconstruction, let alone neopragmatism, but context and hyperbole changes all. Speculative realism’s central premise is that all things and relations are contingent (a familiar term to language‐based antifoundationalists, only now in a way that includes the “laws” of physics, which evidence thus far suggests is demonstrably constant) and presumes to think the absolute in its indefinite forms with set theory. Insofar as mathematics is “about nothing” in particular, it can think the transcendent universality of everything in general, whether existent or nonexistent. That is, it can think the truth about material realities that exist as well as their laws, but also about those that don’t exist but might come to exist ex nihilo (i.e. literally out of nothing, without reason or determinate cause, in complete violation of the present constancy of natural law). Given the “hyper‐chaotic” contingency of reality (its super‐contingency) whether beings exist or inexist (a verb form derived from Badiou’s term inexistance, which the latter spells with an “a” in hommage to Derrida, and which I use in the next section to characterize Rorty’s transvaluative dimension), all things that have come to be or could be 237

Paul Trembath

(peut‐etre) are themselves knowable in their “factiality” through mathematization (think of Descartes’s and Locke’s writings on the primary qualities of things as the ontological precedent). What follows from Meillassoux’s absolutization of contingency is not the expected conclusion, attributed to language‐based philosophers such as Rorty across the board, that nothing is real, but instead that everything is. One can envision Meillassoux and Latour quarreling over which of them has textual rights to “reality” a transvaluated word that now signals contested critical terrain to students in the know, given that it finds a different articulation in every instance. Meillassoux’s transcendent rationalism sometimes takes on the testimonial tone of a witness who has not only seen but suffered the abuses of correlationist usurpers – all identified as Kantians and, even worse, Berkeleyan idealists – and Rorty is now becoming legible in this manner, but only to those who know nothing of his controversial differences with poststructuralism, his emphatic anti‐Kantianism, and his tendency to describe Berkeley’s philosophy as a story whose conceptual plot is resolved in the end by a philosophical deus ex machina. Moreover, the unified perpetrator of crimes against transcendent reason is problematic from reasons that I have no room to discuss here, not least of which is the victim Meillassoux defends in the service of philosophy proper – his own selectively Aristotelian version of materialism, which seeks to distinguish itself from the three hundred years of philosophy that precedes. He does so, in Rorty’s terms, by narrating a conceptual continuity that begins with Kantian critique and proceeds to the present, only to then be retroactively codified as a compound Bishop Berkeley, the sudden future anterior of everything that denies the reality of things external to the mind. This is the framework from which all else follows – including the drama whose deus ex machina is Meillassoux. I have said that such exaggeration is always somehow present in philosophy  – ­especially as twentieth‐century analytics knew and reviled in philosophy of a “narrative” kind, which Rorty brought to bear upon his own tradition. In fact, exaggeration is ubiquitous throughout its history and considered by some a legitimate philosophical power (Nietzsche) or if not, an inevitable consequence of language use that must be treated case by case (Wittgenstein). Adrian Moore (2014) discusses this difference in terms of proactive and reactive antifoundationalisms in his book on metaphysics (although I reference Nietzsche here instead of Derrida, who is in the subject of the original comparison I borrow from Moore). Meillassoux, however, in contrast with either tendency, simply ignores the hyperbole that creates the urgency of his position and its difference from others, and paints in philosophical strokes – as one might say of Rorty, who would have little problem acknowledging his hyperbolism – that are either too broad or too narrow for the consequences he presumes they entail. It seems to me that this is a weakness in Meillassoux’s position, and it is not one that hinges on the truth of what he says, but on the assumption of its necessary philosophical value, which can only be created philosophically by “briefing,” as I called it earlier. To look the other way from one’s procedures of presentation when they are so obviously matters of forcing resemblances, so clearly cases of creating continuities by presenting metonymies as homologies, that even Plato, whose later continuity of argument follows from propositions as rigorous as “By Jove, Socrates,” would blush at the sophistry. And this is transparently so even if Meillassoux, whose theory is designed to make empirical evidence 238

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

impossible (thus its “anything goes” dimension) while remaining scientific in the Cartesian sense of “rationalist,” is right about what he says, and even if his knowledge transcends what Derrida would call his parergon. There would be no philosophical position to engage (true or false, right or wrong), nor would the acquisition of “absolute knowledge” be the measure of philosophical merit (as it has once again happened to become, were it not for the hyperboles that launch Meillassoux’s “necessity of contingency” into our philosophical constellation). But let us take a minute to consider what the hyperbolist in Meillassoux has done here, and I say what follows with admiration. If we accept the complex consistency of his “briefing,” Meillassoux has arguably out‐deconstructed all discursive materialisms as a scientific rationalist, affirmed the contingency of all things as a transcendent foundationalist, and done so by establishing the “factiality” of the correlate and the contingency of sufficient reason in a single argument, all of which effectively rockets reason, science, and materialism into a transvaluative atmosphere that solipsistic ozone, leaving both Heidegger and Galileo behind in the idealist dust of a pan‐synoptic Kantianism. But Meillassoux’s argument, and its reservoir of implications, does not stop here. It goes on to “redescribe” what Hume and Kant understood as an epistemological limitation as an ontological insight, and in a way that not only does away with the necessity of final causation in rational argument, but defeats the very possibility of necessity altogether, which in consequence also makes it possible for Meillassoux to claim that his transcendent rationalism, given its noncontradictory refutation of the existence of final causes, is not a metaphysics. We see that Meillassoux powers of redescription are somehow comparable to those of Rorty, a philosopher with whom he otherwise seems to shares nothing  –  nothing, that is, except a talent for calculation, a martial arts slipperiness and, perhaps significantly, a strategic antipathy for Kantian metaphysics that has gone under the resemblance radar since speculative realism first hit sympathetic ears, and which separates Rorty and Meillassoux alike from the rhetoric of Derrida. But there is a Derridean dimension to Meillassoux’s strategy as well, which involves a certain rhetoric of postponement that gives him leeway to say and think things which would otherwise be philosophically impermissible. Only the Derrida of infinite deferral – who I sense is the real target of Meillassoux’s ambition, with Meillassoux’s Kant doing double‐duty both as means and pretext – ever thought his way around the functional relation of presence to prohibition with such stealth of thought. For in Meillassoux the play of presence and absence, which is addressed in literal rather than textual terms, assumes the form of a present from which sufficient reason is forever absent. What Meillassoux’s philosophy suspends indefinitely is the inevitability (or necessity, if you will) of an ex nihilo “advent” that would establish the necessity of his knowledge by demonstrating empirically as well as rationally its compatibility with a final (and thus necessary) cause. As Meillassoux describes it, super‐contingency is so contingent that no necessity exists that will ever require an advent to occur or not to occur, although at any given point an advent is as likely to occur, without rhyme or reason, as it is not. I can see how much of this would have interested Rorty in a way that might have produced commentary, but a sort that would have surprised us once again instead of being as it sometimes became, given the later bulk of his output, rote Rorty. 239

Paul Trembath

It is true that Nietzsche, at least in English translations, often conflates “truth” with “meaning,” just as Foucault’s rhetoric, for emphatic purposes, conflates “truth” with “knowledge.” This is a matter of some confusion, and in many respects favorable readers of Foucault and Nietzsche are responsible for its facile perpetuation. But what “truth” seems to imply is the false necessity of a value, whether the values in question are aligned with truth or not: that things can accurately be said to be true, and they can, is not an issue and, contrary to the popular reception of most poststructuralism, never was (see Derrida’s exchange with Searle, where he constantly insists that what he says about the instability of meaning is “true,” as if he has never been heard. One can sense the frustration). That we should necessarily value truth, however, is always what Nietzsche targets for consideration. Brassier does not see this in Nietzsche and Deleuze, and consequently cannot or will not see himself from such a perspective. In fact, Nietzsche agrees with Brassier’s position: truth in and of itself is meaningless – no surprises there. Yet Brassier writes as if truth is the necessary value. Nietzsche does not. Neither do Deleuze or Derrida, and neither does Rorty (really, Brassier writes as if Derrida and Rorty are beneath the dignity of philosophical commentary. But he attends dutifully to Nietzsche and, more seriously, to Deleuze). The conflation of truth with meaning is obviously an ordinary language problem, and it is ubiquitous. People think that where they have found meaningless truth (e.g. the sun is at the center of this solar system, people are born and die, etc.) they have simultaneously found meaning, or that they can proceed to find it from there. Such an assumption does not exist in Nietzsche. Readers of post‐Nietzschean philosophy, and even intelligent ones, sometimes reproduce this metonymic conflation. The question becomes to what extent does Brassier do this himself for his philosophical purposes? If Nietzsche often conflates “truth” with “meaning” in his rhetoric, Brassier conflates meaning with transvaluation in his trivialization of Nietzsche’s version of nihilism, claiming that his own is somehow necessarily superior (i.e. more disenchanted and thus enlightened). Fair enough. But what we are looking at in the end is a metonymy, a hyperbole in Brassier’s presentation, without which his affirm‐the‐value‐of‐meaningless‐truth position would make no sense at all. Without it, Brassier’s philosophy would be of no value, which is another way of saying that it would not be a legible position at all. Although Meillassoux and Brassier express the desire to retain critique without the Kant – a desire that Rorty does not seem to share, having an entirely different approach to the supposed dilemmas that “critique” is called upon to address – it is not at all clear to me that they have thus far explained the form it might now take or, for that matter, what it needs to address. One gets the feeling that if “critique” is important to either Meillassoux or Brassier, they have not yet reached a stage in their primary projects that would allow for its convincing development. For the time being, we can assume that their retro‐ rationalist eschewal of Kant does away with any philosophical alignment with critique as well (which it must be said is not entirely the case with Ian Hamilton Grant, a presenter on the first speculative realist panel, whose primary referent remains Schelling). Moreover, it is not at all the case with Žižek, who has often expressed his affinity with speculative realism since it first became known, albeit with qualification, and whose central objective, in stark contrast with those critics influenced by poststructuralism, is to secure a place for German idealism in the future of thought, and not, as some might be given to think, simply to assure a comparable place for Hegel by way of Lacan. 240

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

Whatever the case, it seems justifiable to say at this point that critique is not a player in the non‐transcendental but emphatically transcendent neorealisms of Meillassoux or Brassier, any more than it ever was or could have been in Rorty’s neopragmatism, which performs superhuman feats to avoid the transcendental as much as the recently refurbished transcendent. (It is the first avoidance that really sets Rorty apart from his French contemporaries, as well US critics who, from the advent of deconstruction to the endless splinterings of cultural criticism, acquired their approach to antifoundationalism, with or without being told, through the reception of poststructuralism. Such students are in consequence tailormade to be surprised by Rorty, having only vague notions about analytic philosophy’s take on Kantian metaphysics, since their referent for metaphysics, if the term is at all operative in their critical vocabulary, is Platonism.) If the eschewal of critique (that is, of the Kantian investigation of “faculties of mind” as they comprise the “conditions of possibility” for our knowledge, experience of the world, and so forth) is what makes speculative realism “realist,” the same eschewal in Rorty arguably makes him, if never “realist” within the framework of his rhetoric, somehow speculative. Neither Rorty nor speculative realists are speculative, of course, in the sense that Hegel’s philosophy is called “speculative.” But they are both speculative in the sense that they posit their premises, as Levi Bryant explains with reference to the realists, without first investigating their conditions. Rorty’s premises are quite different from those who are clumped together under the rubric of the speculative turn – whether it be Meillassoux, an object‐ or process‐oriented ontologist, or an eliminative nihilist – but his premises, broadly speaking, are similarly postulative. Rorty himself would never use the word “postulative” to characterize his neopragmatism, for it comes with as much metaphysical baggage as Kant’s rhetoric of conditions, but it generally obtains. Rorty proceeds from precise generalizations – generalizations which are hyperboles which then form others – the “strings” of which he writes – rather than from strict argumentation or demonstration. For those who expect philosophy to do more than this, both speculative realism and neopragmatism will be unsatisfactory for the same reasons, despite their different objectives. They will be unsatisfactory for the same reasons that Nietzsche – the bane of the speculative movement – is unsatisfactory, for there is no genitive “argument” in Nietzsche (even though Nietzsche’s hyperboles paradoxically invent the requirement for such arguments). There are transvaluative generalizations that produce conceptual themes by way of hyperboles, but in the strict sense there is no argumentation whatsoever. As for demonstration, if you expect Nietzsche to provide anything of the sort, you have come to the wrong place. This is because Nietzsche’s concepts are produced by way of hyperbole – what in a sense we might call “speculation” – as are Rorty’s very different concepts. I wager that there is more disavowed hyperbole at work in the realists’ evaluative insistence upon transcendent rather than transcendental knowledge than they consider, because the value of any knowledge, whether transcendental or demonstrably transcendent, is always contingent rather than necessary.

4  Rorty as Inexistant Transvaluator Alain Badiou, who is often referenced by speculative realists as an inspiration, mentions in The Speculative Turn that, although he is sympathetic to Meillassoux’s and others’ 241

Paul Trembath

eschewal of Kantian critique, that there is no theory of the event in speculative realism, which is all‐important to Badiou’s philosophy. Neither, we might add, is there any theory of creative practice in speculative realism, a variable concept which concerns us here. How might philosophers be said to be creative? Deleuze famously claims that philosophy creates concepts, and he arguably goes on to create many of his own. Rorty, in contrast, might be said to be creative by devaluing the philosophical parameters that confine concepts as such, and by seeing philosophy as a kind of writing or narrative (Rorty 1982, 90–109), which irks Deleuzians to no end. For them, he has stepped out of philosophical bounds, and in certain terms he has. Rorty’s arguments about philosophy as a kind of writing usually reference Derrida, who like Deleuze and unlike Rorty is nothing but a philosopher. Yet Derrida is unlike Rorty and Deleuze in that he can be read to have discovered what makes the creation of concepts or narratives possible: writing. Moreover, he does so in a way that is both “useful” in Rorty’s sense (he undermines the literalism that dominates life and philosophical “problems”) and “creative” in Deleuze’s (he has transformed “writing” into a philosophical concept). Rorty and Deleuze, completely incompatible as they are, are more difficult to see in this way. They never foreground, for quite different reasons (i.e. Deleuze’s aversion to semiotics and Rorty’s aversion to Kantian rhetorical patterns), their textual conditions of production. In fact, it is Rorty’s entire purpose to devalue philosophy’s discovery‐claims wherever he identifies them. (There is no room here to develop this distinction between Derrida and both Deleuze and Rorty, which is nonetheless worth mentioning – a distinction which Derrida exemplifies, and which has its undeveloped “realist” implications, however invisible they may be to acolytes of Latour, Laruelle, or Sellars.) Slavoj Žižek also enters the speculative realist fray to problematizing effect (Žižek and Woodard 1991). Moreover, he provides a Hegelian‐Lacanian “vocabulary” that enables my (perverse?) characterization of Rorty as a transvaluative reader. I remember Rorty saying in class, with some weariness, that you can “Hegel” anything if you want to (he used the name as a verb), but that in his view, as he writes elsewhere, “James and Dewey [are] not only waiting at the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Foucault and Deleuze are currently traveling” (Rorty 1982, xvii). Žižek is arguably, but not necessarily, another road (or path) altogether and, given his own transvaluative reading of German idealism, he does indeed “Hegel” everything. Like Badiou, Žižek is interested in the concept of the subject in a way that would have simply bored Rorty (to say nothing of his likely contempt for Lacan) as much as it perennially irritates ordinary language philosophers, phenomenologists, and poststructuralists. But Žižek’s philosophy of the subject, as well as Badiou’s, can have some differential bearing here. Žižek rather surprisingly often praises Rorty, condescendingly calling him “an intelligent liberal” with whom “philosophically [he does not] agree at all” (Badiou and Žižek 2014, 52). The same certainly cannot be said of Deleuze, who writes with Guattari that opinions (read: Rorty’s one‐way celebration of doxa), unlike concepts, “are essentially the object of a struggle or exchange. This is the Western democratic, popular conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr. Rorty’s” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 144). No love is lost, then, between Deleuze’s invocation of pluralism and pragmatics and Rorty’s. Yet Žižek’s philosophy of identity‐formation can help us 242

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

conceptualize the transvaluative qualities of Rorty’s rhetoric in a way that Deleuze’s philosophy of transvaluation, given Rorty’s admittedly questionable liberalism, can only abjure. (The work on paradox in The Logic of Sense [Deleuze 1990] offers a way to affirm Rorty’s ambiguous liberalism, but Deleuze does not want to go there. It would run counter to his topical Nietzscheanism.) Transvaluative reading (which also implies thinking and writing) is both untimely and sinthomatic – that is, abject in relation to dominant and therefore more recognizable symbolic legibilities. Nonetheless, I am not talking about a schizophrenic whir of affect here, as in Deleuze and Guattari, which remains formless and thus illegible, if still theorizable. Transvaluative reading lives (inexists) at the edge of il/legibility. And its singularity or “newness” is not finally qualifiable in terms of its official “originality,” even if the reading in question, symbolically speaking, happens to be officially legible as new. Rorty is a case in point, despite the fact that his philosophical purpose and recognizable originality could not be more remote from my use and characterization of him here. For my purposes, this does not matter. As for Deleuze and Guattari, they would no doubt read Rorty’s philosophical desire, as well as Žižek’s, to be “oedipalized” (as if their own conditions of legibility, despite their anti‐oedipal affirmations within such conditions, were not), but this doesn’t matter either. However much Rorty’s philosophy might be said to be oedipalized within Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptual framework, Rorty is transvaluative in a way that ignores injunctions which command us to transvaluate in received philosophical terms. Deleuze himself characterizes such reactive injunctions as order‐words. Badiou argues that anything that deviates from the orders of being and knowledge (which might include standard, however inventive, philosophical expectations) partakes of a subjective truth that exists outside of recognizable evaluative jurisdictions. For purposes of illustration, let us assume that a “subject” who deviates from such expectations is something like a sinthome whose very existence is more or less abject in relation to a dominant symbolic order (Badiou does indeed reinvent, perhaps more than Žižek, a good deal of Lacan’s formulations, and often refers to Lacan unapologetically, even affirmatively, as his “Master”). My point is that Badiou reworks some of Lacan’s psychoanalytic categories in order to transvalue concepts such as subject, truth, universality, and so forth which were the bane of his more poststructuralist contemporaries (Rorty avoided such categories, too). In doing so for his own creative purposes, Badiou coins the neologism “inexistance” to designate a state of being that is somehow beyond immediate symbolic legibility, and he invents the term first in his eulogy to Derrida, and then develops it further in a section of Logics of Worlds (Badiou 2009). My above adaptation and use of the term “inexistance” to characterize transvaluative reading is taken from Badiou, and it can account for the inevitable frustrations that many readers experience when they read Rorty, because Rorty, in a way that is unique to his paradoxical procedures, does not meet their symbolic expectations, even when such readers are officially open to philosophy as creation, transvaluation, and so on. He just does not fit in, which is the craziest thing one can say about any recognizably “liberalist” philosopher (although philosophers as diverse as Marxists and poststructuralists would simply conclude that Rorty’s liberalism, taken literally, is precisely why his philosophy has no transvaluative dimension whatsoever). 243

Paul Trembath

In a passage that is crucial to Badiou’s reading of Derrida, Badiou writes that you cannot, you absolutely cannot, say of the inexistent that it is nothingness. That is the whole problem [according to Derrida]. That is where the metaphysical error lies, the only metaphysical error that is irremediable. The metaphysical error par excellence is to identify the non‐existent with nothingness. Because the point is that the non‐existent is … The non‐ existent is nothing. But being nothing is by no means the same as not‐being. To be nothing is to non‐exist in a way specific to a determinate world or place. The alternating slippages characteristic of Derrida’s prose thus becomes clear. The slippage between “if you say the non‐existent is, you naturally fail to see this: that it does not exist,” and “if you simply say that it does not exist, you fail to see this: that it is” … In tribute to Derrida, I will henceforth write “inexistence” with an “a.” Inexistance. In the same way that he said differance. (Badiou 2009, 140–1, 143; emphasis added)

Rorty, of course, would have read these passages strategically as so much (post)metaphysical mumbo jumbo, yet they can “usefully” apply here. Derrida famously argued that differance was neither a word nor a concept. Rorty suggested for his part that [t]his is, however, not true. The first time that Derrida used that collocation of letters, it was, indeed, not a word, but only a misspelling. But around the third or fourth time he used it, it had become a word. All that it takes for a vocable or an inscription to become a word, after all, is a place in a language game [here we are back to Rorty’s shifting allegiance to Wittgenstein over Derrida]. But now it is a very familiar word indeed. Any literary theorist who confused differance with difference would be out on his ear, just like a theology student in the fifth century who confused homoousion with homoiousion. (Rorty 1991a, 102–3)

Rorty’s dismissiveness here is typical of his transvaluative stylistics, presenting itself, as always, in commonsensical rather than counterintuitive attire. Yet Badiou’s reworking of Derrida’s non/concept can help us situate Rorty’s philosophy in the nonplace between transvaluative legibility and illegibility, where it reads to this day. Rorty’s inexistant dimension is simply irrelevant to “the determinate world” of readers who expect antifoundationalism to rehearse conditions of possibility, or to attack liberal common sense from a transcendental empiricist, genealogical historicist, or pseudo‐ Marxist perspective. My point is that Rorty “inexists” precisely in the way that Badiou describes: he does not exist as a useful figure for certain philosophers (i.e. those who transvaluate at the altar of philosophy’s “problems”), any more than he exists as a useful resource for today’s cultural materialists – but he somehow exists. He exists without being a determinate something and he does not exist without being a determinate nothing. His legibility is illegible and his illegibility is legible at the same time. This is to say that the “usefulness” that Rorty invoked above all other literal implications – and his strategy here, for transvaluative purposes, had to be literal – made Rorty useless to the presentist state of various discursive fields, even at their most legibly anti‐presentist. Rorty always writes with transvaluative calculation  –  that is, he crafts his hyperboles to escape the protocols of received reading. To say that Rorty thus becomes presentist qua liberalism, and he does, is beside the transvaluative point. As a creative rhetorician he is a transvaluator; as a philosopher and social critic he is a 244

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

secular‐humanist old‐timer, even a reactionary, which is as presentist as it gets. But he is both and neither at once. It is in this sense – with no concern whatsoever on Rorty’s part for the literalist arguments about multiplicity in Deleuze and the multiple in Badiou – that Rorty is a singular multiple, and a famous one, which is unusual, although this dimension of his thought remains unacknowledged. Let us briefly consider the north Atlantic and largely US category of “theory”  –  a category which interested Rorty somewhat and which was eschewed, along with “poststructuralism,” by French continentals altogether, and today pretty much by all and sundry. Let us further assume, making some “sentential strings” of our own, that theory is not or was not, as Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp once proclaimed, an attempt to ground and guide the practices of literary interpretation. Let us also assume that “theory” was not a hybridic term that could designate the dissolution of the stringent line between philosophy and literature, as Rorty often suggested (even going so far as to call philosophy a genre of literature). Now, let us finally assume that the transvaluative rhetorician in Rorty has something to do with “theory” – that transvaluative rhetoricizing, apart from the many objectives of philosophy proper and of social criticism, is what so‐called theorists do and have always done. Rorty, despite himself, comes out looking like a theorist – that is, like a renegade hyperbolist who takes philosophical rhetoric “down a deserted path of no return,” but not in the sense of a Kant who happens to influence philosophy proper, and criticism as a whole, forever. Rather, Rorty takes philosophy down a deserted path that might lead nowhere, that guarantees nothing “philosophical” as such, and which serves no inventive or social purpose other than its own end. A strange continuity of transvaluators and their illegible values suddenly becomes conceivable in a way that goes beyond the service of critical rhetoric to philosophical problems, social “injustices,” and the idealist or materialist engagement with “culture” that presently dominates humanist academe. We see that theory as transvaluative reading occupies the nonplace of inexistance, and I am wagering that at his most “interesting” that is where Rorty finds his unintended lodgings. It is more than unusual – a singular paradox – that Rorty should have used “interesting,” “useful,” and “conversation” in his “vocabularies” in ways that rendered his discursive positions useless, uninteresting, and incommunicable to the recognizable philosophical, social, and critical urgencies of his time, however counterintuitive the latter may seem in relation to any “dominant ideology.” Rorty fit in on no recognizable side of the conceptual opposition he unevenly invoked: neither on the side of the antifoundationalism he championed in his attempt to bring analytic and narrative philosophy together, nor on the ideological side of the societal liberalism he endorsed, whose constituency would find him baffling if not completely incomprehensible. What is left? What was always (more or less) there: the transvaluative dimension of his critical hyperbolism, which is there to admire or disdain, deny or affirm, in the name of any number of critical interests. But it is there.

5 Inconsequences The eschewal of every “conditions of possibility” rhetoric had consequences for Rorty’s Critical reception  –  consequences that were already implicit in Consequences of 245

Paul Trembath

Pragmatism, but which Rorty may not have foreseen. If he did foresee them – and he never articulates them as such – his response was something like a further commitment to that Kant‐like “deserted path,” but expressly without the Kant. There is a Nietzschean dimension to this, but most applied Nietzscheans don’t value it much or, if so, only secondarily. By circumnavigating all “conditions of possibility” arguments in one fell swoop, Rorty could not be used – indeed, was not useful – for the rhetorics of “cultural” critics of applied poststructural persuasions. He could not be used to address the power/ knowledge conditions of whatever “historical object” was on the table (say, sexuality or the literary canon); he could not be used to elucidate the textual conditions of any habituated literalism; he could not be used to examine the psychodramatic conditions of identity‐formation and its inevitable failures; the performative conditions of gender and race constitution; any combination of representational conditions as they constitute animality; to genealogize judgments about sexual orientation, and so forth. Nor can Rorty now be used, “speculative” as he is, to supplement the investigation of transcendent rather than transcendental knowledges where Meillassoux enquires into the conceptual consequences of the ancestral or Brassier into the comparable consequences of extinction. He was and is useless across the board – a particularly ironic (if never simply “private”) position for a philosopher who strategically reduced the tools of all critical inquiry to tropologies that “might be useful for some current purpose” (Rorty 1991a, 18). This makes Rorty, despite the flattening effect his rhetoric usually has, distinctly divergent, regardless of his emphatically “liberal” social objectives. These objectives, in my view, amount to nothing if taken literally (to mush, if never simply to “texts” or “lumps”) (Rorty 1991b, 78–92). They have to be read, if one is to grasp their transvaluative dimension and merit, as gestures that have “people” and “society” as a matter of secondary concern – literally as metaphors in a philosophical narrative – if they have conceptual value at all. Such a statement will press a lot of reactive, but never trivial, sociocritical and philosophical buttons, but to read Rorty in this manner is the only way to preserve what might still be of interest in his position – even if it is of no interest to philosophers and cultural materialists  –  if only by example but never primarily with reference to his explicit “content.” For Rorty demonstrates a certain power of hyperbole that is indeed Nietzschean. He sends antifoundationalism  –  even Nietzsche’s version – spinning off in directions that are so extreme that they overreach the very philosophical and/or critical problems that called forth antifoundationalism to begin with. In Rorty we do indeed have an antifoundationalism that persists for its own sake and has its transvaluative articulation as its own objective. It cannot be applied, unless it becomes a simplistic and socially uncritical apologetics for an already dominant secular liberalism. But if we resist our will‐to‐application it reveals itself as something else: an example of transvaluative reading that eschews easy identification as “philosophy” or “art” (or their reproduction by way of a materialism that only overcomes the “idealist” dimension of “culture”), and one that cannot be definitively reduced to the residual “avant‐gardism” or “modernist idealism” that materialists dismissively equate with “high theory.” As for philosophers who do not establish “positions” here with regard to Rorty, they have other contingent urgencies and consequently don’t care. If anything, Rorty’s neopragmatism  –  and I mean what follows strictly in Nietzsche’s sense – is an example of higher theory, for it goes over (almost) every protocol that tacitly 246

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

directs transcendental philosophy (e.g. poststructuralism) and philosophy of transcendence (e.g. speculative realism), just as it overreaches cultural materialism and what has reactively become, as any Nietzschean can see, its “progressive” good conscience. Rorty’s pragmatism has to do this if it is to become what it is, even if it burns every recognizably practical bridge in the process  –  and does so in the paradoxical name of a “usefulness” that has no worldly consequences, or of a democratic “conversation” that is finished before it begins. Rorty does this with little pause. Whatever pause he gives us has to do, of course, with his homologous conflation, in the postmodern debate with Habermas and Lyotard, of “liberal pluralism” with philosophical “antifoundationalism.” Outside of its transvaluative (some would simply say careerist) valence, this hyperbole makes no “pragmatic” or “critical” sense whatsoever. If one takes Rorty’s move here literally, politically it is a very bad one, and Rorty never tells us not to do so. As I see it, the inventor in Rorty is succumbing to the then (and still) growing pressures of the increased politicization of criticism – one that speculative realists are the first to avoid in some time, even if their avoidance echoes Rorty’s speculative but unreal separation of private irony from public solidarity. Rorty’s “politics” is at best critically incoherent, or at worst, as I said above, an apology for what is finally capital process (a finality which in the last determinate instance, as Althusser famously formulated of the mode of production, never comes). Yet charges of Rorty’s careerism aside (and it is there), you can catalog any number of “materialist” careers that were advanced by publishing attacks on Rorty’s formulation, for Rorty truly did have too many critical balls in the air for one transvaluative angle to successfully, or even pragmatically, juggle. If “social responsibility” counts for anything in our assessment of critical contributions (and I think that it counts for too much – for a while it had become The Critical Count itself, if ironically only in academe), this is where Rorty needed to weigh in. He weighed in and he didn’t. What we usually got was an even broader reiteration of his pragmatist position, with Dewey coming more and more to the fore in and as every hyperbole, which satisfied no one, at least not in any way that would have “counted” as satisfaction, given the ready‐made materialist expectations that were then in full play. It is as if Rorty’s “deserted path” was still too populated for its own good. He was caught in the oncoming traffic of Nietzschean historicists, and his liberalist prison house did not serve anyone well in this regard. This is why to see what Rorty best symptomizes – in a way that might cast welcome suspicion on us all – we must read him selectively: that is, for his transvaluative rather than social merits, and if anybody’s critical reception demonstrates the inevitable but negotiable asynchrony of the two, it is Rorty’s. For readers who feel constrained by familiar theories of creative practice (e.g. Williams on “sensuous human activity”), by theories of “philosophical” creativity (Deleuze on how philosophy “creates concepts”), by formats that signal creativity “proper” in automatic ways (paintings, poems, films, and “artwork” generally), by projects that redundantly transform “life” into “art” (reiterated Dada, aleatory music, and so on), or who might feel themselves boxed in by the unexamined metonymies that avant‐gardism, aestheticized politics, and politicized art all share  –  and my list could include much more  –  something somehow creative that is irreducible to the categories of art and ­philosophy, but which also avoids the materialist gentrification of recurrent idealisms, has its attractions. Theory is arguably this “something” – especially the “high” theory 247

Paul Trembath

I ­reference above – but it quickly became a casualty of its official success, since its recognized pertinence obscured the range of its powers and uses. The transvaluative power of theory was devalued, paradoxically, through the inertial mechanisms of its own reception. In effect, Rorty qua theory was on his way to being forgotten as he was obtaining his greatest notoriety, just as “theory” disappeared into its cultural‐critical applications and officially became, if anything, a historical curiosity. I take this, all critical reservations aside, as a good sign – as a sign of something else, of something borderline il/ legible, and thus as an ironic mark of contingency (forget the solidarity) in and of itself. Nietzsche, who was at least as recognizably philosophical as he was not, called this affirmation. Deleuze does too, and he is vociferous in his insistence that affirmation be an end in itself, right here and now, futurity lived and experienced in a present whose future has been so prematurely projected, bought, and sold that there is no temporal future on the experiential horizon. Cataclysms perhaps, but no future, all transformations compromised by an endlessly capitalized present, which will no doubt assure (and even insure) the cataclysms. If Rorty’s liberalism indirectly apologizes for this, we have reasons to distinguish what is best in Rorty from what is worst. What is transvaluative and terminally il/legible is what is best, all recognizable (and in consequence useful) service to philosophy, art, and culture be damned. What apologizes for secular‐liberal ideology is what is worst – the very worst. We are in the habit of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Perhaps we should, given what “babies” of any sort nowadays are likely to become. But we do not want to drown in the mire of cultural‐materialist protocols, and we might remember that reactions can be counter‐hegemonic in the best instances of philosophy, artistry, and cultural critique, and for all that remain reactive. Such reactions simply condemn Rorty. As Nietzsche might have said, mires of this type have a bad smell. How then is the liberal Rorty a Nietzschean? There is the obvious, and by now prosaic, antifoundationalist (and anti‐essentialist) connection. Nietzsche, of course, is clearly no more secular‐liberal than are Marxists or cultural materialists. But despite his massively uncritical and downright wrong conflation of liberal society with antifoundationalist thought, Rorty qua philosophy is no simple liberal either. He has selective reasons for articulating liberalism in his exaggerated way when he does philosophy, and they are not reducible to any practice of liberalism as a “citizen” of so‐called US “democracy” (i.e. of capitalism, unconscious imperialism, and so forth). Rorty shares with Nietzsche (who we might say is evental to Rorty in a Badiouian sense) a fidelity to hyperbole as the transvaluative power of philosophy. A word marks the emergence of this power: genealogy. But in neither Nietzsche nor Rorty (certainly not in Rorty) does genealogy designate a “historicist” duty, as it travels, say, from a reading of Foucault to the literary applications of Stephen Greenblatt and to everybody since (from gender, ethnic, and queer studies scholars to “animality” genealogists). Yet Nietzsche rhapsodizes – there is no other word for it – about such a duty, and creates a historical fiction in The Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche 1998) as strategic foreground for his selective purpose: the revaluation of all values. Judging from all the nuts‐and‐bolts cultural historicists that have dominated critical studies since the late 1980s, Nietzsche’s hyperboles have taken on a literalist dimension that has completely shed the transvaluative implications of his larger philosophy. Moreover, where this emphasis inexists on the edge of critical legibility, it risks being reduced, by now automatically and preemptively, to a residual 248

Speculative Pragmatism: Richard Rorty and the Hyperboles of Philosophy

avant‐gardism, idealism, elitism, and so forth. The “string” of possible charges is as long as it is predictable. And after what is loosely called speculative realism, things are getting worse for philosophy of transvaluation, even if speculative realism  –  despite its explicit content – is implicity transvaluative philosophy. Rorty’s peculiar tragedy (and I mean this in Nietzsche’s affirmative sense) is that he was not a proto‐cultural materialist, any more than he was a “conditions of possibility” antifoundationalist or a by now mythological logical positivist. His specific variety of antifoundationalism could not accommodate those caught up in Foucault’s untimely inertia, and that is all of us, even where Foucault’s name is no longer mentioned (that is, where it probably lives on the most). Rorty can be recuperated, his example transvalued, but only if we read him as a transvaluative reader – that is, as a reader operating within the “medium” and with the “materials” of philosophy, without simply being a philosopher. To philosophy “proper” he can perhaps contribute little, and to cultural materialism (which has experienced difficulties of its own since the US reception of Badiou’s ontology, Ranciere’s aesthetics, and speculative realism) even less. But at a time when even counterintuitive thinking, by way of its familiar procedures and objectives, has become conceptually redundant, Rorty’s example offers something else. He reminds us of a power of critical rhetoric that is in some ways irreducible to the more standard objectives of social criticism and philosophy, and perhaps to philosophy itself. And Rorty shows us how to be creative without simply being an artist or critic of either an idealist or materialist persuasion – to think outside of the Benjaminian box with its ubiquitous distinction between politicized art and aestheticized politics. Whether we “agree” with his hyperbolic angles or not, or whether or not we affirm the practice of transvaluative reading that Rorty exemplifies but never describes, Rorty is a transvaluative reader.

References Badiou, Alain. 2009. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Badiou, Alain and Slavoj Žižek. 2014. Philosophy in the Present. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bryant, Levi R. 1991. “The Ontic Principle: Outline of an Object‐oriented Ontology.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi R. Bryant, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek, 261–78. Melbourne: re.press. Bryant, Levi R., Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek, eds. 1991. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone Press. —. 1994. What is Philosophy? London: Verso. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “Difference.” In Margins of Philosophy, 3–27. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Knapp, Steven and Walter Benn Michaels. 1982. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8(4):723–42. Kosuth, Joseph. 1991. Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966–1990, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2010. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Bloomsbury Continuum.

249

Paul Trembath

Moore, A. W. 2014. The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1998. On the Genealogy of Morals. Indianapolis: Hacket. Rorty, Richard. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. —. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Žižek, Slavoj and Ben Woodard. 1991. “Interview.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, edited by Levi R. Bryant, Graham Harman, and Nick Srnicek, 406–15. Melbourne: re.press.

250

Part IV

Appropriations

15 Rorty on Hegel on the Mind in History PAUL REDDING

In an autobiographical essay Richard Rorty recounted an early phase of his intellectual life in which he became disillusioned with the Platonist “quest for certainty” that he had harbored up to that time. The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place “beyond hypotheses.” There seemed to be nothing like a neutral standpoint from which these alternative first principles could be evaluated. But if there were no such standpoint, then the whole idea of “rational certainty” and the whole Socratic‐Platonic idea of replacing passion by reason, seemed not to make much sense. (Rorty 1999, 10)1

As this self‐narrative continues, we learn how his discovery of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit had played a crucial role in his continuing to pursue life in a discipline otherwise threatened with meaninglessness.2 The message he took from this work was that “granted that philosophy is just a matter of out‐redescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition. It can use it to weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society” (Rorty 1999, 11). For Rorty, Hegel’s masterpiece of redescription had become linked to another, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Together they formed the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged … It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared – the specifically anti‐ Platonic element in their work – that seemed so wonderful. They both seemed able to weave everything they encountered into a narrative without asking that that narrative have a moral, and without asking how that narrative would appear under the aspect of eternity. (Rorty 1999, 11)

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

253

Paul Redding

Not surprisingly it was Proust’s aesthetic application of redescription that provided the most concrete example of what this freedom achieved through redescription amounts to. As he described Proust’s literary revolution elsewhere, Proust had wanted to free himself from the descriptions of himself offered by the people he had met … His method of freeing himself from those people – of becoming autonomous – was to redescribe the people who had described him. … He redescribed them as being as much a product of others’ attitudes toward them as Proust himself was a product of their attitudes toward him. (Rorty 1989, 102)3

Rorty’s parallel vision of Hegel as providing a philosophical form of this redescriptive path to freedom and thereby as providing a philosophical narrative without a “moral” or any “aspect of eternity” is one that, of course, stands in stark contrast to the usual picture of Hegel’s philosophy. Was it not Hegel who wanted to reinstate “the Absolute” as the only real object of metaphysical inquiry, resulting in the “Absolute Knowing” in which The Phenomenology of Spirit itself terminates? And wasn’t “the Absolute” simply an alias for God – a God whose “march” in the world can be seen in the development of the state into its modern form? (Hegel 1991, sect. 258 add.) But of course Rorty was not making claims to historical accuracy here. As is explicit elsewhere, the thinker he often refers to as “Hegel” is a product of his own “redescriptive” narrative, and his redescription is carried out in the pragmatist spirit of Dewey who had earlier wanted to “naturalize” and “de‐absolutize” Hegelian ideas, creating a type of synthesis of Hegel’s historicism and Darwin’s naturalism (Rorty 1998, 77–8 and ch. 15). Rorty appears to have assumed that the actual, historical Hegel did in fact pursue those traditional metaphysical aspirations from which he himself wanted to release philosophy,4 but he clearly thinks that there is much in Hegel that can be capitalized on for this project. Rorty cites Charles Taylor’s Hegel (Taylor 1975) in which, by focusing on what Hegel had in common with his “expressivist” contemporaries like Herder and Humboldt, Taylor had brought Hegel into alignment with ideas about the relation of thought and language popular in the third quarter of the twentieth century. But behind this one might also discern a vision of Hegel able to be rescued from absolute idealism in the approach of Alfred North Whitehead, a focus of Rorty’s interest in the early parts of his career as an aspiring philosopher.5 In fact, Rorty’s own “cheerful” take on Hegel was soon to align his approach with a number of Hegel interpreters who, stressing similar sorts of considerations, were to contest even the historical accuracy of the traditional “metaphysical” view of Hegel Rorty seems to assume,6 making Rorty’s redescription closer to what they were to think of as just description of the real thing. Along with this, the sorts of elements from contemporary analytic philosophy that Rorty brought together in his naturalized Hegel were to be developed in systematic form into an interpretation broadly along these lines by his former dissertation advisee, Robert Brandom (2009, part 1). In this chapter, I take up aspects of Rorty’s account of Hegel in the light of such developments. One notion in particular that has been seized upon by revisionist Hegelians in the effort to free Hegel from the traditional interpretation has been the idea of “recognition” that plays a central role in Hegel’s anti‐Cartesian account of the capacity for human intentionality, on the one hand, and the constitution of “objective 254

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

spirit” (objektiver Geist), on the other. In contrast to Hegel’s suggestive concept of recognition, Rorty’s somewhat “flatter” and one‐sided “redescriptivist” analogue, I will suggest, can be seen as having been held captive by influences from his own “analytic” past, even when he had self‐consciously broken with this past. In particular, this persisting feature of Rorty’s thought can be seen as derived from his particular way of appropriating the “linguistic turn” of the analytic movement when he first turned to analysis early in his philosophical career. Moreover, it is what had also resulted in him having held a radically “eliminativist” position in philosophy of mind in the early 1960s, an attitude to the mind that melded seamlessly into his advocacy of Proustian redescriptivism. Finally, I will raise the question of whether or not something more might be saved from Hegel’s original notion from within the broader analytic field than Rorty’s particular approach had allowed.

1  Rortarian Redescription and Hegelian Recognition When discussing Proust’s technique of disarming the oppressive descriptions that others made of him by redescribing them, Rorty notes Proust’s motivation: “He dreaded being, in Sartre’s phrase, turned into a thing by the eye of the other.” This reference to Sartre provides a direct link to Hegel via Sartre’s appeal in Being and Nothingness to Hegel’s dialectic of “master and slave” in Chapter 4 of Phenomenology of Spirit (1975). Sartre had interpreted Hegel in the light of Alexandre Kojève’s controversial account of the “struggle for recognition” (Sartre 1956, Kojève 1969) – a struggle motivated by a purported “desire for recognition” that he took to be fundamental to the human species.7 Rorty had been obviously attracted to the strongly anti‐Cartesian dimensions of Hegel’s account of “Anerkennung” in which mindedness is treated not as a fixed human capacity but as having a history in virtue of being dependent on historically variable forms of social interaction. Like Kant, Hegel had thought of one’s capacity to be consciously aware of an external world of objects as requiring the reflexivity of self‐ consciousness, but Hegel went beyond Kant by expanding on an idea found in Fichte that made an individual’s self‐consciousness dependent of their recognition (or acknowledgment – Anerkennung) of some other actual self‐conscious subject’s recognition of them. The master–slave scenario sketched in the Phenomenology’s Chapter 4 had provided perhaps the simplest instantiation of a dynamic of recognition that would be expressed elsewhere in other more complex forms, but even in this initial parable of a simple form of life constituted by a single master and his slave, the relations involved are complex and difficult to unravel. Moreover, Hegel nowhere developed anything like a systematic theory of this very suggestive, but equally confusing, idea. The goal of the figure of recognition in Hegel is ultimately to reconcile the spurious duality of the subjective and objective dimensions of human lives, the apparent dichotomy between the freedom each of us possess qua rational mind and the causal dependencies to which one belongs qua physically located body. Hegel’s starting point in chapter 4 concerns the illusions of “self‐certainty”: contra Descartes, he tries to show that no subject can be immediately aware of itself as a subject. A subject can only grasp its own subjecthood indirectly in the recognition of another who recognizes the subjecthood of the first. But to be a vehicle for another’s recognition, the first subject must have 255

Paul Redding

an objective presence for the other and, similarly, that other must have an objective presence for the first. An immediate consequence of this is that I can only achieve a sense of my status as an independent subject, which on the idealist account is a necessary condition of being an independent subject, by taking on board the fact that I inescapably belong to the world of causally related and so dependent beings. In the master–slave dialectic, this is what the master, the exemplar of immediate self‐certainty, fails to do. It had been the slave’s initial acceptance of servitude and objectivity that paradoxically allowed him to escape that condition and achieve an independence and rationality denied to the master. The master’s “recognition” of the slave as a slave, and so as lacking independence, contradicts the essential reciprocity of recognition itself, since one can only properly get recognition of one’s independence from another construed as independent. Rorty’s way of dealing with these matters, I will suggest, seems unable to capture this insight. Part of the problems facing an Hegelian attempt to unravel these complex relations stems from the fact that Hegel had used the dichotomous vocabularies of “subjects” and “objects,” “dependence” and “independence,” and so on, much in the way they are used above, in the endeavor to go beyond such a framework. Thus we easily fall into somewhat loose talk about “inter‐subjective” relations as if they are relations between existing embodied subjects, at the same time as we deny that those relations can be thought as relating identifiable relata, because they are constitutive of those relata.8 It places Hegel’s hints about the deep role played by the fact of one’s belonging to a linguistic community as a condition of the capacity for mindedness, hints that had been taken up by Taylor and others and illuminated in the sort of language‐games‐and‐forms‐of‐life approach of the later Wittgenstein, especially. This seems to promise an approach that gets beyond talk the quasi‐Cartesian talk of “subjects” and “objects,” but Hegel nowhere develops these hints. Rorty’s response to this is wholesale, in that he attempts to bypass the entire framework of subjects and objects, and to do so on the basis of a particular appropriation of the “linguistic turn” of twentieth‐century analytic philosophy. In this approach, while he does appeal to the later Wittgenstein, a more definite source of influence seems to have been, first, the work of Wilfrid Sellars, and later, that of W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. However, even before his turn to “analytic philosophy” in the early 1960s, Rorty had clearly formed an idea of the need to get beyond the language of subjects and objects from his study of Alfred North Whitehead. Rorty’s initial professional training had not been as an analytic philosopher: rather, as both a master’s candidate at Chicago, and a graduate student at Yale, his main teachers were advocates of Whitehead’s speculative philosophy, and his work had engaged to some extent with Whiteheadian ideas (Gross 2008, chs. 4 and 5). After the hugely influential work coauthored with Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, Whitehead, who was originally a mathematician, had turned to philosophy and pursued metaphysical ambitions on a truly Hegelian scale. To some American philosophers in the 1950s, Whitehead had come to be regarded as a bastion of “speculative” metaphysics against the incursion of positivistic versions of the earlier form of analysis introduced by Principia Mathematica brought to the United States by European logical positivists seeking refuge from the rise of Nazism. A few years out of his doctorate, however, Rorty was taking “the linguistic turn” seriously, replacing Whiteheadian ideas with an approach derived from Sellars. These relations were complex, however, as he 256

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

seemed to be spurred by the prospect of developing ideas he saw as being held in common by these seemingly very different thinkers. In Process and Reality, Whitehead had proposed a strikingly simple but powerful diagnosis of the problems of modern philosophy. In the seventeenth century, a new “subjectivist” epistemological principle had been introduced into philosophy in line with the revolution within physics. But those committed to this “principle of subjectivity” had retained the philosophical categories of substance and property from the earlier Aristotelian metaphysics. Not only were the objects known still conceived in the traditional Aristotelian way, as in Locke, for example, the modern notion of the knowing subject had itself been built on the category of a substance, albeit an immaterial one, the properties of which were its representational states. This produced an incommensurable set of beliefs and whole philosophical project, according to Whitehead, had to be rethought, his own processual “philosophy of organism” as set out in Process and Reality being just such an attempt. Rorty’s later critique of the trope of the mind as a “mirror of nature” might be seen as an extension of Whitehead’s critique, but without the possibility of Whitehead’s positive answer. Rorty’s new alternative was seen as allowed by the “linguistic turn.”9 In the early 1960s, as a junior faculty member in the philosophy department at Princeton, Rorty became identified as the proponent of a radical “eliminative materialist” philosophy of mind.10 The linguistic turn recapitulated Whitehead’s critique: knowledge was not to be thought of as the mind’s representation of external “objects,” that is, substances qualified by particular properties. But without this, the modern notion of mind had no real role to play. Rorty’s starting point was behavioristic: a subject’s “mental states” were to be understood in terms of that subject’s dispositions to act, including dispositions to utter sentences. While the meaningfulness of such sentences had to be accounted for, this was to be conceived not because they expressed inner “thoughts,” but because they were subject to further linguistic acts, those of metalinguistic interpretation conceived as an interpreter’s translation of the subject’s utterance into their own language. From this analysis of verbal behavior, radically eliminative materialist consequences for the mental were drawn. While typically materialists had been challenged to explain various features of mindedness that were taken to be fundamental – the “what it is like” of phenomenal consciousness, or the “aboutness” of intentional states, for example – Rorty argued that there was no distinctive “mark of the mental” that had to be accounted for by the interpreter. By the time of his 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the mind had simply become an “invention” that we could do without.11 Relieved of its commitment to an ontology that includes intentional subjects, the Kojèvean‐Hegelian “struggle for recognition” becomes a cultural struggle between speaking bodies over who can impose the norms of speaking on others – a struggle to mold the categorical framework or vocabulary within which claims of speaking correctly will be assessed. And if “getting it right” here consists simply in adherence to the norms of the existing vocabulary, then the imposition of a new vocabulary cannot be assessed in relation to those preexisting standards of correctness. This will, of course, raise problems for the conceptions of the truth of claims made across vocabularies, leading Rorty to face accusations of an indefensible relativism. In comparison to Hegel, the achievement of freedom through Proustian redescription would seeming not be 257

Paul Redding

accompanied by the achievement of truth. Here, however, I want to keep the focus on truth about the psychological. Applied in a Proustian way to the description of the attitudes of others, it would seem that there could be no genuine gap between the intentions ascribed to others, and any “facts” of the mental lives of those to whom intentions are being ascribed – there are only the facts of the other’s interpretable expressions. And the same will be said to one’s own self‐attributions, as here there can be no non‐linguistically formed material which one’s own descriptions will attempt to capture. In a struggle between incommensurable mutual interpretations, then, neither of the antagonists could appeal to the facts of their states of mind against which the interpretations of others might be measured. The resolution of these struggles would seem to only result in a normative situation based on nothing more than “victor’s justice.” Just as Rorty’s account of Hegel is in the pragmatist spirit of Dewey, he links the idea of Proustian redescription to Dewey as well. Imposing a new vocabulary is an aspect of the function of “breaking the crust of convention.” Thus, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, for example, the point of the “edifying” philosophy he there promotes is described as that of “perform[ing] the social function which Dewey called ‘breaking the crust of convention,’ preventing man from deluding himself with the notion that he knows himself, or anything else, except under optional descriptions” (Rorty 1980, 379). That knowledge of oneself (“or anything else”) is always knowledge under a description, is an expression of Sellars’s psychological nominalism, “the denial that there is any awareness of logical space prior to, or independent of, the acquisition of a language” (Sellars 1997, 66). But that such descriptions are always “optional,” suggests something stronger. One’s acceptance of any description over another is optional because the new description brings with it the criteria under which both are to be judged: there is no independent categorical framework within which each description can be assessed. Rorty’s rejection of the relevance of intentionality (with a “t”) is accompanied by a similar dismissal, at a linguistic level, of the relevance of intensionality (with an “s”), leaving him happy to accept the strongly extensionalist metalogical assumptions of Quine and Davidson. Again this attitude is rooted in his work of his early analytic period as expressed in the paper “Empiricism, Extensionalism, and Reductionism,” from 1963. There Rorty engaged with the thesis of extensionalism, the thesis, as he describes it, that “one can construct a language (a) which is adequate to express any given body of knowledge about observable fact, and (b) in which predicates which apply to all and only the same things can be substituted for each other salva veritate” (Rorty 2014, 97). Extensionalism had “stirred the hearts” of the logical empiricists of earlier decades, but recently, he notes, had fallen into disrepute, and among the problem areas facing extensionalism were the “referentially opaque” description of mental states as traditionally conceived. In this sense, intentional contexts in a linguistic setting are like other “modal” ones. If the name “Tully” refers to the same person as does “Cicero,” then all occurrences of “Tully” should, on the extensionalist thesis, be able to be replaced with “Cicero” without change of truth value. But, as Rorty points out using the example from Quine, the substitution of “Tully” for “Cicero” in “Philip believed Cicero denounced Cataline” may fail “because Philip does no know that Tully and Cicero are the same man” (Rorty 2014, 99). 258

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

In this paper, however, Rorty, suggests the extensionalist thesis can be saved by being “disentangled” from the empiricist and the reductionist theses with which it had been associated: “the confusion between the theses of extensionalism and of reductionism is responsible for most of the contemporary distrust of extensionalism” (Rorty 2014, 96). One path beyond the problems of “intensional contexts” is to “distinguish carefully enough between things, their names, names of these names, and so forth” (Rorty 2014, 99). This sounds very much like the path taken by the likes of Tarski and Carnap with their object language–metalanguage distinction, and Rorty will appropriate this within a framework he takes from Sellars and Davidson.12 This early endorsement of extensionalism, I suggest, sets the tone for his later Proustian redescriptivist approach to mental states, which is dependent on his subsequent “elimination” of intentionality as a “mark of the mental.” Mental talk can, one way or the other, be eliminated without loss by the use of a new vocabulary, as long as the new vocabulary is itself thought of as in principle similarly eliminable by some other. Just as talk of phlogiston had been eliminated by a new vocabulary containing terms like oxygen and oxidization, so to can be intentional terms, like “believe” or “desire,” thought of as naming “internal” acts.13 But Quine’s eliminativist approach to “intensional” contexts like modal and doxastic ones was at the time being challenged from within the linguistic turn by a host of critics arguing that such “modal” phenomena were ineliminable. In fact, I suggest that this turn within the analytic framework opened the space for approaches to mindedness from the later Wittgenstein closer to that found in Hegel himself, approaches largely ignored by Rorty. Once more, I want to return to the seminal paper from Rorty’s early career in which he chose Sellars over Whitehead.

2  Alternate Paths from Whitehead – Egocentricity Without Metaphysical Egos At the conclusion of “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn” comparing Whitehead’s and Sellars’s responses to the dilemma caused by the modern conception of the mind as an immaterial substance with representational properties, Rorty ends with a brief comparison between these two positions. Both acknowledge the insight that all human judgments are perspectival, to be made from a particular point of view, but both attempt to make this starting point compatible with the realist assumption that such judgments are nevertheless judgments about a mind‐independent world. Nevertheless, Whitehead and Sellars go about this in different ways, and the limitations of Whitehead’s position stems from the fact that it involves the postulation of entities that cannot be given expression in public language. Whitehead’s critique of the traditional ontological idea of an “unrepeatable” substance and its “repeatable” properties that gets incorporated into, but is ultimately incompatible with, the modern subjective condition of knowledge had required him “to construct a new category of entities – entities which can only be described in token‐ reflexive terms” (Rorty 2014, 92). This was the category of “actual entity” or “actual occasion.” Actual entities are, as successors to Lockean substances, “unrepeatables,” and are “the final real things of which the world is made up” (Whitehead 1978 [1929], 259

Paul Redding

18). But actual entities, unlike traditional substances, cannot be conceived of as independent of experience; rather they are “drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (Whitehead 1978 [1929], 18). This means that actual entities are only unrepeatables when existing in the present, that temporal location at which the experiencing subject is located. When some present entity becomes a past one, it ceases to exist as such. As an object of memory rather than immediate experience, it must be treated as a complex of abstract repeatables, Whiteheadian analogues of traditionally conceived properties. Rorty summarizes: Whitehead (and here he was at one with the idealists) thought that the notion that there were unrepeatable and knowable entities could be saved from Lockeian lines of argument only by disentangling the notion of “being unrepeatable” from that of “being a substrate of repeatables,” identifying the former notion with that of “being an experience,” and conceiving of the latter as an abstraction from the former. But in order to abide (as the idealists did not) by the insistence of common sense that, in every experience, there is a difference between the experience itself and the object of this experience, and that the latter can exist independently of the former, Whitehead had to find a new model of the relation between experience and the object of experience. (Rorty 2014, 73)

Whitehead’s peculiar type of egocentric version of realist metaphysics, in which an entity is only fully real in the present is, Rorty suggests, hopeless as a way beyond traditional ontology. For to make sense of “entity which logically can exist only at time t,” one needs to give a sense to the notion of an entity whose temporal location is not a mere “accident” of it, but is essential to it – so that the statement “A is at time t” is a necessary truth about A. Now it may be thought that this notion is just unintelligible. It does seem that our grammar is such that if we say “A is at time ti” we may also say “It is a logical possibility that A could have been at time tj.” The contingency of statements about temporal locations seems to be part of the very fabric of temporal discourse. (Rorty 2014, 75)

Rorty notes that there is only “one sort of expression which is a necessary truth about the temporal location of a concrete entity: ‘I am here now’ is a necessary truth about me” (Rorty 2014, 75), and to the extent that the “I” of “I am here now” provides a model for a Whiteheadian “actual entity,” Rorty seems to be rehearsing yet again a critique that Hegel (1975), in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, had directed to the self‐contradictory stance of “self‐certainty.” Hegel’s exemplification of this stance with the Fichtean formula “I = I” has something of the same flavor as Rorty’s description of this Whiteheadian attempt at foundational truth. Moreover, Rorty points out that in order to be communicable, statements about such entities, even where those statements contain such egocentric reflexive terms such as “my,” “now,” and so on, need to employ nonindexical ways of characterizing the objects they are about. If Whitehead’s unrepeatable actual entities “are characterizable in terms of ordinary speech at all, [they] must be characterized as entities which can only be referred to by expressions of the form ‘my … now,’ where ‘…’ is replaced by expressions of the form ‘experienced togetherness of —, —, —, etc.’ These latter blanks, it must be noted, are

260

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

filled in not with token‐reflexive expressions, but with names of past, and thereby repeatable, actual entities” (Rorty 2014, 75). As in Hegel, an attempt of a knowing subject to express their own mental contents necessarily brings in reference to external, worldly items – that is, necessarily involves objectification. Any immediate token‐reflexive “feelings” that are in the process of “concrescence” into the actual entity in its presentness must also be able to be identified with the non‐present abstract properties of past things. They are “filled in,” he goes on, “with expressions which stand to ‘my … now’ as ‘Smith was at spot s at time t’ stands to ‘I am here now’ (uttered by Smith at s at t)” (Rorty 2014, 75). But Rorty’s extensionalist assumptions in his writings of the 1960s clearly flatten the more linguistically complex conception of recognition that can be discerned in Hegel. The linguistic expressions of all apparently ego‐reflexive intentional states for Rorty are to be thought of as redescribable in an extensionally conceived metalanguage. That the sentence tokens of the object language are “meaningful” is not to be taken in the sense that they are expressive of the speaker’s mental states. All that is required for a sentence to be meaningful is that (1) occurrences of the token can be coordinated with the subject’s nonlinguistic behavior and (2) that it can be translated into a sentence of the interpreter’s language. This was to be linked by Rorty in the early 1970s to Davidson’s approach of the “field‐linguist’s” radical interpretation of the utterances of members of some exotic tribe,14 but the basics of the approach resting on the idea of translation into a sentence of an extensional metalanguage Rorty had learned from Sellars in the early 1960s, and the approaches of both Sellars and Davidson start from Tarski’s account of “truth in a language.” Thus, quoting Sellars, we take sentences of the form “means ––” as “the core of a unique mode of discourse which is distinct from the description and explanation of empirical facts as is the language of prescription and justification” (Rorty 2014, 88; Sellars 1958, 527). The issues here indeed directly engage with the necessary role played by an external perspective onto mental contents in Hegel’s characterization of the recognitive conditions for the existence of self‐consciousness and consciousness, and yet the language– metalanguage structure Rorty employs still seems to render his analysis one‐sided in relation to Hegel. Importantly, while Hegel insists on the necessary reciprocity of the recognitive relation, Rorty seems to assume that statements in the metalanguage are themselves not dependent on the egocentric statements of the object language in the way those of the latter are dependent on those of the former. However, in the decades after Rorty’s paper, many came to challenge the assumption that egocentric or “indexical” sentences such as “the meeting starts now” can in principle be always replaced by their nonindexical counterparts (Perry 1979). More generally, the 1960s and 1970s were the years in which issues concerning temporal, alethic modal, intentional, indexical and other “intensional” contexts came flooding back into analytic philosophy, challenging the extensionalist semantics of the likes of Quine and Davidson. Among these were approaches that at a linguistic level reasserted the sorts of “presentist” and “actualist” considerations exemplified in Whitehead, but articulated within a framework more in line with “the linguistic turn.” When we look to Hegel, we find that, in contrast to Rorty, Hegel himself seems to insist on the non‐eliminability of intensional considerations. While acknowledging the presence of both indexical or modal judgments, and extensional 261

Paul Redding

or nonmodal ones, Hegel’s account of judgment provides the resources for an account of the recognitive relation that is richer than Rorty’s.

3  Hegel on Intensional and Extensional Judgments The crucial role played by modal notions within Hegel’s account of judgments and syllogisms in the Science of Logic, Book III, is apparent in the difference between what he calls an Urteil or judgment and a Satz, by which he seems to mean here something like an actual sentence token considered in the context of a simple reporting usage. Thus, considered as a mere Satz, the sentence “Aristotle died at the age of 73 in the fourth year of 115th Olympiad” will have a structure in which both subject and predicate are considered as name‐like singular terms: “what is said of a singular (einzelnen) subject” says Hegel, “is itself only something singular (nur etwas Einzelnes)” (Hegel 2010, 553). Considered as something like the juxtaposition of two names, Hegel’s “Satz” looks something like what Wittgenstein in places in Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus also calls a “Satz”  –  that is, a Satz‐sign [Satzzeichen] considered “in its projective relation to the world” (Wittgenstein 1922, sect. 3.12). However, for Hegel the Satz considered in such a projective way is itself neither true nor false, but correct (richtig) or incorrect (unrichtig), and as the capacity for being true or false is the mark of a judgment, a Satz, considered in this way, is not a judgment. In short, judgments cannot be understood extensionally. For a Satz to count as a judgment or Urteil, it must be used in more than in a simple reporting sense. Specifically, it must form part of a larger piece of inferential reasoning: “There would be in it an element of judgment,” writes Hegel, “only if one of the circumstances, say, the date of death or the age of the philosopher, came into doubt … In that case, the figures would be taken as something universal, as a time that, even without the determinate content [bestimmten Inhalt] of Aristotle’s death, would still stand on its own filled with some other content or simply empty” (Hegel 2010, 553). The idea that for the Satz to function as a judgment one of its terms must express an inference‐articulating universal is further exploited in Hegel’s treatment of the types of judgment. Hegel first distinguishes judgments of determinate being (or “thereness [Dasein]”) (Hegel 2010, 557–68) from judgments of reflection (Hegel 2010, 568–81), it being clear that this is a distinction between perceptual and inferentially elicited judgments. Hegel says of the former that the subject is “determined as universal by the predicate” and so becomes universal, while the predicate is “determined in the [singular] subject” and “is therefore a singular” (Hegel 2010, 560). In short, in the very act of judging, the initial logical roles of subject and predicate terms have been reversed. The singular predicate of the developed judgment of determinate being, such as “the rose is red,”15 acts in a name‐like way to pick out the particular redness inhering in some specific rose – we might say, pointing to a rose before us – that rose’s particular way of being or looking red.16 With the predicate as a singular, we will be tempted to think of it as expressing something like a Kantian intuition, the referent of which conceived as an individual, concrete property instance – this instance of redness that is conceived as inhering in this rose. But as predicated of the subject, the predicate “red” cannot be simply thought of as semantically simple in that way; it has an internal structure that emerges on 262

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

consideration of the judgment’s negative form. Starting as a mere Satz, the positive judgment “is not true but has its truth in the negative judgment” (Hegel 2010, 562). When one says, for example, “the rose is not red,” negation here will only be taken as applying to the determinateness of the predicate. In saying that the rose is not red one does not imply that the rose is not colored.17 Rather, “it is … assumed that it has a color, though another color” (Hegel 2010, 565).18 If a rose is red then it is not yellow, not pink, not blue, and so on, and if it is not red, it is either yellow or pink or blue, and so on.19 This shows that the meaning of the predicate in the simple judgment “the rose is red” cannot, after all, be given demonstratively, nor independently of an account of the types of inferences of exclusion into which that judgment can enter. The judgment of determinate being becomes a judgment of reflection. Judgments of reflection are, in contrast, subsumptive judgments, and here the conventional singular‐subject, universal‐predicate order has been restored, in that the property predicated of the subject is now a universal in the standardly abstract sense, what Hegel calls an “essential universal,” that might be truly said of a variety of different things across different genuses. In this, the subject term of the judgment of reflection contrasts with that of the judgment of determinate being, which was an Aristotelian instance of a kind.20 The irrelevance of kind terms in subject place in the judgment of reflection will mean that its ultimate subjects will have the characteristics of a bare “singulars,” allowing a domain of singular unqualified things to be classified under different abstract universals with the use of explicit quantification (Hegel 2010, 570–5). Here, predication is conceived along the line of class membership and so is extensional. Hegel’s two judgment forms exactly reflect the duality of categorial forms, the running together of which Whitehead sees as underlying the metaphysical problems of modernity. “The notions of the ‘green leaf ’ and of the ‘round ball’” he notes, “have generated two misconceptions: one is the concept of vacuous actuality, void of subjective experience; and the other is the concept of quality inherent in substance” (Whitehead 1978 [1929], 167). These former of these “misconceptions” clearly corresponds to Hegel’s judgments of reflection, the latter, to his judgments of determinate being. Whitehead continues that it is because this difference is blurred in ordinary language that it “penetrates but a short distance into the principles of metaphysics.” The underlying suggestion is of a fundamental distinction within experience that cannot be represented in language – the assumption of which Rorty had been critical. But Hegel should in no sense be thought of as simply having produced some fixed inventory of opposing logical forms – a feature of the static Verstand, the understanding, of which he is always critical. The distinction plays a role within a wider processual (or “pragmatic”) account of judgment. As Hegel’s presentation develops, the distinction between judgments characterized by the different inherence and subsumption forms of predication is now repeated at higher and higher levels, generating an array of increasingly complex judgment types, and ultimately types of syllogisms. The generation of these higher forms presupposes the successive Aufhebung, that is, negation but preservation of features of inherence and subsumption conceptions of predication. If we think of the Aufhebung of a judgment of inherence by a judgment of reflection as a type of translation into an extensional metalanguage, 263

Paul Redding

this Aufhebung is captured by Rorty. But the following step in Hegel would represent the sentence of the metalanguage as equally subject to translation back into the original object language.21 I have argued elsewhere that the concrete “syllogism of necessity” in which this development results should be understood as a concrescence of actual judgments of mutually recognizing agents involved in socially mediated reasoning (Redding 1996, 156–8),22 and such a recognitive context gives retrospective sense to the duality of logical forms found in the earlier sections. Those judgmental contents an agent attributes to another on the basis of their linguistic behavior could only be understood as having “reflective” form of subsuming judgments, but the immediate perceptual judgments of the things of the agents own surrounding world will have the form of judgments of determinate being. Moreover, as Whitehead pointed out, the same considerations will apply to the logical shape of objects of present experience and those recalled from the past. This is why for Hegel neither form can be reduced to the other.

4 Conclusion In the early 1960s Rorty had turned to analytic philosophy for a way out of the problems found in Whitehead, who had seemed to have offered an Hegelianism without the unwanted idealist metaphysics. Seemingly by the early 1970s, however, Rorty had come to take the best practitioners of analytic philosophy as exemplifying its self‐ undermining dynamic. In short, Rorty’s increasing rejection of the world of analytic philosophy had not precluded commitments to quite specific doctrines within that tradition, commitments underlying his continuing appropriations of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson. Surely Rorty, as a good Hegelian historicist, would have acknowledged that even his mode of anti‐philosophizing reflected “its time” in thought. During this time, however, and again in line with an Hegelian dynamic of the development of thought, alternatives to the truth‐functional, extensionalist assumptions of Rorty’s heroes had appeared on the scene. To mention one specifically in relation to issues of time and intentionality, Arthur Prior, the inventor of “tense logic,” had challenged the reduction of intensional modal talk to extensional talk, and had treated nonmodal extensionally understood sentences as an outgrowth of the intensionally understood modal ones: “It is not that modal logic or tense logic is an artificially truncated uniform monadic first‐order predicate calculus; the latter, rather, is an artificially expanded modal logic or tense logic” (Prior 2003, 246).23 Prior had, on the basis of a paper on time (Findlay 1941), nominated his former teacher, John N. Findlay, as the “founding father of modern tense logic” (Prior 1968, 91), but Findlay had himself been deeply influenced by both the later Wittgenstein and Hegel (Findlay 1985), and had come up with his idea on tense in relation to the work of the earlier British Hegelian John McTaggart.24 It would seem that there were alternative paths out of 1950s “ordinary language” philosophy than those that proceeded through Tarski, paths that perhaps offer better opportunities for the revival of the Hegelian historicist thought that Rorty sought. However, were this to turn out to be the case, it would not detract from Rorty’s achievement, for surely he had pushed such a dialectic forward to a degree that was possibly unmatched in late twentieth‐century philosophy. 264

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

Notes 1 Rorty describes his disillusion as climaxing around the time he went to Yale to start a PhD in 1952. 2 Rorty’s “discovery” of Hegel also seems to have taken place in the early 1950s (Gross 2008, 112). 3 Rorty was to pursue this theme also in relation to Harold Bloom’s thesis of the “anxiety of influence” of creative artists (Rorty 1989, ch. 2). 4 It might be argued here that with his radically redescriptivist stance, Rorty simply could not maintain a distinction between the “actual” Hegel and any particular description. The distinction might then be redrawn between Rorty’s description of Hegel’s thought and another description – Hegel’s own. 5 In the Preface to his Process in Reality, Whitehead asks whether or not his approach to cosmology there might not be a “transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a Realistic basis” (Whitehead 1978 [1929], viii). David Hall is one of the few commentators on Rorty to stress the continuing influence of Whitehead’s “aesthetic pluralism” in Rorty’s philosophy in Hall (1993, ch. 2). 6 For example, Pippin (1989), Pinkard (1994), and Redding (1996). For an overview of the field of contemporary Hegel interpretation, see Redding (2015). 7 I have criticized the Kojèvean interpretation of Hegel on which this is based in Redding (1996, 119–22). 8 This is, I think, behind the common assumption shared by Rorty that Hegel’s metaphysics is committed to an end point at which “subject” and “object” eventually achieve identity. The theory of recognition, however, has, by this time, essentially changed the meaning of these two concepts beyond recognition. 9 In “The Subjective Principle and the Linguistic Turn” Rorty takes Whitehead’s solution to rely on a type of knowledge that is not expressible in language. Rorty was later to edit a book (Rorty 1967) on the methodological linguistic turn in philosophy. 10 See especially the essays making up chapters 6, 8 and 10 of Rorty (2014). 11 Thus the opening chapters are entitled “The Invention of the Mind” and “Persons without Minds.” 12 In the later “Davidson between Wittgenstein and Tarski” (Rorty 1997), Rorty is less concerned with Davidson’s extensionalism, but his treatment of the intentional, and the “intensional,” throughout this period seems just as accepting of the default extensionalism that he had earlier defended. 13 Thus Rorty sees no difference between the ways new theories or paradigms can replace old, and the way new ways of talking about another’s mental states can replace their original vocabulary. 14 The Kojèvean theme of struggle is all too apparent in Rorty’s adaptation of Davidson’s account of radical interpretation when he likens the mutual copings of radical interpreter and exotic tribe member trying to make sense of each other’s strange noises as “coping with each other as we might cope with mangoes or boa constrictors – we are trying not to be taken by surprise” (Rorty 1989, 14). 15 Hegel switches between the examples “the rose is red” and “the rose is fragrant.” For simplicity sake, I will keep to the former as no logical point hangs on the difference between examples. 16 Compare with “‘The rose is fragrant.’ This fragrance is not some indeterminate fragrance or other, but the fragrance of the rose. The predicate is therefore a singular” (Hegel 2010, 560). 17 “From the side of this universal sphere, the judgment is still positive” (Hegel 2010, 565).

265

Paul Redding

18 Here Hegel draws on features of the logical structure of perceptual judgments later pointed out by the Cambridge logician and Russell‐critic, W. E. Johnson, when he called such predicates the determinants of some general determinable. Johnson (1921, ch. 11). Prior notes the non‐extensional nature of this relation in Prior (1968, 94–5). 19 Moreover, what counts as a determinable of any entity depends up what sort of entity it is. While numbers can be characterized as either odd or even, but not as either red, or blue, or yellow, or … roses can be characterized as either red, or blue, or yellow, or … but not as either odd or even. 20 The “singularity” of the predicate of the judgment of determinate being had required that the subject term be a universal. 21 In this, Hegel follows Leibniz who had treated intensionally understood sentence forms as translatable into extensional forms and vice versa. In contrast, Rorty accepts the reductionistic translation of intentional to extensional sentences  –  a path that leads from Russell through Tarski and Quine to Davidson. 22 In fact the process by which the syllogism has become contentful need not seem mysterious since the process in which judgments and syllogisms have been acquiring content had been at work from the start of the subjective logic. It had been the alternating “intensional” and “extensional” steps of the development that had brought an initially independently conceived “being” into thought. 23 Prior had nominated Findlay as the “founding father of modern tense logic” (Prior 1968, 91). 24 On the seminal role played by Prior in the emergence of modal logic and modal metaphysics in the 1960s see Copeland (2002).

References Brandom, Robert B. 2009. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copeland, B. Jack. 2002. “The Genesis of Possible Worlds Semantics.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 3: 99–137. Findlay, John N. 1941. “Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 19(3): 216–35. —. 1985. “My Life: 1903–1973.” In Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, edited by Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin, and Merold Westphal, 1–51. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hall, David L. 1993. Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism. Albany: SUNY Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right, edited by Allen W. Wood, translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. The Science of Logic. Translated and edited by George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, W. E. 1921. Logic: Part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kojève, A. 1969. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, edited by A. Bloom, translated by J. H. Nichols, Jr. New York: Basic Books. Perry, John. 1979. “The Problem of the Essential Indexical.” Noûs 13(1): 3–21. Pinkard, Terry. 1994. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

266

RORTY ON HEGEL ON THE MIND IN HISTORY

Pippin, Robert. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self‐Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prior, Arthur N. 1968. “Intentionality and Intensionality, II.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary volumes) 42: 91–106. —. 2003. Papers on Time and Tense, edited by Per Hasle, Peter Ohrstrom, Torben Braüner, and Jack Copeland, new edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Redding, Paul. 1996. Hegel’s Hermeneutics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —. 2015. “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel/. Rorty, Richard. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1997. “Davidson Between Wittgenstein and Tarski.” Critica, Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofia 30(88): 49–71. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2014. Mind, Language and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean‐Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: The Philosophical Library. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1958. “Intentionality and the Mental.” In Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell, Vol 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and a Study Guide by Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Charles. 1975. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1978 [1929]. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, corrected edition. New York: The Free Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Further Reading Prior, Arthur N. and K. Fine. 1977. Worlds, Times and Selves, London: Duckworth.

267

16 Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche STEVEN MICHELS

Nietzsche is a regular if not constant presence in all of Rorty’s writings. Even when it is only in passing, Nietzsche always appears as a preeminent thinker and force to be reckoned with. Rorty often identified Dewey as his “principle philosophic hero” (2000, xii), but in an interview with Ian Hacking in 1979 (cited in Gross 2008, 317), Rorty admitted it was difficult for him to talk back to Nietzsche (or Heidegger) and see him as an equal. Elsewhere, Rorty calls Nietzsche a “genius” (Prado 2003, 228). Rorty did not call himself a Nietzschean, but Nietzsche undoubtedly ranks high among his intellectual forerunners. But to say that Nietzsche influenced Rorty is not to say much. It is impossible not to take Nietzsche seriously and still be called a philosopher. Philosophy has been called a footnote to Plato; it could also be called an appendix to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s legacy looms large, even among those who reject him. To what extent did Rorty follow Nietzsche? What did Rorty owe to him? Determining what Rorty took from Nietzsche depends in large part on how he read Nietzsche. Accordingly, we will devote the first two sections to what Rorty said of Nietzsche then give Nietzsche a chance to respond.

1  Songs of the Self The longest and most detailed treatment Rorty offers of Nietzsche comes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, which was based on a series of lectures he gave in England in 1986 and 1987. Rorty’s understanding of Nietzsche, he explains, owes a great deal to Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as Literature, which came out the previous year (Rorty 1989, 27n). It is the only one of Rorty’s books in which Nietzsche appears in the title of a chapter. It is the central chapter in the second of three sections, entitled

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

268

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

“Self‐creation and affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.” Rorty lists them not chronologically, but in order of preference. The purpose of Contingency, Rorty explains in the Introduction, is to give a glimpse of how the world might look once we abandon the search for a theory that combines the need for self‐creation with solidarity. As Rorty sees it, the end of metaphysics made room for a philosophy of the self, where we are able to describe ourselves in our own language and on our own terms. “[I]n abandoning the traditional notion of truth,” Rorty writes, “Nietzsche did not abandon the idea of discovering the causes of our being what we are … Rather, he saw self‐knowledge as self‐creation” (1989, 27). That is why, for instance, Rorty does not distinguish between Nietzsche and his Zarathustra (1989, 79). Zarathustra is not a fictional character as much as he is the expression of Nietzsche’s true self in literary form. At its root, Nietzsche’s project, like Proust’s, is jettisoning traditional and existing contingencies for individual and created ones. Both men are “paradigm nonmetaphysicians,” Rorty explains, “because they so evidently cared only about how they looked to themselves, not how they looked to the universe” (1989, 79). The process itself was in part unconscious and a sort of contingency, which would have troubled a metaphysician. On the other hand, Proust permits metaphysical positions as expressions of life, which the “antimetaphysical theorist” Nietzsche would not have done (Rorty 1989, 98). Rorty holds Nietzsche in high regard throughout, as an exemplar (along with Kierkegaard, Proust, and Heidegger, among others) of what “private perfection – a self‐ created, autonomous, human life – can be like.” Conversely, Rorty identifies Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls as thinker‐citizens engaged in a social activity. The private and public approaches can never be synthesized, he instructs, but we should recognize them as “kinds of tools” that serve different but essential purposes (1989, xiv). Instead, Rorty offers the image of a “liberal ironist.” His definition of liberalism, borrowed from Judith Shklar, he notes, is based on the notion that “cruelty is the worst thing we do” (Rorty 1989, xv). An ironist, Rorty explains, is the sort of person who “faces up to the contingency of his or her own most central beliefs and desires” (1989, xv). Such a person has grave doubts about his or her present vocabulary to describe a particular situation and makes no special claim in doing so. Nietzsche gets some credit here, as the philosopher who put an end to Plato’s will to truth. As Rorty writes, “It was Nietzsche who first explicitly suggested that we drop the whole idea of ‘knowing the truth’” (1989, 27). For Nietzsche, truth was not a value as much as it was a “prejudice” and a problem to overcome. Instead, he advocated for, and indeed practiced, what he called “perspectivism,” which denied our ability to have certain knowledge about the universe and our place in it. Hence Rorty’s preference for the term “post‐Nietzschean” over “postmodern” (Rorty 1991a, 1–2). In the chapter “Private Irony and Liberal Hope,” Rorty describes the differences between ironists and literary critics. Literary critics have read more widely and, as a consequence, have a greater range and scope of experiences and vocabularies. “They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around,” he writes (1989, 80). In that respect, ironists can learn from literary critics, who have an ability to bring together seemingly opposed voices in a way that a theorist could never do (Rorty 1989, 92–3). Ironist philosophers have no strict devotion to particular descriptions but can appreciate the purpose of a multitude of words, which 269

Steven Michels

is why they have not done much, nor can they do much, to advance a liberal agenda. Their work is private work, Rorty explains, and not suited for public liberals. Nietzsche’s perspectivism gives him an advantage over Kantian philosophers who are too devoted to truth to find any value in more than one position, Rorty instructs. But what serves him in private puts him at odds with a liberal public. Indeed, Nietzsche appears in the first paragraph of Contingency as a skeptic of our commonality and sociability, represented in the morality of Platonism and Christianity. The goal, Rorty explains, is not to question the truth of solidarity, but to “create a more expansive sense of solidarity than we presently have” (1989, 196). Taking solidarity and for granted means taking for granted the liberal position on cruelty. If Nietzsche went too far with his skepticism about solidarity and morality, he did not go far enough with his skepticism about his attempt to supplant Platonic philosophy and Western metaphysics with a metaphysics of his own. The scope and intensity of his critique itself had metaphysical implications, Rorty contends. Nietzsche, like Hegel and Heidegger, maintains that modernity has ended and “must be replaced by something new and equally big” (1989, 101). As Rorty has it, Nietzsche is at his best as a skeptic and no‐sayer – for example, in his historicist and relativistic attacks on Plato and Kant. Nietzsche’s error begins when he becomes the teacher of the will to power and eternal recurrence, his attempt at a consistent positive philosophy. He is, as Heidegger disparagingly called him, “the last metaphysician” (Rorty 1989, 106). Nietzsche’s anti‐ metaphysical stance worked in theory but failed in practice. “He thinks that his own historicism will save him from this betrayal, but it does not,” Rorty concludes (1989, 105). Unlike the ironist liberal, the ironist theorist “still wants the kind of power which comes from a closer relation to somebody very large,” Rorty writes; “this is the one reason why he is rarely a liberal” (1989, 102). Ironist novelists, by contrast, are satisfied with something that is different, even if it is only a personal or stylistic difference. Nietzsche could have been more consistent had he been more like Proust in not seeing his predecessors as inherently authoritative. Indeed, the scope of Nietzsche’s mastery of philosophy and history, we might add, makes him especially prone to this kind of misstep. He could have been content with merely redescribing them without the need to overcome or supplant them. Nietzsche wanted his will to power to orient and fix philosophy and morality as it had been understood in the West. But it is an opposition we can dispense with, Rorty explains, once we “abandon the notion that ‘reason’ names a healing, reconciling, unifying power – the source of human solidarity.” If solidarity is understood instead as a “fortunate happenstance creation of modern times,” then we are not required to give a non‐metaphysical or nonhistorical explanation for how or why it exists (1989, 68). For Rorty, the death of God was not a tragedy as much as it was an opportunity for humanity to realize its own divinity: To say, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, is to say that we serve no higher purposes. The Nietzschean substitution of self‐creation for discovery substitutes a picture of the hungry generations treading each other down for a picture of humanity approaching closer and closer to the light. A culture in which Nietzschean metaphors were literalized would be one which took for granted that philosophical problems are as temporary as poetic problems,

270

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

that there are no problems which bind the generations together into a single natural kind called “humanity.” A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new worlds, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species. (Rorty 1989, 20)

Freud, following Nietzsche, calls for us to abandon worship of every kind, treating everything, including how we describe ourselves and our communities as a random occurrence. “To reach this point would be, in Freud’s words, to ‘treat chance as worthy of determining our fate,’” Rorty writes (1989, 22). It is “sheer contingency” of language and thought. Nietzsche, especially the early Nietzsche, points us in that direction, but the course is redirected to Plato once he proclaims the will to power as a philosophic truth. “We do not need to replace religion with a philosophic account of a healing and unifying power which will do the work once done by God,” Rorty concludes (1989, 68). Despite his objection to the illiberal and metaphysical aspects of Nietzsche’s teaching, Rorty does not see him as a failure – far from it. “Different writers want to do different things,” he writes. Nietzsche, like Heidegger, sought “autonomy and sublimity” (1989, 170). In that respect, Rorty asserts, Nietzsche, succeeded – and brilliantly so.

2  Selected Affinities There are essential passages about Nietzsche elsewhere in Rorty’s writings. Most interesting, perhaps, is in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It is remarkable for its scant treatment of Nietzsche. He is not ignored, but he is certainly not afforded the space and the attention he deserves, given the purpose of the book and the influence Nietzsche had on this part of Rorty’s philosophy. It is possible that a pre‐Nehamas Rorty did not know what to do with Nietzsche and his politics. “The aim of the book,” Rorty explains of Mirror, “is to undermine the reader’s confidence in ‘the mind’ as something about which one should have a ‘philosophical’ view, in ‘knowledge’ as something about which there ought to be a ‘theory’ and which has ‘foundations,’ and in ‘philosophy’ as it has been conceived since Kant” (1979, 7). Rorty is not going to provide an original or reworked theory on these subjects. His goal is not constructive, but therapeutic. There were some protests against the prevailing philosophic tradition – he mentions Nietzsche and William James – but they were ineffective, if only because the philosophy that was practiced in opposition to it became a sort of individualized religion, complete with its own language and logos. It was Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey who attempted to give philosophy a proper foundation  –  a new theory of representation, nonscientific categories, a naturalized history, respectively. Their mature writing spoke out against such foundational temptations, and it was “therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than to supply him with a new philosophical program” (Rorty 1979, 5–6). Nietzsche first appears in opposition to Kant, a position Nietzsche would no doubt endorse, but he is not afforded his status as the end of modernity that Rorty grants to him elsewhere. In his place, Rorty substitutes others who have been critical of systematic 271

Steven Michels

philosophy  –  namely, Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Ryle, Malcolm, Putnam, and Kuhn (Rorty 1979, 4). Rorty’s affinity with Nietzsche is more on display later in the text, when Rorty discusses the difference between revolutionary philosophers, who are either systematic or edifying. Systematic thinkers, like Descartes, Kant, and Husserl, wish to found new schools of thinking to displace the old ways. It may have its own language, but it is constructive and offers arguments. It can regularized and institutionalized. Rorty wants to defend a different kind of philosophy, the edifying kind, that is neither systematic nor nihilistic. The key difference is not stylistic, however; systematic philosophers aim to extend their reach beyond their lifetime. Although Rorty rescues Nietzsche from the charge that what he is doing is not philosophy, he still identifies Nietzsche with the edifying camp (Rorty 1979, 369). Rorty’s more mature works confront Nietzsche more directly and more consistently, and in a manner mostly consistent with what appears in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, for example, continues Nehamas’s influence on how Rorty read Nietzsche. Quoting Nietzsche’s dictum that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors,” Nietzsche appears here as seeing philosophy more as a “test of human character” than as the simple quest for truth. “Nietzsche hoped that eventually there might be human beings who could and did think of truth in this way, but who still liked themselves, who saw themselves as good people for whom solidarity was enough,” Rorty writes (1991a, 32). The problem, however, is that Nietzsche was not the right vehicle for determining what would come next. “Nietzsche ran together his diagnosis of philosophical realism as an expression of fear and resentment with his own resentful idiosyncratic idealizations of silence, solitude, and violence,” Rorty contends (1991a, 32–3). This too Rorty adopts from Nehamas, who says he has no interest in “the miserable little man who wrote [Nietzsche’s books], but with the philosopher who emerges through them, the magnificent character those texts constitute and manifest” (Nehamas 1985, 234). We should read Nietzsche even when we disagree with him because of the grand and sweeping nature of his literary creation. The distance Rorty puts between himself and Nietzsche’s public teaching is especially on display in the chapter “Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” where Rorty pairs Nietzsche with St. Ignatius Loyola – an odd couple, if there ever was one. “We do not conclude that Nietzsche and Loyola are crazy because they hold unusual views on certain ‘fundamental’ topics,” Rorty writes; “rather, we conclude this only after extensive attempts at an exchange of political views have made us realize that we are not going to get anywhere” (1991a, 191). The conflict between men like these and our times is simply too great to be meaningful. But since it is a conclusion based on a weighing of the facts, it is not a prejudice. It is simply a liberal intolerance for illiberalism. The dispute between the theorists of power and the champions of dignity and rights has been decided in the latter’s favor. In a footnote to the main text, Rorty, rather illuminatingly, cites Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimation of Modernity, which, unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, he notes, did not view the Enlightenment as a backward slide (Rorty 1991a, 33). Rorty is more sympathetic to Blumenberg, which is emblematic of his problem with Nietzsche and Heidegger. The Enlightenment, like science and liberal democracy, is not fundamentally flawed; it brought with it the means and the hope for 272

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

real progress. The error lies when its limitations are ignored or the expectations about what it can do are exaggerated. Rorty’s public liberalism is more on display in Achieving Our Country, which is among his more overtly political works. Its purpose is to point fingers at the theorizing Left who are content to sit on the sidelines of reform. In their place, Rorty wants people of agency, specifically a Left that will “tell inspiring stories about episodes and figures in the nation’s past” without being overly concerned with the truth in American history (1998b, 3). The Left ought to be the side of hope and vision, not merely content with jousting with the Right (who fear change) on petty debates about culture. The Left should not side with Marx in preferring knowledge to hope. Instead, Rorty wants us to follow Dewey is seeing democracy as “a kind of religion” and fashioning a philosophy that would support it (1998b, 9). Nietzsche is named only four times. The first two are in passing – with regard to how Dewey agrees with Nietzsche’s anti‐metaphysics (Rorty 1998b, 34) and as someone young people might aspire to be (1998b, 131). Rorty also mentions Nietzsche, along with Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, as critics of the Enlightenment who have inspired cultural critics on the Left and how liberalism and humanism are consistent with those traditions (1998b, 96). The most revealing appearance comes in an endnote, where Rorty identifies Nietzsche as an exception to those who see democracy as an essential component of human progress (1998b, 142). Rorty squares the circle as it were by seeing a demarcation between Nietzsche’s philosophy and his politics. “Nietzsche’s contempt for democracy was an adventitious extra, inessential to his overall philosophical outlook,” he contends in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, 31). There is no path from foundationalism or antifoundationalism that leads directly to or away from democracy. Instead, Rorty works backward. Nietzsche’s objections to democracy are undermined by the fact that he shares with others a sort of pragmatic and romantic utilitarian will to happiness, rather than truth (Rorty 2007, 33–4). Rorty came to follow René Berthelot, a dedicated Cartesian, in putting Nietzsche in with James, Dewey, and others into the pragmatist camp (Rorty 2007, 27). Rorty’s first mention of this occurs in Essays on Heidegger and others. “The most that an original figure can hope to do is to recontextualize his or her predecessors,” he writes (1991b, 2). For Rorty, Nietzsche’s new context is the American pragmatism. “I see Nietzsche as the figure who did the most to convince European intellectuals of the doctrines which were purveyed to Americans by James and Dewey,” he writes (Rorty 1991b, 2). Excepting his hostility to Christianity, Nietzsche’s “How the ‘True World’ Became a Fable” is on par with how Dewey viewed the intellectual progress of Europe, Rorty claims. And since Nietzsche, unlike Foucault, for example, encourages people to invent themselves, it is easy to view pragmatism as an outgrowth of Nietzsche (Rorty 1991b, 194). In “The Humanistic Individual,” a chapter in Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty explains the place that Nietzsche has in a pragmatist’s journey. It is, no doubt, Rorty’s own story. An early stage of Enlightenment comes when one reads Nietzsche and begins thinking of all these dualisms as just so many metaphors for the contrast between an imagined state of total power, mastery and control and one’s own present impotence. A further state is

273

Steven Michels

reached when, upon reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, one comes down with the giggles. At that point, with a bit of help from Freud, one begins to hear talk about the Will to Power as just a high‐falutin euphemism for the male’s hope of bullying females into submission, or the child’s hope of getting back at mommy and daddy. (Rorty 2000, 133)

In other words, Nietzsche is a nice place to visit, but you should not want to live there. Rorty continues to mention Nietzsche favorably and minimizing the differences he has with him in The Future of Religion. Rorty joins Vattimo in emphasizing how the search for truth is nothing more than the search for “intersubjective agreement” (Rorty 2005, 36). Rorty sees Nietzsche, along with Heidegger, James, and Dewey, agreeing on this fundamental point, and he includes Nietzsche in a long line of great Western critics, from Copernicus to Freud, who in their service to humanity were in essence “carrying out works of love” (Rorty 2005, 39). Rorty appreciates what the triumph of science over religion has meant for progress but stops short of embracing a society that has completely rid itself of religion. We might have a religious impulse that cannot be extinguished, and perhaps it should not be. The point is not to end religion as much as it is to save it from proclaiming a metaphysical doctrine or even reacting to secular metaphysical theories, he argues (2005, 37). Rorty wants religion without the need for God, just like he wants philosophy without the need for truth. Rorty claims that “Nietzsche thinks religious belief is intellectually disreputable” (2007, 34), but reads him as a polytheist. “Polytheism … is pretty much coextensive with romantic utilitarianism,” he explains. “For once one sees no way of ranking human needs other than playing them off against one another, human happiness becomes all that matters” (2007, 30). This means that poetry replaces religion and poets take the place of priests. On this Nietzsche and James agree with Mill and Arnold, he concludes. Nietzsche was wrong, Rorty tells us, to make a direct and causal link between Christianity and Platonism; it was simply a historical coincidence that their idea of law as the law were similar. Consequently, to end the former is not necessarily to end the latter. It is possible to imagine, Rorty writes, “Christianity as a strong poem, one poem among many, can be as socially useful as Christianity backed up by the Platonist claim that God and Truth are interchangeable terms” (2007, 33). Christianity could be a social and moral teaching, without all of its metaphysical theology. The bathwater might be metaphysical, but the baby is not. Rorty does not say that Christianity is true, but unlike Nietzsche, he cannot say that it is bad. Rorty, like Nietzsche, is pragmatic about religion. In fact, Christianity, or at least post‐metaphysical version of it, could be helpful or even essential to Rorty’s project. “My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one,” Rorty writes, “is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law” (2005, 40). Both Nietzsche and Rorty see utility as the standard, but disagree on whether Christianity passes the test. Rorty’s vision is highly egalitarian, free, and educated, even if he has no idea about how such a thing could be established. Christianity is ripe with liberal metaphors and a language of solidarity and compassion. If the root of Christianity is loving thy neighbor, then it is on par with Rorty’s liberalism and the progressive move from cruelty. 274

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

Christianity might not do much for the mystery of truth, but it could go a long way to solving the mystery of love.

3 Zarathustra Strikes Back Of course, there is more than one Nietzsche. How does Rorty’s Nietzsche fit with what others have said of him? And what might Nietzsche say about Rorty’s reading and about Rorty’s project, more generally? The difference between Nietzsche and Rorty is most striking concerning his affirmative philosophy, specifically the will to power. As Rorty has it, “the world does not provide us with any criterion of choice between alternate metaphors, that we can only compare languages or metaphors with one another, not with something beyond language called ‘fact’” (1989, 20). Nietzsche would disagree. For him, truth as a standard is pointless and dangerous. But that does not mean that every opinion or perspective is equally valid. The standard for any doctrine is the extent to which it serves life. Rorty was right to cull the will to power as a philosophic doctrine. Nietzsche intended it to be one. In Beyond Good and Evil, he calls it the “the primordial fact of all history” (1989a, 204). It is a non‐metaphysical but universal doctrine because it serves life, not truth. It is not true because it is tested by reason or science; it is true because it is demonstrated by nature. It is self‐refuting, which means it is also self‐affirming. Rorty sees Nietzsche’s philosophy as too wedded to truth, but Nietzsche would see Rorty’s teaching as too determined by democracy. While Nietzsche opposes the influence of democracy on philosophy, Rorty uses democracy, or a belief in the equality of individuals and “intersubjective agreement” as the standard for his “truth.” For Nietzsche, consensus is no standard by which to judge anything. More often than not, popularity is the mark of something harmful and thus false, rather than healthy and strong and thus true. Truth – or what he more often calls “reality” – exists for Nietzsche independently of opinion, shared or otherwise. Truth might be too high of a standard for philosophy, but the sharing of a view, however sublime it could sometimes be, is too low of one. Nietzsche’s antidemocratic position was neither incidental nor trivial. It is not, as Rorty put it, “occasional antidemocratic frothings” (1998a, 325). It was at the heart of Nietzsche’s teaching. If life is the will to power, then democracy is the will to weakness. Nietzsche and Rorty also come to opposite conclusions about religion and the usefulness of Christianity. Rorty is more of Christian than Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is more religious. Neither one deemed Christianity true, but Rorty found it useful and therefore good. For Rorty, substituting a moral duty to reality for a moral duty to God is hardly an improvement, but he found the practice of Christianity beneficial to human progress. Nietzsche opposes Christianity and democracy despite their ability to achieve and maintain consensus. Nietzsche sees the value of strong gods, like the kind we see with the Greeks and the God of the Old Testament, who are strong and serve life. The Christian God is too paternalistic and weak – in other words, dead. But a God that inspires fear through strength is a God worth believing in. Nietzsche sought to replace modern morality, where what is strong is considered evil, with a morality that again recognizes strength as good. And rather than seeing cruelty as vicious or wrong, Nietzsche sees cruelty – that is, the permission to exert power – as 275

Steven Michels

a source of supreme joy. “Without cruelty there is not festival,” he writes in On the Genealogy of Morals, “thus the longest and most ancient part of history teaches – and in punishment there is so much that is festive!” (1989b, 67). If Rorty’s liberalism is defined by its aversion to cruelty, then Nietzsche is an illiberal of the highest order. Rorty rejects Habermas’s suggestion that we ignore Nietzsche because he does nothing to advance liberal democracy. Instead, Rorty views Nietzsche as a private philosopher. “I read people like Heidegger and Nietzsche as good private philosophers, and [Habermas] reads them as bad public philosophers,” Rorty explains (1998a, 310). But it is a dichotomy Nietzsche would reject. For him, philosophy is a public enterprise, or at least a private endeavor that aims at large‐scale public implications. Nietzsche thought in terms of civilizations. To reduce him to the level of a navel‐gazing scribbler, as Nehamas and Rorty do, is to miss what he was trying to do. Rorty seems sometimes unduly influenced by certain readers – Nehamas’s literary reading and Berthelot’s pragmatist are the two Rorty makes specific reference to – and a curious emphasis to certain parts of his corpus, which we might trace back to Heidegger. Rorty is fond, for example, of following Heidegger’s lead in reducing Nietzsche’s truth to a “mobile army of metaphors,” a line from “On Truth and Lie in an Extra‐moral Sense,” a posthumously published fragment. The same goes for Nietzsche’s “inverted Platonism,” which Heidegger makes use of, which comes from an early draft of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book. Rorty undoubtedly has a clear grasp of Nietzsche’s thought, but his engagement with Nietzsche’s most important texts are curiously absent. It gives the impression that Rorty went out of his way to find the Nietzsche that suited him best. This method, as some suggest, forms a pattern of sorts. As Margolis writes, “Rorty tends to favor on particular nerve in the thought of each, which he needs for his own philosophic mosaic” (2002, 59). In other words, Rorty’s interpretations are selective or slanted based on his own philosophic biases and needs. Every thinker is guilty of this to a certain extent, we must admit, but Rorty’s intellectual prowess allows him to be especially adept at it. Rorty’s reading of Nietzsche illustrates an overarching problem of literary creation. As Nehamas has it, “The virtues of life are comparable to the virtues of good writing – style, connectedness, grace, elegance – and also, we must not forget, sometimes getting it right” (Carrier 1998). Rorty sees literary expression as the means to replace philosophy’s inherent disputes with something conversational (Rorty 1979, 170), but not everyone’s life is literature. A life of lived metaphors could mean greater solidarity and freedom, but it could also bring with it confusion and conflict and an even more fracturing of our politics. There is some nascent research suggesting the literature can make people more empathetic (Kidd and Castano 2013), but there is no clear link between simply reading literature and becoming better citizens. It is resolved, Stow argues, to the extent that literature can be made a tool of intellectuals (2007, 74). That solves the problem of citizenship but in an inegalitarian manner. There is also research showing how Facebook and social media can make people depressed (Steers, Wickham, and Acitelli 2014). Nietzsche’s “new philosophers” have the stuff of strong poets, but there is every reason to suggest they are few and far between and in the future. 276

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

Karl Ove Knausgård has a series of autobiographical books that have become international bestsellers, well beyond his native Norway. But his life is a struggle – the series is titled Min Kamp – not a celebration. The most significant subplot involves Knausgård’s challenged relationship with his father, but he also struggles with daily chores and the basic activities of life. His style is notable more for its quantity (36,000 words) than its quality. He is perhaps read more because he is doing what others would not or could not do. In fact, what he is doing is not that difficult. Knausgård’s family tried to halt publication of the text (Preston 2013). The alternative is that we censor ourselves so that our narratives are inauthentic or meaningless. For as much as he wants to diminish the authority of texts, Rorty focuses almost exclusively on the written word. As Stow puts it, “Rorty does offer a justification for his position, but it is one based on a reading of certain philosophic texts, one that eschews the value of argument” (2007, 23). It is a serious analytical prejudice to conclude that something has culture import based solely on its appearance on the page. Relatedly, it is entirely possible that the strongest and surest poets have unliterary lives. Remember that Plato’s Republic ends not with the rule of philosophy, but with a morality tale about Er and his joy over being able to choose a private life where he minds his own business. It is neither philosophic nor especially poetic, but it would be decent or even just, meaningful, and in every important respect, true. It is, no doubt, democratic to think that everyone is capable of self‐creation, irrespective of ability, but a sociological analysis might question Rorty’s ignorance of circumstances related to race, class, and gender. Roger Scruton wrote, “Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves” (2007). Rorty might disagree with Nietzsche’s and Plato’s elitism, but at least theirs is overt and coherent. Finally, Nietzsche might take issue with how Rorty situates himself in the history of philosophy. Nietzsche put an end to the war between philosophy and poetry by blurring their aims (truth and beauty, respectively) and setting life as the standard by which they are both judged. But Rorty resurrected the battle  –  and on Plato’s terms. As Farmer argues: “To say, as Rorty does, that the pursuit of Truth has not really gotten us anywhere … is somewhat self‐refuting. For it is obvious that Rorty’s position could not have emerged out of anything but the epistemological tradition” (1998, 219–20). In other words, Rorty is guilty of doing what he charged Nietzsche with – namely, taking the metaphysical philosophy too seriously. The danger of elevating the philosophic argument was not lost on Rorty. Concerning his appreciation for Dewey, Rorty writes, “I think it would be a good idea for philosophers to bourgeoisify themselves, to stop trying to rise to the spiritual level at which Plato and Nietzsche confront each other” (2007, 79). But Rorty claims philosophy’s failures is based on its poor record with regard to truth. Rorty’s aim was to place politics over philosophy, but he failed to abandon truth as a test and ushered in instead a form of resurrected Platonism. In that sense, Rorty cannot help himself from dragging around Plato’s corpse. 277

Steven Michels

It is a difference perhaps best explained by the distinction Nietzsche makes among the different forms of nihilism. It is true that, as conservatives and Christians point out, Nietzsche shares with Rorty a theoretical nihilism. Neither lays claim to any moral absolutes, in the way they understand it. But Nietzsche would see Rorty’s nihilism as passive, whereas the nihilism he and his new philosophers advocate is active in its ­service to life. As Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil: “there may actually be puritanical fanatics of conscience who prefer even a certain nothing to an uncertain something to lie down on – and die. But this is nihilism and the sign of a despairing, mortally weary soul  –  however courageous the gestures of such a virtue may look” (Nietzsche 1989a, 16). From Nietzsche’s point of view, Rorty is the logical but dangerous conclusion of Plato’s project. Rorty prefers the term post‐Nietzschean to postmodernity, when discussing the philosophy of the age. But to the extent that he revisits the once‐settled issue of truth as a standard for what we call philosophy, he is pre‐Nietzschean. Another option would have been for Rorty to read Plato like Laurence Lampert did  –  that is, as a Nietzschean philosopher and creator of values. As Lampert explains in his analysis of Leo Strauss, “This marriage of philosophy and politics, insight and action, is Platonic political philosophy” (Lampert 1997, 160). In that sense, Nietzsche’s objection is not to Plato, but to the particular value (truth) that Plato favors. And Nietzsche rescues philosophy from the unavoidable attacks a dead‐ended Platonism would face from critics like Rorty and his band of passive nihilists. Rorty avoids a return to metaphysics, but the means (don’t be cruel) and the end (an improved future) he comes up with are too vague to be useful. Rorty’s consistent denial of power is itself a power play. Truth might be mobile, but it is also an army. Intended to serve democracy, it could just as easily do the opposite. Nietzsche was the first to identify the problem Plato presented to modernity – and to recognize that it must be resolved not for the sake of the self, but for the sake of civilization. The solution he offered did not need to be true, as much as it needed to be good. Rorty decided the opposite – one that was true but not exactly helpful. And in a battle between Rorty’s democracy of poets and Plato’s aristocracy of philosophers, let there be no doubt as to which camp Nietzsche would favor.

4 Conclusion Rorty owes Nietzsche a great deal for the strength and scope of his no‐saying. Rorty’s antifoundational project owes a significant debt to the success of Nietzsche’s private successes and his open rebellion on truth. Nietzsche made it easier for other ironists, to be sure, but insofar as his skepticism was rooted in a belief in the will to power as a fact of nature, he was overzealous in his objection to metaphysics. Indeed, his objection was itself a kind of metaphysics. Nietzsche’s teaching of self‐creation and self‐affirmation may have been exemplary, but in terms of community and solidarity, it is a disaster, and Rorty is at great pains to come to terms with what Nietzsche has to say about liberal humanism, democracy, and Christianity. 278

Rorty and the Mirror of Nietzsche

Rorty had ample opportunity to reject the philosopher behind the will to power, but instead he sought to tame him, taking what he needed and diminishing the rest. When Nietzsche’s politics are not at issue, his perspectivism makes him a powerful ally.

References Carrier, David. 1998. “Alexander Nehamas.” BOMB Magazine 65 (Fall). Farmer, Frank. 1998. “Foundational Thuggery and a Rhetoric of Subsumption,” In Rhetoric in Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy, edited by Michael Bernard‐Donals and Richard R. Glejzer, 195–223. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gross, N. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Kidd, David Comer and Emanuele Castano. 2013. “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” Science 342(6156): 377–80. Lampert, Laurence. 1997. Leo Strauss and Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Margolis, Joseph. 2002. Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989a. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. —. 1989b. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecco Homo. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Prado, C. G. 2003. “A Conversation with Richard Rorty.” Symposium: The Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 7(2): 227–31. Preston, John. 2013. “The Murky World of Literary Libel.” The Telegraph, July 14. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991a. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991b. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998a. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998b. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2000. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2005. “Anticlericalism and Atheism.” In The Future of Religion, edited by Santiago Zabala, 29–41. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scruton, Roger. 2007. “Richard Rorty’s Legacy.” OpenDemocracy.net. www.opendemocracy.net/ democracy_power/people/richard_rorty_legacy (accessed April 17, 2015). Steers, Mai‐Ly N., Robert E. Wickham, and Linda K. Acitelli. 2014. “Seeing Everyone Else’s Highlight Reels: How Facebook Usage is Linked to Depressive Symptoms.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 33(8): 701–31. Stow, Simon. 2007. Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

279

Steven Michels

Further Reading Koelb, Clayton. 1990. Nietzsche as Postmodernist: Essays Pro and Contra. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Lampert, Laurence. 1989. Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rosen, Stanley. 2002. Ancients and Moderns: Rethinking Modernity. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Schacht, Richard. 1983. Nietzsche. New York: Routledge.

280

17 The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy MARK OKRENT

1 Introduction In a … [1976] article Richard Rorty has attempted to juxtapose Heidegger and Dewey. While finding significant points of agreement between the two, and by implication praising much of Heidegger’s work, Rorty also suggests a series of criticisms of Heidegger. The problems which Rorty finds with Heidegger can, I think, all be reduced to one basic criticism, which has two main sides. In Rorty’s view Heidegger can not really differentiate between Being and beings in the way that he wants, and thus can give no sense to the word ‘Being’ other than the old metaphysical one. That is, Being and the ontological difference are metaphysical remnants, the last evaporating presence of the Platonic distinction of the real world and the apparent world. This is indicated in two ways. First, Rorty feels that Heidegger can make no real distinction between philosophy, which they both agree has ended, and ‘thinking’ in the specifically Heideggerian sense. Second, Rorty claims that it is impossible to distinguish ontic from ontological becoming. That is, the various epochs of Being which Heidegger distinguishes are, for Rorty, parasitic upon and reducible to the ordinary history of man’s activity in relation to things, material and social. As such, Heidegger’s account of ontological epochs is a species of idealistic reflection upon the history of man’s activity upon things. This paper attempts to reflect upon the adequacy of both main parts of Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger. Is it possible to differentiate Being and beings in such a way as to allow for epochs of Being which are not simply reducible to ordinary historical periods? If not, then we will have reason to accept Rorty’s criticism of the ontological difference, and hence of Heidegger’s formulation in regard to Being. If this distinction can be maintained then one major element of Rorty’s pragmatist criticism of Heidegger will need to be abandoned. Is it possible to distinguish the matter of Heidegger’s thought from the Mark Okrent, “The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy,” pp. 500–17 from The Monist 64:4 (1981).

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

281

Mark Okrent

concerns of philosophy in such a way as to preserve this thought given the end of ­philosophy? If not, then Heidegger’s thinking is just another attempt to keep alive a bankrupt tradition. If this distinction can be maintained, then the other major element of Rorty’s criticism must be abandoned.

2  Varieties of Difference Rorty thinks that Heidegger is necessarily impaled on the horns of a dilemma in regard to the history and historicity of Being. Either Being is radically different and distinct from beings, in which case ‘Being’ can be nothing other than the old Platonic ‘real’ world, a ‘real’ which is impossibly vague, abstract, and lacks content and historical determinacy, or in order to give the historical becoming of Being definiteness, the history of ‘Being’ can be seen as utterly dependent on the history of beings. If Heidegger accepts the first alternative then he is committed to, in words Rorty quotes from Versenyi, “an all too empty and formal, though often emotionally charged and mystically‐religious, thinking of absolute unity.”1 On the other hand, if Heidegger admitted that the history of Being must be seen in terms of the history of beings, then he would see that Philosophy (or Heidegger’s own alternative, ‘thought’), as a discipline or even a distinct activity, is obsolete. That is, his concern with Being would be replaced by concrete attention to beings. In fact Rorty feels that Heidegger wants it both ways. While maintaining that he is giving us a history of Being, Heidegger necessarily has recourse to the ordinary history of nations, persons, and their relation to beings in order to give concreteness and definiteness to his ontological history. It seems clear that before we can evaluate this criticism we need a better notion of just what Heidegger means by ‘Being’ and how it is supposed to be different from beings. Rorty, of course, denies that Heidegger can give any other than a negative account. All we are told about Being, Thought, and the ontological difference is by negation. … Heidegger thinks that the historical picture which has been sketched offers a glimpse of something else. Yet nothing further can be said about this something else, and so the negative way to Being, through the destruction of ontology, leaves us facing beings‐without‐ Being, with no hint about what Thought might be of.2

But Rorty himself inadvertently indicates Heidegger’s attempt to hint at the matter to be thought, although he doesn’t discuss it. In the first quote from Heidegger in the paper, from the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger clearly distinguishes the truth of Being from Being itself. Ontology, whether transcendental or pre‐critical, is subject to criticism not because it thinks the Being of beings and thereby subjugates Being to a concept, but because it does not think the truth of Being …3

Often Heidegger commentary does not recognize that in all of his periods Heidegger focuses not so much upon Being as on the sense of Being, or the truth of Being, or the place of Being.4 The distinction between Being and the truth of Being is swallowed, as it 282

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

were, by the distinction between Being and beings. This failure to note the distinction between Being and the truth of Being is perhaps not surprising, given that Heidegger himself is often unclear in regard to it. In the Introduction to Metaphysics, for example, which Rorty cites extensively, this distinction barely makes an appearance as the distinction between the inquiry into Being as such and the inquiry into the Being of beings.5 Nevertheless, this distinction is both present in Heidegger’s texts and the hidden light which illuminates those texts. Heidegger “knows with full clarity the difference between Being as the Being of beings and Being as ‘Being’ in respect of its proper sense, that is, in respect of its truth (the clearing).”6 ‘Being’ then is used by Heidegger in two different, indeed opposed, senses. First, ‘Being’ is the Being of beings, what each being is thought to need so that it is, rather than nothing. That is, ‘Being’ in this first sense refers to that which each being involves simply and solely insofar as it is at all. The science which studies Being in this sense is metaphysics, the science of Being qua Being. Equally, metaphysics, as the science of Being qua Being, increasingly comes to see Being in this sense, i.e., the Being of beings, as the ground of beings and itself. “… the Being of beings reveals itself as the ground that gives itself ground and accounts for itself.”7 Metaphysics thus comes to see Being in this first sense as both what is most general, that which every being possesses in that it is, and as that which supplies the ground for all such beings. “Metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground‐ giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of the all that accounts for the general, that is, of the All‐Highest.”8 As such, such views of Being as pure act, as absolute concept, or even Heidegger’s own view of the Greek notion of Being as the presence of the presencing, all speak to this first sense of Being. The question of Being also concerns the aletheia of Being, that which allows for the possibility of any answer to the question of Being in the first sense. The question of Being, on the other hand, can also be understood in the following sense: Wherein is each answer to the question of Being based, i.e., wherein, after all, is the unconcealment of Being grounded? For example: It is said that the Greeks defined Being as the presence of the presencing. In presence speaks the present, in the present is a moment of time; therefore, the manifestation of Being as presence is related to time.9

In this second sense ‘Being’ is sometimes used, unfortunately, as a shorthand expression standing for the “sense of Being,” or the unconcealment (truth) of Being, or, more simply, the clearing or opening in which Being, in the first sense as presence, occurs. This ‘Being’, as the sense of Being, time, is the concern of Heidegger’s thought from Being and Time onward. What then does Heidegger mean by “the truth of Being’? (Although there are serious differences among Heidegger’s successive formulations, the sense of Being, the truth of Being, and the place of Being, for the sake of brevity I will speak mainly of the truth of Being, the formulation from his ‘middle’ period.) Abstractly, the truth of Being is thought as the opening or clearing which allows Being as presencing to appear and manifest itself. In order to think this it is necessary to explicate the sense in which Heidegger uses the term ‘truth’. Beginning with Being and Time and continuing until very late in his career Heidegger interprets ‘truth’ with the aid of an idiosyncratic and  etymological translation of the Greek aletheia. Etymologically ‘aletheia’ is a 283

Mark Okrent

­privative of ‘lethe’, it is the not‐hidden, the uncovered. “‘Being‐true’ (‘truth’) means Being‐­uncovering.”10 Yet equally essential to Heidegger’s thinking on truth is the claim that unconcealment also involves concealment, hiddenness. The nature of truth, that is, of unconcealment, is dominated throughout by a denial. Yet this denial is not a defect or a fault, as though truth were an unalloyed unconcealment that has rid itself of everything concealed. If truth could accomplish this, it would no longer be itself. … Truth, in its nature, is untruth. We put the matter this way in order to serve notice … that denial in the manner of concealment belongs to unconcealedness as clearing.11

The initial motivation for this interpretation of truth is clear enough. In order for there to be truth in either of the traditional senses, as correspondence or coherence, there must be evidence. That is, the object referred to in the true statement must be manifest, must show itself, it must be uncovered. But that the being disclosed can be uncovered depends upon the possibility of such uncovering. In Being and Time this possibility is supplied by the being whose Being consists in Being‐in‐the‐world, Dasein. Thus the early Heidegger distinguishes two senses of ‘true’, the Being‐uncovered of beings and the Being‐uncovering of Dasein. Circumspective concern, or even that concern in which we tarry and look at something, uncovers entities within‐the‐world. These entities become that which has been uncovered. They are ‘true’ in a second sense. What is primarily ‘true’ – that is, uncovering – is Dasein. ‘Truth’ in the second sense does not mean Being‐uncovering, but Being‐uncovered.12

When the later Heidegger speaks of truth as unconcealedness he is speaking on analogy with the Being‐uncovering of Being and Time, without the subjectivist bias of the latter. That is, ‘truth’ is that which allows beings to show themselves through providing an area of showing. As such Heidegger’s ‘truth’ is analogous with the horizon of earlier phenomenology, but with Heidegger the horizon allows for the possibility of focus, or being manifest, and in that sense is primary truth. As such however it itself is that which is ordinarily not manifest, not present. “Only what aletheia as opening grants is experienced and thought, not what it is as such. This remains concealed.”13 The concealedness and hiddenness which is fundamental to truth is primarily the essential non‐presence (in the sense of not being in the present) of the opening which allows beings to be present. Only secondarily is it the perspectival hiddenness native to those beings themselves. After 1964 Heidegger gives up the translation of aletheia as truth, without giving up the matter thought by aletheia. This matter, the clearing or opening in which both beings and Being can appear, remains the primary ‘object’ of Heidegger’s thought. In On Time and Being Heidegger returns to his earliest treatment of the clearing, in terms of temporality. The ecstatic temporality which is the meaning of the Being of Dasein in Being and Time is now thought as ‘time‐space’. Time‐space is introduced during a discussion of presence in terms of the present and absence. As opposed to the traditional understanding of the present as a now point in a sequence of now points, Heidegger interprets the present as that which concerns human being, the matter illuminated in concern. “What is present concerns us, the present, that is: what, lasting, comes toward us, us human beings.” “Presence means: the constant abiding that approaches man, reaches 284

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

him, is extended to him.”14 Presence, understood in this way as that which lasts in concern, involves more than the present ordinarily so called. It necessarily also involves absence, the absence of that which has been, and of that which is coming toward us. That which is ‘past’ and ‘future’ for Heidegger, is equally present, but only in the sense of being of concern, not in the sense of being in the temporal now. There is a presence of ‘past’ and ‘future’ precisely insofar as they are absent from the now, i.e., as having been and coming toward. But we have to do with absence just as often, that is, constantly. For one thing, there is much that is no longer present in the way we know presencing in the sense of the present. And yet, even that which is no longer present presences immediately in its absence – in the manner of what has been, and still concerns us. … absence, as the presencing of what is not yet present, always in some way concerns us, is present no less immediately than what has been.15

Thus not every presencing involves the present. But the present too is itself a mode of presence. Heidegger’s concern, however, is not with that which is present, past, or future. Reverting to a distinction which is focal in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, he is rather interested in temporality itself or the opening in which that which is temporal can be so. “For time itself is nothing temporal, no more than it is something that is.” “Time‐space now is the name for the openness which opens up in the mutual self‐ extending of futural approach, past, and present.”16 Time‐space supplies this openness in which present and absent beings can be, however, only in that the dimensions of time, past, present, and future, are both related to one another and distinct. Within this distinction lies a withholding of the present. The past and future are present only through their absence. …we call the first, original, literally incipient extending in which the unity of true time consists ‘nearing nearness’, ‘nearhood’. … But it brings future, past, and present near to one another by distancing them. For it keeps what has been open by denying its advent as present. … Nearing nearness has the character of denial and withholding.17

It is both possible and helpful to distinguish Heidegger’s truth of Being, as we have just interpreted it, from certain other contemporary notions which seem to be similar to it. First, the truth of Being should not be seen as analogous to a conceptual scheme. Aside from the obvious fact that Heidegger associates the truth of Being with temporality, rather than concepts, there is a deeper difference between these notions. As Donald Davidson pointed out in his paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” the idea of a conceptual scheme depends ultimately upon something like the hard Kantian distinction between sensibility and understanding. But Heidegger rejects this distinction as fully as do Davidson, Sellars, and Rorty. As early as Being and Time, Heidegger held that we never have merely ‘raw feelings’.18 Rather, for Heidegger, all human ‘experience’ is only possible within a world, a world which is always already linguistically articulated. But then, perhaps the truth of Being should be seen as similar to the analytic notion of a set of linguistic rules which allow for the possibility of language 285

Mark Okrent

use? There is more to be said in favor of this analogy, as Heidegger frequently remarks on the connection between the truth of Being and the pre‐thematic articulation of a world by language. We must be careful here with the concept of a rule. The word ‘rule’ suggests a situation in which a person acting according to a rule must either be obeying the rule (i.e., the rule is a principle which is explicit for the agent) or merely acting in conformity to a rule (i.e., the agent’s acts fall into a regular, perhaps causal, pattern, although the agent is not aware of this).19 Heidegger wishes to avoid both of these alternatives, which he sees as metaphysical. In both cases we are seen as capable, in principle, of giving a single correct interpretation and explication of what is involved in acting according to any particular rule. That is, every rule can be made explicit and focal, either by the agent (in the case of obeying a rule) or by a scientist observing the behavior (in the case of conforming to a rule). For Heidegger, the necessity of the hermeneutic circle, which precludes the possibility of any fully grounded interpretation points to the necessarily nonfocal character of both language and the truth of Being. Thus Heidegger’s truth of Being must also be distinguished from the notion of a set of linguistic rules. Put bluntly, Heidegger’s position is that ‘rules’ can not be successfully used to account for the possibility and actuality of language use. The matter of Heidegger’s thought, then, is the truth of Being, the clearing in which beings can appear and in which Being, as the presencing of presence, can manifest itself. The clearing is analogous with the phenomenological horizon. As such it is the concealed possibility of unconcealment, the ‘truth’ of Being. Further, the opening is temporality, the ecstatic extendedness and distinction of past, present and future. All of this is different from Being, or presencing as such. But how is any of this relevant to Heidegger’s insistence on the epochal history of Being, and his distinction of thought and philosophy, and Rorty’s criticism of these?

3  The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy The thrust of Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger is aimed at the supposed vacuity of Heidegger’s thought of Being without beings. In order to overcome this vacuity, Rorty thinks that Heidegger has recourse to the history of beings. But the form ordinary history takes for Rorty’s Heidegger is the alienated form of the history of philosophy. If he [Heidegger] were true to his own dictum that we should ‘cease all overcoming, and leave metaphysics to itself ’, he would have nothing to say, nowhere to point. The whole force of Heidegger’s thought lies in his account of the history of philosophy.20

For Rorty’s Heidegger, therefore, the content of the history of Being arises out of the history of philosophy. But the history of Being can be subsumed under the history of philosophy, for Rorty, only if philosophy is of Being. Thus Rorty’s Heidegger is necessarily committed to the view that metaphysics was always about Being, and that his own thought is tied to this tradition. … the only thing which links him with the tradition is his claim that the tradition, though persistently sidetracked onto beings, was really concerned with Being all the time – and, indeed, constituted the history of Being.21

286

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

But if Heidegger’s ‘thought’ is really different from the tradition as Heidegger claims, then he is committed to the odd view that his thought is essentially a continuation of the same thinking as metaphysics, although at the same time he utterly rejects everything in that tradition. The criticism thus has three steps. First, Being without being is a vacuous notion. Second, this vacuity is overcome through a consideration of the history of philosophy. This in turn commits Heidegger to the absurd position that his thought is both entirely different from the tradition and also a continuation of the tradition which is about the very same thing as that tradition. Heidegger needs the tradition in order to identify the matter of his thinking, but then turns around and denies that the tradition tells us anything about that matter. The criticism is dominated throughout by the reading of Heidegger which sees his primary distinction in the difference between Being and beings. Rorty’s initial claim, that Being without beings is a vacuous notion, is motivated by this reading. We have argued in the previous section that this understanding of Heidegger is inadequate. Nevertheless, this fact, by itself, is not sufficient to show that the criticism is not cogent. It still may be the case that this other matter of Heidegger’s thought, the truth of Being, may also prove to be vacuous. That is, Heidegger might be equally unable to determine the truth of Being without recourse to his version of the history of philosophy. As Heidegger rejects that tradition as, at least, inadequate, he would once again be in the position of identifying the matter of his thinking through ontology, while denying that ontology has anything positive to say about that matter. Although Heidegger’s truth of Being is in no sense the same as is thought in Kant’s thing in itself (the truth of Being is not a ‘real world’ or beings as they are independent of experience) there does seem to be a certain formal analogy between them. The truth of Being can not successfully be made into an object of experience. This is because it is not an object at all, whether of experience or in itself. It is not. Rather it is meant as the concealed space in which objects can be. But if the truth of Being can never be an object of experience, how can it be indicated, ‘pointed to’? It can’t be ostensively determined, it can’t be distinguished as this as opposed to that, and it can’t be defined in terms of some being. however, suggests a transcendental procedure for the determination of the truth of Being. But, even though Heidegger often uses transcendental sounding language, even in his late writings, he specifically precludes the option of considering the truth of Being as merely the necessary condition for the possibility of experience, as this would be overly subjectivistic. Nonetheless Heidegger often does use quasi‐transcendental arguments in order to identify the place and role of the truth of Being. Indeed, the characterizations we have already given to the truth of Being in the last section all arise out of such transcendental considerations. On the other hand, the base step for these procedures is not the certainty of experience. When the truth of Being is discussed as the clearing, that which it supplies the condition of the possibility of is not experience, but Being. Similarly, when aletheia or temporality are under consideration it is Being in the sense of present evidence or presencing as such which is the basis for the transcendental discussion.22 It is clear that Heidegger thinks there can be no direct access to the truth of Being, no uncovering of the truth of Being such as occurs in regard to beings. I am suggesting that Heidegger substitutes a quasi‐transcendental approach. The foundation for this transcendental access is not experience, however, but rather Being. But how is Being 287

Mark Okrent

itself to be determined and characterized? It seems that we are back to Rorty’s problem. If the truth of Being can only be identified in and through Being, then Being itself must be available to us. But Being as presencing is not. It, Being is not in the open to be viewed. Where then does Heidegger get the determination of Being as presencing? Heidegger explicitly addresses this question in “On Time and Being.” He suggests two answers, one of which is a blatant statement of Rorty’s contention that Heidegger can only determine Being from out of the tradition of ontology. But what gives us the right to characterize Being as presencing? This question comes too late. For this character of Being has long since been decided without our contribution. … Thus we are bound to the characterization of Being as presencing. It derives its binding force from the beginning of the unconcealment of Being as something that can be said. … Ever since the beginning of Western thinking with the Greeks, all saying of ‘Being’ and ‘Is’ is held in remembrance of the determination of Being as presencing which is binding for thinking.23

In this same passage Heidegger also suggests a second mode of access to Being or presencing. Harkening back to Being and Time he asserts that a phenomenological approach to Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit will also yield a characterization of Being as presencing. We will leave aside this second answer to the question concerning the determination of Being as presencing and concentrate on the adequacy of the first answer, given Rorty’s criticism of it.24 Heidegger explicitly asserts that Being has already been characterized as presencing, and that this has been done at the beginning of the Western philosophical tradition.25 It would thus seem that Rorty is right in regard to the first two steps of his argument. Even though Heidegger is not primarily concerned with Being, but rather with the truth of Being, the characterization of the truth of Being depends upon the determination of Being. Apart from the phenomenological arguments developed in Being and Time and then mostly ignored by Heidegger, there is no way to determine Being except through the supposedly already established determination given by the tradition. Rorty is thus apparently correct in his contention that Being is a vacuous notion which is only given content in and through the history of philosophy. The third step in Rorty’s argument is accomplished through the juxtaposition of Heidegger’s dependence upon the tradition with his rejection of that tradition. But Heidegger never simply rejects or refutes the tradition of Western thinking as wrong. In speaking specifically of Hegel, he makes the general point that it is impossible ever to give such a refutation or to hazard such a rejection. Whatever stems from it [absolute metaphysics] cannot be affected or done away with by refutation. It can only be appraised, as its truth is reintegrated more incipiently into Being itself and removed from the sphere of human opinion. To refute everything in the field of essential thought is ridiculous.26

But if Heidegger does not see himself as refuting or rejecting the history of ontology as wrong, then what is the character of his rejection of the tradition? For reject it he does. The answer has already been given. The tradition is inadequate because it never thinks the truth of Being. This, necessarily, remains hidden from metaphysics “… the truth of 288

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

Being as the clearing itself remains concealed from metaphysics. This concealment, however, is not a defect of metaphysics, but the treasure of its own richness…”27 In the history of Western thinking … what is, is thought, in reference to Being; yet the truth of Being remains unthought, and not only is that truth denied to thinking as a possible experience, but Western thinking itself, and indeed in the form of metaphysics, expressly, but nevertheless unknowingly, veils the happening of that denial.28

The tradition of ontology, for Heidegger, is not wrong in regard to its continuous thinking of Being as presencing. It is inadequate and incomplete in that it fails to think the clearing, or truth of Being, in which there can be both present beings and presencing itself, Being. Two crucial conclusions rest upon the character of Heidegger’s rejection of the tradition. First, the fact that Heidegger rejects metaphysics in the way he does, does not commit him to the position that metaphysics is wrong in regard to its characterization of Being. Quite the contrary appears to be the case. It is not even possible for us to ‘give up’ the content of Being as presencing, we necessarily live in terms of it. We can no longer do metaphysics not because it is wrong, but rather because it has ended in, and been continued by, technology and the positive sciences. Second, Heidegger’s thinking is not about the very same thing metaphysics was about. Rorty is just wrong in his contention that it is. Rather, Heidegger’s thinking is distinguished from metaphysics precisely insofar as it is not concerned with Being, but is concerned with the truth of Being. It is in this sense that we must read his dictum that we need to leave metaphysics to itself. Heidegger would seem to agree with Rorty that the proper ‘end’ to philosophy is in the sciences, natural and social, and in practical, technological activity. But there is something left unthought in philosophy, the clearing in which philosophy happens, the truth of Being. Indicating the nature of Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysics does not yet, however, decide the issue between him and Rorty. One additional step is necessary. We have already seen that there is a sense in which Heidegger can not ‘leave metaphysics to itself ’. Even though he is not directly determining the matter of his thinking through the characterization of Being in the history of philosophy, Rorty is right in thinking that Heidegger does need the tradition in order to identify that matter. The truth of Being is identified by asking how Being as presencing is possible. Only through rethinking the tradition as the successive revelation of Being as presencing does it become possible to ask this question. But this relation between Heidegger and the tradition is not open to the criticism Rorty levels. There is nothing odd, contradictory, or impossible about rejecting ontology as incomplete because it does not think the truth of Being, which is necessary for its own possibility, and then determining the truth of Being through a quasi‐transcendental discussion of the possibility of the ontological tradition. On the contrary, this is the ‘method’ which is adequate and appropriate to the task.

4  The Truth of Being and Epochs of Being Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger in regard to the possibility for thinking at the end of philosophy is coordinated with a second criticism. This criticism concerns the relation 289

Mark Okrent

among Heidegger’s account of Being, the history of Being, and ordinary history. Heidegger’s account of Being is, admittedly, dependent for its determination upon his understanding of the history of Being. Rorty claims that this history of Being is reducible to history in the usual sense. At best it is a history of ideas, which itself is parasitic upon the social, political, and economic history of peoples. At worst it is vacuous. There are two distinct though related claims involved in Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger on the history of Being. For most of his paper Rorty asserts that Heidegger’s history of Being must be seen as simply a version of the history of philosophy. “Heidegger’s sense of the vulgarity of the age … is strongest when what is trivialized is the history of metaphysics. For this history is the history of Being …”29 On this account, the history of Being is both constituted by and manifest in the writings of the great philosophers. As such, ordinary history is seen as secondary to metaphysical history – a period is characterized as a failure or a success in terms of its ability to actualize the thought of its philosophers. On the other hand, Rorty also claims that the history of Being must be seen in terms of, and gets its content from, the ordinary ­history of ‘ages, cultures’, etc. Unless Heidegger connected the history of Being with that of men and nations through such phrases as ‘a nation’s relation to Being’ and thus connected the history of philosophy with just plain history, he would be able to say only what Kierkegaard said …30

i.e., his history of Being would be vacuous. These two claims do not, of course, contradict one another. Rather, together they amount to a single assertion concerning Heidegger’s history of Being. For Rorty, Heidegger sees the history of Being as the history of philosophy. But, for Rorty, following Marx and Dewey, the history of philosophy itself is composed of a series of Weltanschauung which in turn are determined in and through ordinary history. Rorty emphasizes those passages in Heidegger which connect the history of Being with ordinary history because for Rorty it is ultimately through this reference that the history of philosophy is made definite. There are thus two relations in question in Rorty’s discussion of Heidegger’s history of Being – the relation between the history of Being and the history of philosophy, and the relation between the history of philosophy and ordinary history. We have already seen that there is a sense in which the history of metaphysics is a history of Being for Heidegger. The various metaphysical determinations of Being as presencing do constitute something like a history of Being. “The development of the abundance of transformations of Being [in metaphysics] looks at first like a history of Being.”31 It is also the case that whatever genuinely characterizes the history of Being for Heidegger, the indications for the concrete stages of this history are taken almost exclusively from the thinking of philosophers. But these metaphysical systems are not themselves the epochs of Being which compose the history of Being, for Heidegger. Rather, Heidegger attempts to differentiate the epochs of Being, which are the stages of his history of Being, from the metaphysical systems, which are merely the concrete indicators for discovering the content of this history. This differentiation can be seen clearly in Heidegger’s use of the term ‘epoch’ to stand for the stages of the history of Being. For the word ‘epoch’ has a specific technical sense in Heidegger’s thought which goes beyond and is different from its ordinary sense. 290

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

To hold back is, in Greek, epoche. Hence we speak of the epochs of the destiny of Being. Epoch does not mean here a span of time in occurrence, but rather the fundamental characteristic of sending, the actual holding‐back of itself in favor of the discernibility of the gift, that is of Being with regard to the grounding of beings.32

An epoch of Being, then, is not characterized by what is positive in any metaphysical thesis in regard to Being. Rather, it is determined by what is absent, held back, in that position. The history of Being is a history of hiddenness, not of presence. It is a history of the specific ways in which the place and truth of being have been forgotten, not of Being in the ontological sense, itself. At this point an apparent, but only apparent, similarity between Heidegger and Hegel suggests itself and is instructive. Hegel’s history of philosophy is also a history of absence, of holding back. For Hegel, each successive stage in philosophical development (corresponding roughly to moments in the Logic) is, as finite, determined by its limit. A philosophical system is as it is because it fails to incorporate within its own thought something which is nonetheless necessary for itself. This other, its limit, is both the determination of the philosophy, and, ultimately, its Aufhebung. But in Hegel’s ‘history of Being’ this holding back is itself limited. That is, thought progressively overcomes each of its successive limits until limitation itself is finally incorporated into philosophy in the Science of Logic. In this culmination the form of finitude, temporality, is also Aufgehoben. In Heidegger’s history of Being, on the other hand, there is not and can not be any such final reappropriation of the hidden. At best there can be only a simple recognition of the hidden, non‐present limit of all philosophical discourse. Returning to the main problem, however, how does the epochal character of Heidegger’s history of Being affect the relation between that history and the history of philosophy? The history of Being is obviously dependent upon Heidegger’s critical rethinking of the history of philosophy, but only in a negative way. The actual content that Heidegger gives to his history of Being is both discovered through and different from the actual content of the history of philosophy. It is discovered through the tradition in that it traces what is forgotten by but necessary for each specific moment in the history of philosophy. It is different from the content of the tradition in that no particular stage in the tradition, or even that tradition taken as a whole, thinks what is at issue in the history of Being. For what is at issue in the history of Being is not Being, but the truth of Being. The history of Being includes, for example, a history of the ways in which temporality functions but is passed over, and must be passed over, in ontology. But if this is the case then it is clear that the history of Being is not simply reducible to the history of metaphysics. Rorty’s claim that “… this history [the history of metaphysics] is the history of Being …” is just false. As was the case in regard to the relation of thinking and philosophy, Rorty has confused an admitted dependence of Heidegger on the tradition with the false proposition that the matter of Heidegger’s thinking must be identical with the content of the tradition. If Heidegger is not committed to the view that the history of Being is reducible to the history of metaphysics, then what are we to make of the relation between the history of Being and ordinary history? A simple transitive relation like the one implied by Rorty will not do. That is, if the history of Being is not the history of philosophy, then the determination of the content of the history of philosophy by ordinary history does 291

Mark Okrent

not necessitate, by itself, an equal determination of the content of the history of Being by ordinary history. But we can discover the actual content of the history of Being only through recourse to the actual content of philosophical thought. Doesn’t this imply the dependence in question? Not really. As the history of philosophy and the history of Being are correlative, and the history of philosophy and ordinary history are also, at least, correlative, there must be some correlation between ordinary history and the history of Being. But this correlation would allow for a criticism of Heidegger only if it made it impossible to differentiate Being or (more accurately) the truth of Being, from beings. That is, if the history of Being were a function of ordinary history, and ordinary history was not reciprocally a function of the history of Being, then the truth of Being would also be a simple function of the actual history of beings. In that case the investigation of the history of Being, in Heidegger’s sense, could only be an alienated and unselfconscious study of the ordinary history of beings. Being and the truth of Being would not be radically different from beings, but only abstract and alienated ways in which a tradition of scholars had indirectly encountered beings. Rorty accepts this inference because he thinks of the history of Being as identical with the history of metaphysics and further thinks of the history of metaphysics as a function of ordinary history. We have already seen, however, that the history of Being is not identical with the history of metaphysics for Heidegger. Given this lack of identity, Rorty’s argument could work only if he showed that the history of Being were a function of the history of metaphysics. This relationship between the history of Being and the history of metaphysics he does not show, and Heidegger would deny. Although there is a correlation between an epoch of Being and a positive metaphysical assertion in regard to Being itself, which allows for the possibility of discovering the content of an epoch of Being, the metaphysical assertion does not determine, causally or otherwise, the holding back which is definitive for an epoch. Rather, Heidegger suggests, the reverse is more likely. Thus, even if the history of philosophy is a function of ordinary history, it does not follow that the history of Being is a function of ordinary history. An epoch of Being is defined by the field of openness in which both beings and Being can be manifest in the particular way they are in that epoch. This ‘clearing’, as the truth or place of Being, is itself hidden from the period. The correlation between ordinary history and the history of Being can be accounted for and is necessitated by the fact that the truth of Being opens a field or world of possibility in which the life of peoples, nations, etc., occurs. This implies no priority to either the ordinary historical events and structures or to the particular character of the open during a particular temporal period. Nor does this correlation make it impossible to distinguish and differentiate beings from the truth of Being. The history of Being, although discoverable for Heidegger in and through the history of metaphysics, is not the history of metaphysics. Equally, the history of Being, although correlated with ordinary history, need not be for Heidegger simply a function of ordinary history. We then see that the second main aspect of Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger fails to be conclusive. As was the case with the first main aspect of his criticism (in regard to the relation of thinking and philosophy), Rorty’s failure to identify the difference between Being and the truth of Being in Heidegger’s thought is crucial here. If this distinction is ignored, then the history of Being can only be identified with the history of metaphysics. If this were the case, Rorty’s criticism would be correct and 292

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

cogent. But as the history of Being is not simply a new version of the history of metaphysics, Rorty’s criticism must be rejected.

5  Conclusion: Heidegger, Rorty, and Appropriation Although the aims of this paper have now been reached, there is still a matter involved in the paper that needs further elucidation. I have somehow managed to write a paper which is primarily concerned with Heidegger but which never once speaks of Ereignis, or ‘appropriation’. It has been suggested throughout this paper that the real ‘matter’ of Heidegger’s thinking is not Being, but rather the truth of Being. This is not entirely accurate. The ultimate concern of Heidegger’s thought is neither Being nor the truth of Being. It is appropriation. What lets the two matters [Being and time] belong together, what brings the two into their own and, even more, maintains and holds them in their belonging together – the way the two matters stand, the matter at stake – is Appropriation.33

Why then have I intentionally suggested that the matter is temporality, or the truth of Being? This has been done for the sake of simplicity. Appropriation itself can only be grasped in terms of the relation between Being and the truth of Being. As such, it is almost totally incomprehensible without a prior thinking of the truth of Being, a thinking which Rorty’s paper lacks. For appropriation operates for Heidegger precisely in the relation, the belonging together, of the two. “The matter at stake [appropriation] first appropriates Being and time into their own in virtue of their relation …”34 Heidegger often speaks of appropriation as the ‘It’ which gives both time and Being. This suggests that appropriation is some third thing, a being over and beyond Being and time. But this substantialization of appropriation is a mistake. “Appropriation neither is, nor is Appropriation there.”35 Rather, the mutual opening up and belonging together of Being and the truth of Being is at issue in appropriation, and only that. In appropriation Heidegger is suggesting an entirely ‘formal’ feature of all historical worlds, the difference and relation of Being as presencing and the truth of Being as temporality. A preliminary attention to the truth of Being is thus necessary to open the way to Heidegger’s appropriation. Since Rorty’s article fails to give this attention to the truth of Being, this paper has attempted to remedy this lack. To have brought up Ereignis prematurely would only have muddied the waters. Then does this paper assert that Heidegger is right and Rorty is wrong, that ‘thinking’ is possible at the end of philosophy, and that there is indeed a history of Being independent of ordinary history? No, it remains uncommitted in regard to these issues. Neither does it suggest that there is no significant difference between Rorty and Heidegger. There is indeed such a difference. But Rorty has misidentified it. Rorty thinks that the difference between Heidegger and himself lies in Heidegger’s insistent consideration of ‘Being’. This amounts, for Rorty, to the ‘hope’ that even after the end of ontology there might still be philosophy, as thought, which searches for the ‘holy’, which while rejecting the tradition, still looks for something analogous to the ‘real 293

Mark Okrent

world’. In an odd way Rorty’s interpretation and criticism of Heidegger mirrors Derrida’s reading and criticism of Heidegger. For Derrida, ‘Being’ is used by Heidegger as a ‘unique name’, signifying a ‘transcendental signified’. That is, the verb ‘to be’ is thought of by Derrida’s Heidegger as having a ‘lexical’ as well as a grammatical function, a lexical use which signifies a transcendental ‘Being’ in a unique way. This supposed Heideggerian meaning of ‘Being’ amounts, for Derrida, to a certain ‘nostalgia’ for presence. In fact, as we have seen, neither of these interpretations can be justified in Heidegger’s texts. The truth of Being is not Being as presencing, and Ereignis is nothing outside of the open field in which beings and meanings occur. Heidegger does not ‘hope’ for a ‘real world’, nor is he nostalgic concerning presence. Dominique Janicaud has made this point persuasively in regard to Derrida’s criticism. … I do not think it right to claim that there is nostalgia in Heidegger’s works. … The Heideggerian Ereignis does not mean any self‐closure or self‐achievement, but rather an ek‐statikon. My last words on this point will be taken from ‘Time and Being’: ‘Zum Ereignis als solchem gehort die Enteignung’, which one might translate as follows: disappropriation belongs to appropriation as such. I thus do not see how one could assimilate the Heideggerian Ereignis to the appropriation of presence.36

But if ‘Being’ in Heidegger is not a ‘transcendental signified’, if Heidegger does not hold out any ‘hope’ for a ‘holy’ real world, what then does oppose Heidegger and Rorty? It is precisely the same thing which really distinguishes Rorty from Derrida. Both Heidegger and Derrida consider the field in which presencing can occur, in Heidegger’s language the open and appropriation, in Derrida’s language ‘differance’, as worthy of thought. Heidegger is claiming that there is a ‘formal’ necessity involved in any actual world of activity and meaning, the opposition and belonging together of Being and time. This clearing and belonging together is approachable for Heidegger through something like transcendental argumentation. These arguments do not get us outside of our world, however, only into it in a different way. It is this claim and this ‘hope’ which Rorty is really denying. “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” unfortunately doesn’t address this issue.

Notes 1 R. Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey” in Review of Metaphysics, Vol. XXX, No. 2, Dec. 1976, p. 297. (Cited hereafter as OTT). 2 OTT, p. 297. 3 OTT, p. 280. 4 Otto Poggler and Thomas Sheehan are among those who have recognized the importance of the meaning or truth of Being in Heidegger’s thought. For example, cf., Poggler’s “Heidegger’s Topology of Being” in Joseph J. Kockelmans, ed., On Heidegger and Language (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972) and Sheehan’s “Heidegger’s Interpretation of Aristotle: Dynamis and Ereignis,” in Philosophy Research Archives. 5 This distinction itself appears mostly in an interpolation into the text which was written after 1935. Cf., Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961), p. 14ff. 6 Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 20.

294

The Truth of Being and the History of Philosophy

7 Heidegger, “The Onto‐theo‐logical Constitution of Metaphysics” in Stambaugh, ed., Identity and Difference (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 57. 8 Ibid., p. 58. 9 Heidegger, ed., R. Wisser, Martin Heidegger in Conversation (New Delhi, India: Arnold Hinneman Publishers, 1977), p. 45. 10 Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 262, H. 219. 11 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Hofstadter, ed., Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 54. 12 Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 263, H. 220. 13 Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Stambaugh, ed., On Time and Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 71. 14 Heidegger, “On Time and Being,” in Stambaugh, ed., On Time and Being, p. 12. (Cited Hereafter as OTB). 15 OTB, p. 13. 16 OTB, p. 14. 17 OTB, p. 15. At this point Heidegger’s discussion of time bears a striking resemblance to Hegel’s treatment of time in the Philosophy of Nature. What distinguishes Heidegger’s treatment from Hegel’s, however, is his insistence that temporality is irreducible to a mode of thought. 18 Cf., Being and Time, Sec. 34, etc. 19 This tendency can be seen in Sellars’s article, “Some Reflections on Language Games” in Science, Perception, and Reality. As I understand it, Sellar’s own attempt to avoid these poles ultimately depends on a simple conformity, perhaps causal, to metarules. 20 OTT, pp. 302–303. 21 OTT, p. 303. 22 I describe Heidegger’s procedure for identifying the truth of Being as ‘quasi‐transcendental’. This term needs some explication. For Heidegger, there is a sense in which the truth of Being is phenomenal, roughly the same sense in which a phenomenological horizon is phenomenal. (As opposed to a Husserlian horizon, however, the truth of Being can never be made focal.) It is this that leads Heidegger to assert, in the Introduction to Being and Time, that both the sense of Being and the Kantian forms of intuition are ‘phenomena’. So, if a transcendental argument is seen as one which necessarily argues to a conclusion which asserts the being of a non‐phenomenal condition, Heidegger’s procedure can not be termed transcendental. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s method for identifying and determining the truth of Being does have a transcendental form. That is, he moves from that which is admitted to be the case, beings and their Being, to the necessary condition for the possibility of beings, the truth of Being. For this reason I have called his procedure quasi‐transcendental. I have no objection, however, to calling this method ‘transcendental’, as long as it is remembered that: (1) the argument does not start from experience and (2) the condition argued to is neither an existent nor non‐phenomenal. 23 OTB, pp. 6–7. 24 But cf. Section IV of this paper. 25 OTB, p. 8. 26 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Barrett & Aiken, eds., Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 3 (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 284–285. 27 Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” p. 282. 28 Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” in Lovitt, ed., The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), p. 56. 29 OTT, p. 299. 30 OTT, p. 296.

295

Mark Okrent

31 32 33 34 35 36

296

OTB, p. 8. OTB, p. 9. OTB, p. 19. OTB, p. 19. OTB, p. 24. D. Janicaud, “Presence and Appropriation,” in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. VIII, 1978, p. 73.

18 Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James CAROL NICHOLSON

Both Richard Rorty and William James thought that pragmatism had the potential to lead to a cultural change comparable in significance to the Protestant Reformation, but they had very different visions of the role of philosophy in the utopian future that might result from the triumph of pragmatism. Using Isaiah Berlin’s analogy of the hedgehog (who knows one thing) and the fox (who knows many things), Rorty described himself as “a hedgehog who, despite showering my reader with allusions and dropping lots of names, has really only one idea: the need to get beyond representationalism and thus into an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other” (Rorty 2010, 474). He gave James credit for inspiring this single idea with his pragmatic theory of truth, defined as whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, rather than what corresponds to a preexisting independent reality. He also expressed admiration for James as a personal role model. In “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” he wrote, “James combined, to extent of which most of us are incapable, honesty about his own needs with concern for the needs of others. So the upshot of his investigations is worth bearing in mind” (Rorty 1997, 99). In “Some Inconsistencies in James’ Varieties” Rorty predicted that James’s Varieties of Religious Experience would “continue to be read with profit for centuries to come. This is not because it provides good arguments for any particular conclusion, but because it is a portion of the intellectual biography of an exceptionally magnanimous man. James’s mind was uncommonly capacious, and his charity uncommonly expansive. Reading Varieties can help us become more like James, and thus help us become better people” (Rorty 2004c, 96–7). But Rorty’s borrowing from James was extremely selective. He saw nothing of value in Essays on Radical Empiricism or A Pluralistic Universe, which he regarded as “unpragmatic exercises in Bergsonian metaphysics” that resulted from an “utterly wrong‐ headed polemic against abstract ideas” (Rorty 2004c, 96).

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

297

Carol Nicholson

Some of Rorty’s readers, notably his lifelong friend Richard Bernstein, have argued that Rorty misinterpreted James to the point of doing violence to his philosophy, but that criticism didn’t bother him at all. He never claimed to give a faithful historical account of the classical pragmatists, but he used their ideas as raw material for creative redescriptions and the invention of new vocabularies in an attempt to “put pragmatism into better shape” (Malachowski 2011). This chapter explores the development of Rorty’s thought after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and the reasons for his ambivalence toward James. I point out two different themes that are not entirely consistent in Rorty’s vision of the future of philosophy. The first theme was explicitly atheist, emphasizing self‐reliance and the refusal to submit to a nonhuman power. The second theme emphasized pluralism rather than atheism and a philosophy of religion that Rorty called “romantic polytheism.” In the last decade of his life Rorty began to devote more attention to James, and his later pluralistic vision was closer to James’s view than his earlier atheism. His conception of experience was fundamentally different, however, and his commitment to the “linguistic turn” prevented him from accepting James’s reconstruction of metaphysics and epistemology. From James’s point of view, Rorty missed the main point of pragmatism, which was the shift from an abstract to a concrete perspective. Rorty’s substitution of language for experience committed what James called the fallacy of “vicious intellectualism,” which had the effect of blocking the way of inquiry in a number of fields and prevented him from addressing some of the most important moral and political issues of our time. I conclude that he did not succeed in putting pragmatism into better shape, and yet the overall impact of his work was enormously beneficial in challenging the traditional self‐image of philosophy and moving it in the direction of James’s pluralism. When James compared pragmatism to the Protestant Reformation, he had in mind a shift in the seat of authority, the “centre of gravity” of philosophy, in several different ways. First, pragmatism is forward‐looking rather than backward‐looking, treating ideas as tools rather than representations of an independent reality and placing the criterion for judging them in the future rather than the past. As James put it, pragmatism stands for no particular results but is “only an attitude of orientation,” of “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James 1987, 510; emphasis in original) Second, pragmatism for James emphasizes the practical rather than the theoretical point of view. “It harmonizes with many ancient philosophic tendencies. It agrees with nominalism, for instance, in always appealing to particulars; with utilitarianism in emphasizing practical aspects; with ­positivism in its disdain for verbal solutions, useless questions and metaphysical abstractions” (James 1987, 510). Third, and most important for James, pragmatism focuses on concrete experience. “The whole originality of pragmatism, the whole point of it, is its use of the concrete way of seeing. It begins with concreteness, and returns and ends with it” (James 1987, 934). He wanted to take what was most useful from the tradition of British empiricism but radicalize it so that all experience would be included. “To be radical, an empiricism must neither admit into any of its construction any element that is not directly experienced, nor exclude from them any element that is directly experienced” (James 1987, 1160). “In other words: Everything real must be experienceable somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real” (James 1987, 798). Rorty agreed with the first two of James’s alterations in the seat of philosophical authority (the orientation toward the future and the practical), but he did not accept the 298

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

third (the shift from abstractions to concrete experience). He attempted to put pragmatism into better shape by rejecting empiricism altogether instead of radicalizing it and by focusing on language rather than experience, which he regarded as a useless concept that ought to be eliminated from the vocabulary of philosophy. Many other differences resulted from James’s focus on the concrete and experiential and Rorty’s focus on the abstract and linguistic. James saw pragmatism as a “happy harmonizer” between science and religion, the tough‐minded and tender‐minded habits of mind, which would widen “the field of search for God” (James 1987, 522). He thought that the triumph of the pragmatic attitude would mean that “Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand” (James 1987, 509). Rorty, on the other hand, argued for a complete break with the history of metaphysics and epistemology. In his vision of a pragmatist future the creation of new vocabularies and linguistic descriptions would replace the attempt to describe either a reality that is “out there” independently of the human imagination or a mythical kind of “experience” that is “given” to us without being mediated by language. In Rorty’s utopia there would be no constraints on inquiry other than what is useful in continuing the conversation of humanity and furthering human solidarity. Rorty’s vision changed over time, however, and there are two different themes in his writings which are not entirely compatible. The first theme, presented in his groundbreaking Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, argued for an entirely new self‐image for philosophy that he called “philosophy without mirrors” (Rorty 1979). Rorty’s strategy was to undermine the whole tradition of Western epistemology by criticizing its central metaphor. He argued that the visual imagery used to describe knowledge has led philosophers astray ever since Plato’s allegory of the cave. Descartes created the notorious mind‐body problem by supposing the human soul to be an immaterial “glassy essence” containing clear and distinct reflections of reality, and Kant’s Copernican revolution perpetuated the error by elevating philosophy to the status of a sort of master‐discipline which claimed privileged access to the immutable form of the mirror itself. According to Rorty, analytic philosophy, which culminated in the work of Quine, the late Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson, transcended and canceled itself by showing the absurdity of the notion of truth as correspondence between language or thought and the world (Rorty 1982, xviii). He recommended abandoning the representational theory of knowledge, which he thought could only be accomplished if we “get the visual, and particularly the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether” (Rorty 1979, 371). The end of epistemology, he hoped, would usher in a new kind of “edifying” philosophy, defined as “the project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” rather than pursuing the hopeless quest for a mirror of reality (Rorty 1979, 360). Some of Rorty’s readers interpreted him as advocating the death of philosophy, but in Consequences of Pragmatism he drew a useful distinction between (uppercase) Philosophy and (lowercase) philosophy to show that he was not advocating the end of all philosophizing but only the traditional way of doing it. He defined “Philosophy” as the “Platonic urge to escape from the finitude of one’s time and place” and to “compare ourselves with something absolute” (Rorty 1982, xix). In contrast, from the point of view of pragmatism, “philosophy” is defined as the more modest attempt, in Wilfrid Sellars’s phrase, “to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Rorty 1982, xiv). To put the point 299

Carol Nicholson

linguistically, this means “seeing how all the various vocabularies of all the various epochs and cultures hang together” (Rorty 1982, xxxviii). In describing philosophy as a way of “seeing” that will continue after the end of Philosophy, Rorty seemed to admit that his earlier rather draconian recommendation to rid philosophical discourse of all visual metaphors was a rhetorical exaggeration that was not meant to be taken literally. He did not follow it himself and was sympathetic to James’s description of philosophy as “vision” (Rorty 1982, 45). For more than a decade after the publication of Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty continued to take an explicitly atheist stance and advocated giving up the masochistic urge to worship a nonhuman power, whether it is called God or Truth, so that human beings could for the first time become truly self‐reliant. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty redescribed the ideal liberal society as one which would be “enlightened, secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of divinity remained, either in the form of a divinized world or a divinized Self. Such a culture would have no room for the notion that there are nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible.” The process of “de‐divinization” would culminate in the recognition that it is not useful to derive the meaning of one’s life from anything other than “other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” (Rorty 1989, 45). In the quarrel between philosophy and poetry that Plato began, philosophy would give up the notion that truth is to be found “out there” and “surrender to poetry” (Rorty 1989, 26; 40). The cultural hero of such an ideally liberal polity would be “Bloom’s ‘strong poet’ rather than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth‐seeking, ‘logical,’ ‘objective,’ scientist,” and literary criticism would be “the presiding intellectual discipline” (Rorty 1989, 53; 83). The citizens of Rorty’s utopia would be “liberal ironists” with a sense of the contingency of their language, their conscience, and their community who would combine “commitment with a sense of the contingency of their own commitment” (Rorty 1989, 61). There were early signs, however, of a tension in Rorty’s vision in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, where he described his ideal of a post‐Philosophical culture somewhat differently as one in which “neither the priests nor the physicists, nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more ‘rational,’ or more ‘scientific’ or ‘deeper’ than another” (Rorty 1982, xxxviii). There would be no “Philosophers” claiming to be able to explain “why and how certain areas of culture enjoyed a special relation to reality,” but there would be “all‐purpose intellectuals,” or “culture critics,” ready to offer “a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else” (Rorty 1982, xxxix). Their purpose would be redefined, in Hegel’s phrase, as the apprehension of one’s own time in thought, and so philosophers would be “doomed to become outdated” (Rorty 1982, xl). In these passages Rorty envisioned a more pluralistic utopia than the one he described in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and suggested a more positive role for philosophy than that of making a bonfire of rubbish in order to pave the way for the cultural dominance of poets and literary critics. Rorty’s redefinition of philosophy as “culture criticism” led some pragmatists to wonder how he could consistently rule out any discussion of religion, given its obvious significance in every culture. Cornel West, for example, objected to his “thin” historical narrative in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature as too “far removed from concrete historical processes and realities.” According to West, Rorty’s analysis was weakened by 300

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

his almost exclusive focus on philosophy of science and his silence about philosophy of religion, accompanied by a “glaring absence of sustained social and cultural criticism” (West 1993, 127). Rorty responded to this criticism by modifying his atheistic position and developing a pragmatist philosophy of religion. A new theme, which shifted the focus from the idea of “de‐divinization” to a position that he called “polytheism,” emerged in his writings in the mid‐1990s when he began to devote more attention to James’s philosophy toward the end of his career at the University of Virginia and after his move to Stanford, where one of the first courses he taught in 1998 was on James and Nietzsche. Rorty’s main opponent in this stage was monism rather than theism, and his move toward pluralism was reminiscent of James’s view that the ancient problem of “the one and the many” is “the most central of all philosophic problems” (James 1987, 542). Rorty’s first detailed discussion of religion was in “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” a paper he gave at a conference in 1995 in which his purpose was to defend James and Dewey’s tolerance for religious belief against “those who think that pragmatism and religion do not mix” (Dickstein 1998, 25). Comparing his view to Isaiah Berlin’s doctrine of the incommensurability of human values, Rorty defined “polytheism” as “the idea that there are diverse, conflicting, but equally valuable forms of human life.” He found a precedent for his redefinition of polytheism in section 143 of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science: monotheism, “this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type – the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo‐ gods – was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity.” He agreed with Nietzsche’s view that “In polytheism the free‐spiriting and many‐spiriting of man attained its first preliminary form – the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes – and ever again new eyes that are even more our own” (Nietzsche 1974, 192). Morris Dickstein interprets Rorty’s concept of a multiplicity of gods as a powerful metaphor for “the multiplicity of ethical goals and private needs in a democratic society” (Dickstein 1998, 14). A polytheist need not believe that “there are nonhuman persons with power to intervene in human affairs” but must “abandon the idea that we should try to find a way of making everything hang together, which will tell all human beings what to do with their lives, and tell all of them the same thing” (Dickstein 1998, 22–4). The move to polytheism was more sympathetic to religion than Rorty’s earlier position, and it necessitated revising his previous definition of philosophy in that a polytheist in Rorty’s sense must give up the goal of a single unified vision of how all the vocabularies of all epochs and cultures fit together. Rorty sketched an outline of his philosophy of religion in five theses which can be very briefly summarized as follows: Actions can serve many different purposes, and the pragmatic view of belief as a habit of action means that there is no need to unify all beliefs in a single worldview. Religious beliefs are not in competition with scientific beliefs because they fulfill different purposes. Science, like law, is a project of social cooperation, whereas religion, like art, is a project of individual self‐development and is objectionable only if it intrudes an individual project into a social cooperation project (Dickstein 1998, 27–9). In his 1997 article, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” Rorty elaborated on the different desires that science and religion fulfill. “Science enables us to predict and control, whereas religion offers us a larger hope, and thereby something to live for” (Rorty 1997, 89). The problem with both scientific realism and religious 301

Carol Nicholson

fundamentalism is that they are “private projects which have gotten out of hand. They are attempts to make one’s own private way of giving meaning to one’s life … obligatory for the general public” (Rorty 1997, 93). Rorty followed James in thinking that it does not matter whether we call religious faith “a belief, a desire, a hope, a mood, or some complex of these, so long as it has the same cash‐value in directing action,” and it does not need to be justified to others if it is private rather than public (Rorty 1997, 89). He gave the name “romance” to this “fuzzy overlap of faith, hope, and love,” which he thought could “crystallize around a labor union as easily as around a congregation, around a novel as easily as around a sacrament, around a God as easily as around a child.” He illustrated his point with a quotation from the novelist Dorothy Allison: There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto – God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined. (Rorty 1997, 96)

What Rorty liked best about this passage is the idea that “all these may be the same, that it does not greatly matter in which terms we state our reason to believe” (emphasis added). “What matters is the insistence itself – the romance, the ability to experience overpowering hope or faith or love [or sometimes, rage.]” He compared this quote to James’s idea that “the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come” and pointed out that Allison’s pluralism harmonizes with James’s polytheistic view that “the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alteration, different men may find worthy missions” (Rorty 1997, 97). Rorty’s views on religion continued to evolve, and in “Anticlericalism and Atheism” he admitted regret for using the term “atheism” to characterize his earlier position. He wrote, “Neither those who affirm nor those who deny the existence of God can plausibly claim that they have evidence for their views” (Rorty 2004a, 33). At this stage in his thinking Rorty preferred Max Weber’s expression “religiously unmusical” to describe those, like himself, who have never developed an attachment to any religious tradition. “One can be tone‐deaf when it comes to religion just as one can be oblivious to the charms of music” (Rorty 2004a, 30). He recognized that nonbelievers have no more right to be contemptuous of people who believe passionately in God than believers have a right to be contemptuous of those who do not. Instead of “atheism” he wished that he had used the term “anticlericalism,” the political view that “ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do – despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or in despair – are dangerous to the health of democratic societies.” Religion is not objectionable, from the point of view of anticlericalism, “as long as it is privatized – as long as ecclesiastical institutions do not attempt to rally the faithful behind political proposals and as long as believers and nonbelievers agree to follow a policy of live and let live” (Rorty 2004a, 33). This change in Rorty’s position was clearly incompatible with his earlier vision of an ideal society in which there would be no trace of divinity and no room for the idea of 302

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible. It was no longer possible for him to describe those who experience awe in the presence of a nonhuman power as being stuck in an immature phase in the progress of humanity toward self‐reliance. At this point Rorty may have suspected that by trying to make his own attempt to become self‐reliant obligatory for others, he had fallen into the same mistake that he accused scientific realists and religious fundamentalists of making – letting a private project get out of hand. He addressed the tension between his earlier and later visions of utopia in “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre” (2004b) in which he tried to fit the two themes into a single narrative by treating them as successive phases in the evolution of culture. He predicted that the literary culture he described in earlier writings was a transitional stage that would ideally be succeeded by a more polytheistic and inclusive utopia in which there would be no dominant form of culture (Rorty 2010, 488). In this version of his utopia there would be cooperation between “Kantian strivers as well as self‐involved aesthetes, people who cannot live without religion and people who despise it, nature’s metaphysicians as well as nature’s pragmatists” (Rorty 2010, 487). Such philosophical differences would be viewed as “matters of taste” in the same way that “we presently regard our neighbor’s obsession with bird watching, or collecting hubcaps, or discovering the secrets of the great pyramids.” To get along in this kind of utopia, “literary intellectuals will have to tone down their rhetoric” and learn not to “make invidious and quasi‐metaphysical distinctions” between themselves and lesser mortals. They will no longer think that “there is a standard against which the products of the human imagination can be measured other than their social utility as this utility is judged by a maximally free, leisured, and tolerant global community” (Rorty 2010, 488). We have seen that in Rorty’s philosophical development he had two different visions of the utopian society that he hoped would come about as a result of the “Pragmatic Reformation.” The first was a literary culture in which poetry would take the place of religion and philosophy, and the second was a more pluralistic utopia in which no form of culture would be dominant and religion and philosophy would continue to play a role. The second utopia was more compatible with James’s polytheistic religious beliefs and the metaphor of the corridor that he borrowed from Papini to describe his vision of pragmatism: It lies in the midst of our theories like a corridor in a hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a man writing an atheistic volume; in the next someone on his knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into or out of their respective rooms (James 1987, 510).

Although Rorty renounced his earlier atheism and moved closer to James’s view of religion in his later writings, there still remained a wide gulf between them because of their very different concepts of experience. Until the end of his life Rorty remained firmly lodged in the fifth room of Papini’s metaphorical hotel in denying the possibility of metaphysics, whereas James explored a new approach to metaphysics in his later writings that he called “radical empiricism.” 303

Carol Nicholson

The most important and far‐reaching accomplishment of the pragmatists, according to John E. Smith, was their radical reconstruction of the concept of experience which rescued it from the hands of the so‐called “empiricists” (Smith 1999, 8). James argued that the British empiricists were not empirical enough because they did not attend to the actual process of experiencing, and they tried to ground knowledge in simple ideas that were not empirical at all but the product of reflection and theory. His account of experience as it is lived and felt was opposed to classical empiricism on a number of points: Experience does not come in separate and static bits of sense data that passively reflect what the external world imposes on the mind. It is an ever‐changing “stream of consciousness” in which we actively participate through our selective attention in encountering the world and forming habits of action within it. Experience is not limited to sensation, but it is emotionally charged with interests, intentions, purposes, and values. It is not the opposite of thought or language, but it includes understanding connections and relations as well as distinctions and separations. Through experience we develop practical skills for interacting with the world, which are the basis of knowledge of ourselves, other people, and the order of nature. In short, James understood experience in the more ordinary and less philosophical sense as “know how,” a way of thinking in which experience does not exist in a private inner world apart from the physical and social worlds, and thus the traditional problem of the external world is a pseudo‐ problem that does not arise. There was a personal dimension to James’s radical empiricism that one of his biographers aptly described by saying that “Experience was his salvation, his religion” (Simon 1998, xxii). He was fascinated by new, risky, and intense experiences, and he wanted to dive into the flux of life rather than observe the world from afar like the traditional armchair theorist. He went on a scientific expedition to Brazil, hiked in the Adirondacks (severely damaging his heart on one occasion), and positively enjoyed living through the San Francisco earthquake. His quest for new experiences led him to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs and investigate occult and paranormal phenomena. It also made him intensely interested in different types of personality. When he met new people, “he probed persistently to discover all he could about them, to understand how their experiences made them who they were, to see where those experiences intersected with his own: all this to learn more about himself ” (Simon 1998, xxii). He reveled in the vagueness and ambiguity of the “big blooming buzzing confusion” of life from which “we carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out” to gratify our intellectual interests (James 1987, 1008, 634). To James this “concrete way of seeing” seemed obvious, but by the time he wrote The Meaning of Truth in 2009 in response to his critics, he realized that “concreteness as radical as ours is not so obvious,” at least to many other philosophers (James 1987, 934). It was not obvious to Rorty, whose conception of experience was the mirror image of James’s in being thin and abstract rather than thick and concrete. Rorty often quoted Sellars’s doctrine that “All experience is a linguistic affair,” which he interpreted to mean that “awareness, information, and knowledge are possible only after the acquisition of language” (Rorty 2007, 113). He accepted the Darwinian view that humans differ from other animals only in the complexity of their behavior, but he maintained that “the difference between language‐using and dumb animals” is important, even 304

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

though it is a difference only of degree rather than kind (Rorty 1999, 75). He thought that language is the only thing that is uniquely human, and as far as we know only humans are able to describe things. “Plants and the other animals can interact, but their success in these interactions is not a matter of their finding increasingly more profitable redescriptions of each other. Our success is largely a matter of finding such redescriptions” (Rorty 1999, 63–4). The idea of linguistic redescription, defined as the imaginative power “to redescribe the familiar in unfamiliar terms,” played a central role in Rorty’s neopragmatism (Rorty 1999, 87). It is what differentiates humans from other organisms and is the source of all progress in morality and intellectual endeavors. “No imagination, no language. No linguistic change, no moral or intellectual progress. Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play.” Other animals have the imaginative ability “to come up with socially useful novelties” such as beaver dams, but only humans are able to use it to give and ask for reasons (Rorty 2007, 115). Rorty claimed that his redefinitions of mind, information, and awareness in terms of linguistic practices would lead to progress in resolving a number of philosophical problems. On his anti‐empiricist view, there is no such thing as “mind” without the descriptive skills that only humans possess. “To have a mind is not to have a movie theatre inside the skull, with successive representations of the surroundings flashing on the screen. It is the ability to use persuasion to get what one wants.” There is no “information” without the use of sentences to justify other sentences. “Information came into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing up those assertions with further assertions.” Organisms without language can respond to stimuli in their environment, but there is no such thing as “awareness” without language to describe it. “There is no difference between the thermostat, the dog, and the prelinguistic infant except the differing degrees of complexity of their reactions to environmental stimuli” (Rorty 2007, 113). Instead of thinking of the goal of inquiry as getting in touch with reality by finding accurate representations of it, scientific and moral progress should be viewed as increasing sensitivity and responsiveness “to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people” (Rorty 1999, 81). After the linguistic turn, Rorty argued, the concept of experience as an intermediary between the causal impact of the environment and the organism’s response no longer has any useful function. It is “a wheel that plays no part in the mechanism” like Moliere’s “dormitive faculty” as the explanation for why opium causes sleep, and it should be dropped from the philosophical vocabulary in a more up‐to‐date and sophisticated version of pragmatism (Rorty 2004c, 93). Rorty thought that his argument dealt a devastating blow to all possible forms of empiricism, but he underestimated James’s radical version of it as a viable alternative to both traditional empiricism and anti‐empiricist neopragmatism. James’s reconstruction of empiricism was based on his analysis of the use and misuse of abstract concepts. He argued that the purpose of abstract concepts is to enlarge and illuminate the “crude flux of our merely feeling‐experience” by enabling us to translate it into a conceptual order, but ever since Socrates and Plato, many philosophers have made the mistake of using abstractions to diminish experience rather than enhancing our understanding of it. James called this error “vicious intellectualism,” which he defined as “the treating of a 305

Carol Nicholson

name as excluding from the fact named what the definition fails positively to include” (James 1987, 657; emphasis in original). It was this habit of misusing concepts by “employing them privatively as well as positively to deny the very properties with which the things sensibly present themselves” that led Plato to define “Justice” as a perfect ideal that is utterly different and remote from fallible human actions and institutions (James 1987, 728–9). It was the same mistake that caused critics of pragmatism to argue that “Truth” is eternal and unchanging and has nothing to do with our humble personal interests and purposes. James compared this philosophical move to defining a man as an “equestrian” and then denying that he can ever again walk on his own feet (James 1987, 657). He thought that most philosophical traditions have been guilty of this error, including his British empiricist heroes, who substituted abstract static and separate entities for the actual concrete flow of experience. James regarded vicious intellectualism as “one of the greatest original sins” of the philosophical mind because it arrests thought rather than advancing it (James 1987, 951–2). It is the same error that Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” but it is not a formal logical fallacy like “denying the antecedent” or “affirming the consequent” in an argument. This habit of mind stipulates a definition of a concept before any arguments are presented and then uses the concept that has been abstracted from the flow of experience to oppose and negate the “mother soil” from which it was derived (James 1987, 586–7). James thought that the widespread tendency toward vicious intellectualism prevented previous philosophers from adopting the “concrete way of seeing” that to him was “the whole point of pragmatism.” Rorty accused James of engaging in a “wrong‐headed polemic against abstract ideas,” but this was a serious misinterpretation. On James’s view the ability to form abstract concepts is “one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives” as long as it is used to interpret experience rather than to supersede and deny it (James 1987, 728). “Perception is solely of the here and now; conception is of the like and unlike, of the future, of the past, and of the far away.” If we “weigh extent against content, thickness against spread,” it is clear that the value of each depends upon our purposes. Both are essential for understanding, and we cannot limit ourselves to one of them any more than “a pair of scissors can cut with a single one of its blades” (James 1987, 1020). Jacques Barzun compared concepts in James’s view to fire and knives, which are precious instruments for enhancing the power of the mind that can be dangerous if misused. “Keeping hold of the concrete and the particular is not to take sides against concepts and conceptions, ideas and general truths. On the contrary, it is to value these so much that one remembers to be fastidious in their use and demanding as to their quality” (Barzun 1983, 63) James argued that the vicious use of abstractions can result not only in intellectual errors but also in moral failures. It can manifest itself in the “sentimentalist fallacy,” which is “to shed tears over abstract justice and generosity, beauty, etc. and never to know these qualities when you meet them in the street, because the circumstances make them vulgar” (James 1987, 586–7). He gave the example of a Russian lady “weeping over the fictitious personages in the play while her coachman is freezing to death on his seat outside” (Barzun 1983, 68). Her error is a failure to connect the abstract concepts of suffering and sympathy with the concrete situation, which is due not to an excess of fine sentiments but rather to a deficiency of imagination. James’s 306

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

favorite of all his writings was “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in which he described a personal experience that opened his eyes to the significance of the inner lives of poor settlers in North Carolina. “The only way in which to apprehend reality’s thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one’s self, or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else’s inner life” (James 1987, 745). George Cotkin has argued that for James “vicious intellectualism represented the philosophical counterpart to the blindness of imperialism in the political sphere.” The link between them is the failure to recognize and respect the concrete experiential reality of others (Cotkin 1989, 143). In the conclusion to “On a Certain Blindness” James drew a lesson from his experience in North Carolina that he linked to his pluralistic philosophical vision: “It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth, nor the whole of good, is revealed to any single observer” (James 1992, 860). The difficulty in comparing James’s and Rorty’s views of experience is that they were using the word in the context of completely different vocabularies. Martin Jay makes this clear in Songs of Experience, an illuminating account of how the concept of experience has changed dramatically in the history of ideas (Jay 2005). When James wrote about experience, he had in mind concrete examples such as a mountain vista, a mescaline trip, or a personal encounter with someone who has a completely different vision of reality. Rorty meant by experience the kind of abstract concept that traditional empiricists postulated as an intermediary between the mind and the world, a theory of knowledge that James criticized a century before. Rorty accused James of being “led down the garden path of radical empiricism” because of the bad influence of Bergsonian metaphysics, but from James’s point of view it could be argued that Rorty fell into the error of vicious intellectualism on a grand scale. By eliminating the concept of experience from philosophy, he outdid even Plato, who argued that experience is less real and important than knowledge of the Forms but never went so far as to banish the concept from the academy. James would have said of Rorty’s substitution of language for experience, “There never was a more exquisite example of an idea abstracted from the concretes of experience and then used to oppose and negate what it was abstracted from” (James 1987, 586). He would have agreed with Bernstein’s criticism of Rorty that “to eliminate experience from pragmatism (old or new) is to eviscerate pragmatism, to leave us with a gutless shadow of pragmatism” (Bernstein 2010, 128). It would have dismayed him to see that, instead of putting pragmatism into better shape, Rorty’s “crash diet” went too far in depriving philosophy of its main source of nourishment in the lived experience of the stream of consciousness. Many contemporary scholars who are sympathetic to pragmatism have objected to Rorty’s substitution of language for experience. Mark Johnson argues that meaningful experience is far broader than concepts and sentences and is rooted in bodily experiences that are expressed in the conceptual metaphors that underlie abstract thought. He thinks that Rorty’s chief mistake is the neglect of nonlinguistic meaning, which results in a failure to take art, music, and dance seriously and drastically impoverishes our understanding of life (Johnson 2007, 270–1). Johnson finds support for his 307

Carol Nicholson

embodied meaning hypothesis in “recent empirical research in biology, in cognitive neuroscience, and in cognitive linguistics” and encourages philosophers to follow James and Dewey in understanding that “philosophy and empirical science must develop in mutual cooperation and criticism, if we are ever to have an empirically responsible and philosophically sound understanding of the human mind” (Johnson 2007, 111, 152). James T. Kloppenberg points out that “for James and Dewey language was only one important part of a richer, broader range that included interpersonal, aesthetic, spiritual, religious, and other prelinguistic or nonlinguistic forms of experience” (Kloppenberg 2000, 22). He objects to Rorty’s privileging of language over experience because its effect is to “dismiss much of what historians value in their efforts to understand the past as it was lived” (Kloppenberg 2000, 33). David Skrbina raises a good question about Rorty’s view that prelinguistic infants have no more awareness than thermostats: “At what point do babies acquire mind? Does mind gradually come into existence, or does it leap into being at the first utterance of ‘mama’? Either answer is fraught with difficulties” (Skrbina 2005, 280n12). Experimental techniques now allow researchers to test hypotheses about infants’ inner lives by monitoring their eye movements sucking responses, challenging Rorty’s view that they have no awareness (Johnson 2007, 34). Barry Allen argues that Rorty is not nearly pragmatic enough. “The so‐called linguistic turn in twentieth‐century philosophy is one more academic overestimation of the sort of knowledge academic methods best master, which is egregiously elevated over every other way in which human beings know how to be effective” (Allen 2000, 143). These criticisms point out how the doctrine that all experience is linguistic blocks the way of inquiry in aesthetics, history, and the sciences, and thus it could be called a dogma of Rorty’s anti‐empiricism. Rorty’s narrowly intellectual definition of language also had ethical implications. He thought that the goal of inquiry and moral progress is to increase sensitivity to the needs of more inclusive “groups of people,” but why stop at human beings if the only difference among living things is the degree of complexity of their behavior? Rorty never wrote about environmental issues, but given his view of philosophy as cultural politics, his silence on one of the most serious moral and political issues of our time is surprising and disappointing. He assumed without any empirical evidence that plants and nonhuman animals have no awareness and do not share information in social networks, which blocked collaboration between philosophers and scientists and ruled out including nonhuman organisms in the moral community. Rorty’s anthropocentrism could thus be seen as another dogma of his anti‐empiricism. The tension between Rorty’s human‐centered perspective and his romantic polytheism reflected his ambivalent attitude toward James. Rorty made his reputation on his relentless refusal to submit to a nonhuman power, and yet he wanted to become more like James, who was famous for his defense of the right to believe in polytheistic gods. James moved “beyond a narrowly anthropocentric view to describe an ethical universe in which our perceptions, purposes, and actions coexist alongside, and in competition with, the perceptions and demands of other beings,” as Albrecht (2004, 27) persuasively argues. Skrbina points out that James’s view was very close to the pluralistic panpsychism of Fechner, who “deserves to be held as a founding father of the modern environmental movement” and “anticipated much of Gaia theory more than a century 308

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

before Lovelock” (Skrbina 2005, 224). Rorty was a student of Hartshorne and he wrote his dissertation on Whitehead, both of whom were panpsychists. In a candid interview he revealed that at Yale he had been “badly educated for a career teaching philosophy in the US” because he “didn’t learn enough about analytic philosophy” (Rorty 1998, 50–1). If Rorty had not found it necessary to reeducate himself in analytic philosophy, he might have become more like James, but he would not have written Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and philosophy would have been immeasurably poorer without his pioneering work. Brian Leiter says that most philosophers have stopped reading Rorty, but I hope that he is mistaken (Leiter 2004, 18n99). In spite of his blind spots, Rorty should continue to be read for many generations because, like Hume, he awakened philosophy from its dogmatic slumber. I have argued that in the last decade of his life Rorty moved closer to James’s position in becoming more pluralistic and tolerant of a diversity of philosophical approach, but his systematic denial of the concrete in favor of the abstract point of view was an example of what James called “vicious intellectualism” and had the effect of blocking the way of inquiry. As James pointed out, both abstract and concrete ways of thinking are necessary in philosophy and everyday life depending on our purposes. For solving our intellectual and practical problems we sometimes need to narrow our focus of attention for the sake of clarity and precision, and in other situations it is important to pay attention to the broader context. Rorty’s adherence to the first dogma of anti‐empiricism, the view that all experience is linguistic, ruled out of philosophical consideration the experiences of babies and nonhuman organisms as well as artistic and musical experience. His adherence to the second dogma of anti‐empiricism, the assumption of a human‐centered worldview, denied the possibility of including nonhuman members in the moral community and prevented him from developing a response to the environmental crisis. It would have been more consistent with Rorty’s later more pluralistic vision if he had said that the linguistic turn is one way, but not the only way, of doing philosophy. If Rorty had given up the dogmas of anti‐empiricism, he might have been able to imagine new kinds of (lowercase) metaphysics and epistemology that would not be tied to Platonic ideas about eternal realities or Kantian notions about the foundations of knowledge. Instead of attempting to end epistemology, he should have said, in the spirit of James’s radical empiricism, that we need a new kind of (lowercase) epistemology that could be defined more broadly and more modestly than traditional epistemology as the study of how all human scientific, historical, and artistic endeavors are related to each other and to the conduct of life. Instead of attempting to end metaphysics, he should have said, in the spirit of James’s pluralistic universe, that we need a new kind of (lowercase) metaphysics that would include nonhuman members in a broader vision of the moral community. Assuming that Rorty was right in thinking that the proper role of philosophy is to express one’s own time in thought and that every philosophy is doomed to become outdated, perhaps his work can best be viewed as a “transitional genre” that was important in paving the way for an even more pluralistic vision of the future of philosophy than the one that he developed in his later writings. I have pulled no punches in my criticisms of Rorty, and I would like to balance this by being equally frank about my admiration for him as a philosopher and as a person. Like 309

Carol Nicholson

James, Rorty thought that philosophy had become too scholastic and remote from the problems of life, and he succeeded in creating a new self‐image for the discipline that would make a difference to people’s lives. Although he modestly denied that his work made much of an impact on philosophy (Rorty 1998, 54), I am convinced that he changed it significantly for the better by his example of openness to American pragmatism, the Continental tradition, and feminist philosophy. When I was fresh out of graduate school, I was very fortunate to be teaching at a college just a few miles away from Princeton while Rorty was there. He was an important influence on my thinking and an exemplar of the kind of philosopher that I wanted to become. During several decades of reading Rorty’s work and debating with him at conferences, I always found him to be brilliantly stimulating and tremendously fun to engage with, even when I profoundly disagreed with him. He inspired and infuriated me as if he were the very incarnation of Socrates, and I loved him dearly. To paraphrase Rorty’s words about James with which this essay began, his mind was uncommonly capacious and his charity uncommonly expansive. Reading Rorty can help us become more like him, and thus help us to become better lovers of wisdom and better human beings.

References Albrecht, James M. 2004. “‘What Does Rome Know of Rat and Lizard?’ Pragmatic Mandates for Considering Animals in Emerson, James, and Dewey.” In Animal Pragmatism, edited by Erin McKenna and Andrew Light, 19–42. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allen, Barry. 2000. “Is It Pragmatism? Rorty and the American Tradition.” In A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, edited by John Pettegrew, 135–49. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Barzun, Jacques. 1983. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row. Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Cotkin, George. 1989. William James: Public Philosopher. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Dickstein, Morris. 1998. The Revival of Pragmatism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. James, William. 1987. Writings (1902–1910). New York: The Library of America. —. 1992. Writings (1878–1899). New York: The Library of America. Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Johnson, Mark. 2007. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kloppenberg, James T. 2000. “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” In A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, edited by John Pettegrew, 19–60. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Leiter, Brian, ed. 2004. The Future for Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malachowski, Alan. 2011. “Putting Pragmatism into Better Shape,” Pragmatism Today 2(1): 51–5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1997. “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” In The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam, 84–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

310

Rorty’s Romantic Polytheism: The Influence of William James

—. 1998. Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies. Charlottesville, VA: Prickly Pear Pamphlets. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. —. 2004a. “Anticlericalism and Atheism.” In The Future of Religion, edited by Santiago Zabala, 29–41. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2004b. “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.” In Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, 3–28. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. —. 2004c. “Some Inconsistencies in James’ Varieties.” In William James and a Science of Religions, edited by Wayne Proudfoot, 86–97. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 473–88. New York: Wiley Blackwell. Simon, Linda. 1998. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Skrbina, David. 2005. Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, John E. 1999. “Introduction.” In Classical American Pragmatism, edited by Sandra B. Rosenthal, 1–11. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. West, Cornel. 1993. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge.

Further Reading Rorty, Richard. 2000. “Afterword: Intellectual Historians and Pragmatist Philosophy.” In A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, edited by John Pettegrew, 207–11. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Voparil, Christopher J. and Richard J. Bernstein, eds. 2010. The Rorty Reader. New York: Wiley Blackwell.

311

19 Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud ALAN MALACHOWSKI

Freudian discoveries are troubling, even for pragmatists. Richard Rorty

1 Prologue Sigmund Freud happens to be one of Richard Rorty’s adopted heroes. Although he is never spoken of as a “favorite,” and does not often have the kind of prominence on the page enjoyed by various other figures Rorty greatly admires,1 Freud is nevertheless allocated a significant role. And, as so often when Rorty ushers a major figure into the midst of his ­discussions, a number of Freud’s views are cast in a fresh light that opens up various intriguing possibilities. However, the complexity of the resulting picture is deceptive. For it shields tensions between Rorty’s own views and those he cheerfully attributes to Freud. Our strategy in elaborating on these tensions will be to first outline Rorty’s general approach to Freud. And, to do this, we will concentrate, for the most part, on the variegated picture that emerges from two principal texts, alongside an accompanying subsidiary. The key texts are: the second chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, entitled “The Contingency of Selfhood,” as well as “Freud and Moral Reflection” (henceforth FMR), an ambitiously substantial lecture, first delivered in 1984. Our subsidiary source is the short, but pregnant, article “Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics” (henceforth FMH). We will then dig beneath the detail of Rorty’s general approach to reveal certain problematic aspects, with a view to exploring their implications. These lead to our main conclusion, which is perhaps worth flagging now: though it is enlivened by characteristically lively and colorful ideas that make for some very stimulating reading, Rorty’s appropriation of Freud is largely misguided, even by Rorty’s own lights. This alliance ultimately fails, we argue, because it overlooks the ways in which the holistic style of pragmatism Rorty habitually favors undermines his conception of the fundamentals of Freud’s account of our identity and mental life. A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

312

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

Having suggested that psychoanalytic discoveries are troubling for pragmatists, Rorty somehow fails to notice how troubling his own pragmatism is for his interpretation of Freud and, consequently, the portrait of the self that feeds off this interpretation. Without going into detail, we will further conjecture that Rorty’s pragmatism is also likely to pose serious problems for certain aspects of psychoanalysis, even when we set aside his reading of Freud. Ironically, although these anomalies reflect rather badly on Rorty’s choice of a conversational partner in crime, they provide much food for thought and attest to the strength of certain features of his stance on the nature purpose of philosophy. Though, again, this is not something we will dwell on.

2  Language, Self, and Contingency It is the accidental factors that play the principal part in analysis. Sigmund Freud (1986, 278)

Rorty floats Freud’s “discoveries”2 as sterling examples of how one person’s creative brilliance can radically change the prevailing cultural landscape, and even, at times, the course of history, by introducing fresh ways of speaking. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, for example, Freud is classed among those history‐makers “of individual genius who think of something new” (Rorty 1979, 264) and thereby provide “striking examples of the phenomenon of reflection’s changing vocabulary and behavior” (1979, 386). This Freud is an inveterate vocabulary‐creator, someone with imaginative powers akin to those of Rorty’s archetypal heroes, the “strong poets”: those verse‐makers who use words “as they have never been used before” (Rorty 1989, 28). Like them, Freud introduces language that is as challenging as it is evocative. It challenges common perceptions of what kind of beings we are and what kind of life we can, and should, lead. Indeed, according to Rorty, everything we hold dear seems to come under threat from the ways in which Freud’s words ironize our “love of humanity and truth” (Rorty 1980, 179). This is the Freud who also, as the general editor of the new Penguin Freud translations, tells us, did “so much to ironize our wishes for greatness” (Phillips 2006, viii).3 But, Rorty’s views on the historical status of this ironizing challenge lack stability. At times, he writes as if Freud’s greatest contribution was to introduce words and phrases that stir up cultural controversy and raise difficult questions, the consequences of which will take a very long time to determine: “if high culture survives, we are in for another few hundred years of getting adjusted to the availability of the psychoanalytic vocabulary” (Rorty 1980, 177). We are, Rorty tells us, “still at the beginning of answering the really crucial question that Freud raised: can we hang on to the idea of ‘humanity,’ the secular substitute for God, which the intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created for us?” (1980, 177). On this reading, Freud’s innovative contributions to language have yet to be properly assimilated. But, Rorty also refers to, and often assumes the existence of, “the commonsense Freudianism of contemporary culture” (1989, 31): a phenomenon that Mark Edmundson describes with comprehensive lucidity: What one might call commonsense Freudianism has become pervasive in the West. Without thinking about it, people have come to believe in the determining power of

313

Alan Malachowski

childhood; they take the child’s relations with her parents to be archetypes, or models, for future love relations and relations with authority. Even readers of supermarket tabloids know something about the perils of the Oedipal complex. It is understood that dreams are fulfillments of repressed wishes and that they are susceptible to analysis, as are slips of the tongue and pen. Few now would deny that “repression,” which Freud called the “cornerstone” of his theories, is a large part of what determines any individual character. People speak serenely of infantile sexuality, neuroses, and narcissism. (Edmundson 2007, 4)

In accepting this picture, Rorty writes as if the difficulties and resistances that psychoanalytic discourse provokes have not prevented it from being seamlessly absorbed into our ordinary ways of thinking and speaking. Indeed, in this respect he appears to concur with Harold Bloom’s characteristically bold assessment that “Few figures in cultural history have had anything like Freud’s success at insinuating concepts into our consciousness” (Bloom 1995, 380). Nevertheless, on other occasions, Rorty suggests that the life span of Freudian terminology might be short, that it might soon be replaced by the kind of words that refer only to biochemical and neurological phenomena: “There is always the possibility that Freud will prove to have been a false start – that when corpuscularism finally gets down to the microstructure of the nervous system, we shall no longer need Freudian vocabulary” (Rorty 1980, 178).4 The cultural preference for a word like “neurotic” over “wicked” might then, he says, turn out to have been merely “transitional” (1980, 178). Having told us that, however, Rorty also waters the warning message down elsewhere: “Even if analytic psychiatry should someday be abandoned in favor of chemical and microsurgical forms of treatment, the connections that Freud drew between such emotions as sexual yearning and hostility, on the one hand, and between dreams and parapraxes,5 on the other, would remain part of the common sense of our culture” (Rorty 1991a, 149n8). When Rorty does consider Freud to be someone whose thinking has already become part of “our culture,”6 he uses that thinking, or rather his take on its popular assimilation, to launch a wide range of his trademark, synoptic, explanatory forays. Thus, he extrapolates from the part that unconscious beliefs and desires play in causing our behavior without serving as reasons for that behavior, to what he regards as an analogous general account of cultural change where “the ‘irrational’ intrusion of beliefs which ‘make no sense’ (i.e. cannot be justified by exhibiting their coherence with the rest of what we believe) are just those events which intellectual historians look back upon as ‘conceptual revolution’” (Rorty 1991a, 15).7 And, to cite just one more example, Rorty tries to help us get a better handle on late Heidegger and early Derrida by characterizing them as the kind of prophets that Freud debunked on psychoanalytic grounds: Prophets who claim a personal, quasi‐filial relationship with God tell us that he is as inescapable for us as for them. But, Freud suggested, such prophets may simply be trying to excuse their own idiosyncratic difficulties by taking them to be universal: imagining that their own tiresome and embarrassing parents are also the parents of everyone else. Late Heidegger and early Derrida are, to my mind, this sort of prophet. (Rorty 1991a, 108)

They are prophets of this sort because “‘the discourse of philosophy’ is to early Derrida as ‘Being is to late Heidegger. Both terms refer to something we can never simply walk away from, but instead must constantly struggle with” (1991a, 107). Rorty likens 314

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

this struggle to the life‐long Freudian struggle with “figures of infantile fantasy” (p. 107). Interesting and prismatic though they may be, these uses of Freud are cosmetic.8 But, Freud is treated as a more substantial exemplar when it comes to demonstrating the philosophical significance of what came to be one of Rorty’s own pivotal notions: contingency. And, the emblematic theme here is the contingent nature of selfhood. According to Rorty, Freud shows us that the self is woven out of a plethora of idiosyncratic experiences involving human relationships reaching back to early childhood as well as myriad chance reactions to events and objects, many closely associated with those relationships, others not. In doing this, Freud undermines the idea of the self as something immutably given, such as a soul or, more generally, “something within each of us which resonates to the presence of the same thing in other human beings” (Rorty 1989, 189).9 It is, instead, a veritable “tissue of contingencies” (1989, 32). Conceiving the self in such terms, Rorty contends, encourages us to give up on an age‐old philosophical prejudice that regards time and chance as “unworthy of determining our fate” (1989, 31).10 It is not entirely clear why we should be so encouraged, and still less clear why we should find the results of what we are encouraged to so do encouraging:11 why we should become enamored of the achievements of Keats’s “magic hand of chance.”12 However, Rorty’s thought seems to be that if we want to become more comfortable with ourselves, we have to look favorably on both the contingent factors that psychoanalysis helps us identify as being responsible for shaping who we are and the very fact that these are contingent. Then, true comfort requires us to take creative ownership of the particular contingencies concerned in order to shape them into a unique self. We have to do this for what can seem rather arcane reasons that Rorty sees as flowing from both a need to avoid the kind of anxieties over lack of uniqueness that Harold Bloom attributes to great poets13 and a quasi‐Nietzschean suggestion that self‐knowledge involves self‐ creation rather than self‐discovery. Here is how Rorty pulls this all together: Nietzsche did not abandon the idea of discovering the causes of our being what we are … He only rejected the idea that … tracking [them] was a process of discovery … Rather, he saw self‐knowledge as self‐creation. The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing new language – that is of thinking up some new metaphors. For any literal description of one’s individuality, which is to say any use of an inherited language game for this purpose, will necessarily fail. One will not have traced that idiosyncrasy home, but merely have managed to see it as not idiosyncratic after all, as a specimen reiterating a type, a copy, or a replica of something which has already been identified. To fail as a poet  –  and thus for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being – is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself, to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at best, elegant variations on previously written poems. So the only way to trace home the causes of ones being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language. (Rorty 1989, 27–8)

The “identity of process” broached in the fourth sentence remains puzzling even when it is unpacked in the sentences that surround it, where Rorty appears to be saying that it is not enough for us to track down and simply acknowledge the Freudian contingencies causally responsible for us being who we are. If such acknowledgment is voiced 315

Alan Malachowski

in the plain literal terms of common usage, it will tag these contingencies as types, thereby ignoring the very quality that makes them, and hence us, unique: their idiosyncrasy. Only by clothing them in fresh words that we have conjured up by ourselves can we release our inner poet and kick start the process of self‐creation that can make us who we are and who we would want to be when we know who we have become. There is perhaps a small, unremarked irony in this: to attain the freedom to take over the process of shaping who we are, we must submit to the necessity of recognizing, accepting, and redescribing in our own terms the contingencies that have shaped us so far. Some obscurity remains, however. But, before we confront it, we need to look more closely at where poets and poetry fit in. On Rorty’s understanding, Freud provides an account of how selves are produced that meshes perfectly with his own idea of persons as poets.14 Selves are fashioned by the weaving together of capricious experiences and object‐directed relations, where the unconscious is the quirky, but clever, behind‐the‐scenes weaver. When this account is interpreted, and where necessary modified, so as to exclude any thought that “the unconscious” is a single weaver, Rorty finds it congenial enough to make it his own. And, on his further reading, the process of Freudian weaving is linguistically precocious, with sufficient inventiveness to make each person intensely interesting. Indeed, under appropriate scrutiny, everyone’s life can exert a fascination comparable with that exerted by literary artifacts such as novels or poems.15 Rorty quotes Philip Rieff in crisp support of this: “Freud democratized genius by giving everyone a creative unconscious” (Rieff 1961, 36). He also provides pertinent backup from Leo Bersani which he says generalizes the position of both Rieff and Freud’s most celebrated literary interpreter Lionel Trilling: “Psychoanalytic theory has made the notion of fantasy so richly problematic that we should no longer be able to take for granted the distinction between art and life” (Bersani 1977, 138). But, the interpretation of Freud that Rorty is rolling out here seems to be very much influenced by facets of Trilling’s exegesis which require no such generalizing. Trilling had a deep and abiding interest in Freud, was analyzed himself, and wrote some penetratingly thoughtful essays on Freud’s relationship not only to literature, but also to culture in general.16 And, Trilling’s Freud is clearly the Freud that Rorty knows he needs: someone who “showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind” while regarding the mind “as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry‐making faculty” (Trilling 1967, 89).17 It may look as if this helps us swallow what would otherwise be a fanciful idea: that it is not too much to expect each one of us to “invent new language.” But, this leaves unclear when, why, and how the requisite inventiveness comes into play. Since the unconscious is itself supremely poetic, why do we need to improve on its handiwork when we start to become aware of its causal influence on our character? And, if the “we” refers to egos,18 then isn’t the inventiveness requirement too demanding after all? Rorty is ambiguous on this. At one point he seems resigned to the fact that most of us are “doomed to remain philosophers … doomed to spend our conscious lives trying to escape from contingency rather than, like the strong poet, acknowledging and appropriating contingency” (Rorty 1989, 28). Yet at other times, he runs enthusiastically with Rieff ’s suggestion that Freud democratized genius, and then discusses in some detail how Freud “gives each of us the equipment to construct our own private 316

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

vocabulary of moral deliberation” (Rorty 1989, 32).19 Moreover, it is also difficult to see how Rorty’s vacillating account squares with what happens in a psychoanalytic setting. For again: it seems over‐demanding to expect analysands to come up with fresh language to describe their experiences. If they are speaking from the ego, they are unlikely to have the talent to do this, and if the unconscious id is taking charge, the requirement is surely redundant, if not counterproductively intrusive.20 Adopting suggestions from an analyst will not help either. He or she will face the same problems, and, in any case the resulting linguistic contribution will then be unsuitably secondhand.

3  The Pragmatic Dimension The vocabulary Freud introduced that purportedly shows us “nobody is dull through and through” (Rorty 1989, 135) has pragmatic value in Rorty’s eyes. That is, of course, fundamental to its attraction. Freud’s “mechanistic explanations work: they give us a handle on the things we want to manipulate or change” (Rorty 1980, 183). Rorty suggests, moreover, that our own attitude toward them needs to be correspondingly pragmatic. For they are the kind of explanations that we can get the best out of only when we make them familiar and abjure any inclination to assume a distanced, theoretical stance toward them: “[I] think psychoanalysis needs to be used rather than transcended. We need to get closer to it rather than distance it, to live with its terminology rather than translate that terminology into another, less specific, loftier vocabulary” (Rorty 1980, 181; emphasis added). Rorty presents, then, a Freud who plays various roles amenable to his own projects. Freud conjures up words and phrases in ways which illustrate Rorty’s contention that vocabulary shifts are both the wellspring of philosophical problems and the motor of important historical change. And, this happy confluence helps shore up Rorty’s conception of what philosophers are good for.21 They serve us best when they act as pragmatic mediators at nodes of major vocabulary change, a view that Rorty suggests was earlier promoted by John Dewey: Dewey construed Hegel’s insistence on historicity as the claim that philosophers should not try to be the avant garde of society and culture, but should be content to mediate between the past and the future. Their job is to weave together old beliefs and new beliefs, so that these beliefs can cooperate rather than interfere with one another. Like the engineer and the lawyer, the philosopher is useful in solving particular problems that arise in particular situations – situations in which the language of the past is in conflict with the needs of the future. (Rorty 1995, 199)

Furthermore, the content of the claims Freud fashions together out of terms like “transference,” “libido,” “super ego,” “wish fulfillment” and “repression”22 has an unsettling effect at both the personal and cultural level. It seems to show us, for instance, that our moral sensibility, both as individuals and as community members, is “historically conditioned, a product as much of time and chance as political or aesthetic consciousness” (Rorty 1989, 30). But, this leaves us ill at ease with any sense we might have, or wish to have, of there being something in us, or about us, that lifts us forever 317

Alan Malachowski

above the capricious turn of worldly events.23 Here, Freud appears to be the anti‐Plato, an arch debunker of elevated conceptions of the self.24 In addition, we have the Freud who insists that the very constitution of the mind is creative enough to wrap every life in a web of intriguing fantasy, the proper understanding of which must also make room for the play of contingency. Rorty’s readings of Freud and his tendency to attribute convenient roles to him have not escaped criticism. Jean Bethke Elshtain, for example, scoffs at the notion Freud simply tossed some new words into pot of culture without regard to any motivational issues that transcend contingency and the very possibility of imminent Rortian re‐ description (Elshtain 2003).25 And, Jacques Bouveresse is singularly unimpressed by Rorty’s following depiction of Freud’s legacy: The increased ability of the syncretic, ironic, nominalist intellectual to move back and forth between, for example, religious, moral, scientific, literary, philosophical, and psychoanalytical vocabularies without asking the question “And which of these shows us how things really are?” – is Freud’s major legacy. (Rorty 1991a, 158)

Bouveresse objects that this ignores Freud’s obvious scientific ambitions and, more specifically, his belief that he had discovered “something essential about the ‘true nature’ of mental life, and … cleared, in territory traditionally claimed by metaphysics and religion, a new space for an authentically scientific psychology” (Bouveresse 2000, 136–7). Rorty has a blanket reply to these and other such objections. He argues that it is relatively harmless, and is even likely to be very profitable, to read “authors against their own expectations [and] against the grain of their intentions … to use [their] writings as grist for my own mill – taking what I want and setting aside what I find pointless” (Rorty 2000, 150). But, when we look closely at how Rorty explains in detail why Freud’s language requires “mediation,” why it is so challenging to traditional conceptions of the self and ingrained prejudices concerning the effects of “time and chance,” we can see he is invoking an interpretation of Freud that clashes with his own views in ways that cannot be so blithely dismissed.

4  Cleverer Selves Inside Clever Animals The interpretation of Freud that causes problems for Rorty is one he cheerfully derives from Donald Davidson’s ingenious defense of three claims that Davidson regards as quintessentially Freudian: (1) The mind contains a number of quasi‐independent structures, these structures being characterized by mental attributes like thoughts, desires, and memories. (2) Parts of the mind are in important respects like people, not only in having (or consisting of) beliefs, wants, and other psychological traits, but in that these factors can combine, as in intentional action, to cause further events in the mind or outside it.

318

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

(3) Some of the dispositions, attitudes, and events that characterize the various substructures in the mind must be viewed on the model of physical dispositions and forces when they affect, or are affected by, other substructures in the mind (Davidson 2006a, 139) Davidson argues (1)–(3) can be used to explain common forms of irrationality that would otherwise tend to appear paradoxical, and hence inexplicable. These include “wishful thinking, acting contrary to one’s own best judgment, self‐deception, [and] believing something that one holds to be discredited by the weight of the ­evidence” (2006a, 139). It is not difficult to see how the three Freudian claims can help Davidson generate a nonparadoxical account of such phenomena.26 By a ­ llowing that the mind can contain independent sets of beliefs, intentions, desires, and so forth, the specifiable contents of which are consistent in and among themselves but not across their boundaries, and by also allowing that there can be causal interaction between the members of such sets as well as between them and the related body, we can flesh out a picture of why a person might, say, perform a particular action while also sincerely believing best available evidence dictates that it is very unwise to do so: one set embodies the desire to perform the action, but not the salient beliefs about the available evidence in question, while another set does contain those beliefs, but not the desire, and members of the first set get the body into gear, causally speaking. Davidson is quite clear about one of the main principles at work here. Mental events can cause other mental events without being reasons for them.27 This is most obvious, he claims, in cases where “cause and effect occur in different minds” (Davidson 2006a, 147). I very much want you to fold your hand in poker, for example, and on seeing me feign strength you are moved to want to fold, and therefore you do. But, although my desire for you to do fold caused you to do it, that desire was not the reason (not even a reason) why you acted the way you did. Indeed, it was necessary that you should not even have been aware that it existed. And, of course, my behavior was designed to ensure this. Such cases of “social interaction” may provide the “most obvious and clear cases,” says Davidson, but the principles involved can “be applied to a single mind and person.” And, not only that, “if we are going to explain irrationality at all, it seems we must assume that the mind can be partitioned into quasi‐independent structures” (Davidson 2006a, 147–8). Rorty does two things with this account. First, he takes it a good deal further, and second he uses it to show why Freudian language about the self is unsettling enough to cause cultural consternation, and a prima facie need for some philosophical mediation. Rorty pushes Davidson’s account further by suggesting that the individual sets of beliefs, desires, and so on that Davidson refers to can best be treated as separate persons. Davidson himself is cautious on this score, telling us that the analogy between the subdivision of the mind and “what is needed to explain ordinary actions does not have to be carried so far as to demand that we speak of parts of the mind as independent agents … the idea of a quasi‐autonomous division is not one that demands a little agent in the division; again, the operative concepts are those of cause and action” (Davidson 2006a, 151). Rorty throws this caution to the wind.28 319

Alan Malachowski

He takes it that Davidson’s strategy of partitioning the mind “leaves open the possibility that the same human body can play host to two or more persons” (1991a, 147), and he explores the results of taking this possibility both seriously and literally. In doing this, he quickly sidelines Davidson and attributes the multi‐person approach directly to Freud himself: What is novel in Freud’s view of our unconscious is his claim that our unconscious selves are not dumb, sullen, lurching brutes, but rather the intellectual peers of our conscious selves, possible conversational partners for those selves. (Rorty 1991a, 149)

This is more forthright on the subject than Freud was generally inclined to be, but it has some textual foundation.29 In The Unconscious, for instance, Freud says that we should apply the kind of inferences he claims we ordinarily make about the existence of conscious states in others to ourselves: If we proceed in this way, we have to say that all the actions and expressions we can observe in ourselves and cannot relate to the rest of our psychic life must be judged as if they belonged to another person, and must be explained in terms of a psychic life ascribed to that person. (Freud 2007, 53)30

But, in describing the unconscious in such terms, Rorty also suggests how Freudian analysis might be profitably redescribed. It can be best viewed as a project of “self‐ enrichment”: one that primarily involves “getting acquainted with one or more crazy quasi people, listening to their crazy account of how things are, seeing why they hold the crazy views they do hold, and learning something from them” (Rorty 1991a, 150). And, the upshot of the orthodox Freudian project of inviting the ego31 into the territory of the id, and vice versa, will no longer need to yield talk about overcoming, or sublimating, instinctual drives, but rather reports like: Once I could not figure out why I was acting so odd, and hence wondered if I were, somehow, under the control of a devil or beast. But, now I shall be able to see my actions as rational, as making sense, though perhaps based on mistaken premises. I may even discover that those premises were not mistaken, that my unconscious knew better than I did. (Rorty 1991a, 150)

In addition, Rorty emphasizes that the multi‐person model shows more clearly why Freud’s discoveries were, and can still be, so disturbing. For this model enables us to sharpen Freud’s own famous explanation as to why psychoanalysis continues the “decentering” of human thought begun by Copernicus and Darwin, namely that it “seeks to prove to the ego it is not even master in its own house” (Freud 1966, 284). Rorty points out that although “the relevant sense of mastery is unclear … the suggestion that some unknown persons are causing (or, to stress the alienation produced by this suggestion, causing our bodies) to do things we would rather not do is de‐centering in a way that an account of the heavenly bodies (or the descent of man) is not” (Rorty 1991a, 148). He further claims “this suggestion that one or more clever, articulate, inventive persons are at work behind the scene – cooking up our jokes, inventing our 320

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

metaphors, plotting our dreams, arranging our slips, and censoring our memories – is what grips the imagination of the lay reader of Freud” (1991a, 149). It is this “picture of sophisticated transactions between two or more fertile ‘intellects’” that not only encourages us to abandon the traditional picture “of one ‘intellect’ struggling with a mob of ‘irrational’ brutes” (1991a, 149), but to also radically revise our self‐image. The image will then have to be more “egalitarian”: one which cuts many things to equal sizes by humanizing them: Just as [it] humanizes what the Platonic tradition took to be the urges of an animal, so it humanizes what that tradition thought of as divine inspiration. It makes conscience, like passion, one more set of human beliefs and desires – another story about how the world is, another Weltanschauung. Most important, it makes it just another story – not one that (in the case of the passions) is automatically suspect nor one that (in the case of conscience) is automatically privileged. It treats, so to speak, the three different stories told by the id, the superego, and the ego as alternative extrapolations from a common experience – in particular experience of childhood events … To adopt a self‐image that incorporates this egalitarian revision is to think that there is no single right answer to the question “What did happen to me in the past?” It is also to think that there is no such answer to the question “What sort of person am I now?” It is to recognize that the choice of a vocabulary in which to describe either one’s childhood or one’s character cannot be made by inspecting some collection of “neutral facts.” (Rorty 1991a, 151)

This takes us deep into familiar Rortian territory, where contingently chosen vocabularies rule the roost. But the multi‐person model that gets us there has been assembled quickly, and without apparently checking its viability against the set of beliefs and desires that foster Rorty’s own preferred pragmatist self‐image.

5  Pragmatist Qualms No word has any value except what it receives from its neighbours and its position among them. Edward Thomas (2011, 11)

One of the lynchpins of Rorty’s pragmatist approach to philosophy is holism. On his mature understanding, it is cognizant of the insights behind Thomas’s prescient claim – and the upshot is that “if we have a plausible narrative of how we became what we are, and why we use the words we do as we do, we have all we need in the way of self‐understanding” (Rorty 2007, 181). He arrives at this conception via scattered sources of inspiration, but the main influences are Hegel, James, Dewey, Quine, Sellars, and Wittgenstein. And, Rorty believes he can finesse its philosophical motivation by taking on board Donald Davidson’s holistic account of the mental which covers, in particular, the interdependent relationships between belief, meaning, and truth.32 Pull these too far apart, says Davidson, and cognitive and semantic chaos reign. Consider a set of beliefs that S purportedly holds about some subject, say trees (a standard example). Suppose we take “truth” out of the picture completely? Then none of the alleged beliefs S holds about trees are true, and when questioned about trees, S is unable to provide any truthful answers. But, can we keep a grip on the notion that S 321

Alan Malachowski

actually holds any beliefs about trees? And, under further questioning with truth still missing in action, can we accept that S holds any beliefs in this connection? Or even any beliefs? Davidson thinks not, and thinks this in all cases when the questioning is pushed far enough.33 Rorty happily follows suit. The strongest case of nonfeasance here – S fails to hold any beliefs at all – will occur because of the interdependence of meanings and truth in general. If S does not believe that trees have certain well‐known features and cannot answer questions about such features truthfully (for instance, S does not believe that wood is generally flammable, does not believe that it is not liquid, does not believe icebergs are not made of it, and so on), then this will cast into great irreversible doubt whether S believes anything, whether S is saying anything meaningful or even speaking in a language, and hence whether it is worth trying to ask S questions. Davidson holds that not only does “one belief demands many beliefs,” but it demands many, many of these to be true beliefs (2001, 96).34 When considering the psychological consequences of Davidson’s holism it is important to remember it does not just involve constraints on interpretation, theory, or philosophical approach, but entails that the phenomena in question (those to be interpreted, explained, and so forth) are themselves holistically constituted.35 This makes the claims of holism stronger. The psychology that holism reveals is not simply what can be seen in the mirror of methodology, but what is there.36 When we start to examine Rorty’s multi‐person model against this background, it is an exigent task, to say the least, to discern how the model can comport with the holism involved.37 The individual “inhabitants” of a person are clearly, on Rorty’s account, fully fledged linguistic beings (it is not clear, for reasons that will later become clearer, that we can call them creatures or the like). They are, for example, witty (“a witty unconscious is necessarily a linguistic unconscious”; 1991a, 149) and “rational”: no more able to “tolerate inconsistency than can consciousness” (1991a, 149). Hence, holism of meaning (which we are assuming entails that of “attitudes” and “the mental”) is very much to the point. But, this puts a heavy burden on these occupants: each has to possess a large store of true beliefs (indeed, one that is potentially infinite). For without sufficient beliefs and sufficient truth in the mix, beliefs cannot be identified as beliefs about anything – as truth recedes, focus collapses so that belief content eventually disappears from the frame of interpretation. This the natural terminus of the Davidsonian thought: “False beliefs tend to undermine the identification of the subject matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of a description of the belief as being about that subject matter” (Davidson 1984, 68). Huge amounts of true beliefs have to be held in duplicate, triplicate, and so on within one mind. The model therefore posits massive cognitive, epistemological, and semantic redundancy for each individual mind. But it is important to make it clear that these and other such remarks about substantial stores of beliefs do not presuppose a realist picture in which all the beliefs a person holds are stowed away in the mind – sitting there, waiting to be activated, so to speak. Philosophers often assume that for any p, if S believe p, then S believes q, r, s, … whenever these are entailed by p (e.g. Dennett 1971, 95: “But, one gets nowhere with the assumption that entity x has beliefs p, q, r, … unless one supposes that x believes what follows from p, q, r, …; otherwise there is no way of ruling out the prediction that x will, in the face of its beliefs p, q, r, … do something utterly stupid”). This obviously creates a 322

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

“storage problem.” A model of the self that accepts the common philosophical assumption here also has, on the face of it, to accept that anyone capable of holding beliefs must store an indefinitely large amount of them (provably infinite, in my view). But the latter is implausible, if not impossible, and hence unrealistic. It remains reasonable to assume that for any p, if S believes p, then for any r, S will generally believe r when r is implied by p and S recognizes this to be the case. But, to capture the wider scope of the “‘common assumption” and deal with the “lack of realism” problem, a suitable formulation must drop the recognition requirement and allow the “will” in “will generally believe” to serve as an operator that signals hypothetical status of some appropriate sort. Let Q be S’s belief set comprising all and only the beliefs S is conscious of holding (call these “primary beliefs”) as well as the beliefs that are logical consequences of those beliefs. Then the majority of members of Q must have a latent hypothetical status such that although, in our previous terms, S does not hold these in storage (they are not part of S’s on board belief set, as it were), S will assent to any of them that S comes to realize are a logical consequence of a primary belief (or combination thereof). This preserves and clarifies the “storage problem”: while most beliefs are latent hypothetical beliefs, a person still has to have many beliefs that are directly available (and hence in storage or some equivalent) – if only to be in a position to hold latent hypothetical beliefs (which, for something like Dennett‐type reasons, S must hold). Figuratively, each inhabitant of a person will need to possess a web of beliefs, the “closest” of which are held in storage, while the vast majority of them shade off into hypothetical status. Now, if we switch to a physical perspective, and talk just about the brain rather than the mind, we might, on a broad, shop‐worn analogy with computers, shrug this supposed difficulty off by saying that, empirically speaking, it involves, at worst, a minor problem of over investment in data storage space, rather like having excessive backup in a system. But the redundancy problem is not just about “storage” as such.38 For it concerns not only the ontological status, the existence, of so many overlapping beliefs, but also their acquisition. Beliefs do not pop into the mind, as if by magic. They are acquired by processes that must, at some point (and normally at many points) involve contact with things outside the mind or, to put it in less tradition‐laden terms, things other‐ minded and non‐minded.39 Rorty’s holism is, if anything, all‐embracing. It encompasses belief acquisition processes naturalistically, roughly along lines that are Wittgensteinian, but extrapolated to accommodate a thoroughly Hegelian stand on history.40 Whereas Davidson was once prepared to top Frege41 by suggesting he might have said that “only within a language can a word have meaning,” Rorty thinks they both miss trumps: it is only within a culture and its history that a meaningful belief can be formed and procure meaning. The acquisition process is, at base camp, entirely practical. It depends, moreover, on cultural practices that are often constitutive of the meaning involved. Meaning cannot be separated from its genealogy. This is presumably one of the main reasons why Rorty advocated a form of ethnocentricism.42 For him, meaning begins and gains traction at home and down on the ground, not elsewhere on culturally distant shores or up in the philosophical skies. We have painted our picture with a broad brush, but it should suffice to show why Rorty’s holism poses grave problems for his multi‐person model of the self. For holism 323

Alan Malachowski

implies that each of the hypothesized cohabiting selves has to be embedded in the practicalities of belief acquisition, and thus an active part of culture and history. This makes the “redundancy” issue daunting. Is it credible that each of the selves that live inside us43 is hooked up to our perceptual organs and is listening to and watching everything that goes on? And, even if that were true, and they take advantage of the neurological equivalent of “line‐sharing,” there would still be serious redundancy of action. Passive perception of the passing show is not sufficient: involvement is necessary. Indeed, the case for this is overdetermined in that it can also be made on the grounds of what (with a nod toward Dewey, Mead, Quine, and Wittgenstein) Davidson claims about the social nature of language: it is: “intrinsically social [and] public availability is a constitutive aspect” (1990, 314). This is a view that Rorty always seems prepared to double down on. If the id was like a reticent character out of Beckett, locked down behind the gates of the ego and superego, not to mention the organs of repression, how could it become “witty”? How could it learn how to “feed us our best lines”? A person inhabited by multi‐ selves must lead multiple lives that are, each of them, outwardly industrious. Indeed, each self must lead a life that is Shakespearean in comparison to the “locked down” version: a witty unconscious might need something like prior experience as a stand‐up comedian. Absent bizarre scenarios,44 this is impossible. Therefore something is seriously wrong with a model that requires it.45 The problems posed by Rorty’s holistic picture of meaning, belief, and agency for a multi‐selves model of a person, also appear to put pressure on certain features of psychoanalysis in general, regardless of his interpretation of Freud.46 Where it claims to deal with the mental life of very young children, for example, those claims will be rendered suspect by holism if they make explanation‐bearing references to fantasies or behavior (or behavior based on fantasies47) that unwittingly or otherwise assume the possession of concepts, however basic, and occur prior to the possession of even rudimentary linguistic competence. For language on Rorty’s understanding, as perspicaciously summed up by James Tartaglia, “is not some abstract code super‐added to pre‐linguistic awareness, but is rather the medium through which we first become aware of things by relating them to each other within an inter‐subjective and holistic web of significance” (Tartaglia 2007, 119; emphasis added).48 When Freud speculates about babies hallucinating “the breast” and then explores possibilities of “substitute gratification” based on that, he ignores questions concerning how, in its prelinguistic mode, a child is supposed to master the complex tasks of constructing and then recognizing and re‐recognizing an image as an image of a breast and also developing consistent attitudes toward it over time (expecting gratification, disappointment, and so forth).49 The whole process of how hunger causes the creation of fantasy images designed to satisfy it is left mysterious. In fact, “designed” signifies something too sophisticated, but any adequate replacement (one that signifies the presence of an “attitude”) will do the same. Without such a replacement, the link between hunger and the “image” becomes arbitrary. And when, for example, Melanie Klein speaks, as she so frequently does, of very young babies having strong feelings of love and hate, of wanting to ingest or destroy “the breast,” a parental figure, or some fantasized object, she also ignores the basic requirements of holism regarding such “attitudes.”50 Rorty’s Wittgensteinian streak enables him to allow that psychological 324

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

terms can be used to describe young babies when employed in an entirely “secondary sense” – the sense in play when psychological predicates are ascribed, for example, to inanimate objects in fairy tales or animated films.51 But, the psychoanalytic approaches we are alluding to require more than this in order to build up complex and sophisticated theories that are capable of explaining quasi‐intentional behavior. Davidson’s “holism of the mental,” which to my knowledge Rorty buys into completely, implies holism of attitudinal content. Moreover, it is not possible to sensibly attribute attitudes in isolation because the words specifying the content involved cannot have meaning in isolation and are, in any case, contrastive, as Robert Fogelin explains in an astute gloss on Wittgenstein’s approach to them: The words we use for describing feelings, emotions, etc., come in a system containing contrasts (guilt rather than shame), matters of degree (rambunctious rather than spirited), and so on. Thus when we ascribe a particular feeling or emotion to a person, we locate it in a field (a logical space) of concepts. It makes a difference whether I attribute hope or confidence to someone, but this difference only emerges within a complicated form of life open only to users of a rich and subtle language. (Fogelin 1987, 192; second emphasis added)

Generally speaking, having an attitude also necessitates having a certain degree of awareness or knowledge of having that attitude.52 The problem here, surely, is not that these various requirements are too strong, but that it is not at all clear how to make sense of attitudinal possession without them, or something close: “S hates and wants to destroy M.” Does S know this? Does S believe this? Is S aware of this? Does S understand the consequences of doing this? Can S differentiate between this and some other attitude? Will S be disappointed if S fails to destroy M?  –  Will S want to destroy anything that closely resembles M? (or so the questioning might go, and go on). Yet, if we continue inquiring, and can only countenance negative answers (which we should expect when even minimal linguistic competence is absent), it is difficult to conceive of ever both reaching a level of questioning, either more general or more fine grained, where it is possible to propose positive answers (“Yes in the presence of M, S bites M”) and hang on to the notion that genuine attitudes of “hate” and “wanting to destroy” are present. This has consequences not just for the psychoanalysis of children, but adults in so far as early childhood experiences are involved (which is frequently quite far). It also casts an acute shadow over the common characterization of psychoanalysis as “the talking cure.”

6 Postscript Conclusions to focus on here are: (1) there is too much tension between Rorty’s holism and his multi‐person model of selfhood for them to both survive intact, (2) the role that Rorty’s holism plays in his overall approach to philosophy is too central for him to give it up, and (3) the prospects for modifying Rorty’s holism to square it with his multi‐­ personalism are slim. Whether Davidson’s partitioning of the mind can survive his own brand of holistic scrutiny, I leave for others to explore.53 It seems, then, that we are owed a sequel to “The World Well Lost” (reprinted in Rorty 1982, 3–18): something like “The Sole Self Well Lost” will do. Rorty has not provided it. 325

Alan Malachowski

Perhaps one can be gleaned from his various writings or someone else can provide it. But, if the above conclusions hold any water, we should not hold our breath. It may also be worth quickly saying something to clarify the basis for these conclusions and the attendant pessimism. The tensions are derived from Rorty’s own stated positions. In that sense, they are “internal.” I have some sympathy, well quite a bit, with the thrust of holism as depicted here, but I do not think the approach itself can ever be wrapped up in a watertight theoretical package that identifies necessary and sufficient conditions, or the like. So, although I believe Davidson is usually on the right track in these matters and Rorty mostly is as well, I also think we need to pull back on the Wittgensteinian reins before we follow either of them too far.54 In short, I am not fully committed to the holism of these pages, but only to the conclusion that Rorty’s interpretation of Freud cannot stand up to it as described. This considerably weakens the substance of my final reflections on psychoanalysis in general, which are already probably far too speculative. I would not be dismayed if I found, or was given, grounds to tone down or even reject them – though I would still be surprised if defects in holism were to constitute the main reasons for doing so. Meanwhile, starting from its stated consequences for some of his own views, the notion that Rorty’s holistic approach to pragmatism can be used for purposes of detailed critique (a term that is not part of Rorty’s vocabulary) still seems promising, and might lead to more robust results elsewhere. I think it is fair to say that this possibility has not been rendered anachronistic by Rorty’s own criticism of the philosophical tradition (because they are usually pitched at a higher level of generality). Finally, the tensions caused for Rorty’s account of the self by his holism seemed clearly apparent to me long before I looked more closely at his reading of Freud. Then they seemed even more obvious. For that reason, the arguments I pursued on the basis of them appeared rather crude, and even, to re‐use a word that has cropped up in these pages, simplistic. Seeing this, I also realized I ought to check whether I was pushing forward a workhorse that had long been retired from action or fallen like Bellow’s flailing dray horse.55 Here, after a fairly extensive search, is what I found: two authors of papers56, namely, Miguel Amen (2005) and Simone Gozzano (1999) suggest that there are redundancy and/or holistic‐type problems with Davidson’s partitioning of the mind. And, in his very useful book, Freud (2014), Jonathan Lear argues ingeniously against the plausibility of extracting multiple minds from Freud’s account of the unconscious and the structure of the mind. Finally, I discovered an argument of Donald Davidson’s, brief and compressed even by his standards, which contends that, ultimately, the unconscious mental phenomena described by Freud are not threatening to “first person authority”: In psychoanalytic practice, recovery of authority over an attitude is often considered the only solid evidence that the attitude was there before being non‐inferentially appreciated by its holder. Thus those cases of unconscious mental states that were unsystematically recognized to exist before Freud are indirectly included in the scope of first person authority by psychoanalysis. So I do not think the existence of unconscious attitudes threatens the importance of first person authority. (Davidson 2006b, 245)

326

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

Otherwise, I found very little that encroached on the material that Rorty offered here. I stand to be corrected, but for the time being, at least some of what I say here looks to be newsworthy.

Acknowledgment I am grateful to Mark Solms and James Tartaglia for useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 Think, for example, of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, the three heroes of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 2 As is well known, Freud never claimed to have discovered the unconscious. But it is fair to say that he developed most of the techniques of psychoanalysis and its vocabulary virtually single‐handedly, and believed this to be the case. In this sense, Lionel Trilling was probably justified in claiming “the basic history of psychoanalysis is the account of how it grew in Freud’s own mind, for Freud developed its concepts all by himself ” (Trilling 1964, 12). That said, the necessary process of placing Freud’s achievements in a broader and deeper historical context, of historicizing psychoanalysis, as Eli Zaretsky puts it, is well underway. Although, some excellent work has already been done on this, it is still too soon, for me at least, to judge the results. Texts that I have so far found illuminating (especially the first) include Towards Reading Freud: Self‐Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, and Sigmund Freud by Mark Edmundson (2007); Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis by Eli Zaretsky (2004); The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious by S. J. McGrath (2012); The Foundation of the Unconscious by Matt Ffytche (2011); and Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery by Joel Faflak (2007). 3 There is a further irony here, given the strength of Freud’s own wishes for greatness. 4 This resonates with the earlier selves of both Freud and Rorty. For, as Christopher Norris reminds us, Freud never renounced what Derrida calls his “neurological fable”: “the idea that psychoanalysis might one day become a species of applied science; that the hermeneutic aspects of interpretation might at last give way to a neurophysiological account of the mind and its workings” (Norris 1986, 206). And Rorty, of course, was one of the first, and most original, advocates of eliminative materialism, the view that mental talk “might go the way of demon‐discourse, given the proper neurological discoveries and resulting ways of explaining behavior” (Rorty 2014, 199; see also Chapter 2 in this volume). 5 For those now unfamiliar with the word, it means “slips of the tongue,” or “Freudian slips.” 6 This is a bit simplistic: Rorty’s Freud is an agent of history and therefore plays an important part in recreating culture even as it assimilates his ideas. 7 Rorty is also extrapolating from Donald Davidson’s interpretation of Freud, but we get to that later. 8 One of Rorty’s professed aims, of course, is to redescribe people and positions in order to make them “look good,” comparatively speaking. But, even when keeping that sympathetically in mind, I still intend the implied implication: “merely cosmetic.” 9 What Rorty takes at first from this reading of Freud is support for his own anti‐essentialism about the self. But, at other times, as we will discuss, he is more interested in bolstering Freud’s claim that the self is not master in its own house.

327

Alan Malachowski

10 Rorty does not consider the possibility that Freud might be committed to a form of internal determinism such that there is no individual self with the capacity to do anything other than submit to contingent forces (and therefore the idea of creativity as the product of such a single self is illusory). 11 Although he is clearly influenced by James and Nietzsche in this respect, Rorty does not fully explain his great affection for “contingency.” He does not, for example, join forces with those inspired by artists such as John Cage and Marcel Duchamp who befriend chance events in order to slip what they regard as the stifling noose of the will so as to open up fresh perceptions of the world (e.g. Cage’s “All sound is music, if you know how to listen”). And, at times he appears to conflate “contingent” with “philosophically optional” and “philosophically unimportant.” 12 The phrase is from “When I Have Fears” (Keats 1966, 258). 13 “The covert subject of most poetry for the last three centuries has been the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform” (Bloom 1973, 148). Rorty refers directly to this quote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, 25n3). 14 It also fits his long‐standing “Davidsonian” account of persons as networks “of beliefs and desires … continually in the process of being rewoven” where there is no “agent distinct from the network” (Rorty 1991b, 123). For a witty response, one that tries hard to expose the need for an “active weaver” in Rorty’s account, see Hollis (1990). 15 Freud clearly found theorizing about “ordinary” lives fascinating, but eventually became bored of actually dealing with the humdrum neurotic features of those lives, even though they were presumably at least partially a product of the poetic unconscious. 16 See especially “Freud: Within and Beyond Culture” (Trilling 1967), “Freud and Literature” (Trilling 1951), and “The Authentic Unconscious” (Trilling 1972). For an insightful sketch of Trilling’s approach to Freud, see “The Uses of Freud” (Krupnick 1986). 17 In an interesting and vivid recollection of Trilling, William Barrett points out that Trilling’s Freud is a “very selective and idealized Freud: a heroic figure, in his way a great poet” (Barrett 2015). 18 Again this is too simplistic: Freud came to the view that parts of both the ego and the superego were themselves unconscious (but never, as far as I can see, suggested that these parts were necessarily linguistically creative in their own right). In addition, there is a problem, one that in FMR Rorty acknowledges he has no answer to, of incorporating “repression.” One reason that there is a problem is that repression is presumably what prevents the various selves that occupy a person from already having conversational relations prior to the kind of Freudian therapy that Rorty suggests will make these both desirable and possible. But then, the explanation as to how repressive operations can do the requisite work (screen beliefs, desires, and so on) without themselves being both linguistic agents and inclined to initiate conversational relationships of their own are difficult to conceive. This problem exacerbates the redundancy problem that we later discuss. We do not deal with it in the main text to avoid overcomplicating matters – and the redundancy problem is, in any case, sufficiently serious to cause problems for Rorty as it stands. For similar reasons, we ignore the fact that there is also some overlap here with Sartre’s famous criticisms of Freud, where he objects that the “instruments” of repression have contradictory roles in that they must themselves be both conscious and unconscious (“conscious” in order to recognize and evaluate beliefs, desires, and so forth, but “unconscious” because repression is not something of which the ego is aware). If different “seats of consciousness” are allowed, then all the difficulties we discuss later kick in. For Sartre’s criticisms of psychoanalysis, see the “Bad Faith” sections (Sartre 1956). 19 We do not have space to deal with Rorty’s views on how Freud’s thought has, and should, influence moral deliberation. He claims that when we understand Freud’s ideas then we will

328

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

20 21 22

23

24

25

26 27

28 29

30

treat the need to familiarize ourselves with the contingencies that have caused us to be who we are as something of a moral obligation. But he doesn’t make it clear however why morality gets a look in here. Presumably, he is tacitly connecting this need with our quest for authenticity – but he does not explain why authenticity cannot be acquired outside the obligations imposed by what Bernard Williams christened “the peculiar institution of morality” primarily because it puts unrealistic emphasis on the notion of obligation (1985, ch. 10). I am thinking here of “free association,” where interference would presumably be problematic. In his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (1999, 4–21), Rorty says that he has spent most of his career trying to figure out what philosophy is good for. I am grateful to Jannie Malachowski for pointing out to me something I really should have known: some key terms customarily associated with Freudian psychoanalysis (e.g. “Ego” for “Ich” and “Id” for “Es”) were introduced by James Strachey, the translator of the Standard Edition (Freud 1966), somewhat in contravention of Freud’s expressed preference for plain language. For in The Question of Lay Analysis (1991) Freud tells his readers “You will probably protest at our having chosen simple pronouns to describe our two agencies or provinces instead of giving them orotund Greek names. In psychoanalysis, however, we like to keep in contact with the popular mode of thinking and prefer to keep its concepts scientifically serviceable rather than to reject them … our theories must be understood by our patients who are often very intelligent, but not always learned.” Mark Solms has also pointed out to me that Strachey’s translation often followed established conventions and was guided by a “Glossary Committee” chaired by Ernest Jones. Interestingly, in later life Trilling moved away from a Rortian, historicized notion of self based on what he then called “gratuitously chosen images of personal being,” toward an aesthetic version that involved “the experience of art projected into the actuality and totality of life” (Trilling 1955, xiv). Here, he struggled to formulate a conception of self that lifted it beyond culture and history. For astute commentary on Trilling’s different views on the self and their relationship to Freud, see the final four chapters of Krupnick (1986). We should probably point out that these are traditional conceptions. Rorty’s own view of the self, the one he would prefer us to adopt is itself “elevated” in the separate sense that seeks to raise it above restrictive, outmoded dogmas of the elevation of selfhood. Mark Edmundson makes the more general and, no doubt more important, point that Rorty’s account of vocabulary change is rather cavalier in that it “underestimates the extent to which discourses are solidified and defended by social interests and particularly class interests.” Doing this “makes culture into a zone of free play and brackets off the facts of social conflict” (Edmundson 2007, 20–1). This brings to mind Foucault’s assurance that Nietzsche “says words have always been invented by the ruling classes [and] impose an interpretation” (Foucault 2000, 276). This is perhaps as bit too casual, and unfair to Davidson. It would not have been “easy to see” prior to the publication of “Paradoxes of Irrationality” (2006a). A second, long‐standing, Davidsonian principle also comes into play: “at least some mental events interact causally with physical events.” I believe this was first introduced in “Mental Events” (Davidson 2006b, 105–21). Rorty is tentative in first introducing the idea of “divided personhood” on the basis of his reading of Davidson, but then goes on to use the idea with increasing confidence. Supplementary textual support can be found in the commentary of one of Freud’s most fertile recent interpreters: “To assume that there is an unconscious is to believe that there really are other people, other voices, inside and outside oneself (that if there is a mind it has minds of its own)” (Phillips 2002, xiv). Freud also suggests that we need to be prepared to take into account “an unlimited series of states of consciousness, all unknown both to ourselves and each other” (2007, 56). We

329

Alan Malachowski

leave aside the fact that, mainly following Wittgenstein, the inferential process that Freud refers to has long been philosophically discredited. The reasons for this are too complex to go into here, but Søren Overgaard provides a useful gloss on how things presently seem to stand: “The notion that there is a fundamental epistemological difficulty concerning the very possibility of achieving knowledge of any minds other than one’s own … is a result of a particular way of conceiving the mind (or subjectivity) in the first place – if we think about the mind as constituting an inner realm of its own, separated in various ways from the ‘external’ world, then something like the epistemological problem of other minds is likely to pop up sooner or later, precisely in virtue of the way in which we have conceived of the mind” (2007, 2). It goes without saying that Overgaard considers Wittgenstein to have shown that the “particular way of conceiving the mind” described here is both invidious and disposable, but he credits Anita Avramides with the insight that “the problem of other minds” is an ontological or conceptual rather than epistemological problem and that it is a profound mistake to approach difficulties in this area by starting from one’s own mind. Avramides, herself, says “there are deep mistakes involved in taking reflection on one’s own mind as one’s starting point for thinking about the mind more generally” and she implies that we can best avoid such mistakes by giving the question “What is the mind?” priority over epistemological concerns (2001, 3). Rorty would no doubt want to argue that “we Wittgensteinians” should regard any tendency to spend much philosophical time even on the last question as backsliding. For a valiant attempt to defend the kind of inferential process to which Freud refers, see Hyslop (2001). 31 “Inviting” may be too passive, Freud also took a more aggressive stance where “the ego’s occupation of the id” might be a more appropriate characterization. 32 Davidson talks about holism in various connections, including: the mental, attitudes, beliefs, intentionality, interpretation, and meaning. On my reading, it is not clear where he allocates priority (e.g. whether it is holism of the mental – where the other forms follow), but given he holds there can be no fully fledged thoughts or attitudes without language, it seems that holism of meaning can be considered central for our purposes (because the others can be derived). 33 In their excellent comprehensive, and yet detailed, commentary on Davidson’s work, Lepore and Ludwig (2005) make a case for claiming that Davidson is not, and in any case should not be, an outright extremist when it comes to holism. And, there are places where he backs off from his more strident remarks (for instance: back from when he says Frege could have held that words make sense only in the context of a language – discussed later). But it seems he never backs off far enough to repudiate the approach that we are outlining in the main text. 34 Why “many, many true beliefs”? Well, because it is difficult to imagine a natural “cut‐off point” for truthfulness in the vicinity of any belief. When, under questioning, false beliefs are reached their existence can have a knock‐on effect on the meaning and identification of many other beliefs which then impacts back, like chain reaction, on the viability of the original belief/s. 35 The useful distinction between “methodological” and “constitutive” holism in Davidson’s work is introduced by Jeff Malpas (forthcoming, 57–8). Davidson eschews any scheme/ content distinction, so there is no “gap” between reality and the language used to describe it that would make constitutive holism problematic. 36 Rorty, would regard “but what is there” as no more than a bogus metaphysical gesture. This has no bearing on what follows, where the constraints Rorty is being accused of flouting cause problems even if they are interpreted as methodological in nature. 37 Davidson notices that holism can be problematic (2006a, 150): partitioning the mind is designed to allow for inconsistency, but the holistic methodology of interpreting a person does not have this license. However, he underestimates and sidesteps the problem by

330

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

38

39

40

41

42 43 44

45 46

47 48

saying that it is a question of degree: we can accept a limited amount of inconsistency against a larger background of consistency. This does not address the large difficulties we discuss. One of the causes of possible confusion here that I should own up to is that the model/s we are talking about are pitched at a high level of abstraction and generality far from evidential concerns. Presumably the redundancies we refer to here and elsewhere would have a physical realization that could, in principle, be empirically detected. Here, I assume, without arguing the case, that a mind that has no causal contact with anything other than its own contents cannot formulate beliefs. I take it that, among other things, Davidson’s triangulation thesis commits him to this, and that Rorty’s naturalism also makes his own commitment to it solid. Rorty seems to treat Wittgenstein’s notions of “use,” “language games,” and “forms of life” (largely correctly in my view) as doing for meaning more or less what Aristotle did for ethics: making its practical context shoulder the explanatory burden. “Frege said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the same vein he might have added only in the context of a language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have meaning” (Davidson 2006b, 159). For a brief exposition and defense, see Malachowski (2002). “Inside us” is a suspect way of putting it – but a necessary one until we have a vocabulary which enables us to dispense with the whole picture it both derives from and conjures up. It might be possible to construct a consistent scenario where the inhabitants of persons interact with one another and the world, while each being aware, and self‐aware, of only single persons. But it would be too much of a stretch to pay this price for keeping the multi‐ person model intact. And, the assumption here is that it is better for Rorty, on his own pragmatist criteria, to give up or modify his multi‐person model of self rather than do either with his holism. Although Rorty explains why a Freudian multi‐person account of the self is culturally threatening, he does not seem concerned that its acceptance might pose a threat to what R. D. Laing presciently called “ontological security”: the subjective perception of being a whole subject, of having “a sense of … presence in the world as a real, alive, whole, and, in a temporal sense, continuous person.” When Laing describes his clinical experience of dealing with what appeared to be presented as a multi‐person inhabited self, it was “as though one were doing group therapy with one patient … It seemed therefore that one was in the presence of various fragments, or incomplete elements, of different ‘personalities’ in ­operation at the one time. Her ‘word salad’ seemed to be the result of a number of quasi‐ autonomous partial systems striving to give expressions to themselves out of the same mouth at the same time” (Laing 1973, 39, 195–6). Laing is talking about someone suffering from psychosis, but his description raises some thorny questions as to how the multi‐selves Rorty refers to are to form some kind of harmonious relationship. Given the constraints that holism imposes on language acquisition and use, the case just described looks like one in which a single self has been broken up (this explains why the parts have acquired linguistic competence). Rorty assumes that the selves he refers to will be able reach some kind of ­amicable agreement that avoids the problems Laing depicts by working up conversational relationships. But, holism casts doubt on whether this is possible, and hence whether there are “selves” in the Freudian/Rortian sense. For Rorty, ontological security is perhaps an illusion to be cast off. I ignore the fantasy/phantasy distinction. Tartaglia nicely pinpoints some of the difficulties that Rorty’s linguistic holism gets him into when he has to deal with the cases of children and animals. However, these difficulties do not undermine the objections to the aspects of psychoanalysis to which we are alluding.

331

Alan Malachowski

49 Freud does speculate on how memories are built up out of hallucinations, but again ignores problematic questions concerning how memory can function in isolation and prelinguistically. He seems happy to place babies in a philosophically dreaded “private language” situation where not only is what seems right going to have to be right, but ditto for what seems to seem right, and so on. The intervention of others is crucial, but is purely causal at this stage (i.e. does not involve linguistic transactions). Freud was, however, fascinated by most aspects of language: “The individual’s always ongoing acquisition of language – his relationship to the language he inherits and the language he speaks – was one of Freud’s primary concerns” (Phillips 2014, 17). Mark Solms has helpfully directed me to the “Experiences of Satisfaction” section of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) where he tries to explain the details of how the hallucinations and memories involved here are formed. But, there is a significant gap between Freud’s talk of events at the physical level and his use of terms that are laden with nonphysical associations to refer to phenomena such as “wishful activation,” “memories,” “perception” and “disappointment.” Freud bridges the gap by conjecture, but does not appear to recognize just how big the gap is, conceptually speaking. 50 The holistic constraints on attitudes/language/meaning in play here might be used to critique various other takes on psychoanalysis including, for example, Derrida’s contention that Freud’s claims are shot through with writerly metaphors and Lacan’s claims that the unconscious is structured like a language (in these particular cases the question as to how the posited linguistic phenomena (and in the instance of Freud, those picked out by the metaphors) can occur is apparently overlooked, leaving behind a mystery). In Derrida’s case, this is not to say that he is wrong in what he claims to see, but rather that he doesn’t seem to notice how mysterious Freud’s views become on his interpretation. I hope to expand on these cryptic remarks in future work. 51 The notion of such secondary uses is introduced in Wittgenstein (2009, 103e–104e). 52 Davidson has arguments to show that, for example, a genuine belief requires possession of knowledge that it is a belief. We need not assess those now. Lepore and Ludwig (2005) claim they are inconclusive. But, intuitively, there does seem to be something fishy about positing, say, a hateful action on behalf of someone who does not have a clue that it is hateful (and therefore cannot, among other things, distinguish it from other types of action).Without such a clue there can be, for example, no “intent.” 53 There may be some mileage in considering whether, and, if so, how an analyst differs from a Davidsonian radical interpreter and an analysand differs from such an interpreter with regard to his or her own unconscious. 54 For some indications as to what this involves, see Chapter 21 in this volume. 55 “On Roy Street in Montreal a dray horse has fallen down on the icy pavement. The air is dark as a gray coat lining. A smaller animal might have found its feet, but this beast with its huge haunches could only work his hoofs in the air” (Bellow 2000, 97). 56 Gozzano also discusses John Heil’s claim that Davidson’s partitioning account introduces too much complexity (Heil 1989)

References Amen, Miguel. 2005. “Davidson on Irrationality and Division.” Mind Language and Action Group, Universidade do Porto. Avramides, Anita. 2001. Other Minds. New York: Routledge.

332

Inconvenient Conversational Partners: Rorty and Freud

Barrett, William. 2015. “The Authentic Trilling.” Commentary, March. Bellow, Saul. 2000. Ravelstein. London: Penguin Books. Bersani, Leo. 1977. Baudelaire and Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bloom, Harold. 1973. Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1995. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. Bouveresse, Jacques. 2000. “Reading Rorty: Pragmatism and Its Consequences.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 129–46. Oxford: Blackwell. Davidson, Donald. 1984. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1990. “The Structure and Content of Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 87(6): 279–328. —. 2001. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2006a. “Paradoxes of Irrationality.” In The Essential Davidson, 138–52. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2006b. The Essential Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, D. C. 1971. “Intentional Systems.” Journal of Philosophy 68(4): 87–106. Edmundson, Mark. 2007. Towards Reading Freud: Self‐Creation in Milton, Wordsworth, and Sigmund Freud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elshtain, Jean B. 2003. “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyan Liberalism.” In Richard Rorty: Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, edited by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley, 139–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Faflak, Joel. 2007. The Burden of Mystery. New York: SUNY Press. Ffytche, Matt. 2011. The Foundation of the Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fogelin, Robert J. 1987. Wittgenstein, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 2000. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, edited by James D. Faubion, 269–78. London: Penguin Books. Freud, Sigmund. 1895. Project for a Scientific Psychology. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1966. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. —. 1986. “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” In The Essentials of Psycho‐analysis: The Definitive Collection of Sigmund Freud’s Writings, edited by Anna Freud, 277–375. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. —. 1991. The Question of Lay Analysis. Translated by James Strachey. London: Vintage. —. 2007. The Unconscious. Translated by Graham Frankland. London: Penguin Books. Gozzano, Simone. 1999. “Davidson on Rationality and Irrationality.” In Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by M. de Caro, 137–49. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Heil, John. 1989. “Minds Divided.” Mind 98(392): 571–83. Hollis, Martin. 1990. “The Poetics of Person Hood.” In Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski, 244–56. Oxford: Blackwell. Hyslop, Alec. 2001. Other Minds. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. Keats, John. 1966. The Selected Poetry of Keats, edited by Paul de Man. New York: Signet Classics. Krupnick, Mark. Lionel Trilling: The Fate of Cultural Criticism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Laing, R. D. 1973. The Divided Self. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Lear, Jonathan. 2014. Freud, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Lepore, Ernie and Kirk Ludwig, eds. 2005. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Malachowski, Alan. 2002. “Post‐colonial Liberalism.” In Richard Rorty. Volume 3: Politics, Irony and Solidarity, edited by Alan Malachowski, 111–14. London: Sage.

333

Alan Malachowski

Malpas, Jeff. forthcoming. “Davidson’s Holism: Epistemology in the Mirror of Meaning.” McGrath, S. J. 2012. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Norris, Christopher. 1986. Derrida. London: Fontana. Overgaard, Søren. 2007. Wittgenstein and Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity within Wittgenstein, Levinas, and Husserl. New York: Routledge. Phillips, Adam. 2002. Wild Analysis. London: Penguin Books. —. ed. 2006. The Penguin Freud Reader. London: Penguin Books. —. 2014. Becoming Freud. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rieff, Philip. 1961. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1980. “Freud, Morality, and Hermeneutics.” New Literary History 12(1): 177–85. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophic Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995. “Philosophy and the Future.” In Rorty and Pragmatism, edited by Herman Saatkamp, 197–205. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. —. 2000. “Response to Bouveresse.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 146– 55. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J. P. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Methuen. Tartaglia, James. 2007. Rorty and the Mirror of Nature. New York: Routledge. Thomas, Edward. 2011. “Words.” In Selected Poems of Edward Thomas, edited by R. S. Thomas, 11–12. London: Faber and Faber. Trilling, Lionel. 1951. “Freud and Literature.” In The Liberal Imagination, 34–57. London: Secker & Warburg. —. 1955. The Opposing Self. London: Secker and Warburg. —. 1964. “Introduction.” In The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones. New York: Penguin Books. —. 1967. “Freud: Within and Beyond Culture.” In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 87–110. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. —. 1972. “The Authentic Unconscious.” In Sincerity and Authenticity, 134–72. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1985. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations, edited by P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, rev. 4th edn. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Zaretsky, Eli. 2004. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Random House.

334

20 Rorty and Dewey DAVID L. HILDEBRAND

1 Introduction The perennial question, What is pragmatism? increasingly turns on answering Who was John Dewey? Who was Richard Rorty? For outside of narrow academic studies, one rarely encounters Dewey without reference to (or coloration by) Rorty’s own pragmatism. This is no accident. Rorty’s own work became increasingly affiliated with Dewey largely because Rorty himself enacted this trajectory. Indeed, Rorty’s references to Dewey – “my principal philosophical hero,” “the philosopher whom I most admire, and of whom I should most like to think of myself as a disciple” – became more numerous (and more affectionate) as his career came to a close in 2007 (Rorty 1999, 6, 8). The practical upshot is that anyone interested in Richard Rorty must endeavor to grasp, to some significant extent, John Dewey. Still, Dewey and Rorty were different men, living at different times, with different, if overlapping, values and objectives. Any benefit derived from associating them depends, also, on distinguishing them; conflating Dewey and Rorty only muddies both. To distinguish them, this chapter asks: Who was John Dewey to Richard Rorty? What, according to Rorty, did Dewey contribute to pragmatism, to philosophy, and most importantly, to humanity? My answer endeavors to avoid commentary, offering as much of a “report” as possible. (Such commentaries proliferated after Rorty’s 1982 Consequences of Pragmatism; while often insightful, their various agendas are, here, distractions.)1 Before commencing, let me mention two challenges inherent in this particular inquiry. One concerned how to determine which of Rorty’s references to Dewey should “count” as genuinely about Dewey. After all, the name “Dewey” appears like buckshot in Rorty’s works. Which were passing riffs, mentioning or using Dewey for predominantly Rortian purposes? Which, in contrast, were significant references meant to clearly and

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

335

David L. Hildebrand

intentionally present Dewey as Dewey? This report works to separate the latter from the former. A second challenge to determining Rorty’s view of Dewey traces back to Rorty’s self‐ licensed freedom to give “strong misreadings” that “simply beats the text into a shape that will serve [one’s] own purpose” (Rorty 1982, 151). As James Conant observed, One often finds Rorty thus carving philosophers up into their “good” and “bad” sides when confronted with aspects of their thought that don’t fit into his reading of them. His writings on Cavell, Dewey, Heidegger, Putnam and Wittgenstein all furnish cases in point. But such a separation of a writer’s thought into distinct components can only be effected if the (purportedly) “good” region of his thought can be partitioned off from the “bad” and still remain the region of his thought that it is. (Conant 2000, 337)

Many commentators have found Rorty’s borrowings frustrating, as they are clearly prescinded from a more holistic Dewey; and also worrying, because those encountering Dewey via Rorty were getting a Dewey‐concoction without caveats. Rorty was aware of this worry and occasionally defended himself on the (postmodern) ground that because there are no urtexts (or “ur‐authors”) “fidelity” is an unreasonable demand. Over time, it may surprise some to learn that Rorty retreated from these postmodern defenses, expressing some contrition and regret about his use of Dewey. In a 1985 exchange, Rorty regretted declaiming about Dewey and pragmatism before having “done enough homework” (Rorty 1985, 39). By 1995, he was labeling his interpretation “a hypothetical Dewey” which allowed him to “describe what Dewey might have said, and in my view should have said, rather than what he did say” (Rorty 1998, 292; emphasis added).2 And, in a further concession to textual and author integrity, Rorty admitted, “I may have gotten in the habit of construing Dewey in my own sense, and thus putting words in his mouth that he would have eschewed. This is a bad habit, and I regret if I have indulged it to the point of misleading the rising generation about what Dewey actually believed” (Rorty 1995e, 52, my emphasis). While some contritions could have been ironical feints, I believe Rorty was mostly sincere, and that his cautionary language reflected his varying, dialectical needs to interpret Dewey in either “creative” or “faithful” ways.

2 Outline This chapter begins by reviewing Rorty’s biographical entanglements with Dewey (early personal and academic influences) to sketch how and why Rorty identified with Dewey over much of his career. Next, context for Rorty’s view of Dewey is provided, first by reviewing Rorty’s view of the basic difference between pragmatisms (“classical” and “neo‐”) and then by summarizing Rorty’s overall approach to Dewey (including his “good” vs. “bad” trope). These preliminaries then yield to the main aspects of Dewey that Rorty presented: experience; objectivity and truth; inquiry and scientific method; ethics, politics, and democracy; and, to conclude, the function of philosophy itself. 336

Rorty and Dewey

3  Biographical Entanglements Rorty held Dewey in the highest regard, as a philosopher and as a human being. Besides naming Dewey as his “principal philosophical hero” and the philosopher he most admires, Rorty called himself a “follower” and a “disciple” of Dewey’s (Rorty 1999, 6, 8, 234). For Dewey’s ability to set aside “most clearly and explicitly” the Greek and German aspiration to represent nature’s intrinsic reality, Dewey was “the most useful and most significant figure in twentieth‐century philosophy” (Rorty 1999, 49). At a more personal level, Rorty called Dewey “a remarkable man” (Borradori 2006, 34) and praised both Dewey and Sidney Hook as “heroic” and “giants” for “the sheer quantity of work they managed to get done … the range of their curiosity, and … their ability to switch back and forth between abstract philosophy and concrete social issues with no sense of strain, and no diminution in intensity” (Rorty 1995a, 40). Beyond their importance to philosophy, Rorty praised “their greatest importance … as exemplary Americans … [who] still had hope for what America may yet be” (Rorty 1995a, 42). Rorty’s acquaintance with Dewey went back to his childhood. While unable to recall meeting Dewey, their personal paths were close; Rorty recalls his mother saying that at seven he “passed sandwiches around at a party which Dewey attended” but that was the “only time I was in his presence” (Szahaj 2006, 149). Rorty’s uncle and aunt knew Dewey’s close friend (and pragmatism popularizer) Max C. Otto; Rorty’s parents were friends with Sidney Hook. “So, as it happened,” Rorty commented, “the only philosophy professors I met when young were disciples of Dewey” (McReynolds 2015, 27). Dewey also figured in his parents’ politics; Rorty recollected, “My father had almost, but not quite, accompanied John Dewey to Mexico as PR man for the Commission of Inquiry which Dewey chaired.” At 12, Rorty read his parents’ copy of the commission’s reports (The Case of Leon Trotsky and Not Guilty) regarding them “in the way in which other children thought of their family’s Bible: they were books that radiated redemptive truth and moral splendour” (Rorty 1999, 5–6, 5). When Rorty went to University of Chicago for college in 1946, Dewey’s influence was there, too; but while many had studied pragmatism (including his MA advisor, Charles Hartshorne), Dewey became a target for Rorty’s self‐described “adolescent revolt.”3 Rorty remembers Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler aiming “their sneers” at Dewey’s pragmatism, which they considered “vulgar, ‘relativistic’, and self‐ refuting” which, more importantly, was unable “to answer the Nazis [by justifying] one’s choice of social democracy over fascism” (Rorty 1999, 8). After a five‐year dalliance with “Platonism,” Rorty read Hegel, charmed especially by “the young Hegel’s willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time” (Rorty 1999, 11). Twenty years later, Rorty found himself “being led back to Dewey … who now seemed … a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously” (Rorty 1999, 12). While many know Rorty turned increasingly toward Dewey in the 1970s (after rupturing with the analytic mainstream), he already exhibited a more than passing interest in Dewey and pragmatism. Biographer Neil Gross writes that “as early as 1959, Rorty could be found arguing that contemporary analytic discourse was colored by pragmatic themes [amounting to, as Rorty put it, a] ‘pragmatic reconstruction 337

David L. Hildebrand

… [whose] basic themes and theses … are familiar enough from Dewey and his ­followers’” (Gross 2007, 158). In 1961, motivated by “the spectacle of philosophers quarreling endlessly over the same issues,” Rorty argued that one way toward a more “fruitful conversation” was via a “metaphilosophical pragmatism” that would be “fairly close to the attitude which Dewey adopted toward the history of philosophy” insofar as it took the need philosophy fulfilled “to be, pre‐eminently, communication” (Rorty 1961, 302). Two years later, in a book review, Rorty pronounced that “Dewey’s philosophy is the noblest and most profound statement of the aims of a democratic society” (Rorty 1963, 744).4 As Rorty’s career matured, his identification with Dewey grew. In 1979, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature famously linked his own views to “the three most important philosophers of our century,” Dewey, Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein (Rorty 1979, 5). He updated that opinion in 1986, writing that Dewey “has, in my imagination, gradually eclipsed Wittgenstein and Heidegger” (Rorty 1986, x). Rorty identified with Dewey not merely for the affinity of their philosophical positions, but because he saw them battling for similar goods – and embattled in similar ways. The gist of the criticisms I get from both left and right is pretty much the same as the gist of the criticisms aimed at Dewey by the Thomists, the Straussians and the Marxists, back in the 1930s and 1940s. Dewey thought, as I now do, that there was nothing bigger, more permanent and more reliable, behind our sense of moral obligation to those in pain than a certain contingent historical phenomenon – the gradual spread of the sense that the pain of others matters, regardless of whether they are of the same family, tribe, colour, religion, nation or intelligence as oneself. (Rorty 1999, 14)

Toward the end of his life, answering a question regarding the degree to which he thought his neopragmatism differed from Dewey’s, Rorty said I don’t think there is any great difference in fundamentals. I pay close attention to the philosophy of language, while Dewey did not. It is a matter of intellectual context … [W]ithin analytic philosophy, Dewey’s … attacks on traditional dualisms … have been persuasively presented … in the philosophy of language, particularly by Quine and Davidson. I don’t think this adds anything much to Dewey: it is just adapting what Dewey said for a different audience, for people with different expectations. (Borradori 2006, 35)

4  “Classical” versus “Neo/New” Pragmatism Rorty’s take on the broader accomplishments of “classical pragmatism” helps to contextualize his take on Dewey. Classical pragmatism mostly succeeded when it was “critical,” revolting against traditional quests: certainty in knowledge, intrinsic structure of reality, eternal norms of morality. “James’s and Dewey’s main accomplishments,” Rorty writes, “were negative, in that they explain how to slough off a lot of intellectual baggage which we inherited from the Platonic tradition” (Rorty 1999, xiii). Classical pragmatism’s revolutionary perspective found its fulcrum in Darwinian evolutionary biology, which hastened pragmatism toward historicism, instrumentalism, and the nascent insight that words, too, were tools. 338

Rorty and Dewey

Pragmatists hope to break with the … Cartesian‐Lockean picture of a mind seeking to get in touch with a reality outside itself. So they start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment … No matter whether the tool is a hammer or a gun or a belief or a statement, tool‐using is part of the interaction of the organism with its environment. (Rorty 1999, xxii–xxiii)

Classical pragmatism provided new ways to cull retrograde aspects of both older and newer traditions; echoing Richard Posner’s remark that “pragmatism clears the underbrush and leaves it to others to plant the forest,” Rorty added that “the underbrush in question is mostly specifically philosophical underbrush … [created during 30 years of a period now called] ‘positivistic analytic philosophy’” (Rorty 1999, 96). Insofar as the classical pragmatisms had a worthwhile positive project, it was political  –  not philosophical. Classical pragmatisms, Rorty writes, were seeking “the creation of a social democracy … a classless, casteless, egalitarian society. I interpret James and Dewey as giving us advice on how, by getting rid of the old dualisms, we can make this project as central to our intellectual lives as it is to our political lives” (Rorty 1999, xiv). By reorienting intellectual attention to political reconstruction, Rorty thought pragmatism might undermine philosophers’ addiction to unending metaphilosophical battles. Dewey’s interest in helping people solve problems, Rorty argues, “resulted in his being dismissed as a bourgeois bore” because he was thought unable to rise to “the spiritual level on which philosophy should be conducted.” However, Rorty continues, “One reason that Dewey is my philosophical hero is that I think it would be a good idea for philosophers to bourgeoisify themselves, to stop trying to rise to the spiritual level at which Plato and Nietzsche confront each other … [to] stop thinking in terms of levels altogether, cease to imagine themselves ascending to heights or plumbing depths” (Rorty 2007, 80). How did pragmatism survive and remain relevant? Classical pragmatism’s meliorism and instrumentalism were invigorated by a subsequent advance, the “linguistic turn.” This new pragmatist tradition (e.g. Putnam, Sellars, Davidson, and Quine) took classical pragmatism’s insistence on the made‐not‐found nature of philosophical problems and then argued that these made problems could be “unmade by using a different vocabulary than that which the philosophical tradition has used” (Rorty 1999, xxii). These new pragmatists stopped talking about “experience” and “method” and talked instead in terms of language.5 The slightly longer neopragmatism backstory, according to Rorty, was that the logical empiricists shoved pragmatism aside and “linguistified all the old Kantian distinctions which Dewey thought Hegel had helped us to overcome” (between fact and value, and between science [and] ideology, metaphysics and religion). Their effort was countered by Quine et  al., whose neopragmatic tactics effected “the re‐ pragmatization – and thus the de‐Kantianizing and the re‐Hegelianizing – of American philosophy” (Rorty 1999, 31). The upshot of this to‐and‐fro was, Rorty thought, an update for pragmatism, rendering it “more palatable” to a new generation (Rorty 1998, 306). Since, however, this “update” required Rorty’s excision of classical pragmatism’s central elements (experience, inquiry, and method), it is possible that he created a new (and less palatable) task for followers: explaining how this Rortian amalgam of “isms” (antifoundationalism, 339

David L. Hildebrand

antirepresentationalism, antiauthoritarianism, etc.) still resembles, somehow, a “pragmatism.”

5  Rorty’s Approach to Dewey Rorty’s aims were served not by getting Dewey “right” but by presenting two Deweys, “good” and “bad.” This good/bad division ranges over a variety of subordinate dualisms  –  therapeutic/constructive, playful/serious, imaginative/systematic, practical/ theoretical, rhetorical/metaphysical  –  which Rorty uses to assay Dewey (and other ­philosophers). Dewey’s work, Rorty believed, was internally divided: Throughout his life, [Dewey] wavered between a therapeutic stance toward philosophy and another, quite different, stance – one in which philosophy was to become “scientific” and “empirical” and do something serious, systematic, important, and constructive. Dewey sometimes described philosophy as the criticism of culture, but he was never quite content to think of himself as a kibitzer or therapist or intellectual historian. He wanted to have things both ways … Dewey never quite brought himself to [see] … that philosophy’s mission, like that of therapy, was to make itself obsolete. (Rorty 1982, 73, 82–3)6

Rorty preferred Reconstruction in Philosophy and A Common Faith, admiring what might be termed Dewey’s Nietzschean side, for the sheer provocativeness of [Dewey’s] suggestions about how to slough off our intellectual past … how to treat that past as material for playful experimentation rather than as imposing tasks and responsibilities upon us … [and how to] put aside that spirit of seriousness which artists traditionally lack and philosophers are traditionally supposed to maintain. (Rorty 1982, 87)

This “sloughing off ” (to many’s surprise), even sets “theory” against “practice,” for pragmatists “such as Dewey turn away from the theoretical scientists to the engineers and the social workers – the people who are trying to make people more comfortable and secure, and to use science and philosophy as tools for that purpose” (Rorty 1991a, 9). Rejecting scientism and embracing improvisation, these pragmatists reject the “idea that some new metaphor, some new philosophical idea, might reveal the permanent neutral matrix of inquiry, a matrix which now simply needs to be filled in‐by systematic teamwork. The reweaving of the community’s fabric of belief is not to be done systematically; it is not a research program … [but is] a matter of scratching where it itches, and only where it itches” (Rorty 1991a, 18). Because Dewey, unlike Nietzsche, was oriented toward democracy, Rorty reads Dewey as Emersonian. Dewey provides not truth and philosophy, but criterionless hope and inspiration: Instead of criteria, Deweyans offer inspiring narratives and fuzzy utopias. … For Dewey, Emerson’s talent for criterionless hope was the essence of his value to his country. … [Dewey thought] that Emerson did not offer truth, but simply hope. Hope – the ability to

340

Rorty and Dewey

believe that the future will be unspecifiably different from, and unspecifiably freer than, the past – is the condition of growth. That sort of hope was all that Dewey himself offered us, and by offering it he became our century’s Philosopher of Democracy. (Rorty 1999, 120)

Naturally, such interpretations invited vigorous attacks, and Rorty expended enormous effort defending. This was certainly the case with pragmatism and Dewey (see, e.g. Rorty 1985, 1995b, 1995c, 1995e). But since our present aim is understanding Rorty, it pays to focus on his overall rationale. Rorty knew others’ believed him to be violating the “letter” of Dewey’s philosophy; his choice, he said, was to honor Dewey’s “spirit” instead because this would be more successful in making Dewey accessible and relevant to new generations. Followers pay the best homage, Rorty thought, by fixing shortcomings: rephrasing soggy prose, eschewing shibboleths (e.g. “experience” or “scientific method”), and disregarding pseudo‐problems. While this was his tactic, other (more “faithful”) interpreters have sometimes failed: “These commentators stick so closely to the letter that they can make no concessions to current audiences. So they cannot help those audiences catch the spirit” (Rorty 1995e, 52–3). There is, perhaps, some unwitting irony in Rorty’s remark, since Rorty (an arch anti‐dualist) is arguing that the only way to save Dewey (another anti‐dualist) is by splitting him up! Dewey sought to sublate the practice‐theory dualism; Rorty, to attack theory, must first preserve that dualism. Dewey sought to sublate the experience‐knowledge dualism; Rorty, to attack knowledge, must first preserve that dualism, too. If we wish to take Rorty’s candor at face value, two different strategies for reading Rorty’s Dewey become salient. Christopher Voparil has suggested reading Rorty’s (highly selective and creative) interpretations not as a guide to Dewey, but as a use of Dewey pushing philosophy toward advocating non‐philosophical (liberal, political) ends (see Voparil 2014, 375, 379). Another proposed option, from Daniel Conway, is to see Rorty as fulfilling an eliminativist impulse already implicit in Dewey’s philosophy. On this reading, Rorty sees Dewey devising pragmatism as itself a tool, one which (we have seen) attacks metaphysical and epistemological dualisms when they obstruct practical changes (such as the renewal of political liberalism); nevertheless, Dewey’s own pragmatism must also succumb to scrutiny (especially cherished notions like “experience,” “method,” and “inquiry”); so, once the pragmatic tool is self‐ applied, Dewey’s philosophy “cancels itself upon completing its assigned task” (Conway 1999, 231). We need not endorse either suggestion to see their potential to rationalize Rorty’s otherwise outré positions: his attacks on “experience” and “method,” his dismissal of major works like Experience and Nature (Dewey 1925) and Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (Dewey 1938), or his sweeping statements like “Dewey’s best work had been written before 1925, hence for twenty‐five years [1925–50] not much had happened in American philosophy” (Borradori 2006, 36; see also McReynolds 2015, 23). The danger, however, of not finding a rationalization – of treating Rorty instead as one more interpreter  –  is that we may find “an irrecuperable discontinuity between [Rorty’s] vision of pragmatism and Dewey’s own … [one] to which Dewey could (and would) not have pledged allegiance” (Conway 234). We may find that “unwittingly but inexorably, Rorty threatens to undo Dewey’s work, rather than carry it forward” (Gouinlock 1995, 87). Such are the stakes. 341

David L. Hildebrand

6 Experience I regard [Dewey’s theory of experience] as the worst part of Dewey. I’d be glad if he had never written Experience and Nature. Rorty7

We begin with Rorty’s presentation of Dewey on experience because it is pivotal. Why? Experience was central to Dewey’s philosophy; Rorty repudiates it; this repudiation fuels his division of Dewey into “good” and “bad”; finally, that division presses Rorty’s more general characterizations of “pragmatism” and “neopragmatism.” Experience and Nature (EN) was, while not his first, certainly Dewey’s most elaborate effort to describe experience in a metaphysical vein.8 EN also criticized ways earlier philosophers had simplified and denigrated experience. A common thread uniting Dewey’s various targets was their misbegotten relegation of experience to a separate and inferior ontic realm  –  the changing, the mutable, the uncertain, the inferior, the bodily, the mundane. Typically, they also considered experience subjective or private; for this reason, it was often identified with reflection or knowing. Dewey’s account of experience built on his own (and James’s) continuity thesis in psychology: that mind and body, mental and physical, were not categorically different substances, but were instead dynamic and ongoing events in a larger system. Mind and body were co‐constitutive, each implicating the other, as well as the environment, other people, and whatever various cultural, historical, and linguistic features might be part of (what Dewey called) a “situation.” Dewey argued that much experience is not reflective, but “had” or “undergone.” Yet other experience is reflective; it is “known” or “mediated,” and abstracts away from what is undergone in order to investigate connections and relations which may be of eventual interest to future experience. Dewey’s strategy was to provide an empirically based account, both historical and phenomenological, of the character and relations we experience; phrases such as “generic traits of experience” were intended to provide a summarizing handle for repeating patterns: precariousness, stability, novelty, transaction, immediacy, and potentiality, to name just a few. Dewey’s larger purpose was cultural; his “empirical metaphysics” was a tool aiding philosophy’s mission of culture‐criticism.9 Rorty could abide none of this. His view of Experience and Nature (and, tout court, Dewey’s notion of experience) is unqualifiedly negative. In works such as “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (1977, in Rorty 1982) and “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” (1994, in Rorty 1998). Rorty argues that Dewey’s effort to describe experience was ill‐ conceived, misdirected and, unnecessary to advance the melioristic and instrumentalist project already begun. Dewey set out to show the harm which traditional philosophical dualisms were doing to our culture, and he thought that to do this job he needed a metaphysics – a description of the generic traits of existences that would solve (or dissolve) the traditional problems of philosophy, as well as open up new avenues for cultural development. I think that he was successful in this latter, larger, aim; he is one of the few philosophers of our century whose imagination was expansive enough to envisage a culture shaped along lines different from those we have developed in the West during the last three hundred years. Dewey’s mistake … and it was a trivial and unimportant mistake … was the notion that criticism of culture had to take the form of a redescription of “nature” or “experience” or both. (Rorty 1982, 85)

342

Rorty and Dewey

Echoing George Santayana, Rorty argued that Dewey’s attempt to provide a “naturalistic metaphysics” was doomed from the start, especially “if [Dewey] also agrees with Hegel that the starting point of philosophic thought is bound to be the dialectical situation in which one finds oneself caught in one’s own historical period – the problems of the men of one’s time” (Rorty 1982, 81).10 Put another way, Dewey mistakenly believed he could historicize logic but still do ontology, and so he fell into bad faith, enacting that for which he had long condemned others: [Dewey] was never to escape the notion that what he himself said about experience described what experience itself looked like, whereas what others [e.g. empiricists such as Hume, Bain, Hodgson] said of experience was a confusion between the data and the products of their analyses. Others might be transcendentalizing metaphysicians, but he was a “humble psychologist.” Other philosophers produced dualisms, he was to insist throughout his life, because they “erected the results of an analysis into real entities.” But a nondualistic account of experience, of the sort Dewey himself proposed, was to be a true return to die Sache selbst. (Rorty 1982, 79–80)11

EN’s “empirical metaphysics” project struck Rorty as stillborn, one neither Dewey nor his sympathizers could justify. “Dewey’s own view of the nature and function of philosophy,” Rorty writes, “precludes it” and, moreover, “sympathetic expositors of Dewey‐as‐metaphysician cannot … explain why we need a discipline at that level of generality, nor how the results of such ‘discoveries’ can be anything but trivial” (Rorty 1982, 77).12 Beyond EN’s goals, Rorty was rebuking its implicit methodology: Dewey was trying to provide “experience from a God’s‐eye point of view,” “a permanent neutral matrix for future inquiry … [which says] ‘here is what experience is really like, before dualistic analysis has done its fell work.’” (Rorty 1982, 80). Such an attempt, Rorty argued, contravenes the pragmatist creed of starting from a stance that admits context, history, and perspective. Despite rejecting the same dualisms as Dewey (cognitive/noncognitive, thinking/ feeling, mind/body, human/animal), Rorty believed Dewey’s strategy for creating continuity was flawed because it was “panpsychist”: The problem with this way of obtaining continuity between us and the brutes is that it seems to shove the philosophically embarrassing discontinuity back down to the gap between, say, viruses and amoebae. But why stop there? Only … a full‐fledged panpsychism will eliminate such embarrassments … Dewey should have dropped the term experience rather than redefining it and should have looked elsewhere for continuity between us and the brutes. (Rorty 1998, 297)

James and Dewey erred by thinking truth had to amount to more than merely “what works” and “that an appropriate philosophical response to Darwin required a kind of vitalism – an attempt to coalesce the vocabulary of epistemology with that of evolutionary biology.” Thus, they were “led down the garden path of radical empiricism” (Rorty 1998, 299). Instead, Dewey should have more fully embraced the liberation Hegel’s historicism provided. He could have minimized his pragmatism’s metaphysical ambitions, advocating for an idea based on future usefulness rather than on future ­experience. Dewey could have merged Hegel and Darwin “not by finding a holistic, 343

David L. Hildebrand

­ anpsychist way of describing the relations between experience and nature, but rather p by finding a historicist, relativist way of describing Darwin’s claim upon our attention” (Rorty 1998, 294). Lacking the linguistic turn, Dewey (and James) failed to push pragmatism fully clear of their interlocutors’ baggage. But present philosophers are not so encumbered: I see it as the great virtue of Davidson’s linguistification of Dewey’s antirepresentationalism that it enables us to get rid of “experience” as the name of such an intermediary [between organism and environment]. It describes causal transactions between the environment and the linguistic behavior of speakers which are mediated only by, e.g., nerves and light waves. (Rorty 1995b, 219n10)

Rorty’s student, Robert Brandom, is another new pragmatist Rorty thinks updates pragmatism by eliminating experience: “Brandom can be read as carrying through on ‘the linguistic turn’ by restating pragmatism in a form that makes James’s and Dewey’s talk of experience entirely obsolete” (Rorty 1998, 122).13 Language, then, refashions pragmatism, providing a cure for the “experience” hangover. With experience gone, Dewey can become “good,” finally rejecting all epistemological and metaphysical breaches between humans and world, agreeing with Wittgenstein and Sellars that “there is no way to come between language and its object” (Rorty 1998, 127). This contemporary perspective could have moved Dewey to agree that philosophy cannot answer the question: is our vocabulary in accord with the way the world is? It can only answer the question: can we perspicuously relate the various vocabularies we use to one another, and thereby dissolve the philosophical problems that seem to arise at the places where we switch over from one vocabulary to another? (Rorty 1998, 127)

From this new vantage point Dewey could realize that “philosophy can never be anything more than a discussion of the utility and compatibility of beliefs – and, more particularly, of the various vocabularies in which those beliefs are formulated” (Rorty 1998, 127).14

7  Objectivity and Truth By the time Dewey had written his 500+ page opus, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, “truth” had been demoted to a single index item to one footnote. (The entry is telling: “Truth, Peirce on, 343n. See also, Assertability.”) Dewey’s thought had moved so far from truth as an isolable and substantive concept that there was virtually nothing positive left to say. Rorty’s own trajectory was similar, and he frequently invoked Dewey to affirm that “truth” is not worth theorizing about, and that “objectivity” be understood as intersubjective agreement (“solidarity”). Dewey, Rorty argues, saw truth as an outmoded concept which had now outlived its usefulness. While initially emancipatory, certain ideas had, over time “turned into instruments of repression” which Dewey called “the crust of convention.” 344

Rorty and Dewey

Dewey thought that the idea of “absolute truth” was such an idea and that the pragmatic theory of truth was “true in the pragmatic sense of truth: it works, it clears up difficulties, removes obscurities, puts individuals into more experimental, less dogmatic, and less arbitrarily sceptical relations to life.” “The pragmatist,” [Dewey] continued, “is quite content to have the truth of his theory consist in its working in these various ways, and to leave to the intellectualist the proud possession of [truth as] an unanalyzable, unverifiable, unworking property.” (Rorty 1998, 77–8; Dewey 1929, 9)

Rather than talk about truth, philosophers should limit themselves to “justification” or warrant. For this reason, Rorty links Dewey with Davidson. “Dewey (and, I have argued, Davidson), have suggested that there is little to be said about truth, and that philosophers should explicitly and self‐consciously confine themselves to justification, to what Dewey called ‘warranted assertibility’” (Rorty 1999, 32). But while Rorty sees Good Dewey as a helpful pruner of the tradition, the Bad Dewey occasionally slipped into the temptation to show why warrant would lead to truth (in the long run). About this unfortunate hangover, Rorty writes, Philosophers have hoped to … [link] the temporal with the eternal, the transitory human subject with what is there anyway, whether there are humans around or not. That can be done if philosophy can show that the better justified a belief is, the more likely it is to be true. Failing that, it might try to show that a certain procedure for justifying belief is more likely to lead to truth than some other procedure. Dewey hoped to show that there was such a procedure; Davidson, and more pragmatists, seem to me right in suggesting that there is not. (Rorty 1999, 35)

The “procedure” which draws Rorty’s criticism here is “inquiry” and “scientific method.” For Dewey, as Gouinlock pointed out in a piece critical of Rorty, “The very process of inquiry is inseparable from manipulating and organizing overt events, and its intent is to produce the full‐fledged object. Clearly, it is not reducible to conversation” (Gouinlock 1995, 78; cf. 81). Here, Gouinlock is emphasizing Dewey’s pragmatic realism – a realism which simultaneously holds that inquiry works with events and situations as encountered without thereby supposing that this amounts to a “Given” – an antecedent reality whose meanings (or truth values) transcend inquiry (and are therefore already fixed). Rorty, however, rejects this interpretation of Dewey; it is simply another (missed) opportunity to stop referring to Reality. Dewey … sometimes rejected questions and terminology, and I wish he had done so more often. Unfortunately, he often employed the alternative technique of giving new, puzzling, senses to words like object, experience, nature, and correspond … He unfortunately forewent the chance to say “Just forget about ‘correspondence’” in order to say “Here is something you could mean by correspondence, even though it has nothing to do with the meaning used by those who worry about whether truth consists in correspondence.” (Rorty 1995b, 99)

Because he believes this, Rorty occasionally presents Dewey as if his “warranted assertability” notion was identical to Rorty’s own “intersubjective agreement.” For example, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty equates Dewey’s “warranted 345

David L. Hildebrand

assertability” with “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying” (Rorty 1979, 176). In 1998, Rorty made a similar equivocation, this time entangling Deweyan “objectivity” with that of Habermas: “Dewey anticipated Habermas by claiming that there is nothing to the notion of objectivity save that of intersubjective agreement – agreement reached by free and open discussion of all available hypotheses and policies” (Rorty 1998, 6–7).

8  Inquiry and Scientific Method Rivaling Rorty’s criticisms of Dewey on experience were others of inquiry and scientific method. Rorty’s reformulations of Dewey on these issues, moreover, echo his other, broader prescriptions for epistemology and philosophy of science. As most know, the classical pragmatism’s specialized use of “inquiry” traces back to Peirce, and was central to their Darwinian revisions of knowledge and truth. Crudely, their opponents (at the time) have become known as “correspondentists” (popular with realists) or “coherentists” (popular with idealists). Dewey wrote prolifically about inquiry and method; some writings were intimate, phenomenological descriptions of “how we think” (to borrow a title) which then applied their revolutionary import to specific arenas  –  for example, psychological, educational, religious, scientific, and public‐political spheres (see Gouinlock 1995, 75; Dewey 1929, 160; 1933, 23–4). However, Rorty believed Dewey’s efforts were wasted and retrograde efforts to find something mythical. Taking aim at Dewey’s Logic, Rorty comments that Dewey thought that “logic rests upon analysis of the best methods of inquiry that exist at a given time” [from Dewey 1938, 21]. He thought that Aristotle was generalizing the “methods” of Euclidean geometry and that he himself was generalizing those of Galileo and Darwin. I think that the whole idea of “analysis of methods” is misconceived, and thus that “logic,” conceived as Dewey conceived of it, is a subject not worth developing. (Rorty 1985, 41)

Dewey’s fundamental error was when he said “Inquiry is the controlled or directed transformation of an indeterminate situation,” he believed that “an indeterminate situation” meant “something stronger, something metaphysically distinctive” than what it really was – a case in which one “is not clear what language to use for describing what is going on” (Rorty 1985, 42–3). In other words, Dewey waxed metaphysical rather than looking at things linguistically. Setting aside Dewey’s deep background in psychology and education, Rorty glibly asserts that Dewey made “inquiry” too freighted since a simpler account would do: I think inquiry  –  fitting whatever comes down the pike into our previous experience and beliefs as best we can – is something nobody can help doing. We do not need a goal called truth to lure us into this automatic, involuntary process of adjustment to the environment … We do not, as far as I can see, have any choice about how to form beliefs. (Rorty 1995c, 152)

We should not be asking, Rorty is saying, “What method do scientists use?” Rather, we should “just say that Galileo had a good idea, and Aristotle a less good idea; Galileo 346

Rorty and Dewey

was using some terminology which helped, and Aristotle wasn’t. Galileo’s terminology was the only secret he had – he didn’t pick that terminology because it was ‘clear’ or ‘natural,’ or ‘simple,’ or in line with the categories of the pure understanding. He just lucked out” (Rorty 1982, 193). Dewey’s erroneous assumptions about inquiry also infect “method,” a notion Rorty calls “pretty useless.” For the idea, Rorty says, there could be a “method of critical intelligence” is a fiction; rather, “we muddle through as best we can” seeking to be “experimental, nondogmatic, inventive, and imaginative” without expecting (or trying for) certainty. There is no way to teach a “methodical way of being inventive and imaginative.” Rorty speculates that Dewey used “method” to limn advances made by the New Science over the “a priori, deductive method”  –  or to explain what philosophy could offer once it stopped “offering a body of knowledge.” But using the term “method,” Rorty says, “was not a fortunate choice [because] … it promised more than he could offer  –  something positive, rather than the merely negative admonition not to get trapped in the past.” It is a mistake to presume that “one can isolate, in Dewey’s work, something both wide enough to be ‘extended to all problems of conduct’ and also narrow enough to have ‘formal properties’ – something … generic enough to be … the method of democracy as well as of science, and yet specific enough to be contrasted with other methods that people have actually employed” (1995b, 92). All phrases like “scientific method” (and, presumably, “method”) can amount to “is a name for an unfindable middle ground between a set of virtuous habits … and a set of concrete, teachable techniques” (Rorty 1995b, 93; cf. Rorty 1991b, 65–6; 1986, ix–xviii). Thus, Rorty’s attack on “inquiry” and “method” entails the vacuousness of “scientific method.” Though Dewey didn’t realize it, there is no such thing. Granted that Dewey never stopped talking about “scientific method,” I submit that he never had anything very useful to say about it. Those who think I am overstating my case here should, I think, tell us what this thing called “method” – which is neither a set of rules nor a character trait nor a collection of techniques – is supposed to be … what it was supposed to add to the virtues of curiosity, open‐mindedness and conversability. Dewey could have said everything he needed to say if he dropped the term “scientific method.” (Rorty 1995b, 94–5) Dewey saddled himself with the job of discovering Galileo’s and Darwin’s methodological secret. But neither of them had a methodological secret. They merely had a number of bright ideas about how you could describe certain very particular things in new ways. (Rorty 1985, 41)

Once one moves beyond fictions (e.g. reality), other projects (scientifically or philosophically “knowing” reality via “inquiry,” “method,” “scientific method”) are also annihilated. And, of course, anyone trying apply scientific methods to philosophy is doubly duped: There is no activity called “knowing” which has a nature to be discovered, and at which natural scientists are particularly skilled. There is simply the process of justifying beliefs to audiences. None of these audiences is closer to nature, or a better representative of some ahistorical ideal of rationality, than any other. (Rorty 1999, 36)

347

David L. Hildebrand

Quine’s linguistic critiques of foundationalism and Kuhn’s sociological x‐rays of “scientific progress” rendered obsolescent the attempts to erect methodological distinctions between science and non‐science; grasp this, and “all that remains of Peirce’s, Dewey’s and Popper’s praise of science is praise of certain moral virtues – those of an open society  –  rather than any specifically epistemic strategy” (Rorty 1999, 36; cf. Rorty 1982, 193; 2007, 192). To recognize the full implication of the linguistic turn was to recognize that all claims are “proved” by their capacity to convince; individuals we call “great thinkers” are those whose imagination and chutzpah have succeeded in creating and fomenting new vocabularies. We need, Rorty writes, “more of the courage and imagination which Bacon and Galileo shared (despite their radically different conceptions of the nature of science), as well as more willingness to toss old ideas that have not panned out” (Rorty 1995b, 94–5). Despite his disappointment about Dewey’s use of “scientific method,” Rorty remained unequivocal that Dewey was not scientistic. “Dewey’s experimentalism,” Rorty writes, “is not scientistic. On the contrary, it treats the natural sciences as exemplary in their procedures, but as no more or less ‘in touch with reality’ than politics or poetry” (Rorty 1995a, 41). Despite his enthusiasm for science and technology, Dewey was never reductive, in part because he “remained sufficiently Hegelian not to think of natural science as having an inside track on the essences of things, while becoming sufficiently naturalistic to think of human beings in Darwinian terms” (Rorty 1979, 362n8).

9  Ethics, Politics, and Democracy When it comes to ethics, Rorty’s presentation of Dewey is consistently positive; gone are disagreements over experience and inquiry/method. While many Dewey scholars would insist that these notions are integral to his ethical and political views, Rorty largely neglects their connection; as a result, Rorty has predominantly positive things to say: the ethical‐political Dewey is the Good Dewey. Dewey’s general antifoundationalism about reality extended to moral values; he denied there was any summum bonum to either compel or inspire our conduct. For Dewey, Rorty writes, moral obligation does not have a nature, or a source, different from tradition, habit and custom. Morality is simply a new and controversial custom. Our sense that prudence is unheroic and morality heroic is merely the recognition that testing out the relatively untried is more dangerous, more risky, than doing what comes naturally. (Rorty 1999, 76)

Moral laws and principles carried forward by history are, for Dewey and Rorty, tools devised to mitigate conflict or produce greater satisfaction. While refusing to align with utilitarianism, Kantianism, or virtue ethics, Dewey nevertheless argued that all three approaches identified enduring, independent factors useful for problem solving in ethical life. Dewey’s chief criticism focused on the idolatrous and counterproductive tendency to make superordinate one factor over the others (see Dewey 1930). 348

Rorty and Dewey

Rorty applauded Dewey’s general approach, not least because it dismissed outworn (but annoyingly persistent) moral puzzles and distinctions. For example, the classic question “Why be moral?” rests on a categorical distinction between morality and prudence, goodness and usefulness. But Dewey dissolves the distinction by rejecting its metaphysical basis  –  the idea that morality requires special insight into something permanent in nature or God – and then by reframing morality as distinguishing “between routine and non‐routine social relationships.” Like the distinction between custom and law, this is “a distinction of degree – the degree of need for conscious deliberation and explicit formulation of precepts – rather than a distinction of kind” (Rorty 1999, 73). An important resource for Rorty’s reframing is Dewey’s rejection of Kant’s attempt to link morality with a form of rationality subsequently made implausible by Darwin. Witness Rorty’s obvious delight at Dewey’s (unusually acerbic) repudiation of the categorical imperative: All that the categorical imperative does, Dewey said, is to commend “the habit of asking how we should be willing to be treated in a similar case.” The attempt to do more, to get “ready‐made rules available at a moment’s notice for settling any kind of moral difficulty,” seemed to Dewey to have been “born of timidity and nourished by love of authoritative prestige.” Only such a tendency to sado‐masochism, Dewey thought, could have led to the idea that “absence of immutably fixed and universally applicable ready‐made principles is equivalent to moral chaos.” (Rorty 1999, 75; Dewey 1922, 169, 164)

Ouch. Contra Kant, Dewey saw morality instead in terms of a “means‐end‐continuum,” roughly, as Rorty puts it, the claim that “we change our notions of the Right and of the Good on the basis of the particular mixture of success and failure produced by our previous efforts to act rightly and do what is good” (Rorty 1998, 303). Rorty celebrates this rejection (of the traditional morality‐rationality linkage) as a rejection of the “tension between facticity and validity.” Dewey “saw that tension as a philosopher’s fiction, a result of separating two parts of a situation for no good (that is, no practical) reason, and then complaining that you cannot put them back together again. For him, all obligations were situational and conditional” (Rorty 2000, 24). Dissolving the fact/ value distinction in ethics informs Rorty’s dissolution of the science/nonscience boundary; it is “better to follow Dewey in thinking of the role of science and technology not in terms of our relation to Being but rather in explicitly political terms” (Rorty 1998, 288). Rorty also heartily approved of Dewey’s challenge to prevailing models of the self, commenting that for Dewey, the central flaw in much traditional moral philosophy has been the myth of the self as nonrelational, as capable of existing independently of any concern for others, as a cold psychopath needing to be constrained to take account of other people’s needs. (Rorty 1999, 77)

Dewey rightly set aside this model for “only when we masochistically picture ourselves as such selves do we feel the need to punish ourselves by quailing before divine commands, or before Kant’s tribunal of pure practical reason” (Rorty 1999, 77). 349

David L. Hildebrand

“Dewey,” Rorty adds, “showed us how to drop the notion of ‘the true self ’ and how to drop the distinction between nature and convention” (Rorty 1999, 119). On Dewey’s superior account, “the boundaries of the self are fuzzy and flexible” as the self is “a self‐ reweaving and self‐correcting network of beliefs and desires – a homeostatic mechanism” (Rorty 1999, 80; Rorty 2007, 196–7). Dewey’s notion of “moral progress” was amenable to Rorty; it exemplified the general pragmatic virtue he named “anti‐authoritarianism.” Dewey preferred to skip talk of “authority,” “legitimacy” and “obligation” … to talk instead about “applied intelligence” and “democracy” … He wanted the first question of both politics and philosophy to be not, “What is legitimate?” or, “What is authoritative?” but, “What can we get together and agree on?” This is the strand in Dewey’s thought which Rawls, especially in his later writings, has picked up and developed. (Rorty 1999, 111)15

By separating moral progress from “authority,” Rorty enables his own defense of Dewey’s key notion, “growth.” For despite attacks on notions’ apparent fuzziness, “Dewey rightly saw that any [overly specified] criterion would cut the future down to the size of the present” (Rorty 1999, 120). Moral progress, then, is emblematized by growth, manifesting as “a matter of increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things” one which champions “imagination, rather than reason, as the engine of moral progress” (Rorty 1999, 81; Rorty 2000, 26n10).

10  Democracy and Politics Rorty admired Dewey for his philosophical work, and for his efforts beyond academia. While he didn’t think Dewey has made any special political contribution, [Dewey] stood for the right causes for a long, long time. He was in favor of women’s suffrage. He was against racial discrimination. He was in favor of increasing the power of the trade unions. These were all things that came to pass more or less in the course of his lifetime. (McReynolds 2015, 24)

Rorty both endorsed and modified Dewey’s philosophical ideal of democracy. As Rorty reads him, Dewey emphasized three constitutive aspects of democracy. First, democracy emerges from communities seeking solidarity through dynamic conversational exchange, not by appeals to human nature or reason; second, democracy is, therefore, not “justified” in any way – it is an experiment assessed by what eventuates; third, while democracy is not grounded in pragmatism, pragmatism’s hopeful and melioristic stance buttresses democracy. Regarding the first aspect, conversation, Dewey showed philosophers that our experience of democratic politics has made it possible … to change our notion of “reason” from what Habermas calls “subject‐centered reason” to what he calls “communicative reason” … The democratic community of Dewey’s dreams is a community in which … everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. (Rorty 1998, 289; Rorty 1999, 20)

350

Rorty and Dewey

Regarding the second aspect, justification, Rorty notes that Dewey “did not try to justify democracy at all. He saw democracy not as founded on the nature of man or reason or reality but as a promising experiment engaged in by a particular herd of a particular species of animal – our species and our herd” (Rorty 1999, 119). Regarding the third aspect, pragmatism, Rorty wrote that when Dewey … called pragmatism “the philosophy of democracy” … [he meant] that both pragmatism and America are expressions of a hopeful, melioristic, experimental frame of mind. I think the most one can do by way of linking up pragmatism with America is to say that both the country and its most distinguished philosopher suggest that we can, in politics, substitute hope for the sort of knowledge which philosophers have usually tried to attain. (Rorty 1999, 24)

While Rorty denied pragmatism entailed democracy – fascism and pragmatism are not incompatible, he says – Rorty saw a connection between philosophy’s de‐transcendentalization (secularization) of culture and increased political engagement. “I do see it as an inducement to involvement, and I think that Dewey did too. Dewey is saying: suppose you’re a pragmatist about truth – that is, you think that truth is what works. The obvious question, then, is whom does it work for?” (O’Shea 2006, 47).16 Before concluding this section, a note about political liberalism. Rorty differed with Dewey, especially over what kinds of individual–group relations should be considered ideals. Rorty thought democracy’s strength lay in freeing individuals to “worship his or her personal symbol of ultimate concern, unless worship of that symbol interferes with the pursuit of happiness by his or her fellow‐citizens” (Rorty 2007, 40). Unlike Dewey, who saw constructing the “Great Community” as integral to democracy’s project, Rorty sees no such obligation: Accepting that utilitarian constraint, the one Mill formulated in On Liberty, is the only obligation imposed by democratic citizenship, the only exception to democracy’s commitment to honor the rights of individuals. (Rorty 2007, 40)

I suspect Rorty worried that constructive proposals like Dewey’s were double‐edged because they might lead to tyranny.17 Despite Dewey’s many pieces arguing for a much more expansive conception of citizenship, Rorty tends to portray Dewey as a Millian (Rorty 1999, 272). Against critics claiming that Dewey’s idea “intelligence” was bound up with democracy, Rorty responded that democracy had no use for scientific intelligence – a chimera, anyway, he claimed  –  and only needed “ungrounded social hope [of] the sort that Jefferson, Whitman, and Dewey had for the America of their various days” (Rorty 1995b, 91).18

11  Conclusion: The Function of Philosophy What is philosophy good for? Rorty and Dewey agreed that philosophy’s aim is to clarify present thinking about present moral and social problems. By minding philosophy’s ­historical dimension, present critics can see how “precious values embedded in social 351

David L. Hildebrand

traditions … [sprang] from a clash of social ends and from a conflict of inherited institutions with incompatible contemporary tendencies” (Dewey 1920, 94, quoted in Rorty 1999, 66). Unlike Dewey, Rorty sees the engine of philosophy not operating via “inquiry” or “scientific method” but by creatively mediating “old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks, with new ways of speaking, developed in response to new demands” (Rorty 1999, 66). Thus, for Rorty, “philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative … by a few people in each generation glimpsing a possibility that had not previously been grasped.” Dewey was one of these few (Rorty 1998, 8, cf. p. 5). Pace Dewey, philosophy is neither constructive nor reconstructive. For Rorty, it is a way of reading past thinkers “as therapeutic rather than as constructive: as having told us what problems not to discuss” (Rorty 1998, 6). The role of philosophical pragmatists, in turn, is to “see themselves as involved in a long‐term attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self‐image of their community” (Rorty 1998, 41). This focus, on rhetoric and imagination, marks out a significant difference between Rorty from Dewey who, after all, retained the belief that pragmatists were still philosophers, whose criticism of popular beliefs was “marked off by methods of critical inquiry” (Dewey 1930, 164). From Rorty’s perspective, this view is yet another missed opportunity. Dewey, sticking with his profession, failed to see that philosophers were not engaged in a special project, but one embarked on by “high culture” more generally. The only unique thing left for philosophers to do, as mentioned earlier, is to clear “philosophical underbrush,” so that “old philosophical ideas do not block the road of inquiry” (Rorty 1998, 306).

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8

9

10

352

Voparil (2014) groups commentators into “three waves of Rorty‐Dewey interpretation.” On this, see Voparil (2014, 398n34). Regarding Rorty at Chicago, see Gross (2007); see also Rorty (1999, 8–9). Two other reviews during this early period were on Dewey and pragmatism; three more were on other American figures: A. N. Whitehead, Chauncey Wright, and Charles S. Peirce. For other recent and succinct comparisons between classical pragmatism and neopragmatism, see Rorty (1999, 24–5, 35, 95). Sometimes, though, Rorty presents Dewey as wholly able to reject philosophy: “Dewey found what he wanted in turning away from philosophy as a distinctive activity altogether, and towards the ordinary world – the problems of men, freshly seen by discarding the distinctions which the philosophical tradition had developed” (Rorty 1982, 53). In Hudson and Van Reijen (2006, 20). Democracy and Education (1916) treated experience at length in connection with learning and education, while Art as Experience (1934) considered experience metaphysically, but with a focus on art and aesthetics. “Philosophy is criticism; criticism of the influential beliefs that underlie culture; a criticism which traces the beliefs to their generating conditions as far as may be, which tracks them to their results, which considers the mutual compatibility of the elements of the total structure of beliefs. Such an examination terminates, whether so intended or not, in a projection of them into a new perspective which leads to new surveys of possibilities” (Dewey 1931, 19). “The first and most general criticism [of EN’s “generic traits of experience”] is Santayana’s claim that ‘naturalistic metaphysics’ is a contradiction in terms … Nobody can claim to offer

Rorty and Dewey

11

12

13

14

15

16 17

18

an empirical account of something called ‘the inclusive integrity of experience’ nor take this ‘integrated unity as the starting point for philosophic thought,’ if he also agrees with Hegel that the starting point of philosophic thought is bound to be the dialectical situation in which one finds oneself caught in one’s own historical period – the problems of the men of one’s time” (Rorty 1982, 81; see Santayana 1925). Rorty refers to EN’s enterprise as a “neutral monist ontology of ‘experience’” in Rorty (1998, 97n34). Rebuttals of his interpretation abound; see, especially, R. W. Sleeper: “For two generations we have been told that Dewey was trying to work out a ‘metaphysics of experience’ as the basis of inquiry. He was trying to do no such thing. He was trying to work out a metaphysics of existence on the basis of the successes of inquiry already in practice. It would not be a ‘first philosophy’ in anything like the traditional sense. It would not be a metaphysics that dictates to the sciences, but one that learns from them” (Sleeper 1985, 17–18; cf. Sleeper 1986). My name for Rorty’s interpretative strategy is “Rorty’s Fork”: Dewey was either intentionally or unintentionally offering yet one more metaphysics, sub specie aeternitas (“here is what experience is really like”). On either option, Dewey’s philosophy is retrograde: undemocratic and, in Rorty’s sense, authoritarian. See Hildebrand (2003, 103). Rorty’s attack on Dewey’s “empirical metaphysics” has precedents in those by B. H. Bode (1906), R. W. Sellars (1939), and W. P. Montague (1937). See Hildebrand (2003), especially chapter 3. Important discussions about the substitutability of language for experience can be found in Rorty (1982, especially “Introduction” and “Dewey’s Metaphysics”; 1991a, esp. 50, 53; 1995d, esp. 36; 2007, esp. 166). Compare with Donavan (1995) and Hildebrand (2014). I cannot argue it here, but I contend Rorty himself was unable to fully banish the term “experience” from functioning in his own philosophical arguments. Often his defenses of the adequacy of “conversation” or “discourse” turn on whether a particular result “seems” or “works” better, has more “advantages,” or presents greater “utility.” Deweyans or Jameseans are smart to argue that such metrics indicate Rorty’s need for further, richer resources: for example, “experience” (including, of course, all the usual caveats). As Voparil points out, Rorty’s anti‐authoritarianism was inspired by Dewey’s view of democracy as a faith in experience that had not been subjected “to some form of external control … [or] to some ‘authority’ alleged to exist outside the processes of experience” (Dewey 1939, 229). See Voparil (2014, 389). Rorty was also inspired by Dewey’s rejection of authoritarian elements of religion. See Rorty (2007, 38). Regarding fascism’s compatibility with pragmatism, see Rorty (1999, 23). Conway aroused this suspicion: “Following Mill and Berlin, Rorty insists that we can cherish, protect, and even welcome the achievement of private self‐realization without actively and publicly promoting it in others. Indeed, we must so refrain from shaping the political sensibilities of our fellow citizens, since every attempt to manage the cultivation of self‐ realization culminates in unwanted tyranny … Dewey may have had good historical reasons to attempt to fuse the personal and the political, but [Rorty thought] we do not” (Conway 1999, 238–9). Voparil argues that Dewey and Rorty are more complementary on this issue than it might appear (see Voparil 2014).

References Borradori, Giovanna. 2006. “After Philosophy, Democracy: Interview with Richard Rorty.” In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 34–45. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

353

David L. Hildebrand

Conant, James. 2000. “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 268–342. Oxford: Blackwell. Conway, Daniel W. 1999. “Of Depth and Loss: The Peritropaic Legacy of Dewey’s Pragmatism.” In Dewey Reconfigured: Essays on Deweyan Pragmatism, edited by Casey Haskins and David Seiple, 221–46. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Dewey, John. 1916. Democracy and Education (MW9). —. 1920. Reconstruction in Philosophy (MW12). —. 1922. Human Nature and Conduct (MW14). —. 1925. Experience and Nature (LW1). —. 1929. The Quest for Certainty (LW4). —. 1930. “Three Independent Factors in Morals” (LW5:279–88). —. 1931. “Context and Thought” (LW6: 3–21). —. 1933. “The Supreme Intellectual Obligation” (LW9: 96–101). —. 1934. Art as Experience (LW10). —. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (LW12). —. 1939. “Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us” (LW14: 224–30). —. 1969–1991. Standard references are to the critical edition The Collected Works of John Dewey 1882–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston and abbreviated here as The Early Works 1882–1898 (EW), The Middle Works 1899–1924 (MW), The Later Works 1925–1953 (LW). Donavan, Richard. 1995. “Rorty’s Pragmatism and the Linguistic Turn.” In Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism, edited by Robert Hollinger and David Depew, 208–26. Westport, CT: Praeger. Gouinlock, James. 1995. “What is the Legacy of Instrumentalism? Rorty’s Interpretation of Dewey.” In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 72–90. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Gross, Neil. 2007. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hildebrand, David L. 2003. Beyond Realism and Antirealism: John Dewey and the Neopragmatists. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Detailed comparison between neopragmatism and classical pragmatism (especially Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Dewey) that assesses key interpretations of Dewey, and argues that ­tensions among neopragmatists rehearse central features of early twentieth‐century debates between realists, idealists, and classical pragmatists. —. 2014. “Introduction.” Language or Experience: Charting Pragmatism’s Course for the 21st Century (Special issue). European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 6:2. Hudson, Wayne and Wim van Reijen. 2006. “From Philosophy to Postphilosophy: Interview with Richard Rorty.” In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 18–27. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McReynolds, Phillip. 2015. The American Philosopher: Interviews on the Meaning of Life and Truth. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. O’Shea, Michael. 2006. “Toward a Postmetaphysical Culture: Interview with Richard Rorty.” In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 46–55. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1961. “Recent Metaphilosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 15(2): 299–318. —. 1963. “Review of Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals by Paul Goodman.” Teacher’s College Record 64: 743–4. —. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

354

Rorty and Dewey

—. 1985. “Comments on Sleeper and Edel.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21(1): 39–48. —. 1986. “Introduction.” In John Dewey: The Later Works. Volume 8: 1933–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, ix–xviii. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1991a. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995a. “Remembering John Dewey and Sidney Hook.” Free Inquiry 16(1): 40–3. —. 1995b. “Response to Gouinlock.” In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 91–9, 218–19. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1995c. “Response to Haack.” In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 148–53. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1995d. “Response to Hartshorne.” In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 29–36. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1995e. “Response to Lavine.” In Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics, edited by Herman J. Saatkamp, 50–3. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. —. 2000. “Universality and Truth.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert Brandom, 1–30. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santayana, George. 1925. “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics.” Journal of Philosophy 22(25): 673–88. Sleeper, R. W. 1985. “Rorty’s Pragmatism: Afloat in Neurath’s Boat, but Why Adrift?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21(1): 9–20. —. 1986. The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey’s Conception of Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Reissued, 2001, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Remarkable work of scholarship focused on Dewey’s metaphysical and logical theories that also defends Dewey’s project against earlier and later misinterpretations, including by Bertrand Russell and Richard Rorty. Szahaj, Andrzej. 2006. “Biography and Philosophy: Interview with Richard Rorty.” In Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, 148–60. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Voparil, Chris. 2014. “Rorty and Dewey Revisited: Toward a Fruitful Conversation.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50(3): 373–404. Painstaking examination of Rorty’s Dewey interpretations and their reception by Dewey scholars. Strategically emphasizes Rorty’s and Dewey’s shared commitments to foment new directions for pragmatism. Worth the trove of notes and references alone.

Further Reading Alexander, Thomas M. 2013. “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty Toward an Ethics of Meaning.” In The Human Eros: Eco‐ontology and the Aesthetics of Existence, 180–206. New York: Fordham University Press. Draws significant contrasts between neopragmatism and classical pragmatism in ethics with special attention to the “moral imagination.”

355

David L. Hildebrand

Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Malden, MA: Polity. Incisive, original, and clear examinations of classical and neopragmatism’s historical sources and prospects by a scholar with deep sympathies to both Dewey and Rorty. Margolis, J. 2002. Reinventing Pragmatism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. A penetrating, deeply informed, and original account that explains and assesses both the rise of neopragmatism as well as the “second life” of classical pragmatism. Special attention is paid to Rorty and Dewey. Saatkamp, Herman J. 1995. Rorty and Pragmatism: The Philosopher Responds to His Critics. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Indispensable set of exchanges between classical pragmatism scholars and Rorty. Shusterman, Richard. 1994. “Pragmatism and Liberalism between Dewey and Rorty.” Political Theory 22(3): 391–413. Keen analysis of ideas central to Rorty’s and Dewey’s liberalism which seeks to explain how Dewey’s radical liberalism evolved into Rorty’s more conservative version; essays also seeks new alternatives drawing on both figures.

356

21 Common Understanding Without Uncommon Certainty: Rorty’s Wittgenstein Revisited ALAN MALACHOWSKI

Rorty was deeply influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and wrote a good deal about him.1 However, for many readers the phrase “Rorty’s Wittgenstein” is liable to invoke the figure provocatively introduced in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (henceforth PMN) (Rorty 1980) as someone who, in tandem with John Dewey, believes that “a natural quest for understanding has been run together by modern philosophers with an unnatural quest for certainty” (p. 228). This Wittgenstein is said to share with Martin Heidegger a further belief which Rorty also attributes to Dewey: “the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned” (p. 6). At the start of PMN, Wittgenstein, Dewey, and Heidegger are hailed as “the three most important philosophers of the century” (Rorty 1980, 5). Rorty tells us these thinkers are peripheral, but should be regarded as no less important on that count. For when brought in from left field, their ideas can help philosophers, and presumably not just philosophers, to set aside a host of beguiling ocular metaphors along with the seductive problematic, running from Plato through Descartes, Locke, Kant, and beyond, which embeds them. In addition, the trio provides a welcome glimpse of “the possibility of forms of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment” (p. 6). To fixate on a depiction of Wittgenstein as this sort of figure, and in this context is, however, to risk falling into disenchantment with Rorty’s handling of the role Wittgenstein is supposed to be able to play in the liberating philosophy from its deadening past, if only because, on closer inspection, the details of that role are not clearly articulated. In Part One of PMN, Rorty elaborates somewhat on how Wittgenstein helps dispel difficulties caused by the Cartesian conception of mind as essentially a private theater in the head, a container of publicly inaccessible phenomena such as thoughts and

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

357

Alan Malachowski

sensations. And here, Rorty is prepared to go into detail, while rehearsing and developing his own earlier work in the philosophy of mind.2 But, when Rorty turns to the part he thinks Wittgenstein plays, while supposedly standing shoulder to shoulder with Dewey and Heidegger, in making intellectual space hospitable to “an ideal society,” one that “is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement” (p. 13),3 the ensuing account tends to be pitched at a vague, promissory level. And even if we ignore this, it is still problematic to give too much credence to the way Wittgenstein is portrayed in PMN. For that image reveals little about the nature of Wittgenstein’s abiding influence on Rorty’s thought. What is singularly important about this influence is not that it is mediated by any special interpretations of Wittgenstein’s views on Rorty’s part, but rather that at a certain point he is prompted to take what he regards as the practical consequences of those views, construed at face value as far as that is possible, very seriously indeed, especially those concerning how philosophy should be practiced and what sort of questions it ought to be concerned with. This, in itself, is significant, even though Rorty’s approach does occasionally spill over, as it must, into the contested territory of interpretation. It is significant for two overlapping reasons: first, much of the secondary literature on Wittgenstein has been, and too often remains, tied to a standstill by controversies over just what it is he wants to say in the first instance, so it rarely moves on to consider the practical upshot of his views or what further useful lessons might be gleaned from them, and second, the wider philosophical community has generally been equally remiss in failing to accommodate, or even seriously respond to, the prospective practical upshot and/or lessons of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.4 Moreover, if this was not significant in these respects, there would have been less motivation for writing (or reading) PMN. Even a brief survey of Rorty’s wide ranging work reveals just how deep and pervasive Wittgenstein’s influence is. Indeed, in one of Rorty’s earliest published papers, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language” (reprinted in Rorty 2014, 6–38), evidence is already abundantly obvious. For there, Rorty is sufficiently confident in his grasp of Wittgenstein’s ideas to involve them in an ambitious and, on his own terms, prescient, project: “What I am trying to show is that the closer one brings pragmatism to the writings of the later Wittgenstein and of those influenced by him, the more light they shed on each other” (2014, 17). Rorty proves himself to be familiar enough with the main arguments of Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1968), especially those in Part One, to make suggestive comparisons with the thought of Charles Peirce, the main subject of the paper itself.5 And in another early publication, “Wittgenstein, privileged access, and incommunicability” (reprinted in Rorty 2014, 172–98), Rorty’s self‐ assurance in handling Wittgenstein’s views encourages him to proffer some corrective advice to avoid “certain confusions committed by Wittgenstein and/or his interpreters – notably between ‘privacy’ in the sense of ‘susceptibility to privileged access’ and in the further sense of ‘incommunicability’” (p. 172). If we dodge these confusions, Rorty tells us, “there may not be as much reason as Wittgenstein thought to be frightened of the view of sensations as private objects of knowledge” (p. 194). He concludes that we may then also be able to see how what “is novel and exciting in the [relevant] portions of the Investigations is the attack on the Cartesian notion of pre‐linguistic awareness  –  the notion that there is a species of awareness which antedates and 358

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

underlies our coming to be able to justify the utterance of sentences” (p. 198). The claim that there is no such awareness (or certainly that nothing like it can play a determinable role in either philosophical explanations or life itself) became a lynchpin in Rorty’s thinking about the mind and human agency. Other examples in Rorty’s early writings demonstrate his familiarity with, and sympathy for, the work of the later Wittgenstein. But, I now want to turn to the cardinal general feature of Rorty’s relationship to those insights, the one we have already flagged. This feature, a strong inclination to give priority to the consequences and utility of Wittgenstein’s views, largely irrespective of controversies over their interpretation, pervades Rorty’s whole approach to philosophy, though it becomes increasingly prominent after the publication of PMN and prior works feeding into it. Having discussed this tendency, I then briefly assess how it sits with a distinction Rorty forges late in the day between “Wittgensteinian pragmatists” and “Wittgensteinian therapists” in his article “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn” (reprinted in Rorty 2007, 160–75). Rorty sides there, predictably, with the pragmatists. But, I round off by considering whether this really is a useful move for him to make, whether it can be profitable for Rorty to endorse any substantial distinction between “pragmatists” and “therapists.” Rorty’s approach to the philosophical tradition, and especially its still dominant analytic branch, embodies an anomaly that seems to be generally unacknowledged. He is highly critical of that tradition, and keen to show how philosophers can both gain some distance from it and get on with doing something different, something he regards as more useful, something that does not involve perpetuating the problems it has thrown up or breathing more life into them by trying to find solutions. Yet, at the same time, Rorty often trades on the acuity of some of the tradition’s luminaries. In PMN, for example, he stresses that its “therapeutic” approach “is parasitic upon the constructive efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose frame of reference I am trying to put into question” (1980, 7). In this way, Rorty is often inclined to take that tradition more seriously than it takes itself. He takes it more seriously in the sense that he highlights and explores the practical upshot of the lessons in critical scrutiny such luminaries offer. In the case of analytic philosophy itself, these are the fruit of an attribute that Rorty freely admires: “nothing has so becomes analytic philosophy as its constant self‐ criticism – its habit of chipping away at its own foundations, calling its own pretensions into question” (1999). However, this characteristic is not one that encourages Rorty to find analytic philosophy wholly commendable. For he believes the ongoing process of self‐criticism he otherwise finds so congenial, lacks a serious pragmatic dimension. Rorty believes the practical consequences of such criticism, especially those pertaining to the nature and purpose of the tradition itself and its relationship to problems within culture at large, are not sufficiently acknowledged, still less acted upon. When well thought out and creatively conceived criticisms crop up such as W. V. Quine’s famous attacks on meaning and on the analytic/synthetic distinction, Wilfrid Sellar’s undermining of the notion of “self‐authenticating verbal episodes,” and Donald Davidson’s radical suggestion that “there is no such thing as a language, not if language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” (Davidson 2006, 265), they are, usually sooner rather than later, plowed back into philosophical discourse, and things tend to go on as normal. For the most part, the standard, shop 359

Alan Malachowski

worn problems then remain firmly in place. Even philosophers who initially voice such criticisms with considerable insight, strength, and vigor often end up unwittingly cooperating with those in the majority who help maintain the status quo. Sometimes this happens because critics simply cancel each other out. For example, as Rorty indicates, both Quine and Sellars “make continual, unofficial, tacit, heuristic use of the distinction which the other transcended” (1980, 171). And further to this point, in her Foreword to the second edition of Quine’s Word and Object (2013), Patricia Churchland provides an insightful sketch of how the radical consequences of his ingenious attack on conceptual analysis were either ignored or circumvented: “Surprisingly many philosophers went on doing conceptual analysis and pushing alleged necessary truths as if Quine were irrelevant: his main arguments were not so much countered as sidestepped” (p. xii). It seems to be a notable, but apparently not easily acknowledgeable, characteristic of analytic philosophy that it likes to cloak itself in the rhetoric of perpetual change, or even revolution (e.g. Ayer et al. 1963), but, in so frequently failing to act on the upshot of its own radical conclusions, somehow manages to remain forever the same. If this were not the case, if analytic philosophy followed up on the conclusions of its self‐ criticism more assiduously, then, again, PMN would lack motivation.6 In his work leading up to PMN and throughout his subsequent writings, Rorty exhibits an eagerness to buck this conservative, self‐preserving trend. He therefore capitalizes on what he sees as the practical consequences of the later Wittgenstein’s fierce criticisms of his both former self (i.e. the author of the Tractatus) and certain coeval views of Frege and Russell. But, Rorty also considers the thrust of these criticisms to be applicable, by extension, to the analytic tradition in toto whenever, for example, it leans heavily on the idea of language as a distinct entity whose connections to the contents of the world can be examined and clarified in ways that purportedly help solve philosophical problems (typically problems he regards as generated by the envisaged language/world divide). The example is apposite. For Rorty embeds it in an historical “good news story” about how language came to supplant experience as a philosophical touchstone because (1) It possessed equally wide scope (“the entire domain of human inquiry,” as Rorty puts it). (2) It appeared suitably invulnerable to any naturalizing tendencies that might give science a chance to elbow philosophy of language aside from its assumed position as “first philosophy” (Rorty 1991, 53). Although Rorty has no first philosophy pretensions, the news is good for him because it implies, or so he believes, that a raft of unfruitful problems associated with experience, and hence empiricism, can be sidelined. But more importantly, the move toward language enables him to harvest even better news from his reading of Wittgenstein’s treatment of it in the Investigations (1968). Rorty is, then, quite clear about what he regards as the anti‐theoretical, practical concomitant of the alternative approach to language that he sees Wittgenstein as offering: philosophers should drop “the whole idea of ‘language’ as a bounded whole,” as he did, and then give up attempting to find “non‐empirical conditions for the possibility of linguistic description.” (1991, 57). Doing that, Rorty thinks, will help them to 360

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

become as reconciled as Wittgenstein was “to the idea that whether a sentence has sense” depends on whether another sentence is true: “a sentence about the social practices of the people who [use] the marks and noises which [are] the components of the sentence” (1991, 57). This means that language use, at least, can be naturalized, but in a Wittgensteinian sense, one that does not provide a window for scientific encroachment. For, as David Pears point out Wittgenstein espoused a naturalism inspired by the idea that: The right method in philosophy is not to theorize about things but to describe them as we find them in daily life … He was concerned with meaning only as it is for us who use the words. We use them well enough, but when we reflect on our use of them, we lapse into mythology. We imagine that their use is completely dictated by the natures of the things to which we apply them; or that it is completely dictated by freely adopted rules. The task of philosophy is to neutralize these myths about an independent authority regulating our performance and the neutralization must be carried out on the ground that generated them, the user’s consciousness. Scientific knowledge would be irrelevant. (Pears 1995, 411)

The “meaning‐only‐in‐social‐context” holism, or “social practice” approach as Rorty more comfortably calls it, has far reaching implications for the future of philosophy, and the analytic branch in particular provided it keeps itself honest. According to Rorty (and here he lets us know he is lining up with Michael Dummett’s well‐known take on the upshot of Investigations), it entails “there can be no such thing as a ‘systematic theory of meaning for a language’” (Rorty 1991, 57). It is surprising that the anti‐ theoretical consequences of Wittgenstein’s later philosophizing have not been more seriously engaged with. For they were certainly voiced with serious intent and, as David Pears has rightly pointed out, he was severing “the old connection between philosophy and science” (Pears 1988, 201). Rorty also punts a quasi‐Wittgensteinian reading of Davidson, though he suggests Davidson’s own holism regarding language is “more explicit and thoroughgoing than Wittgenstein’s” (1991, 58). Its consequences are anti‐philosophical in a general sense, and not just ruinous for the ambitions of would‐be systematic theorists of meaning: Whereas in the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein still toys with the idea of a distinction between the empirical and the grammatical, between nonphilosophical and philosophical inquiry, Davidson generalizes and extends Quine’s refusal to countenance either a distinction between necessary and contingent truth or a distinction between philosophy and science. Davidson insists that we not think either of language in general or of a particular language as something which has edges, something which forms a bounded whole and can thus become a distinct object of philosophical study or of philosophical theorizing. (Rorty 1991, 58)

Rorty thinks Wittgenstein provides good reasons to assert this sort of strong conclusion, and to further insist that it is time to move on from the concerns ordinarily dealt with by philosophers of language. These reasons mainly derive from two large changes in Wittgenstein’s thinking which occurred when he came to repudiate the central thrust of the views expressed in the Tractatus. 361

Alan Malachowski

The changes in question were adeptly summed up over forty years ago in Pears’s early, but still in places instructive, introduction to Wittgenstein’s thought: (1) “(Wittgenstein) abandoned the idea that the structure of reality determines the structure of language … So he no longer believed it to be possible to deduce the pre‐existing structure of reality from the premise that all languages have a certain common structure. [This] undermines any theory that tries to base a pattern of thought, or a linguistic practice, such as logical inference, on some independent foundation in reality. If these things need any justification, it must lie within them, because there are no independent points of support outside them” (Pears 1971, 13). (2) Having argued in the Tractatus that differences between languages are superficial because they all share a logical structure which can be revealed by analysis, “he came round to the diametrically opposite view” that languages “have no common essence … they are connected with one another in a more elusive way, like games, or like the faces of people belonging to the same family” (Pears 1971, 13). We can immediately see one of Rorty’s pet themes, anti‐foundationalism, emerging here (“there are no independent points of support”), as well as at least a partial basis for his trademark claim that there is no point in trying to get behind words for philosophical purposes, to, as it were, separate language from the world: Pragmatists agree with Wittgenstein that there is no way to come between language and its object. Philosophy cannot answer the question “Is our vocabulary in accord with the way the world is?” (Rorty 1998, 127)

And, we can also begin to see why Rorty thinks philosophical attempts to ape science, to construct theories of language which explain and/or depend upon its verifiable connections to the extra‐linguistic world, are doomed to falter under multiple Wittgensteinian pressures. For Rorty sees himself as following closely in the bold footsteps of Wittgenstein’s own attempt to distance himself from: an approach that has played a dominant role in philosophy for more than a century. Many philosophers have been attracted to the idea that producing a theory of language – or, more specifically, developing a theory of meaning – is the first task for philosophy. With such a theory in hand, one can then turn to the problems of philosophy, possessing the tools needed for their proper solution or, perhaps, their dissolution. On this approach, theory of meaning comes first; the treatment of other philosophical problems comes later. (Fogelin 2009, 7)

Analytic philosophers neglecting to so distance themselves, or preferring not to, have often ignored such pressures. Hence, we find Scott Soames opening his book Philosophy of Language with a confident, almost scientistic flourish, as if the later Wittgenstein, someone who resolutely denied that a scientific theory might contribute to the solution of a philosophical problem, believed philosophical science worship amounts to a disreputable “graving for generality,” and viewed it as “the real source of 362

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

metaphysics” which “leads the philosopher into complete darkness” (see Wittgenstein 1969, 18), had never existed: This book focuses on two main facets of the philosophy of language: its contribution to the development of a theoretical framework for studying language, and the investigation of foundational concepts  –  truth, reference, meaning, possibility, propositions, assertion, implicature – that are needed for the investigation, and important for philosophy as a whole … Philosophy is, above all else, the midwife of the scientific study of language, and language use. (Soames 2012, 4)

Notice there seems to be no felt need to even pause here to acknowledge possible Wittgensteinian objections to: (a) philosophers approaching language via a preset, theoretical framework, (b) the idea that such a framework could usefully have foundational concepts of the kind mentioned, and (c) the notion that such a philosophical approach has, or will significantly help yield, important scientific value. Notice too, that these objections are not crude, “anti‐science” claims. They do not entail that language is an improper subject for scientific study as such, but rather, that it is important, as Pears reminds us, “to maintain a firm line between that way of studying it and philosophy” (1988, 455), something Wittgenstein was always anxious and careful to do. On his understanding, to slide from philosophical considerations, to those of science, or vice versa, is usually a bad mistake. The philosophy of language is something of a representative case. But, the important point now is one about the distinctive nature of Rorty’s own attitude to the denouement of the later Wittgenstein’s ideas in general. For he regards them as paving the way not just for an exodus from theory driven accounts of language, but for a very different set of philosophical concerns across the board, concerns that slip the noose of old questions, and avoid getting stuck in the loop of trying to answer them. The old questions are normally considered definitive of various areas of philosophical inquiry. They have invaded and conquered, for example, the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of mind. There is a difference on this, however, between Rorty and Wittgenstein, as well as between Rorty and unfortunately rather too many interpretations of his own work. Rorty’s historicist appreciation of philosophical questions takes them to be contingent products of social circumstances rather than universal, hardy perennials “which arise as soon as one reflects” (1980, 3). They have a shelf life: “philosophy makes progress not by solving problems, but by replacing old problems with new problems – problems created by one use of words with problems created by another use of words” (Rorty 1998, 127). This makes the later Wittgenstein’s quest for complete clarity and perpetual philosophical tranquility (“The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to … The one that gives philosophy peace” [Wittgenstein 1968, #133]) a dubious prospect in Rorty’s eyes. It also means that disregard for certain questions, at a certain time, has nothing to do with disregarding philosophy itself or somehow “bringing it to an end.” When questions of a particular kind are abandoned –those that are past their cultural sell buy date – historical circumstances and/or sheer acts of genius or capricious experimentation will tend to throw up other questions, those more relevant to society’s current (or future) interests and prospects. And, as such change occurs and fresh language is employed, new 363

Alan Malachowski

problems will also be generated by the clashes between the use of this language and older vocabularies. In the Tractatus (1966), Wittgenstein is convinced he has solved all philosophical problems and follows through on the practical upshot by promptly retiring from philosophy, presumably leaving it to wither away under its own devices. Then on his return, he is brutally candid in the Investigations (1968), about how wrong he had earlier been. But, as just intimated, he still seems to hang on to the hope of freeing himself, and readers who understand his work or have adjacent thoughts, from the agonizing muddle of philosophical puzzlement. Rorty thinks this is a misguided hope. Philosophy can neither destroy itself completely by its own means, nor ensure permanent quietude of thought. For, it has no say over its own future because it has no commanding control over history. And therefore, it cannot prevent problems being created at the volatile intersections of the different vocabularies thrown up by sociohistorical change. Rorty regards Wittgenstein’s work as immensely helpful in showing us how to avoid, or at the very least avoid taking seriously, a particular set of questions clustered around certain sociohistorical developments (which include the evolution of certain philosophical views), but this does not prevent the emergence of further questions ad infinitum. And, Wittgenstein was wrong to suggest that it ever could. Those who paint Rorty as an “end of philosophy” thinker have therefore gravely misunderstood him. These differences cue us in to discuss what we might reasonably surmise is Rorty’s mature assessment of Wittgenstein’s thought. It comes in what seems to be his last substantial published deliberation on the topic: “Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn” (reprinted in Rorty 2007). In this article, Rorty discusses three views on Wittgenstein corresponding to “three ways of thinking about the so‐called ‘linguistic turn’” (2007, 160). And, in doing so he takes the opportunity to defend two large claims which, as he reminds us, he has frequently argued for in the past: (1) “There is no interesting sense in which philosophical problems are problems of language.” (2) “The linguistic turn was useful nevertheless, for it turned philosophers’ attention from the topic of experience toward that of linguistic behavior” (2007, 160). The three views on Wittgenstein are those of naturalists, therapists, and pragmatists. Rorty takes issue with both the naturalists and the therapists, while explaining why he prefers the pragmatists. Although Rorty describes a “three cornered debate” (Rorty 2007, 163), we can ignore what he says about the naturalists. These, he claims, now pay very little attention to Wittgenstein’s work, and as someone who is convinced by this work that they are reactionaries, troubled mainly by problems which should be dissolved rather than solved (2007, 161), Rorty is happy to return the compliment by offering no more than a cursory account of the naturalists’ views. Of much more interest to him, are the differences between those who do take Wittgenstein seriously enough to read him: the therapists and the pragmatists. In criticizing the therapists, Rorty looks as if he might be making, or at least preparing for, a sea change in both his own approach to philosophy and his interpretation of Wittgenstein. For prior to this paper, he has tended to characterize that approach as 364

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

broadly therapeutic in intent (as quoted earlier from PMN), while he has also frequently spoken in the same terms about what it is that he finds useful in Wittgenstein’s thinking, what function it best serves. But, whether or not such a dramatic shift away from a broad therapeutic stance is intended (this isn’t entirely clear), it is certainly not required. The therapeutic approach Rorty is actually targeting is, as we might put it, narrowly therapeutic, and as such it is a very different beast from the more spacious edifying therapy that he has previously located in Wittgenstein’s work, and frequently championed. This narrow form of therapy identifies philosophical problems as problems only in the very particular sense that they are caused by specifically inappropriate uses of language (thereby ostensibly going against (a) above). These defective uses allegedly generate complete nonsense, or at best confusion. But, naturally, this only becomes apparent under therapeutic scrutiny. Just as the psychotherapist’s client does normally not recognize the causes of his or her distressing symptoms (or even that they are symptoms when they are not obviously distressing) before therapeutic steps have been taken to help reveal them, philosophical problems generate symptoms of puzzlement or even agitation until the cause of such concern is shown to consist of improper uses of words, when it can then be seen that they amount to nonsense and no longer merit serious consideration. An important part of the therapy is supposed to involve showing just how such “improper uses” were able to create the illusion of sense. Since Sartre was surely right in claiming that although it can be a means of deception, “language in itself is not deceitful” (Sartre 1981, 13), this raises questions as to whether something can seem to make sense without actually doing so, whether the very notion of illusory sense is highly problematic, but here is not the place to explore them. There are a few points to unscramble here. But, first and foremost it is important to recognize that Rorty directly attacks only this narrow form of philosophical therapy. He is right to do so, for reasons we will explain shortly. But, he is then wrong to make such a big deal out of his “therapy/pragmatism” distinction on the basis of just that attack. His criticisms are effective against attempts to generalize about the nature of philosophical problems in a way that makes them out to be simply cases of language use gone wrong. But, this does nothing to undermine ways of viewing the later Wittgenstein’s work as more broadly therapeutic in line with Rorty’s own generally preferred approach to it. And, in the late paper we are now discussing, he actually avers this himself occasionally though without, it appears, heeding the implications. Rorty’s arguments against the utility of a narrowly therapeutic reading of the later Wittgenstein’s work, and Philosophical Investigations in particular, depend on his own revisionary conception of philosophical problems as problems which occur because of tensions between different clusters of words that have been, or are about to be, adopted socially. These are tensions which arise automatically when, for whatever reason, ways of describing the world change significantly over time. Such problems are the linguistic perturbations of history. And in that sense, they are, pace (a) above, problems of language. But, they are not reducible to individualistic errors in usage, as just described. From Rorty’s sociohistorical viewpoint, it is a mistake then to think that, following Wittgenstein, philosophers should regard themselves as “specialists in detecting nonsense” (Rorty 2007, 171), as people who spend their time trying to reveal how what appear to be deep philosophical problems are actually just erroneous uses of language, uses in which certain words are unwittingly untethered from their normal contexts of 365

Alan Malachowski

meaning (“withdrawn from circulation” as Wittgenstein puts it; 1968, #500) and allowed to slither into the realms of nonsense. By the same token, it is also wrong to regard those who find such problems deeply perplexing as simply having been fooled by disguised nonsense. Rorty shows that Wittgenstein provides resources for explaining why this is a wrong. The larger conclusion which can best be drawn from his reflections on how meaning is dependent on use, reflections which generate the consequent “social practice” account of language Rorty detects between the lines of the Investigations, outweighs any narrowly therapeutic presumptions about nonsense. For this conclusion is that anything can be given meaning or, as Rorty himself puts it: Anything will have a sense if you try hard enough to give it one … any utterance can be given significance by being batted around long enough in more or less predictable ways. (2007, 170, 172)

Now of course, the natural rejoinder here for narrowly therapeutic Wittgensteinians is “We are not denying this, but rather saying that in particular cases, where usage has gone astray, there are words which have not been given meaning and are therefore nonsensical.” But here, Rorty has two quick replies. First, he considers relevant historical cases where there have been important shifts in vocabularies, and then suggests that for advocates of the fresh set of words, “nonsense” can be no more than window dressing in their claims about the inadequacies of the words they wish to replace: When Descartes mocked the Aristotelian definition of motion (“the actualization of potential qua potential”) as unintelligible, he did not try to back up this charge with argument. The term “unintelligible” was just a rhetorical flourish. His point was simply that it would be better to treat “motion” as a primitive term than to try to synthesize mechanism with hylomorphism. When other fans of the New Science called Scotist and Ockhamite doctrines “nonsense” they did not mean that these authors had failed to attach meaning to the words they used. Rather, they used “nonsense” to mean something like “not worth bothering about, now that Aristotle has been dethroned by Galileo and Newton” (2007, 170)

Rorty cites other examples to both reinforce this point and make its wide scope more credible. But we need not dwell on such details. It is a point that tells against overestimating the therapeutic benefits of bringing words back from “their metaphysical use to their everyday use” (Wittgenstein 1968, #116). All the great words of philosophy, words that individual philosophers of genius have gotten worked up about over the years, words such as “substance,” “mode,” “idea,” “essence,” “Being,” “monad,” “reference,” and “Dasein” have evolved as terms of art in debates which emerged in very specific sociohistorical circumstances. To regard them as having been unwittingly ripped out of their proper place and taken into philosophical captivity where they were inevitably starved of the oxygen of ordinary meaning is to display naïvety not just about their role in the history of philosophy but about history and intellectual progress in general. The lines of controversy in which such words emerged as philosophical terms of great interest just are their proper home. They have nowhere else to go back to. 366

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

In disputing the idea that words have a natural ancestral home from which they cannot venture without losing their semantic coherence, Rorty also ushers in a pragmatist move: it is better to evaluate the uses of words in terms of their utility relative to their intended sociohistorical contexts than to assess whether they meet certain standardized requirements for meaning, failing which they can be classed as nonsensical. Rorty’s second reply contends that when the emphasis is sensibly put on the pragmatist move of distinguishing “more useful from less fruitful ways of speaking” there seems to be no reason to “make a place for Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘disguised nonsense’” (Rorty 2007, 172). This is backed up by Rorty’s suggestion, as just mentioned, that when we examine actual cases in their historical context, appeals to “nonsense” can carry little weight. Even in what may have once seemed a paradigm case  –  Rudolf Carnap’s scornful critique of Heidegger’s “Das Nichts nichter”  –  it was premature to play the “nonsense card”: If Carnap had been less eager to bring symbolic logic to bear, and a bit more patient, he could easily have connected “Das Nichts nichter” with other elements of the language‐ game in a way that displays its meaningfulness. The language game in question is one that Heidegger deliberately and self‐consciously created. It is utterly implausible to think that Heidegger might have been led, by a process of elucidation, to find himself confused about his relation to his own words. Like Descartes, Locke, Kant, and Einstein, he gave a technical sense to familiar terms, and invented neologisms, hoping to thereby expand our linguistic repertoire in ways that would bear fruit. (Rorty 2007, 169)

Rorty’s objections to narrow linguistic therapy are irrelevant to his longstanding contention that Wittgenstein’s later writings are therapeutically useful in a much broader sense, one which meshes with his pragmatist aspirations, a sense he captures succinctly in the midst of his attack on the idea of philosophers as nonsense detectors: Wittgenstein’s importance lies in his having helped wrench us out of our Cartesian‐ Lockean mind set. He helped us overcome the temptation to ask “Which pieces of our language lock on to reality and which do not?” On this pragmatic view of his achievement, he did not show metaphysics to be nonsense. He simply showed it to be a waste of time. (Rorty 2007, 163)

To sum up then, Rorty’s approach to Wittgenstein’s thinking takes the consequences of his social practice account of language very seriously, but at a late stage drives a wedge between this account and the idea that it licenses a therapeutic conception of philosophy’s role. At first sight, this might seem anomalous: how can Rorty endorse the view that “meaning” is best explained by reference to “use” and yet reject the claim that deviance from usage yields nonsense? But, although he does not spell this out, his objections really target what we are calling “narrow therapy” and they are therefore entirely consistent with his view that Wittgenstein was right to connect meaning with use. For what Rorty is doing when he denies that philosophical problems can be reduced to problems of linguistic deviance is suggesting that philosophical words have their own contexts of use specifically created for them, contexts which narrow therapists too often ignore when they attempt to play the nonsense card. We said at the outset that Wittgenstein’s influence on Rorty was not mediated by any special interpretations of his views, but by 367

Alan Malachowski

extending the scope of the notion of “use” to include philosophical contexts, Rorty made a significant contribution to how those views can best be divorced from the cramping conservatism implied by overreliance on entrenched norms of linguistic practice.

Notes 1 Apart from the texts mentioned throughout this chapter, see also the Further Reading section. 2 This work is discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 of the present volume. 3 Reflecting on this comment in 2007, not long before he died, Rorty said he should have written instead “but those of social co‐operation in public life and of aesthetic enhancement in private life” (Rorty 2010, 19). 4 And, this holds for both sides of the invidious analytic/continental divide. 5 These comparisons are fleshed out with some finesse in the third segment where Rorty explains how what he regards as Wittgenstein’s pivotal distinction between logical and causal determination (Philosophical Investigations #220) “is tied up with Peirce’s central distinction between the indeterminate and the determinate.” Causal determination involves, in the illustrative case of language use, an identifiable factor which forces linguistic outcomes. Rorty cites “intuition” as an example: “causal determination is what using language would be like if it were a matter of being inspired by an intuition.” Logical determination, by contrast, is a rule governed phenomenon. Rorty suggests that Wittgenstein’s “master argument” against reductionism, shows that in all its forms it generates an infinite regress and thereby echoes “Peirce’s master argument against Cartesian intuitionism” (see Rorty 2014, 29–30). 6 For an insightful discussion of Rorty’s relationship to analytic philosophy, see Dews (1995)

References Ayer, A. J., W. C. Kneale, G. A. Paul, et al. 1963. The Revolution in Philosophy. London: Macmillan. Davidson, Donald. 2006. “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” In The Essential Davidson, 251–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dews, Peter. 1995. “The Historicization of Analytic Philosophy.” In The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays in Contemporary European Philosophy, 59–76. London: Verso. Fogelin, Robert. 2009. Taking Wittgenstein at His Word. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pears, David. 1971. Wittgenstein. London: Fontana. —. 1988. The False Prison: A Study in the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1995. “Wittgenstein’s Naturalism.” The Monist 78(4): 411–24. Quine, W. V. 2013. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rorty, Richard. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. “Analytic Philosophy and Transformative Philosophy.” Unpublished lecture, November 10. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

368

COMMON UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT UNCOMMON CERTAINTY

—. 2010. “Intellectual Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago: Open Court. —. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sartre, Jean Paul. 1981. The Family Idiot, Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, Vol. 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soames, Scott. 2012. Philosophy of Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1966. Tractatus Logico‐philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —. 1968. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscome. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 1969. The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Further Reading Ammereller, Erich and Eugen Fischer, eds. 2004. Wittgenstein at Work: Method in the Philosophical Investigations. New York: Routledge. Hacker, P. M. S. 1996. Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Horwich, Paul. 2012. Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kahane, Guy, Edward Kanterian, and Oskari Kuusela. 2013. Wittgenstein and His Interpreters. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Pitcher, George, ed. 1996. Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations. London: Macmillan. Rorty, Richard. 1982. “Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein.” In Consequences of Pragmatism, 19–36. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

369

22 Rorty, Davidson, and Representation STEVEN LEVINE

1 Introduction In his paper “Rorty and Antirealism” Frank Farrell argues that Rorty’s engagement with Davidson is born of a somewhat cynical attempt “to show that his position, radical though it may seem, is largely motivated by considerations that come out of the work of one of the most honored of contemporary analytic philosophers” (Farrell 1995, 155). In essence, Farrell accuses Rorty of riding Davidson’s coattails, of using his prestige to advance his own more dubious philosophical (or anti‐philosophical) program. But, Farrell argues, because their views are so divergent, Rorty being an antirealist, Davidson a realist, Rorty can only use Davidson in this way by significantly misrepresenting him. If we get straight about Davidson’s views we can see that Rorty’s reading of him as providing support for an antirealist form of pragmatism not only gets Davidson wrong, but precisely backward. I would not deny that Rorty sometimes misreads Davidson, or that there are some significant differences between them, some which we will discuss below. But in this chapter I would like to show that the affinity between the two thinkers is far greater than interpreters like Farrell allow. To put it simply, Rorty and Davidson are united in their attempt to get beyond certain dichotomies  –  between scheme‐content, subject– object, and realism–antirealism – that structure not only twentieth century analytical philosophy but modern philosophy generally, and both attempt to do so by rejecting the concept of representation. If we jettison the concept of representation, they think, we jettison the concept that makes the dichotomies between scheme and content, subject and object, realism and antirealism meaningful. Now Farrell and many others question this interpretation. First, as we mentioned above, they argue that while Davidson rejects the concept of representation, and so the metaphysical form of realism that relies on it, he is nonetheless a realist. Second, they argue that Rorty is not able to get beyond the dichotomies, thinking that he simply

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

370

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

occupies one side of them; the scheme, subject, or antirealist side. This claim is embedded in the common charge that Rorty is a relativist, or a subjectivist, or a linguistic idealist. In this chapter I mostly focus on evaluating the argument that Rorty is not able to get past the dichotomies – although I will have cause to comment on the first one as well. I do not contest that for most of his career Rorty, even though he claimed to disown the dichotomies, nonetheless espoused a view that was structured by them. As I try to show, from the 1970s until the mid‐1990s Rorty was committed to versions of the scheme‐ content and subject–object distinctions, and this pointed his view in an antirealist direction. But in his late work, Rorty, through a reading of Davidsonian triangulation, changed his view in a significant way. In the context of a continued anti‐representationalism, Rorty comes to admit that there is a “truth in realism” and that our relations to the world are not just causal but also normative. I argue that with these admissions Rorty comes to articulate a view that can, with some plausibility, be said to have gotten beyond the dichotomies of scheme and content, subject and object, and realism and antirealism. But I also want to show that the breakthrough here is fleeting, that Rorty does not fully accept the consequences of his own change in view.

2  Davidson and Anti‐Representationalism In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty unfolds a general critique of the concept of representation, which he argues underlies modern philosophy, where epistemology is thought of as first philosophy. The “general theory of representation” (Rorty 1979, 3) offered by philosophy so understood is comprised of two general claims. First, this theory claims that representation of the world is achieved through noncausal intermediaries, whether epistemic intermediaries – ideas, sensations, sense data, and so on – or sentence‐like items conceived of as a medium that stands between self and world. In either case, representations are the product of an encounter between two distinct ontological realms, mind and world. The theory of representation claims we are able, a priori, to parse out what in such representations is owed to the mind and what is owed to the world. As such, it is committed to the scheme‐content distinction. Second, the theory makes the essentialist claim that there is a class of privileged representations that accurately represent things because, through a type of confrontation, they are gripped by the nature of the object itself. It is these representations that correspond to the world’s single intrinsic nature, and it is these representations that must be called on to make true statements about the world. There are two types of representations that are potentially privileged in this way: intuitive representations that are given to the mind, and conceptual representations that, in being the product of the mind, are a priori and necessary. In the central chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature the critique of representation takes the form of a story about “how the notion of two sorts of representations  –  intuitions and concepts  –  fell into disrepute in the latter days of the analytic movement” (Rorty 1979, 168). Davidson does not have the starring role in this story, rather Sellars and Quine do. They have this starring role because of their shared holism, their view that “justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice” (Rorty 1979, 170). 371

Steven Levine

If justification is a social practice in which our assertions are only answerable to others in the space of reasons, then we “have no need to view it as accuracy of representation” (1979, 170). And if justification is not based in accuracy of representation then we have no reason to try to pick out privileged representations – whether intuitive and given, or conceptual and necessary – that correspond to the world’s intrinsic nature. But without these privileged representations the dichotomies between what is given to the mind and what is a product of the mind, what is contingent and what is necessary, cannot even so much as be formed. But while Sellars and Quine respectively go much of the way toward a satisfying critique of the theory of representation, they each come up short. While Sellars dispatches the Given, he holds onto a tacit distinction between the contingent and the necessary, the empirical and the structural. Conversely, while Quine gives up on the distinction between facts and a priori meanings, contingent and necessary truths, he holds onto a conception of the Given. For Rorty, it is Davidson who is able to finally liberate us from the representationalist picture that “holds us captive.” He does this by providing a holistic anti‐representationalist theory of meaning in which there is no place for the scheme‐content distinction. So by “deepening and extending the lines of thought traced by Sellars and Quine” (Rorty 1991, 1), Davidson culminates “the holist and pragmatist strains in contemporary analytic philosophy. These motifs, in turn, are the culmination of a long struggle (which extends far outside the boundary of ‘analytic’ philosophy) against Platonic and religious conceptions of the world” (Rorty 1991, 117). Davidson’s importance extends far beyond analytical philosophy because in giving us a picture of belief, meaning, and knowledge that dispenses with the concept of representation, Davidson allows us to see that the philosophical picture that depends on it, that is, epistemology as first philosophy, is optional and can simply be dropped. In so doing, he also gives us the means stop being gripped by the anxieties generated by this picture, namely, conceptual relativism and epistemological skepticism. So Davidson is perhaps the key figure that Rorty calls on to forward his prophetic desire to leave philosophy (so understood) behind. But as we shall see, in so extensively engaging with Davidson Rorty’s path out of philosophy becomes less direct than he might have hoped.

3  The Attack on Representation: Epistemic Intermediaries Davidson has a two‐pronged attack on the concept of representation.1 The first concerns representations conceived of as epistemic intermediaries – sensations, sense data, the uninterpreted given – while the second concerns representations conceived of as thoughts or sentences that correspond to, or are made true by, the facts. These two attacks, in turn, undermine two distinct versions of the scheme‐content distinction. According to the first, the scheme side of the distinction is comprised of concepts and the content side is comprised of given sensory or intuitive experiences. Here we have the classical Kantian version of the distinction. The attack on representations as sentences made true by the facts, on the other hand, is an attack on a version of the distinction in which the scheme side is comprised of linguistic representations and the content side is the world itself. Here we have the linguistic‐analytical version of the distinction, where 372

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

a conceptual scheme is equated with a language. In this section we’ll look at the first attack, coming back to the second in the next section. In his paper “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” Davidson unfolds a general argument again the idea that our beliefs can be grounded in epistemic bases or intermediaries that stand outside the scope of our beliefs – in sensory experience or the Given. Indeed, the distinguishing mark of Davidson’s coherence theory is “that nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief ” (Davidson 2001, 141). Or as Rorty puts it, in a passage cited approvingly by Davidson: “nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some other test than coherence” (Davidson 2001, 141; Rorty 1979, 178).2 The idea that sensation can provide a reason for holding a belief is attractive because it is seems clear that it is through sensations that we are primarily related to the world, and that we are sometimes aware of such items, making them candidates to be justifiers. But this attractive idea cannot be made good. Davidson’s first argument for why this is so is that if the justification that sensation provides depends on an awareness of sensation, then we have not made good the idea of sensation being the justifier, as awareness of sensation is just another belief. So we have not gotten outside the circle of beliefs. But why can we not just say that sensations justify beliefs directly, without the intervention of an awareness of sensations? The problem here is that sensation, in not being a propositional attitude, is not the type of item that can transmit epistemic warrant to belief, “for that requires that both relata have propositional content” (Davidson 2005, 136). The relation between a sensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs or other propositional attitudes. What then is the relation? The answer is, I think, obvious: the relation is causal. Sensations cause some beliefs and in this sense are the basis or ground of those beliefs. But a causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justified. (Davidson 2001, 143)

In Rorty’s Sellarsian language Davidson here provides a critique of the myth of the given by untangling “the basic confusion contained in the idea of a ‘theory of knowledge’,” that is, the “confusion between justification and causal explanation” (Rorty 1979, 161). It is through sensory experience that we are causally confronted by the world, but the notion of experience at play here is not itself justificatory and hence not one that is relevant, epistemically or semantically, to the propositionally structured beliefs that comprise knowledge. So “although sensation plays a crucial role in the causal process that connects belief with the world, it is a mistake to think that it plays an epistemological role in determining the content of those beliefs” (Davidson 2001, 46). We don’t need an account of sensation as playing a role in determining the content of belief because Davidson endorses an externalism in which beliefs gain their content, via learning mechanisms, through their direct causal relations to the objects they are about. “[I]n the simplest and most basic cases, words and sentences derive their meaning from the object and circumstances in whose presence they were learned. A sentence which one has been conditioned by the learning process to be caused to hold true by the 373

Steven Levine

presence of fires will (usually) be true when there is a fire present” (Davidson 2001, 44). It is important to characterize what Davidson is saying here correctly. The point is not that there are given epistemic intermediaries, neutral and specifiable in world‐ independent terms, which are then somehow causally related to worldly items.3 Davidson’s point is rather that the very characterization of a belief ’s content is intrinsically – because of the direct causal link between belief and object found in the learning situation  –  world‐involving. But if this is true then we have beliefs and we have the world. What we don’t have are intermediaries – neutral and world‐independent representations – that are the touchstones through which beliefs gain meaning.4 What is the upshot of this picture? For Davidson and Rorty – who follows Davidson closely here – the epistemic neutralization of sensation is meant to lead us to abandon the “third dogma of empiricism,” the dogma that there is a distinction between scheme and content. The sensory Given supports a scheme‐content distinction because if there is an “element in the mind untouched by conceptual interpretation” (Davidson 2001, 41) then we have the means to imagine “the unsullied stream of experience” as able to be “variously re‐worked by various minds or cultures” (2001, 41). So the sensory Given provides us with a common reference point which could in principle be taken up by distinct conceptual schemes or languages. Here we have the two essential ingredients of scheme‐content dualism: the notion of an “organizing system and something waiting to be organized” (Davidson 1984a, 189), and there being “something neutral and common that lies outside all schemes” (1984a, 190). But if, as Rorty puts it, there is “no need to postulate an intermediary between the physical thrust of the stimuli upon the organ and the full‐fledged conscious judgment that the properly programed organism forms in consequence” then there would be “no need to split the organism up into a receptive wax tablet … and an ‘active’ interpreter of what nature has there imprinted … The suggestion that our concepts shape neutral material no longer makes sense once there is nothing to serve as this material” (Rorty 1982, 4). In other words, if we don’t have the sensory Given then we don’t have something neutral and world‐ independent that stands ready in the mind waiting to be organized by distinct conceptual schemes. But if there is nothing neutral and world‐independent standing ready in the mind then there is also nothing that mediates the relation of belief and world. So in undermining conceptual relativism Davidson also undermines epistemological skepticism insofar as global skeptical doubts are predicated on the idea that one could be systematically out of touch with the way things are due to the fact that there might be a gap between the epistemic intermediaries of which one is immediately aware and the world. However, if there are no epistemic intermediaries that stand between belief and world, but only direct causal connections, then we have not created “a gap no reasoning or construction can plausibly bridge” (Davidson 2001, 43). Rorty urges Davidson to accept a certain metaphilosophical interpretation of this argument against the skeptic. Davidson should not think of himself as providing an answer to the skeptic, for this entails accepting the validity of the idea that knowledge can be secured only by our accurately representing the world, and so entail accepting the framework of epistemology as first philosophy. Rather, he should think of himself as developing “a way of speaking” about truth, belief, and knowledge “which would prevent [the skeptic] from asking his question” (Rorty 1991, 138). 374

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

In an “Afterthoughts,” written after “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” Davidson accepts Rorty’s framing of the issue: “I agree with Rorty to this extent: I set out not to ‘refute’ the skeptic but to give a sketch of what I think to be a correct account of the foundations of linguistic communication and its implications for truth, belief, and knowledge. If one grants the correctness of this account, one can tell the skeptic to get lost” (Davidson 2001, 157). One can tell the skeptic to get lost because on Davidson’s account “general skepticism about the deliverances of the senses cannot even be formulated, since the senses and their deliverances play no central theoretical role in the account of belief, meaning, and knowledge” (Davidson 2001, 45). If one accepts it then “[a]nswering the global skeptic will no longer be a challenge, the search for epistemological foundations will be seen as pointless, and conceptual relativism will lose its appeal” (2001, 47).

4  The Attack on Representation: Sentences Let’s now move to the other powerful concept of representation available to the philosopher: the notion of a sentence made true by corresponding to the facts. Davidson also provides a powerful critique of this idea, thinking that we can give no sense to the idea of there being anything to which representations correspond, and so no sense to the idea of truth as correspondence. Here, once again, Davidson and Rorty converge. Based on Davidson’s critique of epistemic intermediaries one might think that he rejects the correspondence theory of truth because without them one has no point of reference to get “outside” one’s beliefs so as to compare them with the world. But while Rorty often says things like this, this is not Davidson’s argument. This is because he thinks that this kind of argument takes for granted the correctness of the view that truth is an epistemic concept, one where it is internally tied to justification – whether in ideal circumstances, at the end of inquiry, and so on. But Davidson emphatically rejects epistemic theories of truth  –  whether pragmatic, coherentist, or internally realist. Davidson’s argument against the correspondence theory is not predicated on assuming that antirealism is right, but in finding the idea of correspondence to be incoherent insofar as there “is nothing interesting or instructive to which true sentences might correspond” (Davidson 1990, 303). Because he argues the world is not cut up into propositionally structured blocks to which our sentences correspond, truth cannot be correspondence between sentences and these blocks.5 In light of this: The correct objection to correspondence theories is … that such theories fail to provide entities to which truth vehicles (whether we take these to be statements, sentences, or utterances) can be said to correspond. As I once put it, “Nothing, no thing makes our statements true,” If this is right, and I am convinced it is, we ought also to question the popular assumption that sentences … can properly be called “representations,” since there is nothing for them to represent. If we give up facts as entities that make sentences true, we ought to give up representations at the same time, for the legitimacy of each depends on the other. (Davidson 2001, 184)

Those who claim Davidson for the realist camp argue that this is not dispositive in showing that he not a realist.6 For even though it is clear that Davidson rejects 375

Steven Levine

building‐block accounts of meaning where meanings are confronted with worldly facts – thinking instead that satisfaction relations between word and world are derived from a holistic Tarski‐style theory of truth rather than being its basis – he nonetheless claims that if meaning and belief cohere in the right way that we can account for the correspondence relation. As he put it in “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”: “My slogan is: correspondence without confrontation. Given the correct epistemology we can be realists in all departments. We can accept objective truth conditions as the key to meaning, a realist view of truth, and we can insist that knowledge is of an objective world independent of our thought or language” (Davidson 2001, 138). But things are not so simple. For after this passage was written Davidson expressed regret at ever calling his view a correspondence theory and in light of that says: “To the extent that realism is just the ontological version of a correspondence theory, I must … reject it” (Davidson 2001, 185). And looking back on his prior position, he says this: All I had in mind in calling my position a form of realism was a rejection of antirealism; I was concerned to reject the doctrine that either reality or truth depends directly on our epistemic powers. Once more however, I must make clear that I am neither accepting nor rejecting the objectivist realist slogan that the real and the true are “independent of our beliefs.” (2001, 185)

This is how Rorty would put this point: in rejecting the idea that there is anything for representations to represent, and therefore in rejecting representations, Davidson means to challenge the philosophical picture which forces one to accept or reject the objectivist realist slogan about the independence of the real. Davidson is not best thought of as a realist, but as one who is trying to question the terms upon which the very distinction between realism and antirealism is formed. But while Davidson rejects the correspondence theory of truth, and the concept of representation that it supposes, he nonetheless thinks that truth is objective. Here is how Davidson puts it: “I can believe it is now raining, but this is because I know that whether or not it is raining does not depend on whether I believe it, or everyone believes it, or it is useful to believe it; it is up to nature not me or my society or the entire history of the human race” (Davidson 2000, 16). But if truth is objective how is his view distinguishable from the correspondence theorist, and from the view expressed by his own prior realism? His answer is this: “What saves truth from being ‘radically non‐epistemic’ (in Putnam’s words) is not that truth is epistemic but that belief, through its ties with meaning, is intrinsically veridical” (Davidson 2001, 156). While truth cannot be equated with what is justified or what we rationally believe at a given point, as epistemic theories hold, it is related to belief because most of our beliefs must be true. While our mutually believing something does not make it so (because truth is objective), belief creates a presumption that it is so. Of course the question emerges: why think that belief, because of its ties with meaning, is intrinsically veridical? This thesis falls out of Davidson’s theory of meaning. The basic idea at the heart of this theory is that a Tarskian theory of truth, suitably modified, can stand in for a theory of meaning. To formulate what it is for an agent to understand and use a language we don’t need to posit private meanings or ideas, rather we can, in an extensionist fashion, lay out their grasp of a sentence’s truth conditions. 376

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

Davidson’s way of empirically confirming the theory is to imagine a field linguist in a totally foreign culture trying to interpret the language of a native speaker. In this case he does not know what the native believes or what they mean by their utterances. So to begin interpretation the interpreter needs to latch onto something simpler than these, which Davidson thinks the interpreter can find in “information about what episodes and situations in the world cause an agent to prefer that one rather than another sentence be true” (Davidson 1990, 322). The interpretation of the native, the carving out of intelligible patterns in their utterances, happens through observing their prompted assent to true sentences, and interpreting those sentences in light of two assumptions: (1) that the sentences they assent to are in general caused by the same features of the world that the interpreter’s matching sentence are caused by, and (2) that these sentences display a degree of logical coherence with the other sentences they assent to. Here the interpreter’s observations are governed by two principles of charity: a principle of correspondence and a principle of coherence.7 In both cases the interpreter reads “some of his own standards of truth into the pattern of sentences held true by the speaker. The point of the principle is to make the speaker intelligible, since too great deviations from consistency and correctness leave no common ground on which to judge either conformity or difference” (Davidson 2001, 148). The thesis that “belief is of its nature veridical” follows directly from the necessary use of these principles of charity. Rorty perspicuously glosses the argument as follows: [I]f one thinks of “meaning” in terms of the discovery of the speech dispositions of foreigners rather than in terms of mental essences (ideas, concepts) … we will never reach the limiting case of a foreigner all or most of whose beliefs must be viewed as false … We will not reach this case (so the Davidsonian argument goes) because any such translation scheme would merely show that we had not succeeded in finding a translation at all. But (to extend Davidson’s argument a bit) if we can never find a translation, why should we think that we are faced with language users at all? (Rorty 1982, 5–6)

This is a powerful argument: If an interpreter, after a sustained and good‐faith effort, cannot find – in light of the principles of charity – translations or interpretations for a range of the native’s utterances and actions, if they cannot find some of what the native says and does intelligible, then they have no reason to think that they are dealing with an agent at all, a being whose behavior (including speech behavior) displays a rational and intelligible pattern. Conversely, if an interpreter can understand some of what the native says and does then it is impossible, because of the principle of correspondence, that they could “discover the speaker to be largely wrong about the world. For the interpreter interprets sentences held true (which is not to be distinguished from attributing beliefs) according to the events and objects in the outside world that cause the sentence to be held true” (Davidson 2001: 150). Hopefully it is clear how this applies to the conceptual relativism that follows from acceptance of the linguistic‐analytical version of the scheme‐content distinction. A complete failure of translation or interpretation of a different linguistic scheme cannot be sustained because complete failure just signals that there is no scheme there to be translated. If this is not to be the conclusion then the interpreter must find at least some 377

Steven Levine

of the native’s speech intelligible. But if an interpreter is to find some of the native speech intelligible, and therefore some of it unintelligible, then they must already have a significant baseline of shared belief with the native, giving them a basis to work their way into the native’s system of belief. Because “[w]e can make sense of differences” in meaning and belief “only against a background of shared belief ” (Davidson 1984b, 200) interpretive differences do not signal incommensurability but simply the open and temporal nature of interpretation. The thesis that “belief is of its nature veridical” is also necessary to complete the picture of belief, meaning, and knowledge that prevents the skeptic from asking their question. While skeptical questioning can get a grip with respect to single beliefs, or single classes of belief, they cannot get a grip with respect to our global system of belief. They cannot because with the belief is veridical thesis, we have an assurance that our beliefs “are not mistaken in the main” (Davidson 2001, 146), and therefore that global skeptical doubts are otiose. But Rorty does not think that this is enough to forestall the skeptic from asking their question. For the skeptic “will think that Davidson has shown no more than that the field linguist must assume that the natives believe mostly what we do, and the question of whether most of our beliefs is true is still wide open” (Rorty 1991, 135). Davidson argues that reflection on the very concept of belief gives a subject who applies the principles of charity to others reason to think that most of their own beliefs are true. But Rorty thinks that the skeptic will find this argument question‐ begging. To address the point, we must again show that the skeptic’s assumptions are based on a contestable philosophical picture, one where our access to the world is mediated by representations. If we instead come to “see language in the same way we see belief  –  not as a ‘conceptual framework’ but as a causal interaction with the environment described by the field linguist” then it will be “impossible to think of language as something which may or may not (how could we ever tell?) ‘fit the world’. So once we give up tertia, we give up (or trivialize) the notions of representation and correspondence, and thereby give up the possibility of formulating epistemological skepticism” (Rorty 1991, 139). So to tell the skeptic to get lost we must eliminate the concept of representation and therefore the whole framework in which skepticism makes sense.

5  Two Differences Between Rorty and Davidson Two differences between Rorty and Davidson emerge at this point. First, Davidson thinks that the determination of content by the radical interpreter is not only causal but also normative. The causal account of the content of belief given above is the starting point of Davidson’s view of belief, not its terminus. While interpretation begins by tracing connections between sentences that are assented to as true and the world such sentences are about, the point of doing so is to work one’s way into the native’s network of interlocking propositional attitudes, such that one grasps not only what prompts them to assent to sentences but also what they find to be a reason for what. As McDowell says: “Davidson’s field linguist aims to work into an appreciation, 378

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

as from within, of the norms that constitute the language she investigates: the specific sense of when it is right to say what according to which that language‐game is played” (McDowell 1996, 152). The field linguist not only utilizes norms in their interpretive practice, but they mean to find norm‐governed behavior, rational behavior, in the “object.” This distinguishes the field linguist from the physicist, whose practice is norm‐governed, but for whom there is no expectation of finding rationality in their object (see Davidson 2001, 215). For most of his career, Rorty, in a revisionary spirit, shrugged off this point, thinking that the radical interpreter fixes meanings simply through descriptions of the causal interchange of the native and world. “There is nothing especially normative about my effort to translate, since all I am doing is finding a pattern of resemblances between my linguistic behavior and the native’s. I am trying to mesh her behavior with mine by finding descriptions of what she is doing that also describes what I sometimes do” (Rorty 1999, 583–4). The idea that in radical interpretation we try to gain the inside view of the native countenances the idea that there is an inside view to get, that there is some divide between minds, which have a norm‐governed inside view, and all other physical things, which don’t. But if radical interpretation simply tries to describe patterns of behavior then we can see that psychology and its vocabulary is continuous with the vocabularies of the rest of the special sciences, and consequently, that the mind is not a special object that stands outside of the rest of nature. The second difference between Rorty and Davidson concerns how the “belief is of its nature veridical” thesis bears on the concept of truth. For most of his career Rorty interpreted this thesis as saying that interpreter and native agree in most of their beliefs not because most of those beliefs get reality right, but simply because the principle of charity demands it: [W]hen we remember that Davidson will have no truck with the idea that truth consists in correspondence to, or accurate representation of, reality, we realize that he is not saying that our minds are, thanks to God’s or Evolution’s contrivance, well suited to the task of getting reality right … He is rather saying that most of anybody’s beliefs must coincide with most of our beliefs (because to ascribe beliefs in the first place one must invoke the principle of charity) and that to reject that mass of shared belief (as perhaps not corresponding to reality) is to bring back a tangle of uncashable and useless metaphors – those used to state the scheme‐content distinction. To say, as Davidson does, that “belief is in its nature veridical” is not to celebrate the happy congruence of subject and object but rather to say that the pattern that truth makes is the pattern that justification to us makes. (Rorty 1998a, 25)

Here Rorty interprets Davidson’s view in light of his coherentism and ethnocentrism: to say that belief is of its nature veridical, and so that most of our beliefs are true, is to say that the native mostly agrees with us concerning the justification of our beliefs. It is because others mostly agree with us about justification that we hold beliefs to be veridical and true, not because they get reality objectively right. While we ought not see the mass of our shared beliefs as diverging from the way things are (which brings back the global skepticism based on the scheme‐content distinction) we cannot explain this through the congruence between subject and object but through the convergence of shared justifications. 379

Steven Levine

In contrast, and as we saw above, Davidson thinks that truth is objective and that our agreements in justification depend on our beliefs getting reality right.8 In light if this he poses a challenge to Rorty’s pragmatism: From the fact that we will never be able to tell for certain which of our beliefs are true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched, most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified by all of our evidence, believed by our neighbors, or is good to steer by.) But here we have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective but pointless as a goal. (Davidson 2000, 6–7)

The dilemma is this: either accept that truth is not a goal of inquiry, but is objective; or that truth can be a goal of inquiry, but is not objective. This dilemma has bite because, as Davidson points out, Rorty often says both that truth cannot be a goal of inquiry and that there is no difference between what is true and what is justified (see Davidson 2000, 74n). The latter follows from this thought: “[I]f something makes no difference to practice, it should make no different to philosophy. This conviction makes [pragmatists] suspicious of the distinction between truth and justification … I cannot bypass justification and confine my attention on truth: assessments of truth and assessments of justification are, when the question is about what I should believe now, the same activity” (Rorty 1998a, 19). Based on this it seems that Rorty has a “theory” of truth, that is, that it is justification. But Rorty’s view of truth is, by his own admission, not stable.9 For he came to see, even before his dialogue with Davidson on truth, that any belief might be justified and still be false. The so‐called “cautionary use” of the truth predicate, which is used “in such remarks as ‘Your belief that S is perfectly justified, but perhaps not true’” (Rorty 1991, 128), is meant to mark this point. So one can’t reduce truth and justification (even in ideal circumstances) after all. For most of his career Rorty accounted for the gap between justification and truth by saying that it was “a gap between the actual good and the possible better.” On this account, “to say that what is rational for us now to be believe may not be true, is simply to say that someone may come up with a better idea” (Rorty 1991, 23). Here Rorty continues to reject the idea that truth is an objective or absolute concept. But in Truth and Progress Rorty takes a new tack, one more in line with Davidson’s view. This can be seen in a criticism that Rorty makes of James’s epistemic theory of truth, which equates truth with “what it is better for us to believe,” with beliefs that work in meeting all the local norms of justification. James would, indeed, have done better to say that phrases like “the good in the way of belief ” and “what is better for us to believe” are interchangeable with “justified” rather than with true. But he could have gone on to say that we have no criteria of truth other than justification, and that justification and betterness‐to‐believe will always be relative to audiences (and to ranges of truth candidates) … Granted that “true” is an absolute term, its conditions of application will always be relative. For there is no such thing as belief being

380

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

justified sans phrase  –  justified once and for all … [and] there are no beliefs that can be known to be immune to all possible doubt. (Rorty 1998a, 2)

Notice that Rorty here concedes that “[t]ruth is … an absolute notion in the following sense: ‘true for me but not for you’ and ‘true in my culture but not in yours’ are weird, pointless locutions. So is ‘true then, but not now’” (1998a, 2). So now true does not just signal the “possibly better.” But this concession is Janus‐faced: while truth is absolute, it is precisely this absoluteness that makes it unsuitable to be a goal of inquiry, and makes the concept indefinable and ultimately far less important than we had thought. If truth is absolute it cannot be a goal for inquiry, for a “goal is something that you can know that you are getting closer to, or farther away from. But if truth is absolute “there is no way to know our distance from truth, nor even whether we are closer to it than our ancestors were” (1998a, 4). And if truth is so distanced from human practices then clearly it also cannot be defined. As we know from Plato’s Meno to even begin giving a definition requires already having some, perhaps implicit, grasp of the concept to be defined. But if truth is genuinely absolute then we don’t have this grasp. Rorty’s conclusion is that “the very absoluteness of truth is a good reason for thinking ‘true’ indefinable and for thinking that no theory of the nature of truth is possible. It is only the relative about which there is anything to say” (1998a, 3). These ideas comprise Rorty’s minimalism about truth. Davidson agrees with Rorty that truth is not definable by simpler and more transparent concepts. But “this does not mean we can say nothing revealing about it: we can by relating it to other concepts like belief, desire, cause, and action” (Davidson 1996, 265). We could put the point in a pragmatist vein by saying that we can provide an account of how the concept of truth is used, how the concept is applied in connection with other concepts in making the speech and action of other subjects intelligible. Rorty recognizes that truth is a concept that is necessarily employed by the radical interpreter. But he argues that the same could be said for other concepts that we use to describe, predict, and interpret behavior. If tracing the pattern of truth in an interlocutor’s behavior is also tracing the pattern of belief, desire, cause, and action, then why, Rorty asks, should Davidson’s theory of radical interpretation be called a theory of truth rather than “‘a theory of complex behavior’ or ‘a theory of justificatory behavior’” (Rorty 1998a, 25n)? Why, he asks “does it seem important to Davidson to think of a Tarski‐type theory for a natural language as a truth‐theory for that language rather than simply as a way of predicting regularities in the behavior of speakers of that language? Why, given our agreement on the indefinability of ‘true’, does Davidson object to my saying that there is nothing much to be said about truth” (Rorty 2000a, 370)?10

6  Rorty’s Dichotomies Before answering these questions in the next section, we must first highlight a tension in the above account: Rorty’s point about the descriptive nature of interpretation and his reading of the “belief is of its nature veridical” thesis pull apart. On the one hand, Rorty’s account of radical interpretation is of a purely descriptive practice in which the 381

Steven Levine

native’s beliefs are treated as naturalistically describable “habits of action” developed through their causal interaction with the environment. On the other hand, Rorty’s reading of the “belief is of its nature veridical” thesis makes radical interpretation an intrinsically normative affair, one in which we expand the solidarity of the community through our coming to agree with the native about justifications. Here we do not come to an agreement about habits of action, but about beliefs understood as sentence‐like items that gain their content and epistemic status in the intersubjective space of reasons. This tension is the result of Rorty’s adherence to the Sellarsian injunction to avoid the myth of the Given, the myth that there are given states, in this case beliefs, that are outside of the space of reasons, the space that confers content, but that nonetheless have sematic purport. To avoid this idea we must see beliefs either “from the outside as the field linguist sees them (as causal interactions with the environment) or from the inside as the pre‐epistemological native sees them (as rules for action). To abjure tertia is to abjure the possibility of a third way of seeing them – one which somehow combines the outside view and the inside view, the descriptive and the normative attitudes” (Rorty 1991, 139). I agree with John McDowell that the dichotomy between these two points of view structures Rorty’s thinking generally.11 What I want to argue here is that this dichotomy leads Rorty to accept the dichotomy between scheme and content. My claim is not that his view is structured by either the Kantian or language‐analytical versions of the dichotomy discussed above, but rather, in Rorty’s own words, by “a certain picture – the picture which Davidson calls ‘the dualism of scheme and content’ and which Dewey thought of as ‘the dualism of Subject and Object.’ Both pictures are of disparate ontological realms, one containing beliefs and the other non‐beliefs” (Rorty 1991, 129). Rorty takes it that he is a critic of this picture, as the “picture of two such realms permits us to imagine truth as a relation between particular beliefs and particular non‐beliefs which is non‐causal in nature” (1991, 129). But it is my claim that Rorty, despite his self‐understanding, accepts a fundamental dichotomy between these two ontological realms, and therefore accepts a version of scheme‐content or subject–object dualism.12 Rorty thinks that he can’t be committed to a distinction between two ontological realms because if there are no representations but only causal relations between self and world then we can’t answer the question of whether our representations correspond to something independent of us or not. “I have argued that, if one is content to think of the relations between human organism’s, their beliefs, and the rest of the universe, in merely causal terms, rather than dragging in representational relations in addition to causal ones, questions about realism and antirealism will not arise” (Rorty 1995, 193). Questions about whether the world is, or is not, independent of our minds or vocabularies – which for Rorty is equivalent to the question of whether there are two realms  –  will not arise because if there are only causal relations between mind and world we cannot make sense of either “the picture of the mind projecting structure onto an unstructured world” or “the idea of the world projecting structure onto, or into, language” (1995, 192). We cannot make sense of these pictures because if we have “relations of justification holding between beliefs and desires, and relations of causation holding between these beliefs and desires and other items in the universe, but no 382

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

relations of representation” (Rorty 1991, 96) then nothing intentional or semantic moves across the self‐world divide in either direction. Based on this, Rorty rejects the whole set of optical metaphors – projecting as well as mirroring, reflecting, or shadowing – and thus to reject the question Which come first, subject or object? This means rejecting the question Whose contours were there first Language’s or the Word’s? Whose contours are reflecting whose? Rejecting such questions seems to me the cash value of rejecting what Davidson calls “the dualism of scheme and content.” (Rorty 1995, 192)

In rejecting such questions Rorty avoids two opposite yet co‐dependent views: a linguistic idealism in which the world is both representationally and causally dependent on minds or vocabularies; and a metaphysical realism in which there is a single way the world is, the world‐in‐itself, that can only be represented by a single privileged vocabulary. Both views depend on the concept of representation. But the question of whether one thinks that there are representational relations that bridge the divide between the two ontological realms is orthogonal to the question of whether one thinks there are two such realms. One might think that there are no representations that connect the two realms, but nevertheless that there are two realms. We can see that Rorty has a picture that includes two realms if we consider his account of how the self gets in touch with the world: [I]f we have causal relations (like that between the opening of the door and the acquisition of a belief) holding between the World and the Self, as well as relations of justification (“being a reason for”) internal to the Self ’s network of beliefs and desires, we do not need any further relations to explain how the Self gets in touch with the World, and conversely. We can tell an adequate story about the progress of human inquiry (in all spheres – logic and ethics as well as physics) by describing the continual reweaving of system of belief and desire. This reweaving is made necessary by the acquisition of new beliefs and desires – and so on, the sort which are caused to occur in human beings by such events in the World as the opening of doors. (Rorty 1991, 120)

For Rorty, we should not ask where the new beliefs and desires come from, they just pop up, and when they do the self must accommodate them by changing their web or network of prior beliefs and desires on pain of contradiction or tension (see Rorty 1991, 93). If we wish to justify new beliefs we should not point to the items in the world that they are purportedly about, for “aboutness is not a matter of pointing outside the web. Rather, we use the term ‘about’ as a way of directing attention to the beliefs which are relevant to the justification of other beliefs” (1991, 97). So intentional, rational, and justificatory relations are internal to the network of belief and desire, and the reweaving of these relations (which is justification) happens when a new belief is caused to occur by an event or object in the world. In saying that a reweaving is brought about by a new belief that is caused by an event or object in the world we are only saying that this event or object is the occasion of the reweaving, not that the specific form the reweaving takes is rationally responsive to the event or object that occasions it. This is because while “there is such a thing as brute physical resistance – the pressure of light waves on Galileo’s eyeballs, or the stone on Dr. Johnson’s boot,” there is “no way of transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to facts, to the truth of sentences” (Rorty 1991, 81). If our relations to 383

Steven Levine

the world are strictly causal relations then the world is mute, that is, it cannot speak and offer reasons to us. Only other subjects in the space of reasons can do that.13 So here we have a view structured by two sets of relations that are not themselves related: semantic, intentional, and justificatory relations between beliefs in the space of reasons; and causal relations between habits of action and world. To abjure representations is to rule out putting these relations into a single picture, a picture that is both normative and descriptive. It instead requires having two pictures of two distinct realms. One might think that my rendering of the two realms is different than Rorty’s. His rendering concerns beliefs and non‐beliefs; whereas mine concerns beliefs and their semantic and epistemic relations to other beliefs, and habits of action and their causal relations to objects. So the second realm, one might say, contains beliefs, just rendered as habits of action, and so is not a realm of “non‐belief.” But if we can genuinely give naturalistic descriptions of habits of action then they are to be seen as pieces of nature in causal relation to other pieces of nature. In this respect, the second realm is not a realm of belief, but is a realm of causally ordered natural objects, which includes our habits.14 We have here, as McDowell points out, a dichotomy between reason and nature, which entails a scheme‐content and ­subject–object dichotomy.15 I said in the introduction that Rorty’s endorsement of these dichotomies pointed his view in an antirealist direction. I can now say why. Because there is no way of transferring the nonlinguistic brutality of the causal order to facts, Rorty thinks “the hardness of fact … is simply the hardness of the previous agreements within a community about the consequences of an event” (1991, 80). He thinks this because when “something causal happens … as many facts are brought into the world as there are languages for describing the causal transaction” (1991, 81). So what fact there is depends on the language game that is being played by a community, and this can’t be determined by the causal transaction itself. The world – here understood as the mundane world of causally interacting objects in space and time rather than the ineffable world‐in‐itself – cannot determine what language game is being played because it does not project its structure onto, or into, the language.16 What determines the language game that is being played is not the world but the usefulness of the game to advance some of the purposes of language users. But which language games are more useful to advance certain purposes is not something that can be determined a priori, rather it requires action and experimentation – which requires entering into causal interaction with the world. Perhaps here we have found the place where the causal deliverances of the mundane world have a say in determining the vocabulary that is used to talk about it. But this is not the case, because for Rorty the upshot of our thinking of “linguistic behavior as tool‐using” is an account “of language as a way of grabbing hold of causal forces and making them do what we want, altering ourselves and our environment to suit our aspirations. The pragmatist thus exalts spontaneity at the cost of receptivity, as his realist opponent did the reverse” (Rorty 1991, 81). What language game we play is not determined by the causal deliverances of the mundane world because such deliverances can’t constrain the spontaneity through which we describe and redescribe our wants and purposes, which, in turn, entails different vocabularies and different ways of linguistically grabbing hold of the world’s causal forces. While the world’s causal order perhaps rules out certain games as one’s that simply don’t “work,” it does no positive work in determining the language game we use to cope with it. 384

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

Here, we have the essence of Rorty’s antirealism. His antirealism is not articulated by the thought that the existence of the world is dependent on minds or vocabularies. Because he includes the outside view of belief Rorty can genuinely say “most things in the universe are causally independent of us” (Rorty 1998a, 86). But what he can’t say is that these causally independent things have a genuine say in determining the vocabularies we use to talk about them. In the language that Rorty comes to use, our freedom to use a vocabulary to describe and redescribe things is not answerable to the mundane world we are describing or redescribing, it is only answerable to other subjects in the space of reasons.17 And our use of a vocabulary is not answerable to the world because, in not being related, the realm of non‐beliefs (including habits) – which is the realm of objectivity and necessity  –  can have no authority with respect to the realm of belief – which is the realm of subjectivity and freedom.

7  Triangulation and Truth Let’s come back to Rorty’s question of why it is that Davidson calls his theory a theory of truth. The basic reason is that “[w]ithout a grasp of the concept of truth, not only language, but thought itself, is impossible” (Davidson 2000, 72). But why is this the case? To answer this question we must briefly discuss Davidsonian triangulation. In a series of papers beginning in the 1980s Davidson transformed his theory of radical interpretation into a theory of triangulation. In radical interpretation the field linguist triangulates between the native’s utterances and the world. But in this arrangement the interpreter already understands a language and already has thoughts that display intentionality. The theory of triangulation, in contrast, tries to give a general account of how belief, thought, or intentional mindedness emerges überhaupt (at all) through the triangular interaction between two creatures and the world. So with triangulation we get an account of the conditions of possibility of thought, and not just a theory of interpretation.18 Specifically, entering into a communicative triangle with another creature about the world makes thought possible because it allows a creature: (1) to distinguish between themselves and the world, between subjectivity and objectivity; and (2) to ascribe to their empirical thought a determinate content or meaning. Let’s briefly describe how these two capacities are made possible by triangulation.19 Davidson takes that for a creature to have thought or belief “demands” that they appreciate “the contest between true belief and false, between appearance and reality, mere seeming and being” (2001, 209). A creature grasps this distinction when they grasp the possibility that their thought can be in error. Error is essential for grasp of the distinction between appearance and reality because in being different from what one takes it to be, the world holds itself out as independent, objective, and separate from one’s perspective on it. But how does one come to grasp the possibility that one’s thought or belief can be in error? Davidson argues, in a Wittgensteinian fashion, that a grasp of error, and consequently of objective truth, requires interpersonal communication: The source of the concept of objective truth is interpersonal communication. Thought depends on communication. This follows at once if we suppose that language is essential to thought and we agree with Wittgenstein that there cannot be a private language. The

385

Steven Levine

central argument against private languages is that, unless a language is shared, there is no way to distinguish between using the language correctly and using it incorrectly, only communication with another can supply an objective check. If only communication can provide a check on the correct use of words, only communication can supply a standard of objectivity in other domains … We have no grounds for crediting a creature with the distinction between what is thought to be the case and what is the case unless the creature has the standard provided by a shared language; and without this distinction there is nothing that can clearly be called thought. (Davidson 2001, 209–10)

So a creature grasps the distinction between what is thought to be the case and what is the case, that is, grasps the concept of objective truth without which there cannot be thought, when they come to be able to act in accord with standards of objectivity provided by a shared language.20 But Davidson asks, “why should an interpersonal standard” rendered through the shared use of a language “be an objective standard, that is, why should what people agree on be true?” (2001, 212). Here the other part of Davidson’s account of triangulation, the one concerning determinate content, becomes important. All living creatures classify the world by responding differentially to stimuli. But, Davidson argues, patterns of differential responsiveness to stimuli cannot deliver a theory of determinate content, a theory that can give an answer to the question of what exactly the creature is responding to. For what is the criterion by which it is said that a creature’s response to things is similar to their past responses? This criterion cannot be derived from the creature’s responses; it can only come from the responses of an observer to the responses of the creature. And it is only when an observer consciously correlates the responses of another creature with objects and events of the observer’s world that there is any basis for saying the creature is responding to those objects or events rather than other objects or events. (Davidson 2001, 212)

For a creature’s thoughts or words to have a determinate content they must not only respond differentially to stimuli but must consciously correlate those responses with the observed responses of another creature. This correlation is necessary because until a “triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world, there can be no answer to the question whether a creature … is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in” (Davidson 2001, 212).21 So triangulation is necessary for objective content because through their conscious correlations two creatures are able to identify the “common cause” of their responses and place it in “an objective location in a common space” (2001, 119). Now the indeterminacy of the stimulus has been overcome, and our thought and speech have a determinate objective content. The upshot of the account of objective truth and of determinate content is that there is a two‐way constitutive dependence between inter‐subjectivity and objectivity: While our concept of what is objectively true or false is dependent upon our taking part in intersubjective communication, for such communication to have content “requires and assumes knowledge of a shared world of objects in a common time and space” (Davidson 2001, 118). As such, the concept of objective truth does not just apply within the communicative relation subject to subject, for there would be no such relation if it did not 386

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

triangulate on a shared world in which common causes are placed. Because of this the “belief is of its nature veridical” thesis cannot be read as only applying to our shared beliefs, it must also apply to the world those beliefs are inextricably about.

8  Changes in Rorty’s View Late in his career, through an exchange with Bjorn Ramberg concerning Davidsonian triangulation, Rorty came to realize precisely this: the “belief is of its nature veridical” thesis does not just apply to the convergence of justifications but to the fact that the beliefs that we converge on (generally) get things right.22 [W]hen Davidson argues that most of anybody’s beliefs must be true, he is not just saying (as I sometimes have been tempted to construe him) that most of the beliefs of anybody whom we can treat as a language‐user must accord with most of our own beliefs. He is saying that most of what anybody says about whatever they are talking about gets that thing right. (Rorty 2000a, 374)

What Rorty realized is that it is wrong “to go from criticism of attempts to define truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality to a denial that true statements get things right” (Rorty 2000a, 374). So Davidson’s theory is rightly named a theory of truth because in triangulation my interlocutor and I generally get things right not only about each other’s beliefs but about the objective world itself. What are the ramifications of Rorty’s admission that we need a notion of “getting things right”? Rorty correctly names two. First, it undermines Rorty’s long‐held doctrine, laid out above, that we only have causal relations to the world and not intentional, semantic, or justificatory ones. For if our mental states only have determinate content through our causal relations to stimuli being taken up into the communicative triangle, then the semantic terms “true” and “refers” cannot just signify intra‐linguistic relations, as Rorty had always thought. Instead, the normative relations that they signify should be seen as “hovering over the whole process of triangulation” rather than just locating them “at one corner of the triangle – where my peers are” (2000a, 379). But if this is so, then word–world relations cannot just be causal. But since Rorty’s anti‐ representationalism is still in place we cannot say that they are correspondence relations to “reality‐in‐itself.” Rather they signify relations between an expression and an object as that object is rendered within the communicative triangle, and so “are neither causal nor representational” (2000a, 374). Second, the admission that we need a notion of “getting things right” leads Rorty to recognize that there is a “truth in realism” in addition to a “truth in pragmatism”: What is true in pragmatism is that what you talk about depends not on what is real but on what it pays you to talk about. What is true in realism is that most of what you talk about you get right. Would there be snow if nobody ever talked about it? Sure. Why? Because according to the norms we invoke when we use “snow” we are supposed to answer this question affirmatively. (If you think that that glib and ethnocentric answer is not good enough, that is because you are still in the grip of the scheme‐content distinction. You think you can

387

Steven Levine

escape the inescapable, cut off one corner of Davidson’s triangle, and just ask about a relation called “correspondence” or “representation” between your beliefs and the world.) (Rorty 2000a, 374)

Traditional realism involves two thoughts, one modest, one presumptuous.23 The modest thought concerns the independence of reality; that how matters stand with the world, and what beliefs about it are true, are settled independently of what we think. The presumptuous thought is that even though exactly which beliefs about the world are true is a question settled independently of our thought, nevertheless our beliefs are able to capture in their net a substantial portion of the truth. The “truth in realism” pointed at by Rorty involves both of these thoughts: snow would exist even if we never talked about snow (the modest thought), and our talk about snow is able (and is in fact likely) to get snow right (the presumptuous thought). But Rorty’s version of either thought is not that of traditional realism. He grounds the independence claim about snow not in a correspondence relation but in the idea that the content of the concept of snow is articulated by norms that include the idea of snow as something that is independent of one’s thought. The central place of truth in triangulation dictates this result. And he grounds the presumptuous thought not in the idea that we accurately represent or map the world, but in the veridicality of belief thesis. If most of our beliefs are true then they are able to capture in their net a substantial portion of the truth. The “truth in pragmatism,” in contrast, involves two ideas: (1) that what we talk about is determined by what pays, that is, what satisfies our interests and purposes, rather than what is really real; and (2) that truth is not a goal of inquiry, even in light of the fact that most of our beliefs get things right. First, the real cannot determine what it is that we talk about because there are not norms within the communicative triangle to talk about it, only the particular things upon which we triangulate. The concept of reality‐in‐itself has no content. As such, Rorty continues to espouse the radical idea that “[n]o area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other. The differences between areas and epochs is their relative efficiency at accomplishing various purposes” (Rorty 2000a, 375). All areas of culture, and all periods of history, mostly get things right due to the fact that belief is of its nature veridical. But if we can’t talk about reality insofar as the concept has no content then there is no way of determining which areas of culture or periods of history are closer to, or further away from it. Second, even though most of our beliefs get things right and are therefore true, truth is still not a goal of inquiry. This is because “the connections between the concept of truth and those of meaning and belief has nothing whatever to do with the question of whether, or how, we can tell when a belief is true” (Rorty 1998a, 23). For truth to be a goal of inquiry we would need to know what truth was and what it would be to achieve it. But if truth is absolute then we cannot know either of these two things. So although due to the connections between truth, meaning, and belief most of our beliefs are true, we can never know with certainty which beliefs those are. As Davidson puts the point: “We know many things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal” (Davidson 2005, 6). And as Rorty puts it, “since truth swings free of justification, belief, success and 388

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

everything else save meaning, truth cannot be a goal or a value” (Rorty 1998b, 69n). In this he and Davidson remain in agreement before and after his change in view.

9 Conclusion As Jeffrey Stout says, the admission that there is a truth in realism, is “as surprising as any in the entirety of Rorty’s published writing” (Stout 2007, 17). It is surprising not only because of Rorty’s insistent rejection of the rhetoric of objectivity, but also because of his long‐held claim that the realism–antirealism distinction depends on representationalism. But now Rorty accepts some notion of objectivity, and he accepts that the realism–antirealism distinction has some purchase, even after the rejection of representationalism. Let us take these is reverse order. First, instead of flatly rejecting the realism–antirealism distinction Rorty now argues that there is some truth on both of its sides. There is a truth in realism and a truth in pragmatism, which, we could say, expresses the truth in antirealism. Here Rorty breaks with his usual way of dealing with a philosophical dichotomy, not by simply finding it to be the vestige of an optional philosophical picture that ought to be left behind, but by appropriating the partial truth that each of its sides express. Here we have a more dialectical, less eliminativist, approach. I do not mean to suggest that this approach come to predominate in Rorty’s late work. But it does show that Rorty’s late work involved a trajectory toward a quite different metaphilosophical position than the one that he espoused for most of his career. Second, Rorty now accepts some notion of objectivity, of getting things right. But we have to be careful in how we parse his new found commitment to this ideal. Here is how Stout puts it: I am tempted to sum up what he is doing … by saying that he is trying to formulate a non‐ narcissistic pragmatism, a pragmatism that can do justice to the objective dimension of inquiry. For he is describing inquiry as a human practice that answers to human interests, but also as portraying as an expression of human interests the distinction between getting one’s subject matter right and merely holding beliefs about that subject matter (or holding beliefs that one’s peers would let one get away with holding). (Stout 2007, 17)

But does the admission that belief is of its nature veridical entail that we have an interest in getting things right in addition to achieving agreement with our fellows? I have my doubts because as we saw above, Rorty, even after his change in view, remains resistant to the notion that having true beliefs about something is a distinct goal of inquiry. But how can we have an interest in getting things right over and above arriving at agreement with our fellows if getting things right cannot be a goal of our inquiries? Stout recognizes the force of the question and consequently argues that Rorty, having admitted that we have an interest in getting things right, should go all the way and admit truth to be a goal of inquiry. But I think this gets things hermeneutically backward: Rorty’s continued dismissal of truth as a goal of inquiry should cast doubt on the notion that Rorty thinks that we have an interest in getting things right. While Rorty accepts that most of our beliefs in fact get things right (because belief is of its nature veridical), 389

Steven Levine

he does not think that we have an interest in getting things right over and above agreement with our fellows. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact that in an exchange with Stout that took place after the engagement with Ramberg, Rorty backslides altogether on his willingness to utilize “the rhetoric of objectivity” (Rorty 2010, 422). Here is what he says: “As I see it the whole point of pragmatism is to insist that we human beings are answerable only to one another. We are answerable only to those who answer to us – our conversational partners. We are not responsible either to the atoms or to God, at least not until they start conversing with us” (Rorty 2010, 423). Stout chalks this up to the fact that the rhetoric of objectivity is not consistent with Rorty’s prophetic persona, the persona Rorty adopts when rejecting wholesale the claims of the philosophical tradition (see Stout 2007, 9–10). While this is true, I think there is a deeper reason for the backsliding, namely that Rorty does not seem fully cognizant of what is required by his own change in view, especially with respect to the dichotomies. For example, in a response to Davidson written contemporaneously with his response to Ramberg, Rorty interprets his dictum that semantic relations are “neither causal nor representational” in this way: The point of this doctrine [of triangulation] is that you cannot get along with just holistic inferential relations between beliefs and statements (as coherence theorists tried to do) nor with atomic relations of being‐caused‐by (as realists fixated on perception still try to do). You have to play back and forth between causation and inference in a way which does not permit any of the corners of a triangle to be independent of any of the others. (Rorty 2000b, 78)

So to say that the relations between our thoughts and utterances and the world are neither causal nor representational is not to say that these relations are somehow causal and inferential, natural and rational, at one and the same time. It is just to say that we work back and forth between causation and inference such that a belief enters two distinct streams of relation, a causal one and a normative one. While none of the corners of the triangle, self, other, and object, are independent of one another insofar as without all three determinate content would not be possible, such content does not depend on there being semantic relations that bridge the divide between cause and norm, nature and reason. So the dichotomy between the two disparate ontological realms, which underlies Rorty’s version of the realism–antirealism distinction, remains in place. So like with the change in his metaphilosophical view, we should not say that Rorty definitively overcomes the dichotomies. What we should say is that his work involves a trajectory to do so. In one respect this is not surprising. It is not surprising because it was always Rorty’s stated view that the dichotomies between scheme and content, subject and object, realism and antirealism should not get a grip on our thinking. Seeing a truth in realism, and accepting that words have both causal and normative relations to the world, brings Rorty’s actual view far closer into alignment with this stated view. So instead of seeing Rorty’s change in view as expressing a radical break with his prior work, we could see it as part of Rorty’s march back to his deepest insight. 390

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

Notes 1 Here I follow the interpretive schema found in Ramberg (2001). 2 Davidson later came to express regress at calling his view a coherence theory (see Davidson 2001, 155). But this is not because he gives up this notion of justification, but because he thinks calling a theory a “coherence theory” lends credence to the idealist or antirealist idea that the world is dependent on the mind, an idea Davidson rejects. 3 Davidson argues that these two features of the Given are separable because it is possible to think of an item as world‐independent, a source of evidence that can be “specified without reference to what it is evidence for” (Davidson 2001, 42) without thinking that it is neutral or uninterpreted by a scheme. Davidson thinks Quine has a view like this. In this chapter I treat the Given as having both features. 4 For more on this see Child (1994). 5 This follows from C. I. Lewis’s notion that one cannot locate the part of reality to which a sentence corresponds and Frege’s slingshot argument that all true sentences refer to the same thing. Although these arguments are controversial we shall grant them. 6 Many early readers of Davidson read his semantics as a type of realism. See McDowell (1998). For readings of Davidson as a realist that directly compare him with Rorty, see Baghramian (1990) and Farrell (1995). 7 The principle of correspondence is named in such a way as to mislead us into thinking that Davidson has a building‐block account of meaning, one based on identified atomic correspondence relations. But as we mentioned above we do not arrive at a native’s T‐sentences by noting single causal links between sentences and bits of the world, rather, we work ourselves in the whole system of the native’s nested propositional attitudes by moving back and forth ­between occasion sentences and standing sentences till an intelligible pattern emerges. 8 Neil Gascoigne identifies this as the deepest difference between Davidson and Rorty (Gascoigne 2008, 95). This difference is softened by the moves that Rorty makes late in his career. 9 As Rorty points out, he “swings back and forth” between a view that reduces truth to justification and a minimalism about truth that holds that there is much less to say about the concept than previously thought (see Rorty 1998a, 21). 10 In “Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth” Rorty’s central claim was that Davidson did not think that truth was an especially important concept. This is the essence of Rorty’s “pragmatist” reading of Davidson. In “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?” Rorty concedes, in light of various writings where Davidson insists that truth is the central concept of his theory of radical interpretation, that his interpretation was off base. In light of this, Rorty no longer claims to be giving an interpretation of Davidson, but simply to be disagreeing with him about the importance of truth. 11 See the first Afterword in McDowell (1996, “Davidson in Context”). 12 I think it is questionable whether it is best to call this a dichotomy of scheme and content rather than just a dichotomy of subject and object. However, Rorty calls it a scheme‐content dichotomy and I will follow him in this. I am grateful to Neil Gascoigne and Carl Sachs for helping me think through this issue. 13 For more on the idea of the world’s “muteness” see Levine (2010) and Brandom (2011). 14 For the classical pragmatists, habits involve a nonconceptual embodied sense. For Rorty, in contrast, they are strictly causal mechanisms. 15 See McDowell (1996, 153). Rorty could deny this conclusion by saying that the two pictures he gives are not pictures of distinct ontological realms. Because he accepts Davidson’s thesis that reasons can be causes – which is just “the claim that a given event can be described

391

Steven Levine

16

17 18

19 20 21

22

23

equally well in physiological and psychological, non‐intentional and intentional terms” (Rorty 1991, 114) – he can say that describing beliefs in terms of their rational relations and describing them in terms of their causal relations is just describing the same event from two points of view. I cannot adequately address this complex issue here. My brief response is this: Rorty thinks that it is a deep assumption of the Quine to Davidson tradition that the use of a certain vocabulary does not entail ontological commitment. But I would like to say that if one really disowns the scheme‐content distinction then one can no longer neatly separate “epistemological” questions (questions about the standpoint from which we access the world) and “ontological” questions (questions about the nature of the world accessed). I take this to be one of the upshots of Davidsonian triangulation, where subjectivity, inter‐subjectivity, and objectivity come as a package. Part of the story I am telling is how, in accepting Davidsonian triangulation, Rorty comes to realize this as well. If the mundane world was thought of as projecting its structure into language such that only a single privileged vocabulary was able to correctly capture it (let’s say the vocabulary of microphysics), then the mundane world would simply be the “world‐in‐itself,” one posited by a metaphysical type of scientific realism. For his rejection of the language of answerability see Rorty (1998a 122–37,138–52). For a critique, see McDowell (2000). For more on the relation of triangulation to radical interpretation, see Ramberg (2001). For how triangulation is a type of transcendental argument, see Sachs (2009) and the literature cited there. Davidson’s theory of triangulation is very complex, involving pre‐communicative and communicative stages. Here, I only discuss, in the most rudimentary way, the communicative stage. Although Davidson invokes Wittgenstein here, it is important to point out that for him such shared standards are not provided by rules, but by overlapping empirical theories of truth. Davidson thinks that his perceptual externalism by itself cannot handle the problem, developed by Quine, of whether stimuli is proximal or distal. This is one reason he develops the theory of triangulation, and is one reason why his causal account of content is only the starting point for his theory of meaning and not its terminus. See Ramberg (2000) and Rorty (2000a). In this chapter I only have space to note the consequences of the exchange between Ramberg and Rorty for our topic and not the details of the exchange. Briefly, the exchange concerned the issue of normativity and mind. Ramberg was intent to convince Rorty that Davidson accepts the indeterminacy of translation thesis not because he thinks that the vocabulary of psychology is irreducible, or that minds are ontologically unique, but because the normative “vocabulary of agency” is inescapable due to its necessary use in triangulation. When through this exchange Rorty came to see that his interpretive focus on “the famous Brentinian irreducibility of the intentional” prevented him from understanding that Davidson’s real concern was “the inescapability of the normative” (Rorty 2000a, 370–1), he came to accept the normativity of the mental, which led to his new reading of the “belief is veridical” thesis (for more on this see Stout 2007; Levine 2008; Sachs 2009). Here I follow Crispin Wright’s way of characterizing realism (see Wright 1994, 1–2).

References Baghramian, M. 1990. “Rorty, Davidson, and Truth.” Ratio 3(2): 101–16. Brandom, R. 2011. “Linguistic Pragmatism and Pragmatism about Norms: An Arc of Thought from Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to His Pragmatism.” In Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary, 107–15. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

392

Rorty, Davidson, and Representation

Child, W. 1994. “On the Dualism of Scheme and Content.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, ns, 94: 53–71. Davidson, D. 1984a. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” In Truth and Interpretation, 183– 98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1984b. “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics.” In Truth and Interpretation, 199–214. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1990. “The Structure and Content of Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 87(6): 279–328. —. 1996. “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 93(6): 263–78. —. 2000. “Truth Rehabilitated.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 65–73. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2001. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 2005. “Seeing Through Language.” In Truth, Language, and History, 127–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Farrell, F. 1995. “Rorty and Antirealism.” In Rorty and Pragmatism, edited by H. Saatkamp, 154– 88. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Gascoigne, N. 2008. Richard Rorty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Levine, S. 2008. “Rorty, Davidson, and the New Pragmatists.” Philosophical Topics 36(1): 167–92. —. 2010. “Rehabilitating Objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the New Pragmatism.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40(4): 567–89. McDowell, J. 1996. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1998. “Anti‐Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding.” In Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality, 314–43. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2000. “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 109–22. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ramberg, B. 2000. “Post‐Ontological Philosophy of Mind: Rorty versus Davidson.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 351–69. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2001. “What Davidson Said to the Skeptic or: Anti‐Representationalism, Triangulation, and the Naturalization of the Subjective.” In Interpreting Davidson, edited by Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin, Gabriel Segal, 213–36. Stanford: CSLI Press. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. “The World Well Lost.” In The Consequences of Pragmatism, 3–18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995. “Response to Farrell.” In Rorty and Pragmatism, edited by H. Saatkamp, 189–96. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. —. 1998a. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998b. “Davidson Between Tarski and Wittgenstein.” Critica 38: 49–71. —. 1999. “Davidson’s Mental‐Physical Distinction.” In Donald Davidson, edited by L. E. Hahn, 575–94. Peru, IL: Open Court Press. —. 2000a. “Response to Ramberg.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 370–77. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000b. “Response to Davidson.” In Rorty and his Critics, edited by R. Brandom, 74–80. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2010. “Comment on Jeffry Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.” In Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffry Stout’s Democracy and Tradition, edited by J. Springs ed. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78: 418–25. Sachs, C. 2009. “Natural Agents: A Transcendental Argument for Pragmatic Naturalism.” Contemporary Pragmatism 6(1): 15–37.

393

Steven Levine

Stout, J. 2007. “On Our Interest in Getting Things Right: Pragmatism without Narcissism.” In New Pragmatists, edited by C. Misak, 7–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, C. 1994. Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Further Reading Brandom, R. 2000. Rorty and his Critics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Davidson, D. 2004. “The Problem of Objectivity.” In Problems of Rationality, 3–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

394

23 The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal ANTON A. VAN NIEKERK

Richard Rorty has long been a philosopher accused of relativism. Before moving to the specifics of his recent debate with Habermas, I shall briefly discuss the way in which he, in his earlier work, defended himself against this charge. I do this in order to, among other things, indicate that his position in this regard has undergone significant changes, some due to the validity of specific charges that have been brought in against his work. According to the early Rorty, “relativism” is an epithet that “realists” (i.e. rationalists) wrongly award to pragmatists like himself. In an article with the title “Solidarity or Objectivity” (Rorty 1985; later republished as Rorty 1991, 21–34; references will be to the 1985 version) he claims that by relativism one can understand three different things. The first is the view that any belief is as good as another. As far as Rorty knows, no one holds this view. He also rejects it on the grounds of its incoherent and self‐ undermining nature (Rorty 1985, 5–6; 1980b, 727). The second is that “true” is an ambiguous term that has as many meanings as there are grounding procedures. Rorty does not have much to say about this conception, although he remarked in an unpublished version of his 1985 paper that this conception is too eccentric for him to accept. It will, however, soon become clear that his own views do not significantly differ from this view. The third view, which he claims to espouse, is that nothing can be said about truth and rationality except for the descriptions of the familiar procedures for consistent/ sound knowledge acquisition operative in a given community (i.e. Western liberal democracies). This, according to Rorty, is the view of the kind of pragmatist that he himself claims to be. The pragmatist is the man who abandons the striving for certain knowledge, grounded facts, and objective truth and who accepts that his conceptions of truth and rationality do not reveal his participation in a “universal human nature,” but only his association with a specific community which is the heir of a specific tradition. The pragmatist decides that the striving for objectivity in the cultural history of the West (as it was brought along by Plato’s distinctions between epistéme and doksa; A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

395

Anton A. van Niekerk

­ ppearance and reality), the striving toward identifying an ahistoric human nature by a revealing “underlying structures,” “culturally unchanging factors,” or “biologically determined patterns,” has become and incubus and should be given up (Rorty 1982, 3–18). The pragmatist accepts that he is, in the first instance, a Greek or an American before he is a human being, that he can never entirely divorce himself from the contingency of being born in a specific community at a specific time and that his conceptions of truth and rationality are unavoidably ethnocentric in origin. In a more recent article Rorty formulates this as follows: Consider … the attitude of contemporary American liberals to the unending misery of the lives of the young blacks in American cities. Do we say that these people must be helped because they are our fellow human beings? We may, but itis much more persuasive, morally as well as politically, to describe them as our fellow Americans – to insist that it is outrageous that an American should live without hope. The point of these examples is that our sense of solidarity is strongest when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as “one of us,” where “us” means something smaller and more local than the human race. That is why “because she is a human being” is a weak, unconvincing explanation of a generous action. (Rorty 1989, 191)

The Rortian pragmatist’s way to account for the meaning of his existence, is therefore to tell the story of his contribution to his community, instead of trying to disentangle his relationship with a universal human (and therefore superhuman) reality. In short, rationality and truth only have meaning for the pragmatist from within his solidarity with his group, and not on the basis of his intuition that objective knowledge is an attainable ideal for all humans. “My position entails that feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities [i.e. between, e.g., me and my dog, a robot, an Eskimo, or a fellow South African] strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary” (Rorty 1989, 192). The pragmatist does think that his view is better than that of the realist, who clings to the universalistic ideal of truth, but then not because his (the pragmatist’s) conception “better corresponds” to the way things “really” are. It is not clear to Rorty why his ethnocentric conception can be typified as “relativistic.” For the pragmatist is not holding a positive theory which says that something is relative to something else. He is, instead, making the purely negative point that we should drop the traditional distinction between knowledge and opinion, construed as the distinction between truth as correspondence to reality and truth as a commendatory term for well‐justified beliefs. The reason that the realist calls this negative claim “relativistic” is that he cannot believe that anybody would seriously deny that truth has an intrinsic nature. So when the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth and that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive theory about the nature of truth: as a theory according to which truth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self‐refuting. But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical basis, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. Not having any epistemology, a fortiori he does not have a relativistic one. (Rorty 1985, 6)

396

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

To say of a statement that it is “true” or “rational,” is therefore nothing more than to pay someone a compliment, to “scratch his back” because he uses statements that you find acceptable within the conventions of your contingent, historical, and linguistic community. Of course it is, with a view to the effective functioning of a community, necessary that there should be consensus on a significant number of things, that “truth” can be distinguished from “falseness.” But this is at the most a pragmatic arrangement with nothing more than an ethical basis; it is necessary for the well‐being of the community that such consensus exists. It is, however, not in the least necessary for the essence of the “human race”; for Rorty this is fiction; every attempt to lend any substance to this claim degenerates into presenting conceptions of “humanness” which are clearly oriented toward the preferences of the community from which the formulations are taken. From this we must conclude that Rorty still has much more sympathy with relativism in the sense of incommensurability than he is ever prepared to admit. Truth and rationality  –  concepts he tries to reject elsewhere, or proposes we should abandon – ultimately only have meaning and content relative to a specific group, and are therefore ambiguous concepts that attain different meanings in different communities or universes of discourse. We can, with these few remarks, take our leave of the earlier Rorty. In a much more recent article (Rorty 1996a, 31–47, also published in Rorty 1999: xvi–xxxii; my references will be to the 1996 version), he again sets out by providing four meanings to be attached to the term “relativism.” The term relativist is applied to philosophers who agree with Nietzsche that “Truth” is the will to be master over the multiplicity of sensations. The term “relativist” is also applied to philosophers who agree with William James that “the ‘true’ is simply the expedient way of believing” and to those who agree with Thomas Kuhn that science should not be thought of as moving toward an accurate representation of the way the world is in itself. More generally, philosophers are called “relativists” when they do not accept the Greek distinction between the way things are in themselves and the relations which they have to other things, and in particular to human needs and interests. (Rorty 1996a, 31)

If this is what relativism means, Rorty, unlike in his earlier work, is happy to acknowledge that he is a relativist. He eschews the Greek distinction and believes that we ought to “abandon the traditional philosophical project of finding something stable which will serve as a criterion for judging the transitory products of our transitory needs and interests” (1996a, 31). The fundamental difference between these relativists and their “foundationalist” opponents (of course, each side to this dispute will do its utmost to describe its opponent in the most unfavorable possible terms!) concerns, according to Rorty, the correspondence theory of truth. This theory is, according to traditionalists, “so obvious, so self‐evident, that it is merely perverse to question it.” Rorty and company, on the contrary, “say that this theory is barely intelligible and of no particular importance – that it is not so much a theory as a slogan which we have been mindlessly chanting for centuries. We pragmatists think that we might stop chanting it without any harmful consequences” (Rorty 1996a, 32). Relativists like Rorty are fond of claiming that many of the things that we regard to be the intuitions of common sense are not really “found” or “discovered,” but are 397

Anton A. van Niekerk

actually “made” or “invented.” This is a theme that is already operative in Rorty’s early work. In the more recent article that I am currently discussing, he acknowledges that this claim that “metaphors of making” ought to replace “metaphors of finding” in our reflection about reliable knowledge, is subject to one serious point of criticism: is the validity of this very claim something that has been “found” by pragmatists to be the case? If so, then the pragmatists are seriously contradicting themselves, since nothing of lasting validity can be found! The bulk of the 1996 article then deals with Rorty’s effort to explain in what way he thinks the distinction between making and finding, so prominent in his earlier defense of his brand of pragmatism, can be abandoned. He writes: “I think it is important that we who are accused of relativism stop using the distinctions between finding and making, discovery and invention, objective and subjective. We should not let ourselves be described as subjectivists or social constructionists. We cannot formulate our point in terms of a distinction between what is outside us and what is inside us. We must repudiate the vocabulary our opponents use and not let them impose it upon us” (1996a, 33). Relativism, Rorty wishes to maintain, is a charge that one can only be guilty of if the discourse, conceptual apparatus, and fundamental distinctions of Platonic‐inspired philosophy are adhered to. “We do not call an inquiry ‘philosophical’ unless it revolves around some of the distinctions Plato drew” (Rorty 1996a, 33). The central challenge that he therefore identifies is to question and replace the vocabulary inherited from Plato and Aristotle. He writes “our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than of straightforward argumentation within old ways of speaking” (p. 34). This is a central claim in Rorty’s position. The question is whether he is successful in developing such a new discourse without remaining stuck in “straightforward argumentation within the old ways of speaking.” I shall return to this issue in due course. Rather than wholly accepting the epithets of “relativist” or “irrationalist,” Rorty’s preferred self‐description in his later work is that of an “anti‐dualist” (1996a, 34ff.). An anti‐dualist is not against the use of binary oppositions at all, but she does object to the validity or usefulness of the traditional Platonic distinctions (subject and object, found and made, absolute and relative, real and apparent). Rorty’s effort at transcending this alleged “Platonic vocabulary” is to suggest a Darwinian discourse for our understanding of the process of making sense of our world and of making progress in our intellectual enterprise. According to him, the American pragmatist tradition, of which he is part, is inspired by such a Darwinian discourse which makes a point of collapsing the distinctions between philosophy, science, and politics. In the Darwinian discourse that Rorty proposes, knowledge claims only make sense relative to the functions and purposes, in short, the utility, that they have for people at the specific stage of their development and interests. It is in that sense that he claims that the vocabulary in which the traditional problems of Western philosophy were formulated has lost its utility (Rorty 1996a, 37). The “reality–appearance” distinction must be replaced with the “more useful–less useful” distinction. The Platonic distinctions were, allegedly, useful for our ancestors, but are no longer useful to us. “Our ancestors have climbed up a ladder which we are now in a position to throw away. We can 398

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

throw it away not because we have reached a final resting place, but because we have different problems to solve than those which perplexed our ancestors” (1996a, 37). The pragmatists, according to Rorty, are the thinkers who relinquish the Cartesian‐ Lockean “anxiety” of endless concern about how we could know, with certainty, that the images we have of the world in our minds correspond with what is actually “out there.”1 “So,” Rorty writes “they start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment – doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain” (1996a, 38). Words count among the most important tools that these animals use in order to cope at best with their environments; they are not representations of the intrinsic nature of things; they are rather “nodes in a causal network which binds the organism together with its environment” (p. 38). Drawing on Dennett and others, Rorty furthermore argues that beliefs and desires are not prelinguistic modes of consciousness or immaterial events. He prefers to call beliefs “sentential attitudes,” that is, “dispositions on the part of organisms, or of computers, to assert or deny certain sentences” (Rorty 1996a, 39). Rorty particularly likes Charles Sanders Pierce’s definition of a belief as a “habit of action.” That means that to ascribe a belief to someone is “simply to say that he or she will tend to behave as I behave when I am willing to affirm the truth of a certain sentence” (p. 39). Thus, when I utter a sentence such as “I am thirsty,” I am not revealing something about my inner self that is inaccessible to others, but I am merely assisting other people to predict the way that I am bound to behave. The important question to ask is not “what is really the case,” but rather “for what purposes might it be useful to hold that belief.” According to Rorty, it is analogous to the question “For what purposes would it be useful to load this program into my computer?” On the view he is suggesting, a person’s body is analogous to the computer’s hardware, and his or her beliefs and desires are analogous to the software (1996a, 39). If beliefs are seen, not as representations, but as habits of action, it becomes, according to Rorty, pointless to ask whether, when acquiring a belief, one is inventing, making, or finding. He uses what has since become a quite controversial example, that is, that talk about giraffes – an example of an alleged “object in the natural world” – is similar to talk about a bank account – an alleged “social construction – in the sense that both are descriptions emanating from our needs and interests” (Rorty 1996a, 41). Says Rorty: “it is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing the piece of space‐ time occupied by what we call a giraffe is any closer to the way things are in themselves than any of the others” (p. 41). Consequently, the question “are we describing it as it really is?” is one, says Rorty, that “we never need to ask. All we need to know is whether some competing description might be more useful for some of our purposes” (p. 41). Although much more is to be said about Rorty’s views on relativism, space and time do not allow me to pursue his arguments further. I now turn to Habermas’s main response that we find in the same volume in which Rorty’s more recent articles in this respect are published. Habermas situates Rorty’s position within the larger framework of an effort, inspired by Platonism and the dialectical responses to Platonism that we find in the history of ideas, to come to grips with the ever‐increasing range of contingencies that we find in 399

Anton A. van Niekerk

human experience. Habermas argues that both Greek philosophy and the great world religions owe their origin to the efforts of the human spirit to develop an ever more encompassing and transcending perspective on the world, a kind of “God’s eye view.” The standard distinctions of the philosophical tradition, such as “finite/infinite,” “necessary/contingent,” “universal/local,” “rational/irrational,” and “true/false” derived from this effort to develop a theoretical/rational perspective on reality that was, since the Greek enlightenment, experienced as an emancipation from the mythical world. It enables the experience of human life as a “curriculum for catharsis and salvation.” However, already in Plato’s own time, there emerges, according to Habermas, an anti‐Platonism, inspired by frustration with the Platonic idea that reason is a mere reflection of the infinite logos and ideal order of things. Together with the emergence of reason as the ability to handle the bizarre contingencies of the mythical life world, this anti‐Platonic reaction comes into being. The latter movement points, contra Plato, to the emancipatory potential of “lost contingencies.” It rejects Platonic idealism and the idea that the constructions of Platonic idealism (e.g. the realm of the forms) are something that is “given” or can be “found.” Nietzsche is modernity’s great exponent of this anti‐Platonism. Rorty’s ideas, with his original emphasis on replacing metaphors of “finding” with those of “making,” also fit within this framework. The development of the dialectic of Platonism, anti‐Platonism, and anti‐anti‐Platonism is worked out by Habermas in greater detail than can here be repeated. What is, however, interesting is Habermas’s claim that in their criticisms of Western rationality Rorty and Derrida differ in one important respect. Derrida belongs to a tradition in which it is believed that Platonism will only be overcome by remaining within the sphere of philosophy itself, that is, by remaining sensitive to the means provided by metaphysics to undermine itself (e.g. Derrida’s deconstructive enterprise in view of “traces” recovered in writing). Over and against this idea that the critique of metaphysics is best enabled by means provided by metaphysics itself (the “deconstructionist” strategy), we find the “assimilationist” strategy. The latter no longer understands interpretation as the integration or fusion (Gadamer) of different horizons, but rather as either the extension of my own horizon to consume that of my adversary, or the succumbing to a superior tradition, as, for example, suggested by the work of MacIntyre. Rorty stands outside of both these last strategies. His claim is, as we have seen, that “we must opt out of the Platonist and anti‐Platonist moves.” Both remain the victims of philosophy itself, and “modern societies will fare better without philosophy.” This is then Habermas’s judgment: Rorty chooses not to criticize the Platonist tradition “from within”; he rather “wants to finish it via the fiat of a new vocabulary” (Habermas 1996, 19). Habermas, as well a host of other authors, have repeatedly pointed out the performative contradiction in Rorty’s and many other postmodern thinkers’2 efforts to transcend the discourse of Western philosophy. For example, Lyotard presents his theory of language games as a criticism of Habermas’s notion of consensus. He posits, as an alternative, that dissension or “paralogy” is the telos of speech (Lyotard 1987, 67–8). The question, however, is: how are we to account for the status of Lyotard’s own statement? Lyotard, as Rorty and others, is making a point against Habermas in an argumentative manner, that is, he is providing reasons for what he is saying. But we cannot, however, agree with the 400

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

propositional content of his statement without simultaneously denying the validity of the statement. If the purpose of legitimate discursive speech is not to establish some form of consensus between speaker/writer and listener/reader (achieved by providing reasons for what is being said), I fail to see what the basis is for anyone to take Lyotard seriously for what he is saying. In short, he cannot consistently maintain an argument that seeks to convince us that arguments do not aim at our consent! As Habermas points out, there are certain unavoidable assumptions that accompany any argument, and the propositional content of the argument cannot contradict these assumptions. Lyotard’s claim concerning dissension is thus left with two equally distasteful alternatives. As Holub writes: “Either we take the claim seriously, and fall into a performative contradiction, or we do not admit that Lyotard is offering an argument and therefore do not have to bother with assent or dissent” (Holub 1991, 143).3 The same goes for Rorty. The important question is: what is the status of Rorty’s arguments? Is he trying to convince Habermas or us, who allegedly still cling to the metaphysical, Platonist argument? If he is indeed trying just that, he himself is unavoidably still playing the game that he’s tried to revoke. Habermas points out that it may well be possible that Rorty is not trying to do the latter. It might turn out that Rorty is in fact busy with nothing more than mere rhetorical devices that are intended to get Habermas (and us) to change our behavior; some bystander might realize that this in indeed Rorty’s game (Habermas 1996, 19). If Rorty’s activities in “arguing” with Habermas and others are indeed reducible to such persuasive maneuvers, questions about truth and rationality will indeed become meaningless. “But Rorty could only manage to accomplish all of this,” writes Habermas, “by deploying an alternative – which in fact turns out to be a new – vocabulary” (p. 19). Of this “new language” we must then say that its “success” does not depend on a successful self‐criticism of metaphysics. It does not enjoy the peculiar legitimation of being the result of a deconstruction of an old and illusionary vocabulary. Says Habermas: “Its legitimacy depends on nothing but expediency” (p. 19). The question is: is this what Rorty is in fact doing when he writes articles like the one discussed above? The answer is a definitive no. As Habermas rightly points out: Rorty’s “new language” – the language in which the Platonic dualisms are to be avoided intentionally – is “neither new nor particularly functional.” It is not new since it boils down to little more than the Darwinian discourse of the nineteenth century in terms of which he (Rorty) tries to explain that all that we achieve in the name of knowledge, truth, and so on, are nothing but “coping mechanisms” in terms of which we survive.4 This is a well‐known “language game.” The question remains: why must we accept it? Must we possibly accept it because it rests on “successful science”? If so, we would still require an argument that justifies why we ought to accept the authority of science. Rorty cannot avoid developing some philosophical argument why we ought to take him seriously. As Habermas writes: “If philosophy, literature, science, and politics do not form different genres but provide as many tools for coping with changing environments, as Rorty assures us, scientific success would, however, stand as just one among several criteria for legitimating new vocabularies” (1996, 20). In addition to the points about the performative contradiction and Rorty’s clearly unsuccessful effort at developing a “new language” in which Platonic dualisms can be avoided, Habermas develops three additional and, to my mind, quite strong arguments. 401

Anton A. van Niekerk

First, we could expect Rorty to claim that his “new vocabulary” is not in need of any justification, since “justification” is a requirement of the Platonic vocabulary that he wishes to abandon. He could, possibly, simply claim that his new language “works,” invoking its “reproductive fitness” and its “functional success.” Rorty could, in other words, simply point out that his new style of post‐Platonic discourse helps people cope, and is thus its own, and only required, “self‐justification.” If the “it‐survives‐because‐it‐helps‐us‐cope” argument is meant seriously, Habermas rightly observes, it would hardly help Rorty’s position; in fact it would seriously undermine his position in its own terms (i.e. regarding “mere survival” as a satisfactory self‐ justification). The reason for that is that the “new language” then hardly compares, in terms of mere staying power, with the Platonic discourse that has been around for the better part of two and a half millennia, and that, for most of that time (and still!) “works” pretty well for the majority of us! Given the validity of Rorty’s own pragmatist criterion for taking vocabularies seriously, there is hardly a discourse that could ever compare with the very discourse Rorty wishes to “replace.” The second argument that Habermas develops emerges from Rorty’s collapsing of the boundaries between the predicates “‐is true” and “‐is justifiably held to be true” (i.e. truth as “warranted assertability”). For Rorty, nothing more can be said about truth other than the moves that a certain community – our own – make in order to legitimize its claims. But for Rorty, as we have seen, truth is no more than the paying of a compliment, of scratching one’s back when he or she says something that we agree with. There is no noncircular way of justifying truth claims beyond the conventions of a historically contingent community. Habermas’s response to this claim warrants an extended quotation from his discussion: The problem with any epistemic conception of truth is how to draw and maintain this clear‐ cut meaning difference without falling back into some sort of Platonism (or realism). Can we do justice to the undeniable moment of unconditionality that we, by the forceless force of grammatical rules, in fact link with the use of the truth‐predicate, without taking recourse to any kind of idealization? If truth is explained in terms of rational acceptability [as Rorty claims] and if the cautionary use of the truth‐predicate reminds us of the fact that what is “justified” by our best available standards might still not be “true,” we must not assimilate truth to rational acceptability. We have to build some reservation into the notion of rational acceptability if we want to bridge the gap, but we must not blur the line between “‐is true” and “‐is justifiably held to be true.” We must stretch the referent of the idea that a proposition is rationally acceptable “for us” beyond the limits and the standards of any local community. We must expand the universe of “all of us” beyond the social and intellectual boundaries of an accidental bunch of people who just happen to gather under our skies. “True” would otherwise merge with “justified in the present context.” (Habermas 1996, 21)

What Habermas is arguing in this regard, is that in any discourse in which the concept of truth is meaningfully espoused, we are of necessity required to engage in idealizations about the maximization of the community that are called upon to redeem truth claims. Habermas’s claim in this regard is that “if somebody states ‘that p’, he or she must (implicitly at least) be prepared to justify ‘p’ be appealing to a rationally motivated 402

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

agreement of other publics, not just ours, a public of experts, an ever wider public of reasonable persons, or a public of people who are ‘better versions of ourselves’” (1996, 21). The necessity of “idealizations” therefore simply means that, if we want to use language intelligibly – and truth claims are, as extensively argued by Habermas in his earlier universal pragmatics (Habermas 1979, 1–68), an essential part of all intelligible language – we must accept the existence, somewhere, of an “ideal public” (focus imaginarius) that must be able to vindicate the legitimacy of what we claim outside of the confines of the specific public addressed in a given discourse. The third criticism that Habermas levels at Rorty concerns the latter’s claim that the fundamental reason why we accept anything is because we find it useful, with respect to the claim that intellectual discourse ought to be conducted, primarily for ethical (which, for Rorty, means utilitarian) and not for epistemological reasons. Compare Rorty’s example in which he claims that we do not believe Ptolemaian astronomy as did our ancestors, because to believe in the literal meaning of the Bible is no longer important to us; our needs are better served by practices based on other knowledge claims. Habermas’s rather mischievous response to this is that he himself, for one, would not have minded that much if, indeed, there exists a “salvator God”; think of the sense of security with which such a reality could provide us. He would even gladly forfeit the knowledge that people could actually land on the moon in favor of the idea of God’s existence. The reason, however, why Habermas does not accept God’s existence, and does accept Copernican‐based astronomy, is because the latter accords with what really is the case, and the former not. The reason certainly is not that the latter agrees better with what Habermas would regard as his most important needs as a human being! Habermas’s own suggestion of the way out in this dispute comes to the fore in the closing passage of his article: I would propose, instead, that the interaction between world disclosure and innerworldly learning processes works in a symmetrical way. Linguistic knowledge and world‐knowledge interpenetrate. While one enables the acquisition of the other, world‐knowledge may, in turn, correct linguistic knowledge … Relevant parts of a world‐disclosing knowledge that first enables speakers and actors to look at, cope with, and interpret in a specific way anything that might occur to them can well be revised in the light of what they had learned from their innerworldly encounters. There is a feedback between these results of learning processes and those linguistic conditions which make this learning possible in the first place. This repercussion is owed to the context‐transcending range and context‐bursting force of criticizable claims to validity on the intersubjective – but fallible – recognition on which our daily communicative practices depend. (Habermas 1996, 24)

In Rorty’s brief answer to these arguments, he identifies his most important agreements and differences with Habermas (Rorty 1996b, 24–9). Habermas is correct in noticing that Rorty is advocating a view according to which we should emancipate our culture from the “whole philosophical vocabulary clustering around reason, truth, and knowledge.” There is not so much wrong, Rorty now claims, with the ideas of reason, truth, and knowledge; “all that is wrong is the Platonic attempt to put them in the center of culture, in the center of our sense of what it is to be a human being” (1996b, 27–8). 403

Anton A. van Niekerk

Rorty wants to detach the notion of rationality from that of truth. In a significant departure from his earlier work, he now acknowledges the importance of rationality, but then only in the sense of the habit of striving after or securing ends “by persuasion rather than force.” “As I see it, the opposition between rationality and irrationality is simply the opposition between words and blows.” He sees a significant convergence between Habermas’s substitution of communicative reason for subject‐centered reason and what he calls the “Protagorean/Emersonian tradition” which he himself prefers (Rorty 1996b, 28). This does raise the question whether Rorty is fair to claim, by implication, that force is always implied when truth is in dispute. There certainly are many examples of that occurrence in history. However, I think that the very existence and endurance of the institution of the modern university falsifies this Rortian claim. Without suggesting that universities have always been devoid of violence in the past, it remains a fact that, in spite of isolated examples to the contrary, history has largely borne out Jaspers’s celebrated definition of the university as “an institution uniting people professionally dedicated to the quest and transmission of truth in scientific terms” (Jaspers 1960, 21). That this institution exists and endures, is the best example of the compatibility of truth‐seeking and nonviolence that we have. Rorty concludes by pointing out that the principal differences between himself and Habermas concern the notion of universal validity. “I think that we can get along without that notion and still have a sufficiently rich notion of rationality. We can keep all that was good in Platonism even after we drop the notion of universal validity. Habermas thinks that we still need to keep it.” But, says Rorty, “compared to the similarities between my Emersonian secularist romanticism and his notion of rationality as the search for undistorted communication rather than as an attempt to get from appearance to reality, this difference may not be so very important” (1996b, 28). Let me conclude by making a few evaluatory remarks. As indicated, I think that the criticisms leveled by Habermas at Rorty are very persuasive. Rorty has always created the impression that the only way out of the quandary in which accusations of a performative contradiction have landed him, is to insist that he does not want to play the Platonic (read: traditional philosophical) language game, and that he therefore has to develop a discourse that transcends that game. In this effort, I think that he has failed dismally. Habermas’s sharp observation that what we get from Rorty, is not a new language, but a refurbished version of social Darwinism, is quite accurate. In addition, it might be remarked that Rorty’s wish to abandon Platonic dualisms – in fact Platonic discourse  –  creates the impression that he also wishes to reach some discourse that transcends the whole business of philosophical argumentation as we know it from the tradition. If so, the onus is on him to explain what comes in its place. But, even if this is Rorty’s intention, it must then also be remarked that he never complies with that intention. Rorty is arguing, and he is arguing in terms of the canons of traditional philosophical rationality. He develops arguments, and he clearly wishes to persuade his readers, including Habermas. What the basis for that activity is, given his reservations about the appropriateness of this whole enterprise of rational argumentation for the propagation of his brand of “pragmatism,” is entirely unclear. In arguing to convince us that Western rationality and its concomitant search for truth is humbug and ought to be abandoned, 404

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

Rorty is falling into the same old trap of the performative contradiction that relativists since the time of Protagoras have been guilty of performing. Let me add two critical remarks to these valid points raised directly or by implication by Habermas. The first concerns Rorty’s highly controversial claim that all knowledge claims serve purely pragmatic, which for him implies utilitarian, purposes. This comes to the fore, for example, in the way Rorty in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980a) tried to annex Gadamer for this very same program. Rorty interprets Gadamer’s critique of the Enlightenment’s “prejudice against prejudice,” in conjunction with his take on the insights of post‐empiricist philosophy of science (about which Gadamer does not express himself) as a sufficient excuse to abandon the traditional distinction between the natural and the human sciences.5 According to Rorty, there are no essential differences between these two enterprises (Rorty 1980a, 362ff.); they are merely different “coping mechanisms” by means of which we find our way through life. The natural sciences owe their stature and status in our culture entirely to the pragmatic use to which they can be put within the need structure of a particular kind of society, namely Western liberal democracies. There is no non‐circular way to demonstrate either the “truth” of the knowledge that these sciences yield or the “universal validity” of the criteria used to legitimate their claims (Rorty 1985, 12ff.). Other “coping mechanisms” are valid in other cultures with other needs (e.g. magic for the Zande), and, claims Rorty, there is no way in which we are able to prove the superiority of our ways of knowledge; in fact, the search for the grounding of knowledge types is itself a product of our culture, and not something that, as such, is even sought or considered important in other cultures. Rorty is justified in drawing on Gadamer in support of his claim that the natural sciences are not, in any ahistorical sense, valid.6 But he is not justified in invoking Gadamer’s authority for the claim that knowledge and truth, as aims/ends of intellectual inquiry, must simply be abandoned because of the fact that both the natural and the humans sciences are both historically localized. As Warnke persuasively shows (1987, 159–63), the distinction between the natural and human sciences remains valid and important for Gadamer exactly because he wishes to show that there are other forms of knowledge (and thus truth), and that it is not legitimate to force the kind of requirements appropriate for the natural sciences onto these other knowledge forms. It is indeed the case that Gadamer, similarly to Rorty, rejects the idea that philosophy is to be identified with epistemology; Gadamer also envisions a different role for philosophy. For Rorty, this different role is “edification” and “conversation”: no longer the search for foundations, but at most an explication of “how things hang together” (Rorty 1982, xl). Sometimes, as shown by Warnke (1987, 162ff.), Gadamer seems to be making the same point. However, his problem with modern philosophy’s epistemological orientation is not the fact that philosophy attempts a justification of knowledge. The problem much rather is the fact that, in modern philosophy, there is an unjustified tendency to elevate the scientific justification of knowledge to the model or paradigm of all processes of justification and for all kinds of knowledge. Gadamer contrasts this tendency in modern philosophy with the much older philosophical tradition of practical philosophy. In this tradition, the issue was not primarily the identification and legitimation of the conditions of knowledge, but an account of the way in which different forms of knowledge address different needs of 405

Anton A. van Niekerk

people (see Gadamer’s explication of techne and phronesis; Gadamer 1975, 278ff.). In the latter, the issue is not the objectivity of facts, but the facilitation of social aims, that is, the design of projects by means of which I can successfully orientate myself in the world and thus come to a harmonious understanding and modus vivendi with my fellow men and women (Warnke 1987, 162). The problem with modernity for Gadamer is thus not science as such, but the absolutized faith in the possibilities of science (p. 163).7 The main problem that I have with Rorty’s claim that all knowledge serves pragmatic, utilitarian purposes, is that if that was the case, it becomes a serious problem to devalue the knowledge status of statements such as “Jews are trash” or “Blacks are inferior,” since they clearly serve pragmatic purposes for people like anti‐Semitists or apartheid racists. The irony about Rorty is, among others, that he consistently pleads that epistemological discourse ought to be replaced by the public recognition of its ethical underpinnings, and yet does not seem to be sensitive for this kind of implication. He makes me nervous when he applauds Dewey’s statement that “every evil is a rejected good” (Rorty 1996a, 43), and continues: “For if evil is merely a lesser good, if all moral choice is a compromise between conflicting goods, then [the critics] say there is no point in moral struggle … But to us pragmatists moral struggle is continuous with the Darwinian struggle for existence, and no sharp break divides the unjust form the imprudent, the evil from the inexpedient” (1996a, 44). This is the necessary outcome of judging all knowledge claims by pragmatic criteria; the only question that then becomes important is: “useful for whom?”. It reminds me of Rorty’s earlier approving reference to Feyerabend’s chilling claim: “Objectively there is not much to choose between anti‐ Semitism and humanitarianism. But racism will appear vicious to a humanitarian while humanitarianism will appear vapid to a racist. Relativism (in the old and simple sense of Protagoras) gives an adequate account of the situation which thus emerges” (Feyerabend 1978, 9; emphasis in original). I have serious problems with any intellectual stance that flirts with the validity of such claims. My final remark concerns Rorty’s aversion to the idea that there is a universal community of humans to which we might appeal for the redemption of knowledge claims: Habermas’s idea of “an ever wider public of reasonable persons, or a public of people who are ‘better versions of ourselves.’” Habermas insists that the coherence of the language in which valid knowledge claims are made, requires this idealization. In that, I think he is correct. The presupposed idealization does not in itself require that such a community ever be empirically established. But the point goes further. The universal community of humans is, in addition, a necessary regulative idea for the establishment of an international moral order – the kind of moral order which must be accepted for the formulation and execution of international law – the kind of international law that, increasingly in the world, is making it more difficult for despots like Milosevich and Saddam Hussein to persist with their atrocities. Similarly, it is this same moral order that enabled the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to do its work and to accomplish, as was quite persuasively argued by Antjie Krogh (2004) in a recent article, the moral progress that the work of that commission did contribute to the history of moral deliberation. Rorty’s entire intellectual disposition problematizes the possibility of the kind of international moral consensus presupposed by these acts and events. That, to me, shows both its intellectual and its moral poverty.8 406

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

Notes 1 See Rorty (1980a, 129–312). See also Bernstein (1983, 16–25; 165–9) and Luijpen (1976, 88–112) who refers to it as the “critical problem.” 2 See Holub (1991, 133–61); in the case of the latter, the dispute with Lyotard is at issue, but the point remains the same. 3 I am indebted to Holub’s discussion of this point more generally. 4 Rorty writes in this regard: “But to us pragmatists moral struggle is continuous with the Darwinian struggle for existence, and no sharp break divides the unjust from the imprudent, the evil from the inexpedient. What matters for pragmatists is devising ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality, increasing the ability of all human children to start life with an equal chance of happiness. This goal is not written in the stars and is no more an expression of what Kant called ‘pure practical reason’ than it is the will of God. It is a goal worth dying for, but it does not require backup from supernatural forces. The pragmatist view of what opponents of pragmatism call ‘firm moral principles’ is that such principles are abbreviations of past practices – ways of summing up the habits of the ancestors whom we most admire” (1996a, 44). 5 I draw, for some of the insights that follow, on the discussion of these matters by Warnke (1987, 139–66). 6 Gadamer illustrates this among others by referring to tact, taste, and judgment, that is, forms of (practical) knowledge that cannot be methodically grounded, and that consequently cannot belong to the sphere of modern science practice, but that nevertheless remain forms of knowledge on the basis of which it is possible to demonstrate our capacity to recognize truth. Differently put: they represent “coping mechanisms” (Rorty’s term) that cannot be “epistemologically grounded” and that thus remain part of the plurality of alternative “coping mechanisms” of which Bildung as “edification” (also Rorty’s term; see Rorty 1980a, 357–89) makes us conscious. But it is exactly as alternative “coping mechanisms” that they, nevertheless, remain forms of knowledge, in the sense that they continue to presuppose our capacity to distinguish truth from falsity. For Gadamer, two aspects of tact, taste, and judgment are important: (1) All three presuppose our ability to discriminate, that is, to place value, importance, or relevance in some order of priority; and (2) all three are not purely individual capacities, but must be accountable or justifiable, or must be able to attain legitimacy, within a community. Somebody has tact, taste, or judgment, not because he or she thinks they have, but because other people think so! (see Gadamer 1975, 10–39; Warnke 1987, 159–60). 7 For the discussion of the last few paragraphs on the relationship between Rorty and Gadamer, I draw on work in an earlier article of mine (see Van Niekerk 2002). 8 A previous version of this article has been published as Van Niekerk, A. A. 2005. Contingency and universality in the Habermas–Rorty debate. Acta Academica, Suppl., 2, 2005: 21–41.

References Bernstein, R. J. 1983. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Feyerabend, P. 1978. Science in a Free Society. London: Verso Editions. Gadamer, H.‐G. 1975. Truth and Method. London: Sheed and Ward. Habermas, J. 1979. Communication and the Evolution of Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. —. 1996. “Coping with Contingencies  –  The Return of Historicism.” In Debating the State of Philosophy, edited by J. Niznik and J. T. Sanders, 1–24. Westport, CT: Praeger. Holub, R. C. 1991. Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere. London: Routledge.

407

Anton A. van Niekerk

Jaspers, K. 1960. The Idea of the University. London: Peter Owen. Krogh, A. 2004. “Embarrassed by Forgiveness.” The Sunday Times, February 29. Luijpen, W. 1976. Nieuwe Inleiding tot de Existentiële Fenomenologie. Utrecht, Netherlands: Het Spectrum. Lyotard, J.‐F. 1987. “The Postmodern Condition.” In After Philosophy: End or Transformation? edited by K. Baynes, J. Bohman, and T. McCarthy, 67–94. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. Rorty, R. 1980a. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1980b. “Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (August): 719–38. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Brighton, UK: Harvester Press. —. 1985. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” In Post‐Analytic Philosophy, edited by J. Rajchman and C. West, 3–19. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1996a. “Relativism: Finding and Making.” In Debating the State of Philosophy, edited by J. Niznik and J. T. Sanders, 31–47. Westport, CT: Praeger. —. 1996b. “Emancipating our Culture.” In Debating the State of Philosophy, edited by J. Niznik and J. T. Sanders, 24–28. Westport, CT: Praeger. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Van Niekerk, A. A. 2002. “Hermeneutics and Historical Consciousness: An Appraisal of the Contribution of Hans‐Georg Gadamer.” South African Journal of Philosophy 21(4): 228–41. Warnke, G, 1987. Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Further Reading Barber, M. D. 2004. “A Moment of Unconditional Validity? Schutz and the Habermas/Rorty Debate.” Human Studies 27(1): 51–67. Bernstein, Richard J. 1986. Philosophical Profiles. Cambridge: Polity Press. Note particularly chapter 2 (“What is the difference that makes a difference? Gadamer, Habermas and Rorty,” pp. 58–93) in which an incisive exposition of the issues between these three thinkers is provided. Biswas, P. 2005. The Postmodern Controversy: Understanding Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas. New Delhi: Rawat Publications. Brandom, Robert B., ed. 2000. Rorty and His Critics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. A captivating account of a variety of debates in which Rorty was involved. Grani, F. 2010. “The Habermas‐Rorty 1966 Debate: Considerations on Finitude and Transcendence.” Vertices 12(1): 7–15. An informative account of the earlier phase of Rorty’s debate with Habermas. Gubman, B. “Cultural Dialogue and Human Solidarity: The Rorty – Habermas Debate Revisited in the Light of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy.” In Cultures: Conflict – Analysis – Dialogue: Proceedings of the 29th International Ludwig Wittgenstein‐Symposium – in Kirchberg, Austria, edited by C. Kanzian and E. Runggaldier, 59–66. https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/books/97831 10328936/9783110328936.59/9783110328936.59.pdf. Habermas, J. 1976. Communication and the Evolution of Society. London: Heinemann. —. 1985. “Questions and Counter‐Questions.” In Habermas and Modernity, edited by Richard J. Bernstein, 192–216. Cambridge: Polity Press. Malachowksi, Alan. 2013. The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

408

The Rorty–Habermas Debate: A Critical Appraisal

A comprehensive introduction to pragmatism by a variety of authors, with Rorty’s contribution prominently discussed in chapters 9 and 13. McCumber, J. 2000. Philosophy and Freedom: Derrida, Rorty, Habermas, Foucault. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Niznik, J. and J. T. Sanders. 1996. Debating the State of Philosophy. Westport, CT: Praeger. Rorty, R. 1985. “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity.” In Habermas and Modernity, edited by Richard J. Bernstein, 161–76. Cambridge: Polity Press. Santon, R. J. 2003. “Richard Rorty’s Philosophy of Social Hope.” Philosophy Today 47(4): 431–40.

409

Part V

Culture, Politics, and Religion

24 Rorty and Literature SERGE GRIGORIEV

Rorty uses the words “literature” and “literary” quite liberally, yet he does not have a philosophy of literature proper. Instead, he offers some potentially interesting suggestions regarding the place of literary culture within the larger context of contemporary intellectual life. Philosophers of literature ordinarily concern themselves first and foremost with literature as an art form (Lamarque 2009, 12). Accordingly, various elements that enter into the making of a literary work are normally evaluated in the light of their perceived contribution to the aesthetic value of the whole (p. 171). This naturally applies also to the thematic content of the work: views and perspectives announced in a novel are usually understood primarily in relation to the world of the novel, not the practical world around it (2009, 236–7). Of course, no one can stop the reader from applying the “lessons” learned from the novel to the conduct of ordinary life, but such educational exercises would, as Lamarque correctly opines, amount to “the appropriation of literature for some further end” (2009, 287). Nabokov puts the point quite nicely when he says that good readers “read books not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live, and not for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations” (1980, 381), but for the thrill of enjoying the author’s unique and particular manner of constructing a fictional world (p. 113), a world “with its own logic, its own conventions, its own coincidences” (p. 146). Rorty, by contrast, is almost entirely uninterested in works of literature qua aesthetic artifacts. In his book, literary texts are meant to serve primarily as a means of moral and intellectual “edification” (Rorty 1979, 360). A pragmatist reader valorized in his writings makes no distinction between using texts and interpreting them, between the meaning of the text in itself and its possible implications for one or another external context (Rorty and Eco 1992, 93). Rorty explicitly advocates using the text (philosophical or literary) as an “object of exploitation” (Rorty 1982, 50), beaten into shape by a “strong misreading” which relates it to the reader’s own antecedent interests and

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

413

Serge Grigoriev

­ reconceptions (p. 151). The only nod to the literary work’s autonomy permitted within p this scheme, is a demand for sufficient openness on the part of the reader to allow for the possibility of a text actually altering the reader’s preexisting desires and conceptions (Rorty and Eco 1992, 106). The talk of texts, rather than literary works, is moreover perfectly appropriate: because almost any kind of text can, in principle, fulfill the edifying function that Rorty associates with reading literature. What Derrida writes, for example, counts as literature, despite Derrida’s own protestations that literature is a public institution distinguished by historically concrete determinate characteristics that set it apart from other forms of writing (Derrida 1996, 82). In fact, it is fair to say that Rorty’s use of “literature” has very little to do with any customary meaning of the term; instead, it marks a series of distinctions internal to his own philosophical position. Rorty does not even try to offer a positive account of literature, except maybe as a type of discourse that abandons the misplaced pretensions of traditional philosophy (Fischer 1990, 241). Literature is explicitly defined by him as “areas of culture which … forego argumentation” (Rorty 1982, 142). Literary criticism, advocated by him as the presently proper form of intellectual engagement, is merely a contingent label used by intellectuals who “got jobs in universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties” (Rorty 1989, 81). As such, it has nothing to do with “literary qualities”; for its chief merit consists in facilitating “moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers” (p. 82). Literature, then, in Rorty’s hands, appears to devolve into a lazy catch‐all notion, meant to merely signal a departure from the currently established modes of philosophical writing. However, as we advance in a crabwise fashion through the series of contrasts in which this notion is consecutively placed, it gradually begins to cut a fairly intriguing figure.

1  Philosophical and Literary To some degree, of course, Rorty’s discussions of the literary are meant to counteract the morbid effects of professionalization on contemporary philosophical discourse. In the course of the last century philosophical profession has come to define itself primarily in terms of “argumentative skill” (Rorty 1982, 62), withdrawing over time into progressively technical and specialized areas of concern, where the proper degree of argumentative rigor could be plausibly sustained – withdrawing, as a result, both from other academic disciplines and from the rest of culture in general (p. 62). Philosophy has tried to model itself on the mode of operation associated with what Kuhn used to call “normal science”; and the typical outcome of its activity these days can be described as “an impersonal report of limited results for a severely restricted readership” presented as part of a “collaborative enterprise” (Danto 2010, 54). However, as Danto points out, it is perhaps more reasonable to think of philosophy as a singular “crossbreed of art and science” (2010, 52). In which case, Rorty’s insistence on the “literary” can be seen as a timely reminder that we need to return the artistic element, the element of “revolutionary” science, into the philosophical discussions from which it has been largely purged. Literature, then, becomes a byword 414

Rorty and Literature

for the openness to the new unfamiliar ways of speaking (Reeves 1986, 353), to the change of our discursive paradigms. The distinction between normal and abnormal discourse (Rorty 1982, 106) has been central to Rorty’s thought at least since the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. There he insisted on the contrast between “epistemology” and “hermeneutics,” understood as the contrast between those areas of discourse where we have a strong preexisting agreement on the proper practices of inquiry and those where we do not have such an agreement: the open, unsettled, contested areas where no common standards have as yet been attained (Rorty 1979, 321). “Hermeneutics” in this sense has almost nothing to do with the continental hermeneutical tradition proper, instead it stands for the sheer attitude of openness to fresh and interesting innovative proposals and descriptions (Caputo 1983, 678). “It is a feature of science” says Rorty, “that the vocabulary in which problems are posed is accepted by all those who count as contributing to the subject” (Rorty 1982, 141). By contrast, in suggesting “new paradigms of argumentation, a philosopher cannot appeal to antecedent criteria of judgment, but he may have spectacular success” in providing us with a new and invigorating perspective (1982, 40). “Literature,” understood in this context, stands for the efforts to “give us new terminologies” (p. 40), as opposed to the “philosophical” or “epistemological” activity of working within the terms of an already established critical argumentative framework. Literature, thus understood, is not meant to replace professional philosophy, but merely to augment its conceptual horizons. In response to Habermas’s worry that, within the scope of his argument, “the capacity to solve problems” would be permitted “to disappear behind the world‐creating capacity of language” (Habermas 1992, 205), Rorty issues an unambiguous reassurance that, in his view, the world disclosure and problem‐solving are not mutually exclusive, but rather coordinate, functions (Rorty 1995, 154). Problem‐solving “typically requires the use of familiar, traditional, literal language” (1995, 153). Poetic language of innovation, however, allows us to conceive of “new ways of being human” (p. 154). Accordingly, when critics like Haack insist that serious philosophers are meant to express themselves “as explicitly and unequivocally as possible” (Haack 1996, 68), unlike the literary types who thrive on exploiting productive ambiguities (p. 69), Rorty can readily agree, demurring only that there is more to philosophy than earnest analytical excavation, for such excavation requires the originary act of stage‐setting, which cannot be accomplished by conventional philosophical analysis. If one does not care to invent a new language or say something that has not been said before, but merely aspires to show “how something falls into place in a previously established context” (Rorty 1982, 106), then one can dispense with the “literary pretensions” (p. 106) and set down to do some honest, productive, and even potentially ingenious work. The emphasis on innovation, however, does not exhaust the intended sense of the “literary”: it is but one important strand. The other can be best described as a philosophical turn to cultural criticism (Rorty 1982, xl). Here, Rorty takes his cue from a perceived convergence of two philosophical traditions, resulting in a realization of human finitude, contingency of all synoptic philosophical visions, and tolerance toward and curiosity about potential alternatives to our present perspective (Rorty 1999, 20). One is the post‐Hegelian tradition which turns from the “metaphysics of experience” to 415

Serge Grigoriev

a “study of cultural development” (Rorty 1982, 76). The other is the post‐Wittgensteinian tradition which treats all conceptual necessity “anthropocentrically,” as resulting from the historical “contingencies of social practice” (p. 27). Both traditions, when read (or misread) in Rorty’s admittedly partisan and forceful way, succeed in reinstating the human being, as opposed to reason, as the proper subject of all philosophical reflection. Philosophy thus transformed can only afford to have the ambition associated by C. P. Snow with “literary culture” whose highest hope is to grasp its time in thought (Rorty 1982, xli). But that, of course, makes the role of philosopher “almost synonymous” with that of a generalized intellectual (p. 30). “All one might want a philosopher to do” according to Rorty, “is to synthesize the novels, poems, histories, and sociologies of the day into some larger unity” (Rorty 1982, 77). The new image of philosopher is “somebody who remaps culture – who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among various large areas of human activity” (Rorty 1999, 175). Ostensibly, a philosopher of this sort is not likely to be found in a traditional philosophy department; his proper habitat is the preserve of the “highbrow culture,” instantiated best by literary culture or “cultural criticism” (Rorty 1982, 61). Hence, another side of insistence on the “literary” designates a broadly humanist concern with “the human self which philosophy has been avoiding” (1982, 188) at the risk of courting downright cultural irrelevance, with intellectuals advancing the literary concerns thus understood acting first and foremost as “the friends of finitude, the friends of man” (p. 189). Importantly, despite desiring to be the friends of man, literary intellectuals of the highbrow ilk are no more understood by the ordinary man on the street than the professional philosophers with their at times esoteric concerns. Literary culture is largely isolated from “common human concerns” (p. 158). In fact, it can almost be seen as directly antagonistic to such concerns, insofar as its general intellectual pathos obliges it to question or treat ironically many of the philosophical assumptions deeply “woven into the public rhetoric” (Rorty 1989, 82). “I cannot imagine a culture,” Rorty concedes, “which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization” (p. 87). Hence, intellectual’s redescription of commonly shared assumptions and practices “often humiliates” (p. 90). Ironically, then, the literary intellectual’s prized audience turns out to consist primarily of traditional philosophers, whose common‐sense realism she tends to playfully question (Rorty 1982, 136). This is, of course, as it should be if we consent to construe the relationship between cultural criticism and traditional philosophy on the roughly Kuhnian model of the relationship between revolutionary and normal science. It should come as no surprise then that, according to Rorty, the questioning, unsettling work of literary ironists is always parasitic on the existence of a positive philosophical culture (Rorty 1989, 88), since the two must be seen as coordinate and complimentary phases in the larger temporal process of intellectual cultural development. But there is more, of course; and it is now time to take a walk on the wild side. The “cultural hegemony” of the literary impulse (Rorty 1989, 3), proclaimed by Rorty, is meant to replace philosopher’s search for truth with a romantic’s quest for freedom (p. xiii). The associated talk of giving a meaning to one’s life through a combination of “art and politics” (p. 3) is liable to mislead one into thinking that Rorty intends to substitute something like cultural studies or literary critical theory for the rigors of traditional 416

Rorty and Literature

analytic argument. But that is not the case: cultural studies merely train their students “to clothe resentment in jargon” (Rorty 1998, 127); and the renewal of philosophy requires something more than a mere change of disciplinary matrix. The literary impulse, instead, is meant to be anarchic, deeply personal, intent on individual projects of self‐creation conceived of as “a proliferating realization in contrast to a convergence towards a pre‐existing truth” (Rotenstreich 1990, 614). This is the sense in which literary, here, is opposed to the philosophical: an ideal philosophical contribution brings the discussion to a close by resolving the problems that gave rise to it; whereas an ideal literary contribution, say a novel, inspires the writing of more novels. This is also why Rorty chooses Derrida as his (somewhat reluctant) hero: “For Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more” (Rorty 1982, 94). The insistence on proliferating textual productivity makes perfect sense for someone who (like Rorty) believes that all philosophical problems stem from the conceptual vocabularies that we end up favoring. Writing, on such a view, becomes a strategy for escaping the old language habits, for breaking out of the picture that holds us captive. This notion that all philosophical problems are language problems is probably a delusion (coming to terms with death is probably not a linguistic problem), but then it is a widely shared and familiar one. The more unusual is the simultaneous insistence that all writing must be personal (Rorty 1989, 125), that we must resist the philosopher’s temptation to substitute an attempt at “systematic renewal” of culture for “a personal story of intellectual development” (p. 101). Could this be more than a mere sentimental predilection congenial to those “whose lives were saved by books” (Rorty 1996b, 14), those whose highest aim is to teach others to love what they themselves have loved (p. 14)? We will have to postpone the answer to this question.

2  Ethics and the Image of Man Professional philosophers are clever but lacking in wisdom (Rorty 1982, 221). They do not understand that political, ethical, valuational concerns must take precedence over the cognitive ones: because knowledge can only acquire significance in the context of a particular form of life; because it makes little sense to speak of knowledge without asking for what this knowledge is used. From this perspective, Rorty’s concern with the literary serves to underscore his commitment to the primacy of the value perspective over the purely cognitive one, to remind us about the importance of having a vision, or different alternative visions, to remind us that something has been lost when philosophy “was flattened out to the production and transmission of papers” (Danto 2010, 55). Philosophy carried on as a literary enterprise, by contrast, could be thought of as initiating its audiences into a shared form of life (Danto 2010, 55). When it comes to literature this “Wittgensteinian” line of thinking is fairly common. Novels, presumably, produce moral insight by increasing our attunement to the form of life we call our own: by providing a fresh or nuanced perspective, by presenting the familiar in a new light, by deepening our understanding of what we already know and feel (Lamarque 2010, 381). They allow their readers to identify with the characters and to imaginatively inhabit their worlds. Meanwhile, professional philosophy in the recent past has resigned itself to depicting worlds “which readers cannot fit” (Danto 2010, 67): worlds inhabited 417

Serge Grigoriev

exclusively by dry philosophical abstractions. Philosophy, then, can be charged with forgetting in Murdoch’s words “how to picture and understand human situations,” with becoming oblivious to the problem of taking up a meaningful perspective on life, accompanied by attention to complexity and subtlety of concretely situated judgments. Thus, if the great works of literature can be seen as “monuments to the enduring human effort at revealing and understanding our deepest concerns about what it is to be human” (Lamarque 2009, 295), we may want the outstanding works of philosophy to be still counted among such literary masterpieces. Rorty’s pragmatist philosopher, accordingly, becomes a kind of philosophical anthropologist wondering retrospectively what “image of man” gives rise to the traditional philosophical problems (Rorty 1982, xxxiii). The eventual goal is to formulate a new image of man, which would enable us to simply jettison the old problems (p. 32), replacing them with new and more interesting ones. However, this project should not be conducted as a mere theoretical undertaking; instead it should be attempted in the Emersonian spirit as a process of ethical self‐formation, whereby a person discloses herself as a “method” (Emerson 1983, 311) by establishing selective affinities for things that she will eventually call her own, while rejecting anything indifferent or uncongenial. The whole point of what Rorty calls the “highbrow culture” consists for him in sorting the past visions and figures into the good and the bad (Rorty 1982, 65), “the sort of person one wants to be from the sort one does not want to be” (Rorty 1989, 47). It is, then, a highly personal undertaking. The only reason to associate such intellectual activities with the literary is that “in the course of the nineteenth century imaginative literature took the place of both religion and philosophy in forming and solacing the agonized conscience of the young. … Novels and poems are now the principal means by which a bright youth gains self‐image. Criticism of novels is the principal form in which the acquisition of moral character is made articulate” (Rorty 1982, 66). However, in principle, nothing stops philosophers from contributing to this enterprise. Literature can contribute to the formation of individual character in two different ways. It can do so intellectually, by providing the reader with a new vocabulary, a new set of categories, enlarging her conceptual repertoire, enabling thereby new, potentially liberating, shifts in perspective. Arguably, this is a task that a certain kind of philosophical writing should also be able to accomplish. Additionally, literature can provide a kind of sentimental education, clarifying the reader’s emotions, and increasing her sensitivity to the sufferings of others. Philosophy admittedly cannot ordinarily compete in this realm without crossing over into some form of literary narration. Coincidentally, Rorty has a lot more of interest to say about the first task than he does about the second. What he has to say about sentimental education, in fact, is not very different from the things that Nussbaum says in support and vindication of “the cognitive guidance of emotion” (Nussbaum 2010, 257): we should “cultivate our ability to see and care for particulars, not as representatives of a law, but as what they themselves are: to respond vigorously with senses and emotions before the new; to care deeply about chance happenings in the world, rather than to fortify ourselves against them; to wait for the outcome, and to be bewildered” (2010, 255). Moral progress, according to Rorty, is not secured through the familiar forms of argumentation but through expanding our “moral imaginations” (Rorty 1999, 127), and becoming more sensitive to the claims of others (1999, 81). We do not expand our moral imaginations by latching on to some 418

Rorty and Literature

shared general similarities (Rorty 1989, 190), but by paying attention to concrete, densely written details of human existence, through the “detailed description of what unfamiliar people are like and of redescription of what we ourselves are like” (p. xvi). “Solidarity” says Rorty “is not discovered by reflection but created” (p. xvi); and it is ordinarily created by drawing on the resources of imaginative empathy (or sympathy) which are best developed by works of narrative fiction. The suggestion is not particularly controversial, nor is it particularly original. With respect to inventing the new vocabularies, however, one cannot help but be amused by the uncanny semblance between Rorty’s rebel literary philosopher and the prototypical artist of the modernist avant‐garde. The relationship, of course, is overtly acknowledged by Rorty when he says, for example, that, with respect to its emphasis on autonomy and novelty, “pragmatism is the philosophical counterpart of literary modernism” (Rorty 1982, 153). And of course, just as with the artistic avant‐garde, not just any kind of novelty would do. An avant‐garde artist may be an innovator, but he innovates by grasping the as yet unarticulated conventions that will presently enable him to establish his work’s “nontrivial identity” as a work of art (Fried 1982, 227). In other words, the artist strives to produce and “accepted innovation” (Danto 1986, 108), by invoking new conventions that can be acknowledged by others retrospectively as sharable (Jost 2010, 40). In a way, then, the avant‐garde suggests a general model for thinking about progress in humanities: whereas a scientist succeeds by muscling the system of recorded observations into a new explanatory framework, an artist, or a philosopher succeeds by muscling the preexisting system of authoritative utterances, perspectives, and conventions into a new kind of story told in the language of his own. One succeeds by producing an accepted strong misreading. The highest task for the ironist, says Rorty, is “to create a taste by which he will be judged” (Rorty 1989, 97). It is meant to be, once again, an intensely personal project: an attempt by the writer “to sum up his life in his own terms” (p. 97), “by redescribing the sources of heteronomous descriptions” (p. 100). One should not be worried about being “too personal,” or too idiosyncratic. In fact, the reason why “tracking one’s causes home, is identical with the process of inventing a new language” has to do with the fact that an antecedently shared language cannot capture what is most unique and idiosyncratic about a person (p. 27). Apparently, the goal is to be (in Kipling’s words) “wonderful and different and unlike all other animals, by five o’clock this afternoon” (Rorty 1996a, 60). Nevertheless, although the project of self‐creation through the creation of a new idiom may be a deeply personal endeavor, its success does depend on the way that it ends up being received (eventually) in the public cultural sphere: on whether suitably qualified others acknowledge it as an interesting innovation. A writer cannot break entirely free from the inherited language, which necessarily ties her to other human beings and their familiar modes of expression (Rorty 1989, 41). All innovation is always only partial (p. 43), always parasitic upon the possibilities of the accepted idiom. Hence, what one ends up saying always resonates to some degree with the utterances and concerns of others, and a powerful enough resonance may produce a transformation of the public idiom itself. One should not deliberately aim at producing such a transformation, or attempt to anticipate its consequences in advance. The proper motivation behind the invention of a new language is self‐creation – a personal, existential concern – not an 419

Serge Grigoriev

activist striving to transform the world. Yet, the importance of one’s intellectual developmental path is assessed retrospectively in the light of its aftereffects in the realm of the shared culture. After all, the rare books that succeed at creating new vocabularies “make the greatest differences in the long run” (Rorty 1989, 143). There are two distinct ways in which one’s individual contributions may eventually be taken up by the cultural discourse. There are those whose vocabulary gets absorbed into the everyday idiom: they “become a name but cease to be a person” (1989, 152). Then there are those whose works retain an intense sense of personal presence, but have only marginal effects on the public consciousness (p. 152). There are books we treat as teachers, and there are books we treat as close friends. The former tend to be written by philosophers, and the latter by writers of literature proper, although naturally there is a considerable overlap. The poetic function of creating a new language can be performed by writers and philosophers equally well, for the latter are, in the end, “ascetic priests” searching for “a language different from the tribe’s” so as to enrich the language of later generations, disclosing new unanticipated possibilities of thought (Rorty 1991, 72). The real differences are twofold. First, a philosopher seeks to anchor himself in something that is not contingent, to rise above history; whereas a novelist is happy to “throw” herself [and her work] into history (1991, 76) as just yet another contingent possibility. Philosopher, of course, ends up doing (inevitably) the exact same, but continues to do his best throughout to remain in denial about it. Second, the philosopher has a taste for “theory, simplicity, structure, abstraction, and essence,” while the novelist’s taste is “for narrative, detail, diversity, and accident” (1991, 73). The philosopher, in other words, seeks a language that is capable of dissolving in a public idiom, transforming it in the process; whereas a novelist remains closer to the sphere of intimacy and trust that informs and shapes an individual’s personal perspective. The distinction is one of modus operandi, not of social significance. Moral and political reform are impossible without an intensity of a personal commitment which comes to be individually shared by those who discover that certain forms of indifference and cruelty militate against their deeply interiorized sense of self. The eventual moral consensus, on the other hand, is usually expressed in the form of philosophical platitudes. However, moral impact in the public realm is only a side effect. Most avant‐garde literature, as Rorty readily admits, only teaches us how to live, not how to live morally (Rorty 1996a, 62). There is no reason, aside from the constraints of energy and time, why self‐creation and concern for others cannot be combined (p. 64), but the two are only “compatible” (p. 62), they by no means entail each other.

3  Naturalism and Humanism Some may be tempted to think about Rorty’s position as a contemporary variant of Nietzsche’s aestheticism. There are, of course, important similarities there. For example, as Nehamas reminds us, Nietzsche also gives preference to individuals who give “novel and unusual interpretations of the events that make them up” (Nehamas 1996, 29) and delights in the sheer play and proliferation of creative possibilities that result from their creative activity (p. 28). However, if we are looking for a common ground in this case, it may be wise to set aestheticism aside in favor of another Nietzschean observation: 420

Rorty and Literature

namely, that “every culture is itself a natural phenomenon” (p. 28). That’s the key theme: one that’s shared by Nietzsche and Rorty, but also by Dawkins and Dennett. “Pragmatism” says Rorty, “starts out from Darwinian naturalism – from a picture of human beings as chance products of evolution” (Rorty 1996b, 15). Accordingly, he refers to his favorite view of the human beings as “biologistic” (Rorty 1999, xxxii). This may come as something of a surprise, however, on a closer reading, Rorty’s recurrently repeated central tenets are substantially in accord with the naturalist commitments of an atheist humanism, which insists on the primacy of the human person understood as “contingent consciousness, shaped by genetic inheritance and by physical and social circumstances” (Clark 1993, 22). On this view, human beings have no essence to guide their destiny: all they have is “the current state of affairs – biological and cultural – that contains the preferences, values, beliefs, and dreams that now define us” (1993, 22). Human beings, then, are not distinguished from other animals by the fact that they carry within themselves the roots of all that is good and true (“rationality,” “morality,” “knowledge,” etc.), but by the mere capacity to alter themselves by acting upon themselves, for better or worse. Accordingly, human languages, their conceptual vocabularies, can be understood as ways of “abbreviating the kinds of complicated interactions” that human beings end up having with their environment (Rorty 1999, 64). “Our language and our culture” according to Rorty, “are as much a contingency, as much a result of thousands of small mutations finding niches (and millions of others finding no niches), as are the orchids and the anthropoids” (Rorty 1989, 16). Our culture, in other words, is a product of an evolution guided by the principles roughly analogous to those of natural selection. (We say “analogous” because most cultural products  –  such as new conceptual vocabularies – generally thrive or perish in cultural environments, and have only a mediate relationship with the natural environment proper.) On this view, there is no need to explain cultural novelty in terms of some unfolding logic of cultural development; it is just something that happens – accidentally – like the scrambling of atoms by cosmic rays, and maybe as a result of some such scrambling (Rorty 1989, 17). Nor is there any need to explain why some conceptual innovations succeed, aside from stating that, insofar as they endure, they must have happened to find a niche. Philosophical vocabularies of Kant and Nietzsche are just “two out of many forms of adaptation, two out of many strategies for coping” (p. 35). So, to ask which one is right or which one is better is like asking whether rabbits are better than magnolias: we are merely talking about different presently viable life‐forms, not the consecutive approximations to some ideal form. The advantage of such a view, according to Rorty is that it is “compatible with a bleakly mechanical description of the relation between human beings and the rest of the universe” (p. 17). His naughty postmodernist valorization of the “literary” is, in the end, but another facet of a prosaic commitment to metaphysical materialism. “Strong poets” are “like all other animals” just “causal products of natural forces,” who are “capable of telling the story of their own production” in a new idiom (Rorty 1989, 28). With luck, their conceptual linguistic inventions may find a popular niche, because they simply happen to satisfy some transient need (p. 37). This kind of luck is what normally makes the (retrospective) difference between “genius and eccentricity” (p. 29), although essentially the same process leads to the production of both. The 421

Serge Grigoriev

“process” is perhaps too strong a word, for what we have in each case is an idiosyncratic agglomeration of contingencies, a chance meeting and intertwining of blind causes specific to the individual case. This, is why Rorty compliments Freud on his attention to “details” in the formation of individual character, to “the countless contingent causes” (p. 31). A materialist account of the mind is concentrated more plausibly on the detailed causal history of a concrete organism, than on the conceptual formation of a generic human type. Freud’s greatest accomplishment? The “mechanization of reason” (p. 33). The merit of Rorty’s view, according to his own lights, is that it teaches us “to see a blind impress as not unworthy of programming our lives or our poems” (Rorty 1989, 35). An individual is best regarded as an “experiment in living” (p. 45); and literary individuals are merely those who can produce something like a verbal conceptual equivalent of their form of life. To be like them, roughly, is to think in their own terms. Their intention, however, is never to produce something novel by examining what has been done before: genuine novelty cannot be implied in or reasonably follow from something that preexists it. Like ordinary life‐forms in the animal realm, literary individuals spring from what has come before them (causally); but they spring forth with a difference, a chance divergence, a slight mutation that makes them new, makes them harbingers of new lineages unthinkable heretofore. Whether they succeed depends on whether they find a niche, and here “fashion” is a good enough word for the process that determines whether speaking in a certain vocabulary proves to be a viable adaptation (Rorty 1989, 48). As Rorty puts it, “the creation of a new form of cultural life, a new vocabulary, will have its utility explained only retrospectively” (p. 55). It is, therefore, pointless to ask whether a particular accomplishment was recognized for “good reasons” or for purely “historical reasons,” since, on a naturalistic account of this sort, the line between reasons and causes becomes hopelessly blurred (p. 48). A life‐ form succeeds (provisionally) by simply proving itself viable under the present circumstances; and so does a form of thinking and writing. The biologistic metaphor (as metaphor) undoubtedly has its charm. It is endearingly reminiscent even of Nabokov once describing a talented writer as a freak: “and let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become a man had not a freak appeared in the family” (Nabokov 1980, 372). As a substantive theory of culture, however, it is decidedly question‐begging. Language, in this story, is “just language” (Caputo 1983, 671), “a tribute to the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the beings which we are” (p. 673), with new vocabularies adopted and discarded “to meet changing human purposes, to help people cope” (p. 674). Caputo is probably right to think that such a treatment of language is somewhat fatuous, for it entirely ignores the question of our historical and existential situatedness as human beings (p. 679), as it bypasses any substantial reflection on the relationship between language and the form of life in which it is embedded (see Reeves 1986, 353). After all, using a new vocabulary by itself almost certainly does not amount to inventing a new shared form of life. Nor can we easily dismiss Habermas’s rationalistic irony when he comments on Rorty’s nonchalant willingness to consign the development of every cultural discourse, including science and morality, to the work of “language‐creating protuberances” (Habermas 1992, 206). The exclusion of normative dimension from assessing the validity or promise of cultural projects and shared forms of life requires a sophisticated and rigorous argument: we cannot simply assume that the failures and 422

Rorty and Literature

shortcomings of conceptual systems and political initiatives are best understood as “symptoms of waning vitality, or aging processes analogous to the processes of nature” (Habermas 1992, 206), obviating the need for rational criticism undertaken in the more traditional spirit. This is not the right place, of course, to pursue such objections conscientiously. Instead, we still need to elucidate the nature of the relationship between the individual (literary) projects of self‐creation and their incidental public influence or usefulness. How can the private projects of self‐creation recurrently produce new idioms uniquely suited to address important problems in the public realm? Isn’t it a bit like trying to solve engineering problems by introspection? One possible answer is that, in fashioning new ways of thinking and speaking, creative individuals do not address public problems in a piecemeal fashion, but reconfigure instead our general sense of perspective by providing us with a new potentially viable “image of man.” Every sustained effort at self‐articulation can be understood as an individual experiment in working out a contingent and concretely situated possibility of a meaningful personal perspective associated with a more or less consistently integrated self‐consciousness. So, the products resulting from such efforts can be plausibly viewed as loosely sketched personality templates, enriching our repertoire of interesting, remarkable, or simply noteworthy characters whom we may want to emulate or distance ourselves from. Like all experiments, experiments in self‐fashioning are best conducted on a limited scale. There is no reason why such experiments must be extreme or dangerous, as some critics suggest (Longford 2001, 585); however, the general practice of experimentation in all inquiries advises limiting exposure during the initial stages of testing a new proposal. In Rorty’s case, the task of initial testing is undertaken voluntarily by the individual who is committed to being a certain kind of person or thinking in a certain way, accepting the ensuing consequences or implications. Others may be seduced, but never forced, to follow in his or her footsteps (at least partially): always convinced by personal example, but never by authority, be it the authority of persons, numbers, or accepted modes of argumentation. After all, one cannot give an argument for the kind of person you must choose to be, without undermining the very autonomy that lies at the core of your personhood.

4  Concluding Remarks The emphasis on the personal, so closely tied to the concern with the literary in Rorty’s naturalistic conception of culture, has often been discussed with a view to its political implications, ostensibly because it pits his view against the entire influential tradition of critical theory, particularly popular in literary studies at the time. Rorty’s enthusiasm for “depoliticizing” writing and philosophy – which he mistakenly associated with the work of Derrida (1996, 90) – has often been interpreted as “an apologia for the status quo” (Rosenow 1998, 259), if not an outright capitulation to the prevailing discourse of liberal capitalism. Rorty explicitly questions “the utility of philosophical theory for social democratic politics” (Rorty 1987, 565), and does so on the grounds that political interests (and corresponding visions) are always transitory: “people change their central projects” (Rorty 1999, 63). Admitting contingency as a driving force of cultural and social development renders attempts to articulate a transhistorical political theory 423

Serge Grigoriev

hopelessly futile (McGuiness 1997, 33). We would be better off trusting literature to improve our political climate by using irony and appealing to sympathy on a more personal level (p. 35). It may be tempting to call Rorty’s view irresponsible. One could insist that it is desirable to have arguments we can offer those who for some reason remain obstinately unmoved by cruelty (p. 40). However, criticisms of this sort are ultimately misplaced. Rorty does not say that arguments of the sort desired are undesirable, he merely suggests that effective arguments of this sort are impossible, for we have no argument to offer those who do not recognize the basic terms of the argument. Caputo sums up Rorty’s ideological position very nicely when he says that, from the perspective of postmodern critical theory, Rorty’s conception of the autonomous subject is “too strong,” while his “suspicion of collective structures” is “too weak” (Caputo 1993, 165). Yet, neither is a product of a misunderstanding, political aloofness, or philosophical oversight. Rorty deliberately opposes the elimination of “the unique and the personal” in the fashionable works of theory (Rorty 1998, 125). He actively believes in the cultural need to create a positive space for individual self‐involvement, a personal space par excellence. What he opposes, accordingly, are the ubiquitous forms of social collectivism which threaten and disdain the very existence of such a personal space. Rorty is, then, at least partially suspicious of all collective structures; what distinguishes him from a critical theorist, instead, is the refusal to single out the so‐called “dominant” structures for special attention. In fact, he compliments the liberal societies precisely because they give an individual ironic intellectual the “freedom to articulate her alienation” (Rorty 1989, 89). “After all,” according to Rorty, “part of the point of the efforts of us social democratic intellectuals is to help create a society in which there is room for subjectivity and self‐ involvement, room for the kind of private spiritual development that politically irrelevant philosophers and novelists help us to achieve” (Rorty 1987, 573). Rorty’s esteem for liberal societies is based on their presumed ability to balance the divergent demands of “socialization and individuation” (Rorty 1999, 117), and to provide the social order necessary for stability without introducing undue restrictions on the space for private experimentation. Perhaps he should have simply said that liberal bourgeois societies tend to be more hospitable to people with literary interests, who prize their personal space and intellectual autonomy. He could then add that the priorities of such people deserve respect despite the fact that they have no overt connection to social responsibility or usefulness, despite the fact that the autonomy these people seek “is not the sort of thing that could ever be embodied in social institutions” (Rorty 1989, 65). He could suggest that such respect is warranted, nonetheless, even in terms of social utility: because our past history suggests that individuals of this sort sometimes end up making transformative contributions to culture which could not be imagined otherwise. A stronger claim which links a peculiar naturalized conception of cultural development with the decisive role of contingent literary contributions, establishing thereby the primacy of liberal societies which best allow these contributions to flourish – if such a claim is being made – would not be likely to bear serious scrutiny. Instead it would obscure a very important point which Rorty’s discussion of the literary brings to the fore: namely, that it is important to retain “idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart” (Rorty 1999, 13), without hoping that such private predilections may one day become fused with popular social agenda, or sanctified by a universally shared goal. 424

Rorty and Literature

Rorty’s celebration of the literary intellectuals reminds us that there once was a numerous class of people whose intellectual pursuits were driven by personal interest and curiosity, rather than social activism or academic professionalism. These people reacted with amusement and vexation to the professional collectivism of intellectual and academic fads, because they believed that the integrity of belief is a matter of individual conscience, and that a certain inalienable degree of interiority is precisely what bestows a special dignity on us, human beings in general. In virtue of being intensely personal, their visions were more likely to inspire an individual life than to create a shared form of life (although sometimes they could do that as well, incidentally). The future probably does not belong to such literary intellectuals. The age of social networking is not likely to have much use for interiority; and a genuinely democratized public sphere unequivocally favors the engagement afforded by traditional philosophical arguments over the withdrawn solicitude of private literary imaginings and musings. Nonetheless, Rorty’s spirited defense of the personal, the literary, the unshared, and the disengaged may still serve as a timely reminder of the value of the things past in a world where the meaning of “private” has been largely reduced to that of “domestic.” In his discussions of literature, and of books in general, Rorty produces for us a value‐laden vision of private (or personal) as that which one is entitled to keep to oneself, to shelter and conceal: not in the way in which one hides private property or stores it for safekeeping, but in the way that one conceals intimacy from public sight, to shelter it and to preserve it in loving care, so as to let it blossom when the time is right. In doing so, he also demonstrates, by personal example, that being a true literary intellectual permits one to remain, despite the passage of time, consistently more interesting than one’s critics.

References Caputo, John. 1983. “The Thought of Being and the Conversation of Mankind: The Case of Heidegger and Rorty.” Review of Metaphysics 36: 661–85. —. 1993. “On not Circumventing the Quasi‐Transcendental: The Case of Rorty and Derrida.” In Working through Derrida, edited by Gary Madison, 147–69. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Clark, Thomas. 1993. “Humanism and Postmodernism: A Reconciliation.” The Humanist 53: 18–23. Danto, Arthur. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2010. “Philosophy and/as/of Literature.” In Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost, 52–67. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 79–90. London: Routledge. Emerson, Ralph. 1983. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America. Fischer, Michael. 1990. “Redefining Philosophy as Literature: Richard Rorty’s ‘Defense’ of Literary Culture.” In Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski, 233–43. Oxford: Blackwell. Fried, Michael. 1982. “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark.” Critical Inquiry 9: 217–34.

425

Serge Grigoriev

Haack, Susan. 1996. “As for that Phrase ‘Studying in a Literary Spirit …’” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70: 57–75. Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jost, Walter. 2010. “Philosophy and Literature  –  and Rhetoric: Adventure in Polytopia.” In Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost, 38–51. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Lamarque, Peter. 2009. The Philosophy of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. —. 2010. “Literature and Truth.” In Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost, 367–84. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Longford, Graham. 2001. “‘Sensitive Killers, Cruel Aesthetes, and Pitiless Poets’: Foucault, Rorty, and the Ethics of Self‐Fashioning.” Polity 33: 569–92. McGuiness, Barbara. 1997. “Rorty, Literary Narrative and Political Philosophy.” History of the Human Sciences 10: 29–44. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1980. Lectures on Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace. Nehamas, Alexander. 1996. “What Should We Expect from Reading? (There Are Only Aesthetic Values).” Salmagundi 111: 27–58. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory.” In Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost, 241–67. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Reeves, Charles. 1986. “Deconstruction, Language, Motive: Rortian Pragmatism and the Uses of ‘Literature.’” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44: 351–6. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1987. “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein.” Political Theory 15: 564–80. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1995. “Response to Richard Shusterman.” In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, edited by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 153–7. Malden, MA: Polity Press. —. 1996a. “Duties to the Self and to Others: Comments on a Paper by Alexander Nehamas.” Salmagundi 111: 59–67. —. 1996b. “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.” In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, 13–18. London: Routledge. —. 1998. Achieving our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. Rorty, Richard and Umberto Eco. 1992. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenow, Eliyahu. 1998. “Towards an Aesthetic Education? Rorty’s Conception of Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 32: 253–65. Rotenstreich, Nathan. 1990. “Can Expression Replace Reflection?” Review of Metaphysics 43: 607–18.

426

25 The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism ELIZABETH SPERRY

Richard Rorty is, as commentators have noted,1 one of the only significant male philosophers of the late twentieth century to engage seriously with feminist philosophy. “When you have the sense of your eyes being opened,” he said, “you tend to write about how nice it is to have your eyes open. That’s why I wrote about feminism” (Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett 2002, 30). Rorty explicitly addressed the relationship between feminism and his neopragmatism in two essays, “Feminism and Pragmatism” (Rorty 1998, 202–27) and “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” (Rorty 1993). In this chapter, I explain Rorty’s neopragmatist feminism and some feminist criticism of his work, limiting myself to questions not yet settled in the literature.2 I argue that Rorty can defeat the criticisms that his reformism is too conservative and that his feminism flounders without representationalist truth. The question of Rorty’s compatibility with feminist theory should be of interest even to those pragmatists not otherwise interested in feminism. Since pragmatism lives or dies on its ability to deal with lived human experience, Rorty’s relation to feminist practice is an important test of his neopragmatism. Rorty’s work should enable us to understand what in feminist theory is, and is not, in the words of William James (1907), “good in the way of belief.”

1  Rorty and Feminism As Susan Dieleman notes, “Rorty’s views are often misconstrued” (2014, 110). Consequently, before analyzing the feminist implications of Rorty’s work, we should review relevant topics in Rorty’s corpus. Rorty’s meliorism is central to his feminism. As Rorty explains, pragmatism orients itself toward “language as a way of grabbing hold of causal forces and making them do what we want, altering ourselves and our environment to suit our aspirations” (1991, 81) Pragmatism is oriented toward making things better, improving our language and practices. A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

427

Elizabeth Sperry

The best practices, Rorty insists, are antifoundationalist and anti‐representationalist, not centered in the correspondence theory of truth. Instead, Rorty advocates “ethnocentrism,” meaning that we must start from our own concepts and practices, rather than the world’s.3 We think in terms inherited from our community. As Rorty explains, “the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation” (Rorty 1991, 187–8). Nonetheless, we ought not to rest on our ethnocentric laurels. Rorty explicitly defines “moral progress” as the process of building “greater human solidarity … the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (Rorty 1989, 192). Rorty endorses Judith Shklar’s description of a liberal as “somebody who believes that cruelty is the worst thing we do” (1989, 146), someone concerned to remediate human suffering. We enlarge our understanding of suffering, says Rorty, “by manipulating our feelings rather than our knowledge … [and] hearing sad and sentimental stories” (1998, 172). We make moral progress, then, by evolving toward understanding the suffering of others and making them part of our “we.”4 Rorty sees5 our changing views on analogy with the shifting scientific views depicted in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and The Copernican Revolution (1957). As anomalies pile up in our beliefs, we become open to considering new beliefs that show promise of being more effective.

1.1  “Feminism and Pragmatism” Examining Rorty’s explicitly feminist‐focused essays, we find Rorty addressing pragmatism’s inability to license feminist values as absolute truths. A non‐absolutist feminism can, he argues, ground something more important than metaphysical truth: persuasion. “Feminism and Pragmatism” discusses the apparent paradox that injustices, on a Rortyan view, aren’t injustices until they are so perceived. In the absence of absolute truth, entrenched practices treating women as inferior would not constitute oppression. Yet many feminists would prefer to say that it was wrong to oppress women even before it was widely understood as wrong. Unfortunately, as Rorty explains, “absolute truth” has historically been used to perpetuate women’s oppression. If feminists have not uncovered a new truth about women’s natures, what supports our understanding of women as full human beings? Rorty explains that “injustices may not be perceived as injustices, even by those who suffer them, until somebody invents a previous unplayed role. Only if somebody has a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, and what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination” (Rorty 1998, 203). Social progress originates in linguistic innovation combined with persuasion of others. “Feminists,” Rorty says, “are trying to get people to feel indifference or satisfaction where they once recoiled, and revulsion and rage where they once felt indifference or resignation” (p. 204). Emotional reactions help to determine the efficacy of our practices. We should “modify our practices so as to take account of new descriptions of what has been going on” (p. 206), rather than “talking about the need to go from distorted to undistorted perception of

428

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

moral reality” (p. 206). Pragmatist feminism persuades others to generate new practices that diminish suffering. What guides the evolution of our practices, if not absolute truth? “Prophecy,” says Rorty. Since many of our current practices and concepts were originally adopted to meet the needs of the powerful, changing them will require great imagination and force of will. “Argument for the rights of the oppressed will fail just insofar as the only language in which to state relevant premises is one in which the relevant emancipatory premises sound crazy,” writes Rorty (1998, 207–8). Prophecy, the imaginative portrayal of a possible improved future, is capable of persuading, even where arguments fail. Rorty considers two objections: first, “that pragmatism is inherently conservative, biased in favor of the status quo” (p. 212); and second, that “if you say that women need to be created rather than simply freed, you seem to be saying that in some sense women do not now fully exist. But then there seems no basis for saying that men have done women wrong, since you cannot wrong the nonexistent” (p. 213). Thus it is hard for pragmatists to say that “even when [women] did not know [they deserved equal treatment], and might even have explicitly denied it … they were entitled to it” (p. 219). Rorty’s response to the “status quo” objection is that it is rational argumentation that is inherently conservative. If we reason based on terms we already have, we are only going to get outcomes we can already envision and understand. Pragmatism looks conservative because it rejects radicalism in favor of evolutionary reform. Rorty calls himself a utopian, since utopianism is forward‐looking rather than oriented toward analysis of what has gone wrong. Rather than dissecting our mistakes, we should focus on creating a world in which our future can be better. For this, “courage and imagination” (1998, 216) are required, because creating an improved future entails changing our perceptions. Our perceptions, however, can only develop on the basis of our current awareness. Hence, even if we did know now our ultimate goals for social justice, we still wouldn’t know their final instantiations, nor the practical steps need to promulgate those instantiations society‐wide. Replying to the second objection, Rorty invokes “the masters’ control over the language spoken by the slaves – their ability to make the slaves think of their pain as fated and even somehow deserved, something to be borne rather than resisted” (1998, 220). This is so because “what a human being is, for moral purposes, is largely a matter of how he or she describes himself or herself ” (p. 220), and if there is no language available in which to see yourself as worthwhile, you will not so see yourself. Thus, Rorty admits, “we pragmatists have to identify most of the wrongness of past male oppression with its suppression of past potentiality rather than its injustice to actuality” (p. 220). Rorty understands that there have been resisters, past women who insisted on their worth and dignity. But such insistence cannot be holistic in a hostile linguistic context: “I am denying that women in previous epochs have been able to avoid being torn, split, between men’s descriptions of them and whatever alternative descriptions they have given to themselves” (p. 220). What can a person do when she is at odds with her society’s understanding of who she is and what she can be? She can band together with others who are engaged in the same struggle. Building on Marilyn Frye’s Politics of Reality, Rorty explains that 429

Elizabeth Sperry

“individuals … cannot achieve semantic authority, even semantic authority over themselves, on their own. To get such authority you have to hear your own statements as part of a practice … People in search of such authority need to band together and form clubs, exclusive clubs” (1998, 223). Rorty contends that social change manifests when subgroups’ worldviews metastasize in the larger society. Ultimately, Rorty’s response to the second objection is a form of bullet‐biting. Before women were understood as meriting full human equality, they did not merit full human equality. I believe that this uncomfortable conclusion does have two advantages: first, it helps us make sense of the otherwise baffling fact that many women in previous centuries apparently did not see themselves as meriting the same consideration as men; and second, it makes clear the importance of continuing to change our language and practices. Some oppressed people may need an improved social context to see themselves as fully equal beings. Significantly, however, this is not Rorty’s final statement on the matter. Our own values, imperfectly though they be enacted, regard women as meriting fair treatment. Thus, Rorty says “It was, of course, true in earlier times that women should not have been oppressed, just as it was true before Newton said so that gravitational attraction accounted for the movements of the planets” (Rorty 1998, 225). But how can we say that women in previous eras were not deserving of fully equality when it is also “true in earlier times that women should not have been oppressed”? Rorty is invoking his ethnocentrism, the notion that we can only judge other societies from the perspective of our own. From the perspective of past societies, women were not full‐fledged human beings. But we cannot help assessing those women from our own contemporary perspective.

1.2  “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction” Rorty’s other major statement on feminism, “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View,” takes on similar subjects. Rorty repeats his depiction of feminism as “a reformist rather than a revolutionary movement” (1993, 97) Feminism, like eighteenth century abolitionism, is reformist because “its political goals are fairly concrete and not difficult to imagine being achieved” (p. 97). Rorty writes that “it is relatively easy to envisage a world with equal pay for equal work, equally shared domestic responsibilities, as many women as men in positions of power, etc., and to see present inequities as repugnant to widely shared intuitions about what is right and just” (p. 97). Nonetheless, Rorty recognizes that imagination only goes so far. He explains that “unlike Marx and Engels, [feminists] cannot easily sketch a revolutionary political scenario or a post‐revolutionary utopia. The result is a lot of talk about philosophical revolutions, revolutions in consciousness; these revolutions, however, are not reflected at anything that Marx and Engels would recognize as ‘the material level’” (1991, 97). Given Rorty’s privileging in “Feminism and Pragmatism” of imagination, prophecy, and a utopianism that works to create a better future, what are we to make of his insistence that we cannot fully envision a feminist utopia? I believe Rorty is talking about two different ways of imagining the future: in one, discussed in “Feminism and Pragmatism,” we imagine in the abstract (e.g. a world in which we do not experience ourselves as “split” between our culture’s descriptions of us and our own preferred descriptions of ourselves), but we do not yet know precisely what it would feel like to live in that world. 430

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

Here, however, Rorty is talking about imagining the future in detail. Because feminism is not focused exclusively on such concrete goals as, for instance, “the abolition of bourgeois property” (Marx and Engels 2008 [1848], 53), it cannot imagine the exact conditions of its desired utopia. Thus there is no contradiction: Rorty means that feminists are figuring out what they believe and what they want to change as they go along. Some feminists might prefer a revolutionary self‐understanding, but given feminism’s focus on practices central to our everyday lives, practices (such as the enactment of gender) so intimately woven into our sense of ourselves that we cannot overthrow them, only evolutionary change is possible. Consequently, feminism is a reform movement in both practical and definitional terms. We aim to change things that can only be changed gradually, and we will only know what those things are in concrete detail as we come closer to instantiating them. The other topic of interest in this essay is the recurring question of how feminism can function without absolute truth as a guide. Rorty assesses the desire of many feminist intellectuals to call “masculinist ideology” misguided and “distorted” (1991, 99). The problem, Rorty explains, is that “‘distortion’ presupposes a medium of representation which, intruding between us and the object under investigation, produces an appearance that does not correspond to the reality of the object” (p. 99). But pragmatism spurns representationalism and the classical appearance/reality distinction. For pragmatists, says Rorty, “everything is a social construct and … there is no point in trying to distinguish between the ‘natural’ and the ‘merely’ cultural” (p. 99). Thus pragmatist feminists cannot engage in ideology critique. I believe that Rorty is selling short his own resources. We can, and do, point out to our fellow citizens when they are not living and thinking according to their society’s values. For instance, if a high‐profile academic administrator publicly states that women are intrinsically less scientifically and mathematically capable than are men (Dillon 2005), we can criticize him on the grounds that he is failing to recognize what our society is coming to understand as the ethnocentrically validated practical facts concerning men’s and women’s comparable overall abilities. There is no need to invoke supposed absolute truths about men’s and women’s innate levels of intelligence. As Rorty writes, “Critique of ideology is, at best, mopping‐up, rather than path‐breaking. It is parasitic on prophecy rather than a substitute for it” (1991, 100). Rorty’s final argument in this essay is that “masculinism is the defense of the people who have been on top since the beginning of history against attempts to topple them; that sort of monster is very adaptable, and I suspect that it can survive almost as well in an anti‐logocentric environment” (1991, 101). In other words, the contest is between feminism and masculinism, and each is capable of being essentialist or nonessentialist. Thus promoting essentialism won’t eliminate masculinism, any more than it eliminates feminism. We must fight the core problem, which is masculinism.

2  Reform versus Revolution Some feminist philosophers have accused Rorty of being too conservative, too oriented toward preserving the social, political, and moral status quo,6 too focused on mere reform rather than revolutionary change. Susan Dieleman defends Rorty against this 431

Elizabeth Sperry

critique by arguing, based on Rorty’s use of Kuhnian tropes, that he can indeed support a revolutionary feminism. She writes that “If we understand Rorty as building upon the Kuhnian distinction between normal and revolutionary science, then the introduction of these new metaphors can be revolutionary” (Dieleman 2010, 901). Dieleman adds that “when revolution is meant as the use of force rather than persuasion, Rorty is surely a reformist. However, persuasion itself – the use of words rather than blows – can be both reformist and revolutionary, and I suggest that this does allow for the type of ‘revolution’ that feminist critics typically intend” (2010, 901). I want to add a nuance to this defense, one that ultimately stresses the reformist processual structure of Rortyan social change. I argue that Rortyan processes of social change are reformist rather than revolutionary, based on descriptive arguments about the structure of social change, and normative arguments concerning the best pragmatist cures for our social ills. In addition, I argue that full understanding of Rortyan social change requires distinguishing between revolutionary processes and revolutionary outcomes; and I argue that although Rorty advocates reformist processes rather than revolutionary ones, he is anything but a status quo thinker. The question of whether Rorty is a reformist or a revolutionary may seem like a small one,7 but it is important for three reasons: first, it informs the controversy over Rorty’s supposed conservativism; second, it clarifies the type of feminism Rorty supports; and third, it deepens our understanding of Rortyan social change. Dieleman distinguishes two forms of revolutionary change: violent and verbal, describing verbal revolution as “the use of words” (Dieleman 2010, 901). I distinguish explicitly between reformist change processes and revolutionary change processes, on the one hand; and between change processes and change outcomes, on the other hand. I argue that Rorty is able to support revolutionary outcomes, but that he disavows revolutionary change processes in favor of reformist change processes. Such reform processes can generate what we come to see as revolutionary outcomes. Rorty extols our “liberal, reformist culture” (Rorty 1989, 64) and also suggests that “Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs” (p. 63). He also mentions “revolutionary achievements … in moral and political thought” (1989, 12), but there are sound theoretical and practical reasons why the change that takes us there must be reformist in its processes. The reasons why Rortyan feminist social change must be reformist in process are: (1) we can’t plan significant feminist social change on purpose or in advance; (2) we must live new standards and practices first before we can know what they are; (3) significant, society‐wide change is necessarily gradual; (4) society can only change a limited portion of its concepts and practices at once; (5) slow conceptual and practical social change is more lasting; (6) a processual conceptual revolution would incorporate forms of violence; and (7) radical revolutionary movements are so because of their conviction that they have the absolute truth, an orientation which is opposed to pragmatism.

2.1  Can’t Plan Feminist Utopia in Advance Both of Rorty’s feminist‐focused essays present feminism as a reform rather than revolutionary movement. One of Rorty’s most important reasons for this conclusion is that we cannot imagine now the details of a future feminist utopia. Revolutions are fought 432

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

on the basis of a clear‐cut goal, known in advance. Since we cannot currently know the full content of our feminist goals, we must instead focus on making small incremental changes, based on our current understanding of innovations that could make people’s lives better.

2.2  Must Live New Standards to Know their Instantiations Pragmatism contends that we know based on our practices and experiences. Thus, if we have not experienced new feminist values and behaviors, we cannot fully understand them. Even if it were possible to know the full abstract content of feminist justice in our future utopia, we still wouldn’t know how to instantiate it, because instantiations can only be lived out by concrete people in concrete situations. For instance, we might determine that feminist justice requires the elimination of gender,8 but not be able to imagine the details of living in a gender‐less world. Future persons will invent their own enactments of genderlessness. As Rorty insists, progress occurs when people “invent a previously unplayed role” (Rorty 1998, 203) and “logical space may need to be expanded before justice can be envisaged, much less done” (p. 204).

2.3  Significant Social Change Occurs Gradually Furthermore, significant social change does develop gradually, reformistically, even when its ultimate impact is revolutionary. Rorty writes that “the human self is created by the use of a vocabulary” (1989, 7). Vocabularies don’t and can’t change overnight, but rather by “gradual trial‐and‐error creation” (p. 12), so their associated concepts and practices are also immune to speedy social revision. Speakers generate new metaphors, which at first, do not have actual meanings. If a metaphor is repeated by others “[t]hen it will gradually acquire a habitual use, a familiar place in the language game” (p. 18). Over the past thirty years, attitudes have changed significantly, but incrementally, concerning gay marriage. Similarly, parenting practices and hiring practices have gradually become more gender‐inclusive, both reflecting and leading to changing attitudes about gender; at the same time, however, many gender norms and behaviors are unchanged. There will be gender holdouts for a very long time because gender is central to the self‐understanding of too many people to be switched out in a short time span. I believe that the concerns of some feminists about the need for revolutionary change reflect understandable frustration more than they do reality. While we wait for further changes in attitudes and practices, people are suffering. Such suffering is unconscionable, as it the suppression of human potentiality (Rorty 1998, 220). Many of us wish that social change were easier and quicker.

2.4  Social Change Occurs Piecemeal A significant reason why social change occurs only gradually is that it occurs not only gradually, but also piecemeal. Obviously, progressive people adopt new practices before non‐progressive people do. But this is more than a sociological point; it is also a point about the logic of linguistic and conceptual change. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of 433

Elizabeth Sperry

Empiricism” mentions “our natural tendency to disturb the total system [of belief] as little as possible” (Quine 1951, 41). Since the web of belief is interwoven, disturbing the system requires adjustments elsewhere, a psychologically and epistemologically uncomfortable undertaking. Rorty refers to “the gradual trial‐and‐error creation of a new … vocabulary” (Rorty 1989, 12) and suggests that we think of culture, and of language, as being like a coral reef: new metaphors are constantly being added to the preexisting foundation, as parts of that foundation die off and are calcified (p. 16). Figuring out what to change and what correlative adjustments to make in the system of our concepts and practices takes time and nerve. Even when we do make a change in our beliefs and practices, significant continuity is preserved. Our language and habits remain largely the same even as they are the background for partial alteration. Thus, if our society begins to accept gay marriage, passes legislation supporting gay marriage, and begins criticizing those who oppose gay marriage, we have made a significant change in our practices, norms, and language. At the same time, much has not changed. We still speak of “marriage,” and we still expect married people, gay or straight, to follow its norms. Our society still, at least at this time, thinks of “gay marriage” as a somewhat different category than “(straight) marriage,” despite the fact that we treat both as marriages. Members of our society still have stereotypes about gay people and relationships. We still rely on legislatures and courts to determine the legality of our marriage practices. Thus change, even when significant, occurs against a backdrop of still‐more‐significant continuity.

2.5  Change Via Reform is More Lasting A central advantage of processually reformist change is that it occurs via persuasion rather than enforcement. Reformist change allows people to adopt new practices that they willingly make their own, and hence, adopt genuinely. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out9 gradual change may be more stable, pervasive, and lasting than cataclysmically imposed change. Processes of social change that are reformist may be frustratingly slow, but they are more likely than revolutionary processes to produce real and lasting change.

2.6  Processual Conceptual Revolutions are Violent Alternatively, a processually conceptual revolution would be a violent revolution. This is because revolutions are not the result of persuasion; revolutions are in some manner imposed. A conceptual revolution that forced people to convert would be coercive and hence violent. Liberal societies are, as Rorty stresses, content to let agreement arise out of free and open conversation. One of Rorty’s interviewers said to him, “you argue that the last conceptual revolution in political thought we will need was J. S. Mill.” Rorty replied: “One good thing about Mill is that he doesn’t have that longing [for a conceptual revolution]. … As soon as you think that total reconceptualizations are necessary for political thinking, you’ve already separated from reformist politics and are on your way toward Leninism” (Rorty, Nystrom, and Puckett 2002, 65). 434

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

2.7  Processual Revolutionism Accords with Absolute Truth Finally, revolutionism as Rorty conceives it is premised on knowing the absolutely right social outcome. But as he insists, the concept of absolute truth is problematic. Processually revolutionary social movements want to impose “correct outcomes” instead of letting our society work toward an outcome for itself. In this sense, revolutions are authoritarian; but Rorty’s neopragmatism is antiauthoritarian (Rorty 2006). If my arguments above are correct, why then does Rorty regularly assimilate his views to those of Thomas Kuhn, the prophet of scientific revolutions? Rorty does allow for legitimate conceptual revolutions in the outcome sense; they are not, however, processually revolutionary.

3  Rortyan Feminism and Truth Rorty’s account of truth is a major concern for interlocutors, feminist or not.10 Feminists have been particularly adamant about the importance of absolute truth. As Julia Driver writes, “The view that some moral claims are true, but their truth dependent on cultural beliefs, would seem to entrench oppressive norms, the very norms that feminists have fought to expose as shams” (Driver 2012, 175). Sabina Lovibond argues that it is difficult enough for women to free themselves from culturally reinforced sexism even when employing the guiding language of “emancipatory metanarratives” (1989, 12), and likely much harder without them. But Rorty responds that the pursuit of such metanarratives is a “fantasy of escape from a historical situation into an ahistoricist empyrean” (Rorty 1998, 210). Here I examine recent feminist critiques of Rortyan truth from two different perspectives. In the first, Lovibond and Georgia Warnke maintain that even if Rorty abjures absolute truth, there is still a need for a non‐relativist truth that can guide feminist pursuits. In the second, Linda Martín Alcoff argues that Rorty’s disavowal of representationalist truth renders unusable his concepts of suffering and cruelty, tools he relies upon to show that pragmatist social progress is possible.

3.1  Rorty and Non‐Absolute Truth Sabina Lovibond’s “Feminism and Pragmatism: A Reply to Richard Rorty” (2010) argues for a middle alternative between Rortyan pragmatism and essentialism, on the grounds that we need to be able to distinguish between what we think is true and what is actually true. For Rorty, Lovibond says, beliefs are true when they are widely accepted as true. This analysis cannot be accepted by feminists, however, because anti‐feminist beliefs are pervasive in our culture. Lovibond proposes instead that we seek a universalism that is not “atemporal,” but is rather the “non‐violent coordination of a plurality of individual wills and judgments” (Lovibond 2010, 67). Lovibond’s quasi‐Kantian constructed norms would “exclude the kind of action … in which we implicitly lay claim, through our treatment of others, to entitlements we would not be prepared to recognize universally” (p. 67). Such “historically situated” (p. 67) standards would constitute an enormous improvement, from the feminist perspective, on the, at best, 435

Elizabeth Sperry

relativist standards (and, at worst, “deceptive” standards; Lovibond 2010, 60) endorsed by Rorty, without needing to invoke absolute truth. Georgia Warnke also argues for a middle ground between Rortyan truth and absolutist truth. Her preferred alternative is Habermasian “rational consensus,” a straining toward shared, universal truth even if it is ultimately unattainable. Rorty’s “rhetorical consensus” (Warnke 2010, 114), by contrast, cannot point toward the better interpretive option, says Warnke; nor can it support clear‐cut standards of wrongness. On Warnke’s suggested model, even though “we might not know what it would be to be objective, we can make distinctions between possible interpretations” (2010, 129). John Adams responds to Lovibond, writing that she overlooks the critically important point that persuasion remains central to feminist commitments, since “the truth does not speak for itself ” (2010, 83). Adams adds that “it is rhetoric’s effectiveness that actualizes what is considered truth (and conversely lies) in people’s lives” (p. 95). I would agree with Lovibond that feminism needs the support of historically situated standards of fairness; but I disagree with her apparent assumption that such standards are already clear to all. Some people genuinely do not understand that they are racists or sexists, or that racism and sexism are unfair. They are not aware that they are “lay[ing] claim … to entitlements [they] would not be prepared to recognize universally” (Lovibond 2010, 67). Rorty confronts this issue in “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” As he explains, treating similar cases similarly depends entirely on what we consider a “similar case.” “[T]here is room,” Rorty writes, “to argue that discrimination on the basis of such differences is not arbitrary” (1997, 15). Argumentation about what constitutes similarity, and hence fairness, can go both ways. Thus, enacting Lovibond’s quasi‐Kantian fairness would require persuasion and sentimental appeals, of exactly the sort Rorty defends as central to moral progress. Conversion to “fair” values also requires expanding the ranks of people who are full‐ blown contributors to the conversation. Rorty writes that we should “expand the circles of those whom each party to the agreement had previously taken to be ‘people like ourselves’” (1997, 18). Discrimination, unfairness, and unequally distributed “entitlements,” in Lovibond’s vocabulary, are best defeated by persuading people to see others as suffering needlessly. What Lovibond and Warnke miss is that Western societies are theoretically committed, despite many failures of application, to the value of equality and fair treatment for all. It is a part of our self‐understanding as members of a liberal democracy that each person merits equal opportunity. Meanwhile, our society fails to understand that this rhetoric too often remains mere rhetoric. But persuasion can show us that others are suffering, and prophecy can sketch a future in which that suffering is lessened. Rortyan pragmatism is able, contra Warnke, to determine the difference between better and worse interpretations of our values. Renegar and Sowards explain that: Rorty provides feminists with a mechanism for social change that is available to all humans. The process of critically evaluating the current vocabulary and revising it to better describe our social system and rhetorically create a new system is not something reserved for the intellectually elite or politically powerful. Rather, it is a process in which all people,

436

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

regardless of education, cultural background, or social status, can engage whenever and wherever they are able. (Renegar and Sowards 2003, 345–6)

Thus all members of a society are able to participate in helping to change negligent apprehensions of marginalized persons’ experiences. The marginalized are often ignored when they describe their suffering but those of us who are better off can and should engage in persuasion on their behalf. As Dieleman notes, revisable norms of justice are preferable to absolute standards (2013, 45), because absolute standards cannot be changed. And just as our standards of justice are revisable, so too are our standards for whose contributions should be heard (Dieleman 2012, 106). As our standards evolve, so does our assessment of speakers’ credibility. Given how frequently our “absolute standards” of justice and credibility have caused suffering, revisability offers hope for social progress.

3.2  Rorty and Suffering Linda Martín Alcoff ’s 2010 essay, “Rorty’s Antirepresentationalism in the Context of Sexual Violence” argues that Rortyan language, truth, and meaning are unworkable foundations for feminist justice. Feminism requires representational explanations for why “date rape” and “sexual abuse” are more accurate terms than “seduction” and “being ravished.” Is a language that uses the word “concubine” a better or worse reflection of reality than a language that refers to “sexual slavery”? Some languages are better than others at representing oppression and pain. Women must be able to call sexual assault wrong rather than irrelevant or justifiable. Rorty does say better languages are those that help us to avoid pain, but this won’t work as a response to the problem, says Alcoff, because our understanding of what constitutes “pain” varies situationally. Different societies see different things as painful. Is circumcision a painful practice that should be outlawed in the name of social justice? What about the wearing of high heels? There is no fixed meaning to “pain.” Finally, Alcoff argues, if there is no fact of the matter concerning which practices and terms are unjust, then feminism becomes a power game: who is in control of discourse, and whose preferences will be subordinated? Women become pawns, under the control of feminist activists, rather than agents whose independent experiences must be respected. Alcoff is correct that the oppressed often lack concepts with which to describe their suffering to themselves, and to motivate the dominant culture to heed and ameliorate that suffering. Yet this point ultimately comports with a Rortyan analysis. Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutic injustice, together with José Medina’s analysis of chained action, show how social progress generates new practices and new understandings, which then become available to the dominant culture for incorporation as knowledge. I also argue that: (1) languages don’t come ready‐made with a capacity to conceal or reveal pain; (2) we have no capacity to compare whole languages on their ability to conceal and reveal pain; and (3) improving our own language’s ability to reveal pain requires us to work within that language, while improving our practices. Ultimately, the purpose of feminism should be to “create” women rather than to “free” them, Rorty writes (1998, 213). Women shaped by an oppressive culture will not 437

Elizabeth Sperry

have found it easy to understand themselves as possessors of a fully creative and authoritative agency; thus they should “try to invent a reality of [their] own by selecting aspects of the world that lend themselves to the support of [their] judgment of the worthwhile life” (Rorty 1998, 216). Where women band together to create new ways of speaking, thinking, interpreting and practicing, they generate “semantic authority over themselves” (1998, 223). We are social creatures; thus authoritative self‐interpretations are forged only by “hear[ing] your own statements as part of a shared practice” (p. 223). 3.2.1  Fricker and Medina on Hermeneutic Injustice Rorty explains that when “only the language of the oppressor is available” then “the oppressed will sound crazy – even to themselves – if they describe themselves as oppressed” (1998, 203). This same idea is developed more fully in Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice. On Fricker’s view, hermeneutic injustice occurs when “relations of power … constrain women’s ability to understand their own experience” (2007, 147). “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice,” she writes, “is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction … of selfhood” (Fricker 2007, 168). Some persons inhabit structurally disadvantaged social locations that block access to improved ways of thinking about themselves, their situations, or their prospects. José Medina’s The Epistemology of Resistance builds on Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice. Medina introduces the concept of chained action, by which he means “the interconnected and mutually influencing actions that become chained in social networks and sometimes in social movements” (2012, 225). When acts of resistance are not simply isolated instances without repercussions, but they become the chained actions of individuals and groups linked through social networks, these acts of resistance become echoable, that is, they acquire a repeatable significance and, therefore, they are memorable, imitable, and have the potential to lead to social change. (Medina 2012, 225)

The consciousness‐raising groups of second wave feminism were chained actions, as was the Montgomery bus boycott. A person suffering hermeneutical injustice cannot escape her hermeneutic gap on her own; but by discussing her situation with similarly located others, and working with them to change people’s understandings and behaviors, she may generate new interpretive strategies for herself and others like her. How then to begin a chain? One must perform an act of resistance that is “echoable” (Medina 2012, 225) by others, and then encourage reverberations. 3.2.2  Responses to Alcoff ’s Critique 3.2.2.1  Need representationalism to  compare languages for  representational adequacy Is it true that we must compare languages’ representational adequacy? Is representationalism a prerequisite for choosing appropriately between “concubinage” and “sexual slavery”? Alcoff has misunderstood Rorty’s anti‐representationalism. Rorty stresses repeatedly that the real world exists and that we represent it nominalistically. Rorty writes that an “object can, given a prior agreement on a language game, cause us to 438

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

hold beliefs, but it cannot suggest beliefs for us to hold” (1991, 83). Our words do represent the world, but only in the modest sense that words are workable tools, and that competent speakers of our language understand what they indicate. Rorty does the very things that Alcoff criticizes him for failing to do: he advocates a minimalist representationalism. Perhaps Alcoff ’s most powerful criticism is that Rorty cannot call rape unjust, or say that some languages are superior revealers of oppression and suffering. Alcoff writes that “a language’s ability to conceal or reveal pain or cruelty constitutes an epistemically important distinction between languages” (Alcoff 2010, 142). But these points misunderstand Rorty too. Rorty would certainly endorse a woman’s claim that her rape was cruel and unjust. Within our language and our practices, sexual assault is wrong. We can refer to this injustice without being essentialists or metaphysicians, based on the standards in our culture. We endorse these standards so completely that we say they apply even where people do not have this standard themselves. Rorty would agree that it is ethnocentrically true that rape is wrong. What about Alcoff ’s insistence that we compare languages’ representational adequacy? She asks us to compare “a language that uses the term concubine to mean a lucky girl who gets chosen for the great honor of serving in the leader’s stable of women, and another language that uses the term sexual slavery to refer to the same set of practices. Is there no difference between these alternative descriptions that has anything to do with referring to reality?” (Alcoff 2010, 142). First, note that our language does contain both terms: “concubine” and “sexual slavery.” Thus, we are not actually comparing whole languages, but terms within our language. We cannot compare whole languages, since we inhabit our own language, and understand other languages only by interpreting them through that lens. There have been languages in other cultures that used the word “concubine,” but those are not our language, and we do not understand precisely how to use them. Second, consider the terms themselves. “Concubine” is a word in our language, even though it is not currently in widespread use. We can subject it to rhetorical analysis, just as Alcoff does in her essay. No metaphysics are required – nor does Alcoff use any – to make the case that “concubine” is a term that tends to occlude the experience of the woman so depicted. Third, even when we limit ourselves to comparing terms, “concubine” does not function directly to conceal or reveal pain. One might call a rock musician’s groupie a concubine; or one might use the word in jest. The meaning of “concubine” has changed over time, as have the associated practices. Today actual concubines are a rarity. What were the associated practices in days gone by when concubines were more common? Undoubtedly concubines suffered, and did so without being easily able to describe their suffering. They inhabited a hermeneutical gap. But were their lives very different from those of other women at the time? Historically, suffering was not the concubine’s unique lot; it was the lot of all women. Terms themselves do not conceal or reveal pain. Understanding the suffering of women in cultures that practiced concubinage requires anthropological analysis of those women’s lives, rather than analysis of the word “concubine.” Perhaps in such situations, girls removed from ordinary and pervasive scenes of substantial female suffering did consider their selection as concubines to be a stroke of comparative “luck.” 439

Elizabeth Sperry

3.2.2.2  “Better” is a contradiction  On Alcoff ’s interpretation of Rorty, his claim to be able to call some practices and concepts better than others is incoherent, because he denies that the eradication of oppression gets to the truth about humans and justice. Alcoff writes that for Rorty, “There is no uncovering, no ‘making visible,’ no improved fit between belief and social reality, only reinvention and recreation” (Alcoff 2010, 139). If we cannot improve the fit between belief and social reality, then our beliefs cannot be better. But as before, Rorty is comfortable holding that our language represents the world nominally. Thus we can distinguish between terms that fit our experience better, or worse. Furthermore, chained action can make oppression more visible, both to the oppressed and to their oppressors. As social action reveals suffering, it also provides opportunities for more people to fulfill their potential. Rorty would call any change that augments human flourishing a change for the better. 3.2.2.3  “Pain” not representational  Alcoff is troubled by Rorty’s inability to provide a representational criterion for “pain.” She explains that “what some identify as instances of cruelty are seen by others as the mere appearance of cruelty resulting from faulty and biased descriptions” (Alcoff 2010, 141). Rorty, along with Medina, would agree. Pain does not in fact always have a clear reference. Hermeneutic injustice may leave us only dimly aware of our own suffering, and only dimly experiencing that suffering. It is a losing strategy to try representing something whose conceptual and experiential status is vague and inchoate. Instead, we should work to fill those hermeneutic gaps, by inventing terms and practices that help the oppressed to understand their own experience, and by using chained action. As Fricker explains, women who were sexually harassed before the invention of that concept were “deeply troubled, confused, and isolated … unable to make sense of [their] ongoing mistreatment” (2007, 151). There is something like pain in those circumstances, but turmoil and self‐doubt without clarity are not quite full‐blown pain. Alcoff seeks a language that plainly conceals or reveals pain, but language alone does not have this ability. Rather, pain is concealed or revealed by our practices, psychological sensitivity, and collaborative action. In the case of “sexual harassment,” women worked together to invent both the term and a way of making sense of their experiences. 3.2.2.4  “Justice” discourse becomes power game  Finally, Alcoff worries that non‐representational social justice movements become nothing more than a power grab. She asks us to consider a woman who has been date raped but does not understand the true nature of her experience. When she begins to reconceive the assault as an assault, what has occurred? Alcoff asks, “what is the source, or the cause, of the woman’s subjective experience of being raped? Is the source of that experience a feminist suggestion of new language?” (2010, 151). If there are no representational truths concerning date rape, critics will say that feminist discourse makes women “into pawns in a social contest for cultural power” (p. 151). This objection overlooks an important fact, however: women who participate in the struggle to understand and remediate their experience are not pawns. They are participants in chained action, rather than passive recipients of interpretations foisted upon them by distant authorities. A woman who fights her way out of a hermeneutic gap, 440

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

and finds clarity in feminist concepts, has further developed her own moral agency. Additionally, date‐raped women who seek out feminist terms and analyses do so because they crave an end to their interpretive turmoil. Pursuing a reflective resolution of discomfort is not the behavior of a pawn. Alcoff is wrong to conclude that Rorty rejects a deflationary understanding of the way our words attach to reality. She is wrong as well to maintain that terms and whole languages can be compared for their ability to represent pain; that pain must have a clear‐cut reference; and that moral agency cannot be invented. Rorty’s writings had already made clear that socially marginalized persons cannot always understand what is being done to them, and that changes in our patterns of living are required to create the words and behaviors that will improve their lives. These points are made even more definitive when we draw on Miranda Fricker’s concept of hermeneutic injustice, and José Medina’s concept of chained action. Together, Rorty, Fricker, and Medina show how suffering becomes visible and moral agency is invented, without recourse to essentialism or creation ex nihilo. Rorty is criticized for not offering feminism any guidance, but I argue that feminism has the best guidance available: feminists. We also have access to Rorty’s work, which shows that current sexist practices are grounded only on “contingent historical fact” (Rorty 1993, 100) and are thus revisable. Processual reform can, over time, generate new practices whose outcomes are revolutionary, as we instantiate our theoretical values in an ever‐increasing number of concrete situations, thereby reducing human suffering.

Notes 1 “In addition to his unusual relationship to the discipline of philosophy, what distinguishes Rorty from the other giants of late twentieth‐century Anglo‐American (analytic) philosophy is his interest in, and serious engagement with, feminist theory” (Janack 2008, 32). 2 For discussion of the role of Rorty’s private‐public split in feminist thinking, see Erez (2013). For a response to the charge that Rorty’s ironism is elitist, see Dieleman (2010). 3 “The pragmatist … does not think that his views correspond to the nature of things,” writes Rorty (1991, 23). 4 Rorty does not claim that we evolve teleologically toward intrinsically better morality; nonetheless, he believes that more workable practices survive better than less workable practices. He also believes liberal democracies value the elimination of cruelty. Consequently, our society tends to select, over time, those practices that mitigate cruelty, as such practices better fit our conceptual environment. 5 “I always hoped that,” Rorty writes, “I would be able to cite chapter and verse to show [Kuhn] how much we had been preaching pretty much the same doctrine” (1999, 188). 6 See, for instance, Susan Bickford (1993) and Dorothy Leland (1988), both discussed in Susan Dieleman (2010). 7 Particularly given Rorty’s statement that “one can define the ideally liberal society as one in which this difference [between reform and revolution] is cancelled out.” But he then adds that “A liberal society is one whose ideals can be fulfilled by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution” (1989, 60). 8 A suggestion made by Susan Moller Okin (1987).

441

Elizabeth Sperry

9 “The political process was moving in the early 1970s, not swiftly enough for advocates of quick, complete change, but majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. Heavy‐ handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, conflict” (Ginsburg 1985). 10 A sample of the literally hundreds of relevant citations to be found in the literature: E. D. Hirsch (2008) argues that “people who think they are working to get closer to some truth … will get more productive work done than those who hold [an] … antirealist view.”

References Adams, John C. 2010. “Hope, Truth, and Rhetoric: Prophecy and Pragmatism in Service of Feminism’s Cause.” In Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, edited by Marianne Janack, 79–102. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2010. “Rorty’s Antirepresentationalism in the Context of Sexual Violence.” In Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, edited by Marianne Janack, 131–54. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Bickford, Susan. 1993. “Why We Listen to Lunatics: Antifoundational Theories and Feminist Politics.” Hypatia 8(2): 104–23. Dieleman, Susan. 2010. “Revisiting Rorty: Contributions to a Pragmatist Feminism.” Hypatia 25(4): 891–908. —. 2012. “Solving the Problem of Epistemic Exclusion.” In Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism, edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell‐Jones, 90–112. New York: Routledge. —. 2013. “The Contingent Status of Epistemic Norms.” In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics, edited by Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 31–48. New York: Bloomsbury. —. 2014. “Locating Rorty: Feminism and Poststructuralism, Experience and Language.” The Pluralist 9(3): 110–20. Dillon, Sam. 2005. “Harvard Chief Defends His Talk on Women.” The New York Times, January 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/18/us/harvard‐chief‐defends‐his‐talk‐on‐ women.html. Driver, Julia. 2012. “Constructivism and Feminism.” In Out from the Shadows: Analytical Feminist Contributions to Traditional Philosophy, edited by Sharon L. Crasnow and Anita M. Superson, 175–98. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erez, Lior. 2013. “Reconsidering Richard Rorty’s Private‐Public Distinction.” Humanities 2(2): 193–208. Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ginsburg, Ruth Bader. 1985. “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade.” North Carolina Law Review 62(2): 375–86. Hirsch, E. D. 2008. “Rorty and the Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” New Literary History 39(1): 35–52. James, William. 1907. “What Pragmatism Means.” In Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5116/5116‐h/5116‐h. htm#link2H_4_0004. Janack, Marianne. 2008. “To Philosophize or Not to Philosophize?” Ideas y Valores 57(138): 29–39. Kuhn, Thomas. 1957. The Copernican Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

442

The Contested Marriage of Rorty and Feminism

Leland, Dorothy. 1988. “Rorty on the Moral Concern of Philosophy: A Critique from a Feminist Point of View.” Praxis International 8(3): 273–83. Lovibond, Sabina. 1989. “Feminism and Postmodernism.” New Left Review 178: 5–25. —. 2010. “Feminism and Pragmatism: A Reply to Richard Rorty.” In Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, edited by Marianne Janack, 55–78. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 2008 [1848]. The Communist Manifesto, Introduction by David Harvey. London: Pluto Press. Medina, José. 2012. The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and Resistant Imaginations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okin, Susan Moller. 1987. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books. Quine, W. V. O. 1951. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review 60(1): 20–43. Renegar, Valerie R. and Stacey K. Sowards. 2003. “Liberal Irony, Rhetoric, and Feminist Thought: A Unifying Third Wave Feminist Theory.” Philosophy & Rhetoric 36(4): 330–52. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993. “Feminism, Ideology, and Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View.” Hypatia 8(2): 96–103. —. 1997. “Justice as a Larger Loyalty.” In Justice and Democracy: Cross‐Cultural Perspectives, edited by Ron Bontekoe and Marietta Stepaniants, 9–22. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2006. “Pragmatism as Anti‐Authoritarianism.” In A Companion to Pragmatism, edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, 257–66. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rorty, Richard, Derek Nystrom, and Kent Puckett. 2002. Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Warnke, Georgia. 2010. “Democracy and Interpretation.” In Feminist Interpretations of Richard Rorty, edited by Marianne Janack, 113–30. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

443

26 Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars? MOLLY B. FARNETH

Rorty’s best‐known contribution to debates about religion in public life appears in his 1994 essay, “Religion as Conversation‐stopper.” In that essay, Rorty argues that the introduction of religious premises into public discourse shuts down conversation. Given the importance of conversation in a democracy, he argues, religion ought to be kept out of the public square altogether; it ought to be privatized. Rorty identified this privatization with what he called the “happy, Jeffersonian compromise that the Enlightenment reached with the religious,” and he expressed his worry about what he saw as the breakdown of that compromise (Rorty 1999, 169). Here is the essay’s most famous line: “The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation‐stopper” (p. 171). While memorable for its polemics, “Religion as Conversation‐stopper” may capture Rorty at his least philosophically interesting. His characterization of religion, for one thing, seems to violate his commitment to nonessentialism. He says nothing about the diversity of religious traditions, beliefs, or practices that have informed democratic thought and action in the past, and nothing about the ways that such diversity might belie his claim that religion is conversation‐stopping. He assumes, moreover, that religion enters into public discourse only as an incorrigible assertion of one’s faith or knowledge of God’s will. Reading that essay, one wonders what Rorty makes of the words and deeds of theists such as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin Luther King, Jr.1 It is often suggested that Rorty changed his mind about religion in his later work. Certainly, his later essays acknowledge the criticisms of “Religion as Conversation‐ stopper,” and, as always, generously engage his critics. Rorty changes the target of his attack from religious people to religious organizations, and he distances himself from the label “atheist.” His criticism of religion, he clarifies, is not an ontological one – it does not rest on denial of God’s existence or agnosticism concerning God’s nature. Rather, it is a pragmatic and political claim. It pertains to whether religion does or does

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

444

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

not contribute to the struggle for social justice. Concluding that ecclesiastical organizations, which “accredit pastors” and “offer authoritative guidance to believers,” are too often on the wrong side of that struggle, Rorty comes to characterize his position as “anticlericalism” (2003, 141; see also Rorty 2005, 29–41). It is not clear, however, how substantive these changes turn out to be. Rorty continues to express the hope that ecclesiastical organizations will wither away and that religion will become ever more private. He also continues to make essentialist claims about what religion is and what its effects are. In “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration,” for instance, he writes that “we [secularists] grant that ecclesiastical organizations have sometimes been on the right side, but we think that the occasional Gustavo Gutierrez or Martin Luther King does not compensate for the ubiquitous Joseph Ratzingers and Jerry Falwells. History suggests to us that such organizations will always, on balance, do more harm than good” (Rorty 2003, 142; emphasis added). These organizations, Rorty further generalizes, “typically maintain their existence by deliberately creating ill‐will toward people who belong to other such organizations, and toward people whose behavior they presume to call immoral. They thereby create unnecessary human misery” (2003, 142). And in a talk at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in 2003, Rorty said bluntly that “non‐theists make better citizens of democratic societies than theists.”2 Rorty’s tendency to generalize about the dangers of religion in public life was shaped by the culture wars of the 1990s, the political and cultural struggle between liberal secularists and the religious right over issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Because each side in this struggle took itself to be arguing from unassailable principles unjustifiably rejected by its opponents, the battle lines hardened. Because each side explained its opponents’ commitments away as products of irrationality or turpitude, there appeared to be little point in exchanging reasons. Under these circumstances, Rorty concluded in 1992, upright citizens simply had to choose the correct side and hold their ground: I feel no need to be judicious and balanced in my attitude toward the two sides in this … culture war. I see the “orthodox” (the people who think that hounding gays out of the military promotes traditional family values) as the same honest, decent, blinkered, disastrous people who voted for Hitler in 1933. I see the “progressivists” as defining the only America I care about. (Rorty 1999, 16–17)

Here Rorty divides the United States into two ideologically opposed camps, locked in a struggle over the country’s future. He follows sociologist James Davison Hunter in referring to these two camps as the orthodox and the progressivists; elsewhere, he talks about theists and nontheists, or fundamentalists and relativists. In each case, rather than asking how people who disagree about religion, ethics, and politics might break through the impasses of the culture wars, Rorty stakes a claim with one side. His broad generalizations about the threats that religious people and organizations pose to democracy, along with his continuing insistence that we would all be better off if religion were to disappear altogether, seem more likely to perpetuate the culture wars than to move beyond them. Rorty’s philosophical views on epistemic practices and the social practical basis of authority, however, could have taken him in a different direction on matters related to 445

Molly B. Farneth

religion. In what follows, I offer a philosophical reconstruction of those views in order to make sense of Rorty’s anxieties about religion’s role in democratic life. The danger of religion, he thinks, lies in religious people’s tendency to appeal to nonhuman authorities and to make faith claims for which reasons cannot be offered. He believes that these supposed tendencies threaten the give‐and‐take of reasons among citizens engaged in democratic conversation, and, therefore, he concludes that it is best to exclude religion from these conversations. But, as I argue, these matters are more complex than Rorty lets on. The philosophical views just mentioned – on epistemic practices and the social practical basis of authority – can also be used to construct an approach to religious pluralism that is far more open‐ended and dialogical than the approach that Rorty chose to pursue.

1  The Public Square as Epistemic Arena Rorty believes that religious people and organizations often confuse what is public with what is private, and his secularism is rooted in this public–private distinction. But he often uses these categories of public and private ambiguously, making it difficult to know what, exactly, he means by them. In “Religion as Conversation‐stopper,” for example, Rorty suggests that religious premises ought to be excluded from public discourse because they are not the sorts of reasons that could be broadly agreed upon by the diverse members of a democracy. He endorses Rawls and Habermas’s efforts to identify the basis for a shared moral vocabulary or neutral rules of engagement according to which democratic conversations could proceed. But this nod to public reason turns out to be a red herring. Rorty later admits that such efforts are “pretty hopeless,” as is “the attempt to say that one or another contribution to political discourse is illegitimate” (2003, 146–7). The problem with the idea of public reason, Rorty writes, is that “there is no particular ground for believing that all reasonable and rational people will eventually come to agree on Rawls’s principles of justice, or on any ‘comprehensive philosophical or religious doctrine’” (2003, 144). Perhaps, then, Rorty means that religion ought to be private in the sense that it ought to be a matter of individual conscience alone, rather than a matter of social conventions like doctrine, liturgy, and communal worship. He cites, approvingly, Alfred North Whitehead’s notion that religion is a personal (and, in this sense, private) preoccupation, that it is “what we do with our solitude” (cited, for example, in Rorty 1999, 169). This seems somewhat closer to Rorty’s settled view, although it remains tautological: religion is private because it is what we do with our solitude. It is more illuminating to consider Rorty’s call for the privatization of religion in light of his broader view of epistemic practices. What Rorty calls the “public square” is not the space governed by public reason, or contrasted to the site of one’s solitude, per se, but any space in which truth‐claims are made and adjudicated. The public square, on this reading, is what Rorty later calls the “epistemic arena” (see e.g. Rorty 2005, 29–41). Rorty is famously critical of foundationalism and representationalism. Foundationalism is the notion that knowledge must stand on solid, incontrovertible ground; representationalism is the notion that claims or beliefs are true when they 446

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

r­ epresent or correspond to the way things really are in the world. Rorty argues that we ought to give up on foundationalism and representationalism and focus instead on what people do when they make truth‐claims. What we are doing, Rorty suggests, is submitting such claims to one another for judgment and endorsement. At its most facile, Rorty’s claim is that truth is what others “will let one get away with.” But the more philosophically sophisticated and satisfying point is this: human beings do not – cannot – have a God’s‐eye view of things. Our perspectives are partial and our commitments are marked by contingency. When we say what we believe or explain what we do, we begin to make these commitments explicit, to interrogate them for ourselves, and to try to convince others to accept them. Without saying that truth is merely a matter of convention, we might say that knowledge is a matter of justification – and that justification always takes place under inescapably particular social and historical conditions. Justifying one’s claims, therefore, is a social practice. It belongs to the intersubjective process by which people make claims about how things are or how they ought to be, and by which others challenge and evaluate those claims. Rorty’s former student Robert Brandom, echoing Wilfred Sellers, calls this “the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Rorty’s more colloquial term for this process is conversation, “the ultimate context in which knowledge is to be understood” (1979, 389). The epistemic arena, then, is not so much a physical space (a “public square”) as a set of social (and, on Rorty’s account, mainly linguistic) practices. Such practices are the metaphorical site where conversations happen. What ought to be excluded from the epistemic arena, on Rorty’s account, are one’s idiosyncratic loves – those things or people that one finds oneself committed to without being able to articulate reasons for one’s commitment. Among Rorty’s idiosyncratic loves are poetry and wild orchids. In his autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty describes his intense interest as a teenager in the native orchids that he found in the mountains of northern New Jersey. Rorty was fascinated with them, but as a child who believed that “the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice,” he worried that there was something suspicious about his obsession (1999, 6–7). Looking back, Rorty suggests that there was nothing untoward about his love of these “socially useless flowers” after all; his private loves were something altogether separate from his public commitments (1999, 7). He concludes that “there is no need to weave one’s personal equivalent of Trotsky and one’s personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one’s moral responsibilities to other people with one’s relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart and soul and mind” (Rorty 1999, 13). One’s love for orchids, like one’s devotion to writing poetry, is a private love. On Rorty’s account, one does not owe others reasons for believing that orchids are beautiful, or poetry life‐enriching. One is not responsible to others for these commitments in the epistemic arena. Such loves are important  –  perhaps the most important sources of meaning in one’s life – but they are not candidates for universal assent. They are not the stuff that adjudicable truth‐claims are made of; therefore, Rorty thinks, they are private rather than public. As Brandom characterizes Rorty’s view, “Public vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our answering to each other; private vocabularies articulate the norms that govern our each answering to ourselves” (2000a, 172). 447

Molly B. Farneth

Rorty thinks that religion is, or ought to be, a private love of this sort. When he insists in “Religion as Conversation‐stopper” that the privatization of religion is not the trivialization of religion, it is best to read him with this notion of privacy in mind. He writes that “our family or love lives are private, nonpolitical, and nontrivial … The search for private perfection, pursued by theists and atheists alike, is neither trivial nor, in a pluralist democracy, relevant to public policy” (Rorty 1999, 170). Rorty thinks that, in the end, there is no way to adjudicate the question of God’s existence. One’s belief or nonbelief in God is not the sort of thing for which reasons can be given or for which one can be held epistemically responsible. In fact, one does not owe others reasons for believing God worthy of worship. But that means that belief in, or worship of, God is out of place in the epistemic arena. Rorty’s call for the privatization of religion is a call for its withdrawal from the epistemic arena in which truth‐claims are made and evaluated. “The epistemic arena,” Rorty writes, “is a public space, a space from which religion can and should retreat” (2005, 36). It is worth asking whether Rorty’s public–private distinction holds, even in this revised form. Are our family lives, aesthetic pursuits, and religious commitments really non‐epistemic? In what sense? (One must wonder, too, about Rorty’s frequent inclusion of poetry in this category of “the private” – was Anna Akhmatova opting out of the epistemic arena? If not, was she trespassing in it?) It seems to me that the norms that govern one’s family life, sexual practices, creative work, and religious commitments are shaped by the ongoing conversation about what is and is not true or false, good or bad, right or wrong that Rorty delegates to the so‐called public square. Even if one cannot always give reasons for such commitments, shouldn’t a holist like Rorty acknowledge that one can only make sense of them in light of the other commitments one holds? Let us bracket these questions for the time being; I return to them below. If we understand the public square as the epistemic arena – the space in which truth‐claims are made and evaluated through practices of giving and asking for reasons  –  we might begin to see why Rorty is concerned about the kinds of claims that people make there. In fact, there are two moves that he thinks religious people have a tendency to make that undermine the social practices that sustain the epistemic arena: appeals to nonhuman authorities and faith claims for which reasons cannot be given.

2  The Social Practical Basis of Authority The intersubjective process of making and evaluating claims  –  what Rorty calls conversation  –  is central to democracy. For the state’s use of coercive power in the enforcement of the law to be just and democratic, it must track the interests of the people on whom this power is exercised. In a democracy, a good deal of interest‐tracking takes place in public debates and deliberations. People state their policy positions and argue for them, offering reasons why others should accept them. In these conversations, no one has a trump card or a veto; no position overrides or silences the others a priori. Rorty writes that “moral decisions that are to be enforced by a pluralist and democratic state’s monopoly of violence are best made by public discussion in which voices claiming to be God’s, or reason’s, or science’s, are put on a par with everybody else’s” (1999, 172). Although this appears in the same essay as Rorty’s endorsement of 448

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

Rawls and Habermas, this is not a public reason view of public discourse; it is an equal‐ voice view. This formulation does not entail the exclusion of voices claiming to be God’s, or reason’s, or science’s – it simply entails denial of a privileged position to such voices. It suggests that the exercise of state power must be justified through decision‐making processes that are inclusive and dialogical. These processes are the political correlate to the general epistemic processes described earlier. Whatever authority a person or an idea has in both democratic conversation and, more generally, the epistemic arena emerges from the social practices of the people engaged in these conversations. Authority, on this view, has a social practical basis. This means, first, that a person or idea has authority within a particular community insofar as it is recognized as having authority by the members of the community. All authority is recognized authority. Second, it means that the practices of recognizing such authority  –  that is, the practices that treat particular people and ideas as authoritative – are the source of that authority. As Brandom characterizes Rorty’s view: “any normative matter of epistemic authority or privilege – even the sort of authority exercised on what we say by what we talk about – is ultimately intelligible only in terms of social practices that involve implicitly recognizing or acknowledging such authority” (Brandom 2000a, 159).3 Brandom himself has developed this social practical view of authority in far more detail than Rorty, both in his magisterial work Making it Explicit and in his semantic interpretation of Hegel. As Brandom puts the point: “all matters of authority or privilege, in particular epistemic authority, are matters of social practice, and not objective matters of fact” (Brandom 1983, 389–90 quoted in Rorty 2002, 57). If I say that Scripture is authoritative, what I am saying is that I am committed to treating Scripture as having priority in determining my beliefs and actions. I am also making a claim about how other people ought to treat Scripture as a source of reasons for their own beliefs and actions. Rorty points out that such appeals to authority are no more than moves within the “game of giving and asking for reasons.” Moreover, if others do not share my judgment, Scripture turns out to lack the authority that I call upon in my appeal. Here is Rorty, in a sympathetic paraphrase of Brandom: As long as there is disagreement about what the purported authority says, the idea of “authority” is out of place. Only when the community decides to adopt one faith rather than another, or the court decides in favor of one side rather than another, or the scientific community in favor of one theory rather than another, does the idea of “authority” become applicable. The so‐called “authority” of anything other than the community (or some person or thing or expert culture authorized by the community to make decisions in its name) can only be more table‐thumping. (Rorty 2002, 59)

In the context of a diverse community, Rorty thinks, an appeal to the authority of a person or thing that is not already recognized by the community and its practices is nothing more than rhetorical effect. Rorty’s two main anxieties about religion come from his view of the social practical basis of authority. The first is his belief that religious people have a particular tendency to appeal to authorities outside of the community and its practices: “Most forms of theism entail acknowledgment of a non‐human authority, and such acknowledgment is incompatible with [the] … premise that agreement among human beings is the source 449

Molly B. Farneth

of all norms” (Rorty, in Springs et al. 2010, 420). On Rorty’s account, Enlightenment philosophy struck a death blow against religious claims of this sort. After the Enlightenment, the belief that authority could reside outside of human beings – in God or Scripture or revelation – should appear to us as an unjustified belief. Of course, Rorty would be happy to add that the same is true of appeals to nonreligious exogenous authorities – such as an empiricist’s appeal to the authority of the objective material world, or a Communist’s appeal to the authority of the Party. Rorty thinks that such claims are not only philosophically unsustainable, but also, and more importantly, bad for democratic conversation. Saying that one’s political views are informed by God’s will “is far more likely to end a conversation than start an argument” (Rorty 1999, 171). Rorty worries, for example, about the Christian who “says that his reason for opposing legislation that permits same‐sex marriage, or that repeals the anti‐sodomy laws, is his commitment to the belief that Scripture, and in particular, the familiar homophobic passages in Leviticus and in Paul trump all the arguments in favor of such legislation” (Rorty 2003, 143; emphasis added).4 On Rorty’s view, the appeal to the authority of God’s will is mere table‐thumping. But for the one who makes the appeal, he thinks, it is supposed to be a kind of trump card that effectively ends the discussion. What could be said in response to such an appeal? Such appeals, Rorty concludes, ought to be excluded from public discourse, at least by custom. There are moments when Rorty opens the door to democratic conversation with theists and seems poised to admit that the appeal to exogenous authority is not inherent to theism. He admires, for instance, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s kenotic theology, which reverses the pattern of authority that Rorty associates with religion. What is decisive for Christianity is not human beings’ supplication before God, Vattimo suggests, but God’s humbling of Godself. The kenosis is “the act in which God turned everything over to human beings” (Rorty 2005, 35). Whatever authority remains after God’s self‐empyting, according to Vattimo’s theology, rests in the hands of human beings. For both Vattimo and Rorty, the identification of God with self‐sacrificing love, rather than authority, ought to lead to the secularization of the epistemic arena. As in his earlier work on religion in public discourse, Rorty casts secularization as the removal of religion from the public square. He writes, “To say that religion should be privatized is to say that religious people are entitled, for certain purposes, to opt out of this game [of giving and asking for reasons]. They are entitled to disconnect their assertions from the network of socially acceptable inferences that provide justifications for making these assertions and draw practical consequences from having made them” (Rorty 2005, 37–8). Here Rorty runs together two related but distinct matters. One is the matter of appeals to authority just discussed. The other is the matter of claims based on faith. The latter is the basis of Rorty’s second anxiety about the relationship between religion and democracy. Recall his characterization of private loves as those things or people that one finds oneself committed to without being able to articulate reasons for one’s commitment. These loves involve faith. Brandom characterizes faith as “undertaking commitments without claiming corresponding entitlements” (2000b, 105).5 A faith claim is the assertion of a commitment for which one cannot provide evidence or reasons. Rorty assumes that religious people are particularly prone to making faith claims – and, further, that faith claims uttered in public break the rules of the democratic 450

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

political game of giving and asking for reasons by refusing to be held responsible for one’s commitments. He thinks that it would be best if people avoided making such claims in public. He writes, for instance, that “citizens of a democracy should try to put off invoking conversation‐stoppers as long as possible. We should do our best to keep the conversation going without citing unarguable first principles, either philosophical or religious” (Rorty 2003, 148–9). Faith does not belong in the epistemic arena; this is what Rorty means when he says in his engagement with Vattimo that “religious people are entitled to opt out of this game.” Yet the issue of faith and entitlement is more complex than Rorty lets on. First, it is important to note that not all claims with theological content are, strictly speaking, faith claims. When the Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that human rights are grounded in human worth, and that human worth is imbued in human beings by God’s worth‐bestowing love, his claim draws on the Christian theological tradition (see Wolterstorff 2008). He has plenty more to say, however, about why this way of thinking about human rights is superior to others and why other people ought to adopt his position. He gives reasons for this view of human rights, and he offers them in an attempt to convince others that this view is correct. Second, even those claims that are faith‐based are rarely conversation‐stopping in the way that Rorty assumes. When a person says that his stance on a controversial political issue is based on his faith in God or his reading of Scripture, someone who disagrees with him need not assume that there is nothing more to be said about the matter. She might enter into immanent critique, for example, pointing to places where the texts he cites seem to contradict one another or to be open to other interpretations. Or she might offer what she believes to be the best available evidence for alternate view, leaving it to the other to say how or why that alternative falls short. Third, to relegate commitments based on faith to the “private,” non‐epistemic sphere of one’s life is to shield them from plausible objections. Many commitments that are based on faith or love are commitments to which one is entitled by default until certain objections are raised against them. Once initially plausible objections are raised, however, one retains entitlement to them only if one can meet the objection. Brandom calls this the default‐and‐challenge structure of entitlement to commitments (see Brandom 1994, 176–8). Rorty was entitled to love the wild orchids by default. But if a trusted friend and comrade in the struggle for social justice had raised the question of whether he ought to devote so much attention to those flowers in the face of social injustice and suffering, he may have owed his comrade a reason for his commitment. As it happened, Rorty raised this objection against himself, worrying that “there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism” and searching for a philosophical view that would allow him to hold his commitment to social justice and his love for the wild orchids together. Similarly, if I were to join a religious community and adopt its beliefs, I may be entitled by default to hold them. If they turn out to entail a bad politics, however, my fellow citizens ought to hold me responsible for them. In such cases, to be entitled to a commitment by default does not entail the relegation of that commitment to a “private sphere” once and for all. Thinking about entitlement in this way radically contextualizes the distinction between the claims that do and do not require justification. It is not the case that commitments with one kind of content belong in the epistemic arena, whereas commitments 451

Molly B. Farneth

with another kind of content do not. The same commitment can begin with a default entitlement and then come to require justification; conversely, a commitment can initially require public justification and then later come to be one to which everyone is entitled by default. Which commitments we will end up having to justify to others – those for which we will be held responsible in the epistemic arena – will be determined by the challenges that are raised and the problems that arise, not on an a priori distinction between public concerns and private loves. Moreover, there is no way to shield some subset of one’s commitments – such as one’s stance on public policy matters – from the effects of contingency and arbitrariness. Faith commitments, loves, and moral intuitions permeate our outlooks holistically. When religion is not at issue, Rorty says a lot about the role of contingency and the possibility of arbitrariness in people’s commitments. Whatever knowledge we have, and whatever social progress we achieve, emerges out of a process in which we give voice and body to our commitments, interrogate them, ask what reasons we have might have for them, and determine which ones we ought to take on for ourselves in light of the other things we know and care about. The fact that we cannot give reasons for some of our commitments, at least initially, does not count against their inclusion in the intersubjective process of arguing over what is true, good, or right. Nor does it count against the process itself. Rorty writes: “We should stop opposing universal necessary truth and arbitrary preference, and say that no important decisions are made by an exercise of arbitrary power, no important decisions are made by an assured grounding in universal truth. We are all always somewhere in between” (2008, 27).

3  Religion and Democracy Beyond the Culture Wars In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel suggests that philosophy has overcome the main weakness of religion  –  namely, religion’s projection of authority into a transcendent Other. Philosophy, Hegel argues, now recognizes human beings as the loci of both authority and responsibility. For Hegel this is mainly a philosophical insight – a matter of bringing to self‐consciousness something that is already implicit in people’s practices (and, we might note, an insight that many contemporary theologians now share). Some of the most important of these practices, in fact, are the products of religious communities. The Christian sacrament of penance (confession and forgiveness) and kenotic sacrifice are, according to Hegel, models of the sorts of social practices required to sustain the epistemic arena. We confess the contingency and possibility of arbitrariness of our commitments, and we forgive one another for it, knowing that we are all marked by such contingency. We give up the pretense to a God’s‐eye view of things (see Farneth 2013, 2015; see also Farneth 2017). Rorty (who wrote that “for quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past” [2005, 11]) absorbed Hegel’s insight about the social practices through which norms, including norms about authority and justified knowledge, are generated and transformed. But he missed Hegel’s suggestion that 452

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

religious people and communities are already cultivating these social practices. On Hegel’s account, confession, forgiveness, and sacrifice for the sake of valued relationships are as important as the practices of giving and asking for reasons. Only when two people confess to and forgive one another the contingency and arbitrariness that enter into their beliefs and actions can those two people properly recognize one another as co‐equal loci of authority and responsibility (Hegel 2003, sects. 666–71). I share Rorty’s sense that the relationship among citizens in a democracy ought to be one in which each treats the other as a locus of authority and responsibility. But I take it that our responsibility to one another is not the responsibility to offer reasons for our commitments that we can reasonably expect others to accept, as in the idea of public reason – or even to be able to offer conclusive reasons for our commitments in all cases. Instead, our responsibility to one another is to acknowledge the contingency, and the possibility of arbitrariness, that marks our commitments – and then to move on with the process of giving and asking for reasons where we can, and reconciling when it is just and prudent to do so in the midst of ongoing disagreement. On this model, people can express whatever commitments they hold, including those that rest on faith or contingency; no one is expected to adopt a point of view that suppresses those things. In fact, only this messy process has a chance of dealing adequately with the effects of contingency and arbitrariness on our reasoning. Liberal secularists and representatives of the religious right each want to establish a public square in which certain appeals to authority and certain types of claims are taboo. Each tries to exclude the other, and thus fails to treat the other as a locus of authority. When Rorty calls himself a secularist, and when he says things like “non‐ theists make better citizens of democratic societies than theists,” he sounds an awful lot like a culture warrior. His frustration with appeals to the authority of God or Scripture, and with claims that rest on religious faith, leave him calling for the exclusion of r­ eligion from political discourse. But what if secularization meant something other than an ideological stance in favor of the construction of barriers to entry to a secular realm called the epistemic arena? What if it referred simply to the increasingly self‐conscious recognition of what is already implicit in the social practices of democratic conversation – the recognition that no position overrides or silences the others a priori? Someone who shares Rorty’s views on epistemic practices and the social practical basis of authority could part ways with Rorty on this point, recognizing the fact of this latter sense of secularization without endorsing the ideology of secularism. This way of thinking about secularization does away with the dubious public–private distinction on which Rorty’s secularism depends. It recognizes that the distinction between those commitments that require justification and those that do not depends, not on the kind of content that those commitments have, but on the challenges that arise in particular contexts. It opens the door for all kinds of voices, and all kinds of commitments, to enter into a democratic conversation about which beliefs, practices, and norms ought to be endorsed. If we want to know whether a democratic conversation will produce a just outcome, it seems better to look at folks’ social practices than to ask whether the right rules were in place at the outset. Once in a while, Rorty admits as much. In “Cultural Politics and Arguments for God,” he suggests that the rules of the game  –  which reasons count, 453

Molly B. Farneth

what premises are taken seriously, who or what has authority – are matters of cultural politics, always themselves part of the epistemic contest. He writes: When it comes to deciding whether actually existing churches in fact do such harm, things get complicated. The socio‐political history of the West in the last two‐hundred years is spotted with controversies such as those over Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the laicization of education in France, the Kulturkampf in Germany, and the current controversy in Turkey about female students wearing veils within university. Issues like these require different resolutions in different countries and different centuries. It would be absurd to suggest that there are universally valid norms that might be invoked to settle them. (Rorty 2002, 76)

Whatever norms we employ will need to be worked out in the process. And it is best to have the people whom those norms will constrain – religious and nonreligious citizens alike – recognizing one another as authorized and responsible participants in the process of making and evaluating them.

Notes 1 Jeffrey Stout and Nicholas Wolterstorff both raise this issue in their responses to Rorty’s “Religion as Conversation‐stopper.” Stout also directly addresses the matter of Rorty’s essentialism with respect to religion. See Jeffrey Stout (2004, 85–92, 2010) and Nicholas Wolterstorff (2003). 2 That talk, along with others given on that occasion, was transcribed by Jason Springs and published as: “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition” (Springs et al. 2010, 419). 3 Jeffrey Stout has a helpful discussion about how a pragmatist might also grant authority to God as a person with whom one is in relationship (see Stout 2010). 4 Rorty argues that religious people who make such claims “should be ashamed of themselves, and should be made to feel ashamed,” and he admits that the effect of this would be “pretty close to doing what Carter and Wolterstorff think should not be done: excluding certain appeals to religious conviction from the public square” (2003, 143). 5 Relatedly, on assertions that are not knowledge claims, see Brandom (1994, 227–9).

References Brandom, Robert B. 1983. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.” The Monist 66: 387–409. —. 1994. Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2000a. “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 156–82. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2000b. Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Farneth, Molly. 2013. “Gender and the Ethical Given: Human and Divine Law in Hegel’s Reading of the Antigone.” Journal of Religious Ethics 41(4): 643–67.

454

Rorty and Religion: Beyond the Culture Wars?

—. 2015. “Hegel’s Sacramental Politics: Confession, Forgiveness, and Absolute Spirit.” Journal of Religion 95(2): 183–97. —. 2017. Hegel’s Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 2003. Phenomenology of Spirit, rev. 2nd edn. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2002. “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God.” In Radical Interpretation in Religion, edited by Nancy K. Frankenberry, 53–77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2003. “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.” Journal of Religious Ethics 31(1): 141–9. —. 2005. “Anticlericalism and Atheism.” The Future of Religion, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Santiago Zabala, 29–41. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2008. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Springs, Jason, Cornel West, Richard Rorty, et al. 2010. “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78(2): 413–48. Stout, Jeffrey. 2004. Democracy and Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 2010. “Rorty on Religion and Politics.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 523–45. Chicago: Open Court. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2003. “An Engagement with Rorty.” Journal of Religious Ethics 31(1): 129–39. —. 2008. Justice: Rights and Wrongs. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

455

27 Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

1 Introduction Rorty took religion seriously. He considered it to be a historically constituted part of culture, though – as with any other cultural form – he could imagine human history without it. As a philosopher, he sought primarily to understand religion’s sociocultural nature and role. In his youth, he had even considered studying theology and later, when he first began teaching, he enthusiastically embarked on a course on the philosophy of religion, reading the work of Paul Tillich with his students (Gross 2008, 195). His left‐ wing family upbringing guided him toward atheism; nonetheless, he could not have been unaware of the role of his grandfather on his mother’s side, the influential American theologian Walter Rauschenbusch (whom, having died in 1918, Rorty never met). It was not until almost the very end of his life that Rorty acknowledged him in a short afterword to the centenary edition of Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis. As a “secular humanist,” he paid tribute to the social and moral legacy of the Social Gospel movement of which his grandfather was a leading proponent. For Rorty, this legacy was the struggle for a socially just society, like the “Kingdom of God” created here on Earth and in this life. The hopes that Christians and humanists had of such a society being created were to remain unfulfilled as developments unfolded in a completely different direction: One hundred years ago there was still a chance that the Christian church would play a central role in the struggle for social justice  –  that Christian, rather than Marxist, ideas would inspire radical sociopolitical change … against the backdrop of a consensus, in the West, that building a global egalitarian society was a moral obligation. With a bit of luck, Rauschenbusch’s dream could have come true, despite the “sinfulness of the human heart.” But our luck was bad, and Christianity has probably missed its chance. (Rorty 2007b, 349)

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

456

Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

The forms of religion that were on the ascendancy in the twentieth century, and which continue to evolve today, had, according to Rorty, “little to do with hopes for a cooperative commonwealth” (and nor would any of the communist forms of ideology lead to such a prospect). Here too, Platonism prevailed, diverting Christian attention away from solving the problems of this world and enabling a rather odd blend of ascetism and mammonism to emerge (Rorty 2007b, 347–8). Elsewhere Rorty describes how the two great prophecies  –  Christianity’s the New Testament and Marxism’s the Communist Party Manifesto – were never fulfilled, disappointing the hopes of the masses. Nevertheless, neither had lost its inspirational force as “expressions of the same hope: that someday we shall be willing and able to treat the needs of all human beings with the same kind of respect and consideration with which we treat the needs of those closest to us, those whom we love” (Rorty 1999, 202–3). Reading the first treatise teaches us about human fraternity, and the second about social equality; while reading both together helps us become better people, despite all the peripeteia and cataclysms that history has sent to test these two great tracts.

2  Rorty’s General Approach These two examples testify to the fact that Rorty’s approach to religion was sociocritical, intellectually sympathetic, and humanistic. His was the attitude of an intellectual, a philosopher, who reflected deeply on these issues. Hence, the main thrust of his intellectual critique was linked to the very reason he criticized western philosophy: its ambition – much like that of the metaphysical and theological traditions, varying only in the paths they followed – was to seek out a nonhuman (divine) buttress which would shore up human fate such that it would be safeguarded. Rorty’s beliefs, from his humanism to his anthropocentrism, were, however, philosophical convictions on which humankind depends, just as the individuals in a society depend on one another for cooperation and support. Hence, they are only responsible for one another. There is not sufficient reason or even evidence to support supernaturalism, and any religious or theological vocabulary containing this term is simply one of our sociocultural creations. The fundamental question then is – as it is in the case of the philosophical vocabularies – what purpose do they serve and what benefits do they bring? Rorty’s pragmatic antifoundationalism and his antiauthoritarianism could not but take a critical view of a human culture created by an authority conferred with a superhuman and super‐ historical status. His attitude was deeply democratic and tolerant, emphasizing that culture was fundamentally about conversing broadly and freely on all issues. His intentions were therapeutic, not only in regard to philosophy but also to culture as a whole, insofar as they were concerned with eliminating archaic vocabularies and ways of life that lead to unnecessary cruelty between people. Thus it is better when philosophy and other forms of culture inspire rather than simply discipline, control and punish. Culture’s humanistic mission is that we should become better, freer, more responsible and more creative citizens of democratic society. We are beings who cannot simply step outside our culture and history, and thus escape time, chance, and all that shapes our human destiny. Worst of all, according to Rorty, would be to shirk the responsibility for shaping our own lives. Seen from this perspective, all practices, regardless of form or 457

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

content, are problematic; what are important are the consequences they have on our lives. To avoid responsibility is to avoid humanity. That pragmatism and religion are compatible has been clear since the classicists began developing this philosophy. For Peirce religion is an expression of “evolutionary love,” while for James it is an expression of pluralism and meliorism. According to Dewey, it is an expression of respect for something that transcends us, and for Rorty it is an expression of social hope (Rosenbaum 2003). Rorty’s interest in attitudes to religion is not epistemic (as it is in relation to knowledge) but is political, moral, and cultural – his interest is in religion as a doctrine seeking to inspire and mobilize people to create good, both of an individual and collective nature. Although this function of religion may well now seem out of date and old‐fashioned, Rorty cannot entirely see what could replace it – certainly not science, perhaps art – and so a better approach would be to reform it so it is compatible with the nature of a democratic culture. It is from this democratic culture perspective that he interprets the phenomenon of religion. Rorty’s conception of religion evolved partly in relation to the kinds of issues he was discussing. During phase one (the 1990s), he was primarily interested in whether, in a democratic society, religion should simply be a private matter or also one of public concern (and if so, then in what way and to what extent). During phase two (post‐2000), his thinking on cultural politics developed more broadly, and he wrote about “romantic polytheism” and the future of religion, and so on. In his writing from phase one, he portrays himself as a “secular humanist” as well as an atheist and, in his writing from phase two, as a “nontheist” and “anti‐clericalist.”

3  Conversation Stopper Metaphysics blocks our openness to things new. It is the equivalent of denying freedom and responsibility. The search for a definitive metaphysics blocks change and innovation, and inquiry and conversation. At the same time, “normalizing” this kind of discourse “freezes” culture, which, for Rorty, is the equivalent of dehumanizing people. It arises out of an ambition for transcendence, the desire to immortalize one discourse as the only rightful one that fully corresponds to reality as it should. The type of discourse – philosophical, scientific, political, or religious – is unimportant since it will always have dehumanizing consequences. It turns the person into a subservient “part” and only recognizes its own values. For Rorty, most depressingly of all, it risks preventing the possibility that human life can be lived as poetic self‐creation. Central to this self‐creation is free conversation. This is the hermeneutic backdrop to the position that led him to his first reflections on religion. The first piece of writing he published on this theme was an article entitled “Religion as Conversation‐stopper” (Rorty 1999, 168–74). In it he defended the classical Jeffersonian idea he had previously discussed: that religion has no place in the public sphere since it may – owing to its nature – create unnecessary difficulties for human coexistence, trigger conflicts and controversies, do harm, be a source of cruelty and, chiefly – given its categorical dogmas – block discussion, seek to close down rather than expand debates not subsumed within its doctrines, and so forth. If the essence of 458

Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

democracy is to ensure that everyone in the public sphere has an opportunity to express themselves and prevent unnecessary conflict or even harm or cruelty, then it is better if religious faith is “banished” to the private sphere where it will be freer to pursue its role in the search for meaning in people’s lives, enabling their self‐development, supporting them in life’s difficult situations, and so on. It is clear that Rorty’s position was unable to reconcile religion’s entitlement to access the public sphere with its desire to influence people’s public and private good  –  not through violence  –  as his grandfather, Rauschenbusch, had done before him. His position is, equally clearly, influenced by the Enlightenment attitudes of the secular intellectual, which, in seeking to advance the modernization of society, subsequently usurped the whole of the public sphere. When Rorty argues against the American professor of law, S. L. Carter, at whose behest he penned the article, and stated that it would be better for religion if each person were to “privatize” it, since it could then be used to pursue the goals of personal development and solace, he is still unaware of the untenability of his argument. A secular defense of democracy that comes at the price of excluding religious believers is just as poor a defense as the witch‐burning carried out by fanatical believers that predated the ascendancy of secular modernity. It assumes – as John Dewey had grasped and rejected – that religion and its followers are the a priori enemies of democracy, and that there can be no tolerant, empathetic people amidst their number. That is not the case. Rorty’s arguments as to why religion should not gain access to the public sphere can be summarized thus: (1) religion is best suited to the search for and creation of personal happiness in private lives; (2) its categorical dogmas mean religion is a threat to the continuation of the conversation that lies at the heart of democratic public life; and (3) religion is not a source of moral knowledge, as its followers claim, but simply a conviction that is just as subjective as all other moral convictions (Rorty 1999, 171–3).

4  Faith, Responsibility, and Romance Rorty submitted further arguments in favor of his utilitarian, Enlightenment conception of religion in a second piece entitled “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance” (Rorty 1999, 148–67). These arguments emerged as he was interpreting W. James’s key work‚ “The Will to Believe.” The interpretation differs from his previous one and is influenced by Davidson with whom Rorty is in agreement when he talks about responsibility in relation to other human beings rather than in relation to “Truth and Meaning” (Rorty 1999, 148). Although he attempts to draw on James’s strategy of privatizing religious faith, ultimately he encounters its limits and does not adopt it fully. He begins by establishing the difference between religion and science, which leads him to the idea that if religion is “something done in privacy,” it cannot inflict damage on science or other cultural matters. The main distinction generally drawn between science and religion is that science has to justify its claims while religion does not. While both James and Rorty accept this, it leads them to an entirely different conclusion from the standard Enlightenment one, which is basically the maxim of a scientistic culture: that anything that cannot justify its claim, either rationally or empirically, is fundamentally at doubt. James and Rorty (and others) reject this rationalist, 459

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

scientistic, Enlightenment maxim, ultimately, justifying religion on a different basis. Not on the basis of conviction as is the case with knowledge but on desire as is the case with life; its function is not to control the world but to offer hope for life. By positioning them one against the other or one above the other, we create a dualism with negative consequences (Rorty 1999, 152–3). It is a false dualism that posits the cognitive against the noncognitive, and the rational against the emotional, implying that, on the one hand, we have science with its pursuit of truth and, on the other, religion (and other cultural forms, such as philosophy and art) with its pursuit of happiness. Positioning one against the other, or subordinating one to the other, is unlikely to lead to anything other than unhappiness. Rorty disagreed with James over this, who thought that the search for truth could also be a search for happiness (Rorty 1999, 155). Rorty, however, never doubted that James’s entire philosophy came down on the side of happiness – on the side of romance, which had no need to justify itself to the other rationalist side, requiring only protection from it and the space for self‐realization. James’s “will to believe” also comes down firmly on this side, as does Rorty.

5  Religion in the Public Square In his third piece of writing in this vein entitled “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration” (Rorty, 2003), and in response to work by his fellow philosophers and theologians (particularly N. Wolterstorff), Rorty refines his conception of religion to one that consider it a private matter. He explains that when understood in this way, religion is basically the consequence of a compromise between secular democratic government and the clergy, clearly dating back to the Enlightenment era. His reflections lead him to consider it better to advance this compromise than to preserve it, although not at the highest level of the church but at the lower end – in the parishes – in support of local democracy (Rorty 2003, 141–2). Thus he shifts the problem from the level of doctrine to that of institution, defending the political idea that democracy has the right to protect itself against the possible dangers of upheaval (Rorty, 2003, 147). Nonetheless, he broadens his conception of doctrine and free debate when he accepts that people of a religious persuasion may enter into public and political debate and freely present their arguments just as liberals do, without being regulated by liberal legislation. This does not apply to public opinion, morals, and customs, where a more sensitive response is required, when, for example, an individual arguing on religious grounds causes distress or harm or is cruel to homosexuals (Rorty 2003, 143). If religious supporters and activists acquire the freedom to present their views in the public sphere, the same rules apply to them as do to all participants. They are responsible for ensuring that they do not inflict malice or cover it up (Rorty cites the Jewish pogroms as an example). Thus if religious believers possess and desire a democratic instinct, then they themselves must learn and accept the rules of democracy. Then there will be no reason to protest against their participation in public debate. Rorty concludes his liberalized approach with a very strong antiauthoritarian message: those who decide to engage in democratic conversation cannot argue their case by appealing to an authority, regardless of whom or what that authority may be – the Bible or J. S. Mill. The rules of democracy require us to justify our position not cite an authority (Rorty 2003, 148). 460

Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

6  Romantic Polytheism In phase two of his reflections on religion, Rorty came closer to accepting that religion had a sociocultural role. The first piece of writing in which he did so was “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” (Rorty 1998). Although his primary concern was to defend his new pragmatism, he did so by describing pragmatism’s proximity to romanticism, and religion’s proximity to poetry and the thinking of Mill, James, and Nietzsche. In short, he unveiled the basis of his pragmatist philosophy of religion to which he had alluded in previous writing (Rorty 1998, 27–9): (1) if beliefs are habits of action rather than representations of the world, they need not form a single integral whole, since the goals of actions are varied and require a variety of beliefs; (2) if there is no point in having a will to truth independent of the drive for happiness, then contrasting the cognitive with the noncognitive and the serious with the nonserious becomes a pointless exercise; (3) if science and law are primarily used in the project of social cooperation, then art and religion can be used in the project of individual self‐development; (4) if what has traditionally been referred to as the “love of truth” is more love of intersubjective agreement, it cannot be used to argue against religion, which is equally concerned with responsibility to others through social cooperation; and (5) if the traditional love of truth is a way of seeking a single great authority upon which one can depend, then when it acts as a barrier to human fraternity, it is a betrayal of that very ideal. Rorty thought “Polytheism” seemed to provide a good, pluralistic “bridge” between the atheists, nontheists and theists in contemporary modern culture. The Christian notion around which they could integrate was human fraternity. Pragmatist philosophers such as James and Dewey developed a nontheistic idea which was compatible with the notion of human fraternity: antiauthoritarianism, which rejects the notion that people should bow down to a nonhuman authority (Rorty 1998, 31–3). Logically then, the only possible authority is people themselves, providing they recognize each other as equal “brothers” who know their lives will only be as good as they can make them together. How we create our lives together is also about how we use language and talk about the world and one another. These are our “cultural politics,” and in his analysis entitled “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God” (Rorty 2007a, 3–26), Rorty considers it to be central to the way we conceive of and practice religion. He concludes that cultural politics is everything that we do in society; hence all our sociocultural practices – both linguistic and nonlinguistic – are political because it is through them that we shape our conditions and way of life. We define the possibilities, that is, what we can and cannot do, as well as what we actually do. If this is the case, then the dualism of science and politics, or of philosophy and politics, becomes a little shaky under foot because neither the ontological question “what exists?” nor the theological question “does God exist?” can be answered without recourse to our sociocultural practices including linguistic ones. Equally we cannot resolve the consequences of our response to the question “does God exist?” without using further practices, for instance, by formulating behavioral norms in linguistic terms; hence, “if God exists, you must obey him,” and “to obey God means following the Ten Commandments,” and so on. A social norm is only one of the sociocultural forms created and sanctioned by authorities; institutions are another, and a third is the way we speak. For example, if we establish a 461

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

discourse in society about God or about science, rationality or morality, and so on, in such a way that users of the discourse are advantaged over nonusers (those who do not talk about God), we create a particular type of sociocultural situation, a life to which we either conform or do not. Altering this would mean altering the discourse; that is, our sociocultural practices, both linguistic and nonlinguistic (another interesting question concerns the order in which we would alter them).

7  Cultural Politics Here, Rorty relies on the theory of social practices developed by his former student R. Brandom, for whom this analysis is self‐referential: Brandom (and also Rorty) states that everything we do, including science and religion, is simply sociocultural practice fulfilling the role of cultural politics, based not on empirical evidence but on the recognition that this theory of sociocultural practices (including conceptions of norms, institutions, authorities, etc.) is simply yet another part of our cultural politics. From this perspective, in this “game” called “cultural politics” – the “only game in town” – all that scientists, priests, judges, and other participants do is make decisions based on their opinions of the subject and the consequences of their actions such that, in one way or another, others recognize that decision, that is, it is approved, agreed, complied with, and carried out, and so on (Rorty 2007a, 9). Brandom (and also Rorty) states that we cannot disengage from the game because we cannot step out of our community, culture, language, and so on. If that is the case, then it is the goals of the game being pursued that are the deciding factor. If some of the participants of this game establish and develop a discussion in which they speak of God, Truth, Reality, and so on, as nonhuman authorities (“revealed,” “given, not created by people”), then it is necessary to look at the goals that they are pursuing through the use of these linguistic practices. These goals are very familiar from history and so is the game: some people seek to ensure their social power is backed up by a greater nonhuman (superhuman) force which others no longer have the ability to oppose. To achieve this they employ two basic methods (or a combination thereof): violence and persuasion. Rorty came to believe that, thanks to the discursive practice of cultural politics, the power of discourse, sustained by the way we talk about the world and ourselves, is equivalent to what traditional representationalist philosophy calls the “truth”: what the prevailing discourse recognizes to be the truth. Changing it would mean changing the discourse (Rorty 2007a, 10–11). In other words, it would mean changing what we say and how we say it as well as how we behave and live in the world. People create many different discourses or “language games” and compete (“fight”) over which one will gain traction. Some have shown that some discourses “make no sense” (for example, discourses on God, knowledge, etc.) because they do not fit into their language games. Others have demonstrated that those who do not recognize their discourses (for example, discourses on God, knowledge, etc.) are “mistaken and understand nothing,” because they assume that it is possible to step away from these discursive games and demonstrate one’s truth by comparing discourses with “reality” (empirically, scientifically, practically, etc.). Cultural politics enables us to create a world in which mixed‐race marriages, for instance, are accepted or, equally, a world in 462

Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

which believing in God or in the existence of consciousness is accepted because neither can claim a higher level of proof in experience or in reality. What one discourse considers to be unacceptable and impossible, another takes to be the opposite (Rorty 2007a, 13–14). For us humans, there is no “neutral” point beyond us from which we could make “neutral” decisions about which discourse is better, which is worse, which is true and which is not, and so on. We have to decide all this “according to ourselves,” that is, “subjectively,” on the basis of our goals, needs, and interests, and any such “neutral point” of which we might speak is simply an artifact, just like all the other things with which we seek to compare it (for example, discourses about God, consciousness, etc.). From a cultural politics perspective, all the things we talk about are “on the same level,” in the sense that they are just different forms of discourses, linguistic practices, and games, and none is any more privileged than another simply because it is “ontological” and the other not or because it is “theological” and the other not, and so on. There is no exception – not even what we refer to as the “object” of our investigation or activity; even that is the result of our social practices (Rorty 2007a, 15). So, before we even begin to “solve” ontological or theological questions, we would do better to ask other questions: “Is it good to discuss ontological or theological questions?,” “What is it good for?,” “Why do we need to discuss these?” and “Don’t we know how to discuss things differently?” And even if we provide meaningful, positive answers to these questions that does not mean that our answers will be valid for all eternity. For cultural politics is historical, and nothing exists beyond it that would once and for all pin down one particular answer which could only be the result of a specific practice (politics). If such a thing were possible, it would mean setting in stone a specific practice (politics) in its historical form for all “eternity” or what is known as the “end of history.” Changes in cultural practices take place through changes in cultural politics in the space that W. Sellars called the “logical space of reasons”; however, this space also creates cultural politics. It is not a closed circle, though, because history  –  and indeed progress  –  exists and is manifest within this change when people with imaginations appear (“strong poets”), capable of innovating our discourse such that others accept it. Rorty comes to see that our discourses also contain “bad questions,” not because we are not capable of formulating them linguistically or of talking about them, but because we have not created a “logical space of reasons,” rational norms we could use to create meaningful answers. One such question is “Does God exist?” (Rorty 2007a, 21). Language makes it possible for us to formulate questions which we, as people, have no possibility of answering. What does this mean? For the anti‐metaphysicians, it means having to look at the way we use language; for metaphysicians, it is a mystery and perhaps also proof of our “higher essence,” of which we have only a mystical awareness. For the anti‐metaphysicians group, it means that it may be better to substitute discussions on these kinds of questions with other, more rational, comprehensible ones; for the metaphysicians, it means continuing to have mystical discussions. For the anti‐ metaphysicians, it also means that language is a human creation that cannot contain anything mystical in it; for the metaphysicians, it also means that people and language are mystical enigmas that we ourselves are not capable of understanding or explaining. Our choice of discourse (language games, linguistic practices, cultural politics) and the reasons we choose it are linked to “how we understand ourselves,” which simply means 463

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

we interpret ourselves according to the particular discourse we have adopted. Yet decisions about what language games to play, what to talk about and what not to talk about, and for what purposes, are not made on the basis of agreed‐upon criteria. Cultural politics is the least norm‐governed human activity. It is the site of generational revolt, and thus the growing point of culture  –  the place where traditions and norms are all up for grabs at once. (Rorty 2007a, 21)

The substance of cultural politics is a discussion on the kinds of “logical spaces of reasons” that we create and the purposes for which we create them (Rorty 2007a, 22). Just as we create these spaces socioculturally, their boundaries and internal coordinates shape our traditions and norms as the established parts of our discourses, or the institutions established thus far as part of our extralinguistic practices. There is no other “mystique” behind our discourses. None of the “objects” of our discourses – God, atom, or state – shapes our discourses such that they dictate the manner in which we should talk about them. If anything dictates this to us, then it is the discourses themselves and some of the structural elements that we have embedded in them (traditions, norms, institutions). The problems arise when, for example, we mix different types of discourses together and especially when we cause internal norms of one type to illegitimately “transgress” into another (scientific norms into philosophical ones, etc.). Rorty suggests that instead of asking the ontological question about the existence of God, we should ask about the cultural desirability and usefulness of a discourse on God (Rorty 2007a, 24–5). He again distinguishes between private and public discourse. Private discourse includes, for example, James’s “right to believe,” which seems to be indisputable and comparable to the right to create poetry, paint pictures, and so forth. A good liberal society creates sufficient space for these. There are limits, though, to public discourse in a liberal society, as established by J. S. Mill: ecclesiastical organizations may engage in public discourse so long as they do not cause public harm. However, things become complicated when we come to consider what constitutes this harm and who decides (Rorty 2007a, 25). In a democratic society this is again simply a democratic discussion on the kinds of issues Rorty was keen to promote more than a discussion on the existence of God, since it is about human happiness. The cultural community in question has to decide how to resolve these issues; there is no universal human recipe. Each, though, is concerned to maintain a balance between responsibility to itself and to others (Rorty 2007a, 26).

8  On the Future of Religion In a chapter entitled “Anticlericalism and Atheism” (Rorty 2005, 29–42), Rorty formulates a more personal stance on religion. He begins by pointing out that in the future philosophers may no longer pose these “bad questions” based on notions of “timelessness” (and the ahistorical nature of philosophy itself). Their predecessors are the twentieth‐century anti‐essentialists such as Derrida, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. In part this will lead to the conflict between science and religion being reduced to what can 464

Rorty’s Philosophy of Religion

and cannot be rationally justified; to a greater tolerance among atheists and believers, and also philosophers and non‐philosophers without the philosophers considering the non‐philosophers to be intellectually or morally inferior and vice versa (Rorty 2005, 30–1). It paints a picture of a better, freer, post‐metaphysical culture. The idea that atheists are simply those who believe that God’s existence has not been empirically proven is becoming clearer and more generally accepted, while many have already grasped what Hume and Kant had already stated: that empiricism is irrelevant in proving whether God exists or not (Rorty 2005, 32). Other “nontheists” are the “anti‐ clericalists,” as Rorty now refers to himself (Rorty 2005, 40). This is not an epistemological nor a metaphysical attitude but a political one. Anticlericalism is the view that ecclesiastical institutions, despite all the good they do – despite all the comfort they provide to those in need or despair –are dangerous to the health of democratic societies. (Rorty 2005, 33)

Again Rorty does not see the political risks as emanating from the religious doctrines but from their institutions, should they, through their activities, begin disrupting the democratic society that makes their tolerated existence possible but also requires them to uphold the democratic culture. In such a culture, however, religion’s existence is not contingent upon these institutions; it can easily exist in the private sphere in a form that G. Vattimo (Rorty and Vattimo 2005), who is close to Rorty on this, refers to as “weak faith,” one that is not based on the concept of truth or any other epistemological or “symbolic” foundation, nor indeed on a power base. Its only foundation is love (Rorty 2005, 35). There are further issues relating to knowledge and truth and the legitimacy of religion. If religion is something other than knowledge, and the knowledge sphere in modern society is the public sphere, then religion has no place within it. This does not, however, mean that the entire public sphere of knowledge should be occupied by what Heidegger called “science and technics,” that is, the natural and technical sciences rooted in the rationality and objectivity paradigm. If, however, the rationality sphere is understood to be a “logical space of reasons” and if, instead of objectivity we talk of intersubjective agreement, then we create a sociocultural space, based on non‐epistemological foundations, that can include religion (Rorty 2005, 36–7). It is founded on love, clearly part of the private sphere; yet as utopians neither Vattimo nor Rorty can quite shrug off the hope that some day, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination‐free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of ­temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well‐educated electorate. (Rorty 2005, 40)

Here Rorty is expressing the utopian hope that “love” will prevail as “the only law” in society, rather than in the family or in any other private sphere. He considers this to be more important than endlessly discussing what does and what does not exist, not just for the future of religion but for the future of humankind as well. He views the transitions 465

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ

from a metaphysical culture to a post‐metaphysical secular culture and from a Christian “God of power” to a “God of love” as two parallel processes (Rorty, Vattimo, and Zabala, 2005, 56).

Acknowledgment This work was supported by the research grant GA15‐19968S – Spirituality and Health among Adolescents and Adults in the Czech Republic, GAČR, Czech Science Foundation, Czech Republic.

References Gross, N. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. 1998. “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.” In The Revival of Pragmatism, edited by M. Dickstein, 22–36. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmonsworth, UK: Penguin Books. —. 2003. “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.” Journal of Religious Ethics 31(1): 141–9. —. 2005. “Anticlericalism and Atheism.” In The Future of Religion, R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, edited by S. Zabala, 29–42. New York: Columbia University Press. —. 2007a. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2007b. “Afterword: Buds that never Opened.” In Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classics that Woke up the Church, edited by P. Rauschenbusch, 347–50. New York: HarperCollins. Rorty, R. and G. Vattimo. 2005. The Future of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Rorty, R., G. Vattimo, and S. Zabala. 2005. “What is Religion’s Future after Metaphysics?” In The Future of Religion, R. Rorty and G. Vattimo, edited by S. Zabala, 55–81. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosenbaum, S., ed. 2003. Pragmatism and Religion. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

466

28 Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃSKI

1 Introduction In this chapter, we examine Richard Rorty’s understanding of what it means to be an intellectual in the particular light of his interest in, and influence on, Central Europe. It is clear from his writings that he wished to be the kind of intellectual who not only reads (and writes) a lot of books, but who, most of all, cares for what is important in human life: freedom, solidarity, and social hope. And, he did achieve this. He became not only an idiosyncratic private intellectual who indulges in beloved “wild orchids” of philosophical imagination, but is also a compassionate public intellectual who finds his own way on the Leftist track to social usefulness. Rorty’s conception of an intellectual forms an inherent part of his political philosophy and ethics. It is closely related to a wide range of concepts such as social responsibility, the public/private split, the irony/solidarity distinction, progress, social hope, and so on. But, it is also a part of his philosophy of education, in particular higher education, and connects with his idea of the role of humanities in the academy and culture. Even more broadly, it is a part of his controversial conception of “cultural politics,” and a basic part of his metaphilosophy because it concerns his understanding of the role of philosophy in culture, society, and politics. Intellectuals for him play a crucial role in social life; and he provides a redescription with respect to traditional conceptions of that role.

2  Richard Rorty in Czechoslovakia It is common knowledge that, as an intellectual, Rorty developed a deep concern about various parts of the world in which important political, social, and cultural upheavals were taking place. These ranged from the former communist countries such as

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

467

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

Czechoslovakia,1 Hungary, and Poland, to, for example, Austria.2 For Rorty, the anticommunist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe served as laboratories for the crucial political role of intellectuals, in which, for instance, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia “best fulfill(ed) the intellectual’s hope to act together with the workers  –  of students and workers successfully joining forces to overthrow tyrants” (Rorty 1992, 10–11). Even though he had little sympathy with Husserlian phenomenology, Rorty reviewed the volume of Jan Patočka’s selected writings enthusiastically. This collection was published in English, along with two other volumes published in French. Patočka was Husserl’s student, but later came under Heidegger’s influence, and was perhaps the most important Czechoslovak philosopher as well as being the spiritual guru of Prague anticommunist dissidents (see Kohák 1989).3 Patočka (1990 [1952]) developed his own original version of phenomenology, which he dubbed as “negative Platonism,” attempting a reconciliation between Husserl and Heidegger. In this conception, Patočka reads Plato, whom he considers the primary secular intellectual root of all European culture, “negatively,” that is anti‐metaphysically. Rorty therefore reads Patočka, although he is a phenomenologist, because he sees Patočka as his close ally and also for a number of other reasons. First, Patočka rejected his pre‐World War II teacher Husserl’s idea of philosophy as the highest, strict, and neutral science whose goal is an absolute knowledge. Second, Patočka also rejected his post‐World War II hero Heidegger for his loss of hope in humanity. Third, Patočka lived his philosophy through his personal life as a Socratic hero in his own search for happiness. And fourth, above all, Patočka came to see the role and meaning of philosophy as residing within this search for happiness in a community, thereby associating it with the life of “harmonious and happy community,”4 rather than defining it in terms of pure knowledge. This, however, does not mean that Patočka turned pragmatist, for, along with Heidegger, he despised pragmatism as a non‐philosophy, which deserves to be completely ignored. Even so, we may surmise that if Patočka turned pragmatist or had at least not ignored pragmatism completely, he could have gotten completely rid of his Platonism and metaphysics instead of preserving them in the ethics realm, which he came to understand as the most important for human life. He could not imagine anything less than the “unconditional validity” of the moral principles of a community if it is to survive at all. The greatest horror for Patočka, for his followers (like Havel), and also for nearly all Central European intellectuals, even these days, has been relativism, which they equate with unlimited cynicism and ironism. And, even worse, they see it as eventually causing no less than the “total self‐destruction of philosophy and science” (see Blecha 2007, 41). But, Patočka can still be regarded as special in the sense that he did not try to ground his “moral metaphysics” of unconditional moral obligation in his metaphysics of the objective order of things. Nonetheless, as a non‐pragmatist, he was unable to provide the specific historically conditioned arguments for his account of moral choices. Another important Central European intellectual whose words and deeds attracted Rorty’s attention was Václav Havel.5 Rorty was an admirer of Havel6 from the outset for his civic courage and intellectual brilliance, but nevertheless expressed reservations as to both Havel’s way of using words and practicing politics. First, he was suspicious about the quasi‐metaphysical, absolutist (although post‐totalitarian) vocabulary in which Havel articulated his ideas in his famous address to the US Congress on February 468

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

21, 1990. Rorty considered this vocabulary, from the point of view of an English‐ speaking intellectual, to be either obsolete or the sign of unnecessary “overphilosophication of politics.”7 Rorty called for “banalization” of political vocabulary which for him meant to stop using bombastic ideological phrases as well as potentially manipulative false promises like “ending of all oppression” and “Expropriation of the Expropriators,” which Marxists‐Leninists used in order to promise a “Communist Heaven on Earth. Politics for Rorty, as a Deweyan, is neither a promise‐making and fulfilling activity nor a “scientific prognostication” of what is necessarily to come, but a realistic problem‐solving activity, one which gives people a genuine hope that they are moving step by step toward something which is better today than it was yesterday and which will be better tomorrow than it is today. And, here lies the second concern Rorty expressed with respect to Havel. Rorty’s position was that the function of the intellectual’s critique of existing institutions needs to be reformist rather than radical (Rorty 1992, 5–6). Havel appeared to him to be a radical whose dream was an “existential revolution” which would conjure up a “fully redeemed social order” and a “truly human” being, and so forth. This perception was based on Havel’s slogan of “living in the truth” as opposed to “living in the delusion,” which along with Havel’s followers’ slogan of “living in love” as opposed to “living in hatred,” had apparently magical political effects in turning the anticommunist (and also antisocialist and pro‐capitalist) revolution in former Czechoslovakia into the “velvet” revolution. But this, even for Rorty, the utopian, sounded too much like a form of “quasi‐Heideggerian talk” substituted for Marxian talk, when he felt both needed to be discarded. There was, however, a third aspect of Havel’s “intellectual politics,” which Rorty did not (and could not) follow quite closely. This is the problem of the “fate of intellectuals” when they end up, as Havel did, in politics and become “professional” politicians.8 In 1992, Rorty just hinted, when referring to E. Kohák’s paper in Dissent, at the problem of what Havel, who appeared at the beginning as a socialist, would end up doing if he “remains in office for a decade.” For then, “he is likely to find himself struggling to reverse trends toward inequality that the return to capitalism will produce,” and will be forced to cope with “an ethic of greed” (Rorty1992, 2). Rorty’s hope at the time was that Havel would be able to handle all this and contribute to constructing something like “welfare capitalism with a human face.”9 Havel stayed in office as the president until 2003 (that is, for more than 10 years) but his legacy is not as clean as might have been expected (it included, for instance, his support of G. W. Bush and the Iraq war, and his invention of the term “humanitarian bombarding”). Notwithstanding such qualms, democracy was for Havel the most effective political weapon in abolishing the old communist regime. But, in the end what it resulted in was that (1) democracy turned out to be the political and ideological “mask” for the restoration of capitalism in Czechoslovakia, (2) it served as a cover for corruption, and (3) the political reality of democracy undermined its status as a political ideal. Havel must have been aware of all this. Until his death in December 2011, he remained disgusted with politics as such and attempted to return to the role of “cultural intellectual” which he had performed as a dissident from the 1960s until the 1980s. Thus there are not only radical Leftists like Slavoj Žižek who speak of “Havel’s tragedy” but also Czech intellectuals such as Václav Bělohradský,10 the former student of Patočka 469

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

and a friend of Havel as well as a great admirer and follower of Rorty, who, on the occasion of Havel’s demise, said that he will be remembered mostly for his utopian idea of living in the truth. However, Havel’s tragedy can be seen in his blindness, and even inability, to resist corrupted and destructive political forces (e.g. NATO). Bělohradský recently has claimed that “truth and love has nothing to do with politics”11 and did not hesitate to use the terms “moral kitsch” and “political naïvity” with regard to Havel. Even the Truth does not protect us from evil and cannot save us from the destructive role that politics may exert on human life. It might be a heavy price to pay for the intellectual (as well as for anybody else) when motivated to enter practical politics. This was not an option for Rorty with his infamous claim that “democracy has priority over philosophy.” Thus, as in other parts of the world, it was Richard Rorty who inspired the first impulses to popularize pragmatism again in the former Czechoslovakia (which split in 1993). Many translations from his works started to appear in both Czech and Slovak,12 including his magnum opus13 and a selection from his Philosophy and Social Hope.14

3  Richard Rorty in Hungary The reception of new philosophical ideas is always determined by the actual condition of the intellectual culture and philosophy of the given country or community and their historical heritage. Hungary, as a Central European country, was strongly linked to German culture for centuries in a variety of forms. Its historical development was politically and socially influenced by the German empire from the Middle Ages onward. Within this geographical, political, and historical framework the fate of the Habsburg dynasty closely affected Hungarian progress from the end of the seventeenth century, especially between 1867 and 1918 when Hungary was part of the Austro‐Hungarian monarchy. Anglo‐Saxon influence became more significant only after World War I, but it never took proper hold, even after World War II during the so‐called socialist, “Cold War” era, because of the dominant influence of Moscow. Sometimes described as the “happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” Hungary was a relatively good place to live after the 1956 revolution, but any real orientation to the West, together with philosophical pluralism became possible only after the regime change of 1989. This sociohistorical determination had inevitably impressed its effects on the newly formed and institutionalized Hungarian philosophical life by the end of the nineteenth century. Its main representatives were educated within Continental culture, and they became mostly followers of the philosophy of Kant, classical German idealism, and neo‐ Kantianism. After World War II, Marxist‐Leninist ideology and “philosophy” became dominant in Hungary, remaining until the regime change in 1989. The student movements and social reforms of the 1960s, connected to the newly born hippie, beat, and rock movements, increasingly influenced Hungarian youth, with the influence of the Western philosophical culture becoming ever stronger. However, this development was only possible in a forbidden and persecuted form until the middle of the 1980s. Although the Kádár‐regime and its “Goulash Communism” was more forgiving than the Rákosi‐ regime in the 1950s, the political and ideological boundaries remained rigid. This was an informal agreement between the people and those in power: “Enjoy these new, small 470

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

economic and political possibilities, but do not speak about the ‘56 revolution, do not listen to Radio Free Europe and do not look behind the iron curtain!” Hungarian philosophical life after 1945 was determined for a long time, essentially until 1973, by Georg Lukács and the Budapest School whose members, Ágnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, Georg Márkus, and Mihály Vajda were mostly from among the earlier students or colleagues of Lukács himself. Members of the newer generations could look further afield when the members of the Budapest School, except Mihály Vajda, emigrated. Western philosophy, for example “life‐philosophy” or existentialism, became part of the curriculum only in the middle of the 1980s, but even then only with Marxist references in the literature and titles of these academic classes. The translations of the contemporary works of Western philosophy could only be published later, that is, after the decisive year of 1989. Consequently, coming from this background, representatives of Hungarian philosophy usually do not like pragmatism. Focusing on the essential relationships, it seems that the strong metaphysical orientation of traditional Continental philosophy, on the one hand, and the ideological engagements of the Marxist tradition, on the other hand, did not make it easy to accept pragmatism in Hungary, since it is a philosophy oriented toward naturalism, practice, and democracy. The fact that members of the younger generations were attracted to Western philosophy in the middle 1980s meant that the analytic and cognitive movements, not pragmatism, were their focus. Traditional pragmatism first influenced Hungary in the field of educational theory through the works of John Dewey and Sidney Hook. However, Richard Rorty, as the founder of neopragmatism, captivated some members of the newer philosophical generations from the second half of the 1990s. This was not only the result of Rorty’s analytically clear and fascinating style, but also the consequence of Rorty’s familiarity with both American and European philosophy and culture. The decisive point is that many European philosophers have influenced, positively and negatively, Rorty’s philosophy: Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Derrida, and so on. Thus, his philosophy was connected not only to classical, but also to contemporary European philosophy. Although Rorty several times called Dewey his “philosophical hero,” he actually followed Dewey’s general vision, not his philosophy to the letter. At the same time, it is clear that Rorty carried out the modernization of classical pragmatism, first by applying the so‐called linguistic turn to it. While experience had the central role in James and Dewey, Rorty replaced experience with language; and, it might be argued, Rorty overestimated the role of language, which resulted in a one‐sided textualism and in the unreasonable neglect of experience (see Shusterman 1997, 157–79; 2012, 166–96). János Boros, a philosophy professor at the University of Pécs invited Richard Rorty to Hungary. Boros, the founder of the Doctoral School of Philosophy in Pécs, and his wife, Jolan Orban, a lecturer in the Modern History and Literary Theory Department and the Doctoral School of Philosophy, first met Rorty in Vienna in 1993. Rorty invited them to the University of Virginia for the 1994–5 academic years to study American pragmatism. János Boros recollects: The idea of international philosophical conferences was born during our academic year in  Virginia in 1994–1995, and Richard Rorty had a decisive role in the creation of

471

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

i­nstitutionalizing these conferences. With his direct and indirect support we could invite not only many significant contemporary philosophers from the biggest universities of America and Europe to Pécs, but several of our doctoral students could study for months, even semesters, in the US and Western‐European countries. Although, we feel that we were not able to be thankful enough, his e‐mail of May 10th, 2007, shows that his visits in Pécs also meant a lot for him. (Rorty memorial)

It is notable that the University of Pécs was one of the most important locations for Rorty in Eastern Europe, perhaps in all of Europe, since he became involved in its academic philosophical life. It was in Pécs, in particular, that he gave lectures in four different years. This is the extract from his e‐mail of May 10, 2007, to János Boros: “Mary and I are very grateful to you and Jolan for your kindness and hospitality over the years. Your repeated invitations to Pécs have made a real difference to our lives. I’m very sorry that they will not be repeated” (Rorty memorial). Richard Rorty first visited Hungary in 1995, when he gave a lecture at the University of Pécs. In 2000, he was awarded a doctor honoris causa in Pécs and in 2001 and 2004 he delivered many lectures not only in Pécs but also in Budapest at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He became a professor in Pécs’s Doctoral School of Philosophy from 2002 onward. Even though Rorty was not involved in the day‐to‐day teaching, János Boros organized different courses on his philosophy in conjunction with him. In the fall semester the graduate students read his works and subsequently presented their commentaries at a conference at the end of the spring semester, in which he also participated. Such conferences were held in 2001 and 2004. In 2000, Rorty also took part in the conference on philosophy of his former PhD student, Robert Brandom; he chaired a section himself, gave a lecture, and took an active part in the discussions. On May 3–5, 2004, he gave special public lectures in Pécs titled: “Universalist Grandeur, Romantic Profundity, Humanist Finitude”; “Analytic Philosophy and Narrative Philosophy”; and “The Brain as Hardware, Culture as Software.” Later on May 6, he gave a lecture at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest titled “Is Truth Correspondence to Reality?  –  Putnam, Pragmatism, and Parmenides.” In 2005, the Doctoral School in Pécs organized a summer school focused on the Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Rorty was not able to be there, but he helped to put together the material and supervised the results. All concerned had hoped to continue the collaboration, but after Rorty’s demise in 2007 János Boros could only manage to hold an international conference on May 13–14th, 2008, in Pécs devoted to his philosophy and memory titled “Richard Rorty’s Philosophical Legacy,” where, among others, both Brandom and McDowell also took part. Since the political regime change after 1989, Hungarian philosophy has been developing along pluralistic lines. As a consequence, different reactions and interpretations of Rorty’s philosophy appeared among Hungarian philosophers. Moreover, not only philosophers, but political scientists, literary critics, and sociologists have offered reflections on Rorty’s work, and their interpretations have been extremely diverse. Rorty’s theory of democracy has become especially influential. Hungarian intellectuals understood clearly that modern political and social democracy is not at all perfect. We can recognize many negative features, from the decline of culture into civilization as 472

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

depicted by Spengler, to the revolt of the masses as described by Ortega, the culture industry as projected by Adorno, and the critique of the social order as conceived by Foucault, and many more. But it would be difficult to deny some of the positive features, including (a) that this kind of mass democracy reduces much social suffering and pain caused by nature and society and that it compensates for the remaining old and the new social constrains; (b) that it can be considered as the best socioeconomic formation as there is none other actually functioning in a better way; and (c) that it is the best one, because it involves also the possibility of its own development, which means that it might become even better in the future. On the basis of his historical experiences and related theoretical considerations, Rorty was an astute believer in Western democracy. In his view, history is also contingent on a par with contingencies of language, self, community, and so on. Something similar is happening in politics, because it is clear to the supporters and representatives of Western democracies that ideological and political vocabularies change from time to time. According to Rorty’s philosophy, we should understand that if we want to retain democracy, we have to insist on certain principles and demand that institutions use these principles, regarding them as historical guidelines. However, we can also recognize, again thanks to Rorty, that the choice to build these political principles on moral values and principles is not a fortunate one for two reasons: (a) these values will break down in the first, serious social crisis and (b) there is a theoretically unbridgeable gap between the generality of moral values or principles and particular situations of concrete decisions and actions, and this always makes it difficult to apply them (as we know, Aristotle proposed to solve these problems with the aid of phronesis). That is why it is much better to build democracy on procedural rules, structures, and institutions that have already been proven in practice and accepted by the majority of people. These procedures, structures, and institutions will always be filled with particular political and ideological content by actual participants of the political and ideological arenas. Such claims are in line with Rorty’s views on the relationship between democracy and philosophy. He was convinced that democracy is more important than any philosophy, even his own (see “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” in Rorty 1991b) and thus it is not only unnecessary to create an ultimate philosophical foundation for democracy, but also impossible. As he had put it: The moral of the anti−foundationalist sermon I have been preaching to you is that for countries that have not undergone the secularization that was the most important effect of the European Enlightenment, or that are only now seeing the emergence of constitutional government, the history of Western philosophy is not a particularly profitable area of study. The history of the successes and failures of various social experiments in various countries is much more profitable. If we anti−foundationalists are right, the attempt to place society on a philosophical foundation should be replaced by the attempt to learn from the historical record. (Rorty 2007, 9)

Richard Rorty has influenced the philosophical advancement of many Hungarian intellectuals not only through his philosophical ideas, but also through his friendly and supportive personal approach. János Boros has become a leading Rortian scholar who, in opposition to the former political regime, studied philosophy in Switzerland, France, 473

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

Germany, and the United States. He later became the chair of the Philosophy Department and the head of the Doctoral School of Philosophy in Pécs and wrote, in Hungarian, two books on pragmatism and Rorty (Boros 1998, 2000); in addition he translated several of Rorty’s books and articles into Hungarian.15 We must also note that several PhD students and young colleagues have become followers of Rorty’s neopragmatism. Some of them became explicit Rortians (see Danka 2011a, 2011b; Pápay 2011; and one of the authors [Krémer] of this chapter as well); but there are many more, and those interested in social and political philosophy especially have learned a great deal from him. Even though the more positive reactions have tended to prevail, this does not mean that there were no critical voices addressing Rorty’s philosophy. Among the critics is Ágnes Heller, who had known Rorty for decades when she taught philosophy at the New School in New York, agreed with Rorty’s humanism and democratic views at the Pécs conference in 2004, but criticized him on the basis of some subtle distinctions pertaining to the history of philosophy. István M. Fehér, who spent the academic year 1992–3 with Rorty as a Fulbright fellow, approaches his neopragmatism within the context of Continental traditions and attempts to integrate it with hermeneutics (see Fehér 2013). In doing so, he provides a well‐balanced interpretation of Rorty’s dialogue with several key representatives of European philosophical tradition from Kant through Sartre and Heidegger to Gadamer. Last but not least, there are the representatives of the Central European Pragmatist Forum (www.cepf.sk/), Miklós Nyírö and Sándor (Alexander) Krémer, who have recently influenced the reception of Rorty in Hungary in some significant ways and promoted the Hungarian reception of pragmatism. In addition to presenting lectures at the CEPF conferences and publishing papers in Pragmatism Today (www.pragmatismtoday.eu), Nyírö organized a conference on Rorty at the University of Miskolc in 2008 and went on to publish the proceedings (see e.g. Nyírö 2010). Krémer has also presented several lectures on Rorty’s philosophy in English and in Hungarian at different conferences (see e.g. www. https://www.cepf.sk/index.php?id=archiv; www.pragmatismtoday.eu). He organized the CEPF conference at the University of Szeged in 2006 (see https://www. cepf.sk/index.php?id=archiv) and edited an online volume on Rorty’s philosophy, “The Roots of Rorty’s Philosophy” (Krémer 2011). Krémer also conducted an interview with Rorty in Palo Alto in December 2005, which was later published in both English and Hungarian (Krémer and Ryder 2009). It is beyond question that we have learned a lot from Rorty not only about philosophy and democracy, but also concerning morality.16 Richard Rorty, as a Left‐wing, democratic intellectual, has certainly changed our thinking about ourselves and the world.

4  Richard Rorty in Poland Although Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism had well been known to Polish philosophers since its nascence in the 1980s, it is only recently that it has gained some sympathy from them. And these days, the process of a critical reception is slowly becoming a form of creative development for Rorty’s ideas. The Polish philosophers’ backgrounds, which was predominantly classical, metaphysical, essentialist, foundational, objectivist, and 474

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

Catholic, was initially a major factor in their lack of sympathy for not just neopragmatism, but pragmatism in general. The other factor seems to be the Poles’ experience of totalitarianisms, both Nazi and communist. For Rorty’s sense of individual freedom, his melioristic optimism, and his notion of solidarity could be anticipated yet still be regarded as risky and even untenable in the long run. The relativity, contingency, irony, and dialogue involved in neopragmatism would hardly seem to be applicable in any struggle against oppression. Such struggle against a totalitarian system only makes sense when the fighters know indisputably that there are some definite, if not objective, borderlines which make it possible for them to distinguish right from wrong and good from evil. Certainly, this seems to have been the common attitude of three most famous and most influential Polish philosophers of the twentieth century: Leszek Kołakowski (1927–2009), Zygmunt Bauman (1925–), and Karol Wojtyła, now known as John Paul II (1920–2005). Kołakowski (then at All Souls College, Oxford), met Rorty in person during a discussion in Warsaw (1995) with J. Habermas and other thinkers, of which the volume Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski (1996) is a report of sorts. Kołakowski explicitly claims that “the pragmatist interpretation might have undesirable cultural consequences” (Kołakowski 1996, 57) because it does not clearly recognize the definite limits of the relativity of descriptions and narratives, so that the status of such prescriptions as, for example, “Do not torture people” may be similar to the status of such norms as, for example, “Keep the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right one” (1996, 56). The dispute with Rorty showed that Kołakowski stressed theoretical concerns, whereas Rorty emphasized the role of a practical approach. Rorty does not seem to believe that the theoretical level of philosophical discussion is needed nearly as much as the philosophical practice of implementing ideas to ameliorate society, step by step, in the direction of an increasingly humane coexistence. In his response to Kołakowski, Rorty states the following: “the overall project of free societies – the project of occupying the democratic vistas – is not a well‐defined social practice, any more than is writing or reading poems or falling in love. (These latter may of course be made into well‐defined, criteria‐governed practices, but then we get bad poems and unhappy marriages.)” (Rorty 1996, 60). A similarly critical tone toward the ideas of pragmatism (without, however, evoking Rorty’s name) could be heard from John Paul II, previously a professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of Lublin, who specialized in the objectivist ethics and axiology of German phenomenology. In Fides et Ratio (Faith and reason) he criticizes pragmatism in general: “No less dangerous is pragmatism, an attitude of mind which, in making its choices, precludes theoretical considerations or judgments based on ethical principles” (John Paul II 1998, sect. 89). The Pontiff even accuses pragmatists of uncritical promotion of democracy: “In particular there is growing support for a concept of democracy which is not grounded upon any reference to unchanging values” (sect. 89). As a result, he continues, we have “a one‐dimensional vision of the human being, a vision which excludes the great ethical dilemmas and the existential analyses of the meaning of suffering and sacrifice, of life and death” (sect. 89). However, the criticisms from the followers of an “essentialist” and “foundationalist” philosophy, as Rorty might have put it, do not mean that Rorty was automatically ­welcomed by the followers of anti‐essentialist philosophy. One of the most influential 475

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

articulators of postmodernism and the idea of “liquid time,” Zygmunt Bauman, perhaps most known to the international audience for his Legislators and Interpreters (1987), accuses Rorty of unoriginality and incompletion of his philosophical project, and puts him among “legislators” rather than “interpreters.” Bauman refuses to see any originality in Rorty’s neopragmatism or modern pragmatism as he calls it: If Borges was right when he said (of Kafka) that every great writer creates his own predecessors, and if this rule extends to great schools of thought, then modern pragmatism, particularly in its most recent version proposed by Rorty, may well render Mercenne and Gassendi its spiritual ancestors. Without ever using the term, they did articulate a “crisis management” strategy which implied all the assumptions and tactical suggestions of modern pragmatism. (Bauman 1987, 86)

More importantly, however, Bauman claims that Rorty’s neopragmatism fails to break enough ties with the philosophies that he himself accused of the essentialism of ethical norms, and for elevating rationalism onto the level of the privileged way of universal communication (as did most Philosophers, with the capital “P” he criticized). Bauman claims that Rorty cultivates the role of the Western intellectualist in a similar way as those philosophers, whom he himself criticized, tried to do for centuries: “Rorty is quite outspoken about the purpose of this willingness to talk, to listen to people, to weigh the consequences of our action upon other people, and suggests that it is the proper subject‐matter for philosophy: its purpose is to continue the conversation which is unmistakably our project, the European intellectual’s way of life” (Bauman 1987, 144–5). In other words, Rorty rearranges the form of philosophizing, and leaves the substance unchanged: he still belongs to the camp of “legislators,” that is those who hoped to provide others with universal answers rather than “interpreters,” whose works are deprived of any hope for finding out any answers of this type. Moreover, Bauman puts Rorty within the constraints of the academic culture along with its own limitations and dependencies: “Rorty’s anti‐strategy seems to fit very well the autonomy and the institutionally encouraged concern of academic philosophy with is self‐ reproduction. Until further cuts, that is” (Bauman 1987, 197–8). A sympathetic voice from Poland can be found in the Library of Living Philosophers series dedicated to Rorty (2010). Andrzej Szahaj, in “The Limits of Interpretative Anarchy: Rorty, Eco, and Fish,” defends Rorty against Umberto Eco (and other critics) regarding discussion on interpretative objectivity or the acceptable scope of the interpretation of a given text. Szahaj rejects accusations that Rorty promotes an anarchy of interpretations, despite saying the following: “There does not exist any internal coherence to the test, awaiting recognition through the act of interpretation” (Szahaj 2010, 397). Namely, Rorty’s texts have an unlimited number of interpretations under the condition that these interpretations convey not private fantasies, but rather some cultural message that is intercommunicative and acceptable to given audiences: these interpretations should refer “to the cultural competence of some cultural community” (Szahaj 2010, 404). Szahaj seems to be the most vocal promoter of Rorty’s neopragmatism in Poland. He invited Rorty to visit Poland in 1992 and 2001, and edited a volume providing the discussion from the seminar in Toruń, “Between Pragmatism and Postmodernism” in Polish (Szahaj 1995). In his own book written in Polish Irony and 476

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

Love: Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism and the Postmodernism Controversy (Szahaj 1996, 2nd edn. 2002), he appreciated Rorty’s neopragmatism as a paradigmatic model of postmodernist philosophy. Interestingly, in the same year, there appeared another book (in English) by Marek Kwiek, devoted to “to European connections of Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism”: (Kwiek 1996, 7), entitled Rorty’s Elective Affinities: The New Pragmatism and Postmodern Thought. The book contains a solid presentation of Rorty’s main ideas (self‐creation, literature, recontextualization, political philosophy), his background (anti‐Platonism, Hegel’s presence in Rorty), and offers wide confrontational perspective on postmodernists, such as J. Derrida, M. Foucault, J. F. Lyotard, Z. Bauman, and others. In 2003, a volume titled Community and Irony: Richard Rorty and His Vision of Liberal Society (in Polish) by Magdalena Żardecka‐Nowak was published. In it, she analyzed Rorty’s views on society and culture from the perspective of such thinkers as J. Habermas, I. Berlin, L. Kołakowski, and others. According to her, it is easier to attack Rorty for his idea of ethnocentrism rather than relativism because of his readiness to strongly defend given views, even if not grounded in some objective basis (see Żardecka‐Nowak 2003, 44–5). Two more recent studies include a book (written in Polish in 2012) by Tadeusz Szubka, Neopragmatism, which has three chapters devoted to Rorty (apart from those devoted to H. Putnam and R. Brendom). The author assesses neopragmatism from the perspective of analytical philosophy and gives an account of Rorty’s metaphilosophy: “The main aim of philosophy, therefore, is not to find solutions to a certain set of problems and to seek consensus, but to continue iconoclastic conversation and to propose wide‐ranging narratives which have transformative effects on their readers” (Szubka 2012, 319). Krzysztof Piotr Skowroński, the author of those remarks, in his book (in English) Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism: Studies, Polemics, Interpretations (2015), develops Rorty’s ideas on themes such as humanism, cinematic philosophy, redescription within the philosophy of economics, and other areas. It should be added that all Rorty’s major works have been translated into Polish (https://www.cepf.sk/index.php?id=archiv). But, let me just conclude by mentioning two eminent Rortian scholars of Polish origin: Konstantin Kolenda who was the author of the first book on Rorty (Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism, 1990) and Alan Malachowski who has become a leading international expert on Rorty and a prolific editor of interpretations of Rorty.

5 Conclusion Richard Rorty was an “intellectual provocateur,” and he was more than content with such a label. He took the “middle” position between his critics on the Left and the Right, as he rightly told us in his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and Wild Orchids.” He also liked to describe himself as a “Socratic intermediary between various discourses” (Rorty 1979, 317) or an “intellectual bricoleur.” He should have been well prepared for such a role coming from a family that belonged to the famous New York group of intellectuals. He should not be closely identified with any of his three main philosophical heroes, not with Dewey as a public intellectual, Heidegger as a philosophical poet, nor Wittgenstein 477

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

as a philosophical therapist. He was rather a combination of all three in one. And, indeed, much more, for he was simply “The Edifier,” urging a new paradigm for intellectuals. When we ask the question, why – if at all – the issue of being and defining the role of an intellectual was so important to him, the answer could well be the following: everything Rorty did was influenced by his metaphilosophy, that is, his conception of philosophy and of what philosophers should do today in order to be useful for their fellow citizens and also for themselves personally. This is how he came to be a pragmatist, nauseated with those analytic thinkers who put philosophy on the supposedly safe scientific path to what he regarded as intellectual suicide. The key reference point in philosophy for Rorty was simply human life. He did not wish to judge philosophy based on what it contributes to science, knowledge, truth, or philosophical wisdom itself. He judged it according to its meaning for human life and its betterment. Even though Rorty’s philosophy has not transformed our intellectual culture in a way as he wished, and it even has not transformed our philosophical culture yet, I would like to express my hope that the process of transformation he has ignited is already on its way. And that it is going in the direction that he expressed in his intellectual autobiography written just a few months before his demise: So I hope that the intellectuals of the West, a millennium or so hence, will have as little interest in the question of whether there are absolutes as they now have in the true name of God. In such a culture, issues about “realism” and about “relativism” will no longer intrigue people like my teen‐age self. Many fewer footnotes to Plato and Kant will be written. […] Even if that happens there will still be philosophy, because there will still be cultural politics. As long as there is intellectual freedom there will be people who want an overview of culture in which they grew up, because doing so helps them sketch the outlines of a better culture. “Philosophy” is as good a name as any for the attempt to get such an overview, and “cultural politics” as good a name as any for the attempt to create a change in the intellectual world. (Rorty 2010, 21–3)

Notes 1 Apart from being in correspondence with several Czechoslovak intellectuals, he visited Prague shortly in July 1981 to lecture at the dissidents’ so‐called home seminars under the old regime (see Day 1999, 286), arranged officially by the Jan Hus Foundation. He further visited Prague in 2002 for the conference. He was also invited to the conference on Robert Brandom held in Prague in April 2007, but could attend because of health reasons. He visited Bratislava twice (in 1993 and 1996) by invitation of one the authors of this chapter (Višňovský). 2 He gave a lecture in Vienna at the Institute for Human Sciences in 1993 and also agreed to lecture at the famous Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg in 2006, but could not attend because of medical reasons. 3 Professor Erazim Kohák (b. 1933) has been a Czech émigré to the United States since 1948, completed his PhD in Yale 1957 in theology, and has taught at Boston University since 1977, but following the Velvet Revolution in 1989 returned and lives in Prague and works at the

478

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

Charles University. He, among others, wrote Rorty’s obituary for the Czech Philosophical Journal (Kohák, 2007). He is a prominent Czech environmental philosopher who also has been serving for some time as the member of the editorial board of Dissent, the journal in which he, like Rorty himself, contributed a number of articles. 4 Rorty (1991a, 36). quotes from Patočka: “The only thing philosophy can do and the thing only philosophy can do, is to lay out the project of community where one will do wrong neither to the philosopher nor to anyone else, a harmonious and happy community.” Rorty, of course, agrees with the first, but not the second of his claims about philosophy. 5 Perhaps the most well‐known Rorty essay on intellectuals in Central Europe is his chapter  titled “The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope” (Rorty 1998, 228–43). Originally a different version was published as “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism” (Rorty 1992). 6 In the early 1990s Rorty wrote of Havel in the style of Fukuyama that Leninism ended up with him and “perhaps the image of Lenin will be replaced by the image of Václav Havel” (Rorty 1992, 10). 7 In the above‐mentioned review article on Patočka, Rorty writes that “a British or an American Havel would use different words, raise different questions,” because “we English‐ speaking intellectuals” remain “baffled when asked about the relations of Being and Consciousness” or “when asked whether we think ethics require a metaphysical foundation.” For these intellectuals it is simply the “shared belief that people ought to be free to say what they think” that is necessary in order to be a good citizen. 8 This fate has befallen several intellectuals in the post‐communist countries, for example, the successor to Havel as the Czech president, Václav Klaus, is a professor of economics and his recent successor, Miloš Zeman, is a professor of prognostics. The former prime minister of Slovakia, Iveta Radičová, is a professor of sociology, and so on. This is an interesting phenomenon requiring some closer study. 9 Rorty took over this phrase from Alan Ryan and was heavily criticized for it by the radical Leftist camp. 10 Born in 1944 in Prague, immigrated to Italy in 1970, professor of sociology at the University of Trieste, leading Czech Leftist public intellectual, see, for example, his paper “The Postcommunist Manifesto” (Bělohradský 2011). 11 http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct24/exkluzivne‐na‐ct24/osobnosti‐na‐ct24/205006‐do‐ politiky‐pravda‐a‐laska‐nepatri‐rika‐vaclav‐belohradsky/ 12 See, for example, Rorty’s papers in Slovak editions: “Veda ako solidarita” [Science as solidarity]; “Kontingencia liberálneho spoločenstva” [Contingency of liberal community], in Gál and Marcelli (1991); “Súčasná filozofia mysle” [Contemporary philosophy of mind], in Gál (1992); “Priorita demokracie pred filozofiou” [Priority of democracy before philosophy], in Novosád (1993), and so on. 13 Filozofia a zrkadlo prirody [Philosophy and the mirror of nature], translated by L .́ Hábová (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2000); Filosofie a zrcadlo pr ́írody [Philosophy and the mirror of nature], translated by T. Marvan and M. Ritter (Prague: Academia, 2012). 14 Filozoficke orchidey [Philosophical orchids], translated by L .́ Hábová (Bratislava: Kalligram, 2006). 15 The key translations of Rorty’s works into Hungarian are as follows: Rorty, R. (1994). Esetlegesség, irónia és szolidaritás [Contingency, irony, and solidarity], trans. by J. Boros János and G. Csordás (Pécs: Jelenkor); Rorty, R. (1997). Heideggerről és másokról, [Essays on Heidegger and others], trans. by A. Beck (Pécs: Jelenkor, 1997); Rorty, R. (1998). Megismerés helyett remény [Philosophy of the future], trans. by J. Boros (Pécs: Jelenkor); Rorty, R. (2007). Filozófia és társadalmi remény [Philosophy and social hope], trans. by S. Krémer and M. Nyírö (Budapest: L’Harmatan).

479

EMIL VIŠŇ OVSKÝ, ALEXANDER KRÉMER, AND KRZYSZTOF PIOTR SKOWROŃ SKI

16 When I first met him in Pécs in 2004 I criticized his view on contingency, since I regarded it as extremist, but he started a friendly conversation with me the same evening, and persuaded me otherwise. We stayed closely connected from that day on until his death. This enabled me to visit him at his home in Palo Alto in December 2005 and to conduct the abovementioned interview.

References Bauman, Z. 1987. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post‐modernity and Intellectuals. Oxford: Polity Press. Bělohradský, V. 2011. “The Postcommunist Manifesto.” Human Affairs 21: 62–9. Blecha, J. 2007. Proměny fenomenologie: Úvod do Husserlovy filosofie [Transformations of phenomenology: An introduction to Husserl’s philosophy]. Prague: Triton. Boros, J. 1998. Pragmatikus filozófia: Igazság és cselekvés [Pragmatist philosophy]. Pécs, Hungary: Jelenkor. —. 2000. A demokrácia filozófiája [Democratic philosophy]. Pécs, Hungary: Jelenkor. Danka, I. 2011a. “A Case Study on the Limits of Ironic Redescription: Rorty on Wittgenstein.” Pragmatism Today 2: 68–77. —. 2011b. “Eliminative Materialism Eliminated: Rorty and Davidson on the Mind‐World Relation.” Pragmatism Today 2: 105–17. Day, B. 1999. The Velvet Philosophers. London: Claridge Press. Fehér, I. M. 2013. “Aspects of Rorty’s Legacy: Pragmatism, Hermeneutics, Politics.” Philobiblon 18(1): 58–67. https://edit.elte.hu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10831/9602/2013_Philobiblon‐ 2013_n.1_FMI_paper.pdf?sequence=1 Gál, E., ed. 1992. MyseL ,́ telo stroj [Mind, body, machine]. Bratislava, Slovakia: Bradlo. Gál, E. and M. Marcelli, eds. 1991. Za zrkadlom moderny [Beyond the mirror of modernity]. Bratislava, Slovakia: Archa. John Paul II. 1998. Fides et Ratio. Vatican: L’Osservatore Romano. Kohák, E., ed. 1989. Jan Patocka: Philosophy and Selected Writings. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 2007. “In Memoriam: Richard Rorty.” Filosofický časopis 55: 330–4. Kołakowski, L. 1996. “A Remark on Rorty,” In Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski, edited by J. Niz ̇nik and J. T. Sanders, 52–7. Westport: Praeger. Kolenda, K. 1990. Rorty’s Humanistic Pragmatism. Tampa: University of South Florida Press. Krémer, A., ed. 2011. “The Roots of Rorty’s Philosophy.” Pragmatism Today 2(1). Krémer, A. and J. Ryder, eds. 2009. Self and Society. New York: Rodopi. Kwiek, M. 1996. Rorty’s Elective Affinities: The New Pragmatism and Postmodern Thought. Poznań, Poland: UAM. Novosád, F., ed. 1993. O slobode a spravodlivosti [On liberty and justice]. Bratislava, Slovakia: Archa. Nyírö, M., ed. 2010. Filozófia a globalizáció árnyékában: Richard Rorty. Budapest: L’Harmattan – Magyar Filozófiai Társaság. Pápay, G. 2011. “A Liberal Who Is Unwilling to Be an Ironist: Rorty’s Relation to Habermas.” Pragmatism Today 2: 118–22. Patočka, J. 1990 [1952]. Negatívni platonismus [Negative Platonism]. Prague: československý spisovatel. Rorty, R. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —. 1991a. “The Seer of Prague.” The New Republic, July 1, 36. —. 1991b. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1992. “The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism.” Yale Review 80: 1–16.

480

Rorty and the Intellectual Culture of Central Europe

—. 1996. “Response to Kołakowski,” In Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski, edited by J. Niz ̇nik and J. T. Sanders, 58–66. Westport, CT: Praeger. —. 1997. “Intellectuals and the Poor in the Contemporary United States.” In Discourse, Intellectuals, Social Communication, edited by E. Višňovský and G. Bianchi, 281–7. Bratislava, Slovakia: Veda. —. 1998. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2007. “Democracy and Philosophy.” Kritika & Kontext 34: 1–9. https://www.eurozine.com/ democracy‐and‐philosophy/. —. 2010. “Intellectual Autobiography.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn, 3–24. Chicago: Open Court. Shusterman, R. 1997. Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life. New York: Routledge. —. 2012. Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skowroński, K. P. 2015. Values, Valuations, and Axiological Norms in Richard Rorty’s Neopragmatism: Studies, Polemics, Interpretations. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Szahaj, A., ed. 1995. Między pragmatyzmem a postmodernizmem: Wokół filozofii Richarda Rotry’ego [Between pragmatism and postmodernism: On Richard Rorty’s philosophy]. Toruń, Poland: Wydawnictwo UMK. —. 1996. Ironia i miłos ́ć: Neopragmatyzm Richarda Rorty’ego w konteks ́cie sporu o postmodernism [Irony and love: Richard Rorty’s neopragmatism and the postmodernism controversy], 2nd edn. 2002. Wrocław, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego. —. 2010. “The Limits of Interpretative Anarchy: Rorty, Eco, and Fish.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by R. E. Auxier and L. E. Hahn, 395–413. Chicago: Open Court. Szubka, T. 2012. Neopragmatyzm. Toruń, Poland: Wydawnictwo UMK. żardecka‐Nowak, M. 2003. Wspólnota i ironia: Richard Rorty i jego wizja społeczeństwa liberalnego [Community and irony: Richard Rorty and his vision of liberal society]. Lublin, Poland: KUL.

Further Reading Rorty, R. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. —. 1989. “The Humanistic Intellectual: Eleven Theses.” In Viewpoints: Excerpts from the ACLS Conference on the Humanities in the 1990s. ACLS Occasional Paper No. 10. New York: American Council of Learned Societies. —. 1991. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. “Intellectuals in Politics.” Dissent 38: 483–90. —. 1993. “Holizmus, interiorizmus a ambícia transcendencie” [Holism, intrinsicality, and the ambition of transcendence]. Filozofia 48: 226–41. —. 1993. “Putnam a hrozba relativizmu” [Putnam and the menace of relativism]. Filozofia 48: 212–25. —. 1998. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1998. “Pragmatizmus je politický skrz‐naskrz” [Pragmatism is political through and through]. In. Pragmatizmus: Malá antológia [Pragmatism: An anthology], edited by E. Višňovský and F. Mihina, 542–50. Bratislava, Slovakia: IRIS. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books. —. 2007. Philosophy and Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

481

29 Rorty and Nihilism TRACY LLANERA

The concept of nihilism occupies an interesting position in Richard Rorty’s oeuvre. In the history of philosophy, nihilism is conceptualized in four general ways. Ontological nihilism refers to the denial of an independently existing reality. Epistemological nihilism rejects the possibility of objective truth, knowledge, and certainty. Moral nihilism disavows the existence of universal moral norms. By far the most familiar form of nihilism, existential nihilism, refers to the experience of lostness, disorientation, and despair prompted by the realization that human life has no fundamental meaning, value, or purpose. Rorty’s writings bear connections to the first three kinds of nihilism. While he does not deny that the world exists, Rorty contends that reality is fundamentally unknowable. Following the Jamesian doctrine that “the trail of the human serpent is over all,” Rorty points out that while things in the universe are causally independent of us, nothing is representationally independent (1998 [1994], 86). He thus appears to be an ontological nihilist insofar as he thinks that projects of ontology – projects that presume access to the essential nature of beings – are sterile. Rorty is also critical of the correspondence theory of truth. His criticism has a lot to do with what he takes to be the role of language in human life. Rorty argues that language does not play a truth‐finding, representational function but a world‐coping, mediational one. He characterizes language as “the employment of words as the use of tools to deal with the environment, rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of the environment” (1999 [1996], xxiii). By setting up language as a human construction and the quest for objective certainty as an impossibility, Rorty could then be framed as an epistemological nihilist (see Upton 1987). Finally, Rorty does not believe in the existence of “an ahistorical, incorruptible, transcultural moral law”; more so, he argues that moral progress “is not a matter of rising above the sentimental to the rational” but “a matter of wider and wider sympathy” (Rorty 1999 [1994], 82–3). Disavowing any possibility of a universal ethics, Rorty thus acts as a moral nihilist. In sum, Rorty’s arguments could be rightly described as nihilistic insofar as a non‐nihilistic argument stands for the claim that

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

482

Rorty and Nihilism

there are ultimately correct standards for appraising reality, knowledge, and moral action. As John Marmysz points out, Rorty’s position “seems very close to an almost complete form of nihilism, combining ontological, epistemological, ethical, and political elements into a rather systematic whole” (Marmysz 2003, 83). Curiously, the concept of nihilism does not figure in as a prominent idea in Rorty’s writings. With the rare exception of his review of Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism (1969) in 1972, Rorty neither employs the vocabulary of nihilism to describe his position nor uses the term to centralize his philosophical arguments. Instead, he prefers to stick with descriptions such as “antifoundationalist,” “anti‐essentialist,” “anti‐Platonist,” or “pragmatist” to designate his positions on truth, knowledge, and ethics. While Rorty barely mentions nihilism in his work, some critics either take nihilism to be the defining characteristic of Rorty’s writings or judge nihilism to be the dire consequence of his pragmatism. Thomas Upton, Gary Madison, Jason Boffetti, and Karen Carr use the concept pejoratively in evaluating Rorty’s philosophy. Upton states that Rorty’s attempt to destroy our traditional foundations of knowledge makes him an epistemological nihilist, given that “Rorty claims that nothing can be known, at least known in the Platonic sense of being the object of genuine understanding (episteme, nous) rather than of mere opinion (doxa)” (Upton 1987, 141). Madison ultimately chastises Rorty for celebrating Nietzsche’s dark legacy of nihilism: “If he is anything at all, Rorty is a carefree, happy‐ go‐lucky nihilist who is not about to let himself be bothered any more by the old concerns of philosophy” (Madison 1992, 5). Defending his reading of William James, Boffetti argues that as a whole, “James’s philosophy does not succumb to the nihilism, atheism, and perspectivalism characteristic of Rorty’s ‘Nietzscheanized’ pragmatism” (Boffetti 2004, 605). Finally, Carr argues that Rorty’s antifoundationalism models a dangerous and banalizing form of nihilism in the modern world. In her view, Rorty does not treat nihilism as a big deal, in the sense that human beings can still live with themselves without the guidance of absolute moral laws or the hope for universal truth. Carr warns that Rorty’s postmodern and nonchalant attitude to morality and truth culminates in a form of dogmatism, arguing that: When we fully and happily dispatch with truth, what we gain is not pluralism, not toleration, but rather the absolutization of the dominant power structures of the culture to which we belong. Nihilism, once complete, leaves us with nothing but the set of currently existing social practices and beliefs; in the absence of anything else, these practices and beliefs become, for all intents and purpose, absolute. (Carr 1992, 134)

What we can gather from these examples is that these critics make much more of nihilism than Rorty himself does in his writings. But why does Rorty avoid using the term nihilism in his work, despite its obvious connections to the concept?

1  Rorty’s No to Nihilism? One could argue that Rorty’s avoidance has something to do with the conceptual baggage that accompanies nihilism in its existential terms. In the existential sense, a nihilist refers to someone who finds it difficult to take human activities seriously or to make 483

Tracy Llanera

strong and lasting commitments in human life. This difficulty stems from his or her extreme skepticism of ontological, epistemological, or moral truths. As Carr points out, the existential element of nihilism is energized by prior claims about nihilism, claims that could lead to the conclusion that all of human life is fundamentally meaningless: It is because we believe there is no truth that we conclude the world is pointless; it is because we think that knowledge is mere illusion that we describe life as meaningless; it is because we see no moral fabric in the universe that we see our existence as without value. The despair of existential nihilism is parasitic on one of the other logically prior forms. (Carr 1992, 20)

However, Rorty does not represent this kind of nihilistic thinker. He has also taken steps to make this anti‐nihilistic position clear in his work. For instance, Rorty clarifies in an interview that his attempts to dismantle the problems of the Western philosophical tradition in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature are not intended to be nihilistic. His work was not designed to put an end to thinking. It was instead a call for an alternative approach to the pseudo‐problems of ontology and epistemology, which more careful readers like Kai Nielsen were able to appreciate: “Nielsen was one of the few Anglophone readers of my Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature not to treat it as nihilistic and frivolous. Instead he read that book as I would most like it to be read” (Wenning, Livingston, and Rondel 2006, 54). Furthermore, Rorty also denies the idea of moral nihilism and a kind of existential nihilism. When asked about his romantic convictions and what appears to be his post‐metaphysical attempts to overcome nihilism, he states: “I don’t believe there are such things as “modern forms of disenchantment and moral nihilism” – these seem to me bugbears invented by traditionalists” (Wenning, Livingston, and Rondel 2006, 57). For Rorty, religious and philosophical anxieties are not universal, enduring problems from which human beings require spiritual and moral redemption. They are only temporary, human‐made products of old worldviews – worldviews which purport that human beings must return to religion or aim for the Platonic Forms of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in order to live meaningfully. Finally, Rorty disdains being misrepresented as a thinker whose pragmatism has no place for deep and meaningful commitments to particular ideals and values. Rorty explains that “the depth of an attachment (to a person, a polis, an ideal, a god, or whatever)” should be regarded as “a matter of the inextricability of the object of attachment from one’s most cherished self‐descriptions” (2001, 89). Rorty believes that there is no intrinsic link between the ultimate truth and human obligation. A lover or a socialist will not require any transcendent justification to care for a specific human being or to painstakingly work for a political utopia. The force of metaphysics or the universal does not ground these deep attachments; rather, they are profoundly conditioned by the person’s self‐understanding or, in Rorty’s terms, the individual’s “final vocabulary.” If we follow this pluralistic view, different people simply live for the sake of different things. Thus, if anything, Rorty would disagree with being classified as an existential nihilist, or as someone who thinks that there is nothing in human life worth living for. Further, abandoning the quest for truth, certainty, and universality will not lessen our capacity to live meaningfully for Rorty. By challenging the existential assumptions made about his writings, Rorty could then be seen as a thinker who may have much more to say about the modern challenges 484

Rorty and Nihilism

to human meaning than meets the eye. In this light, the entry will now focus on Rorty’s approach to existential nihilism and human meaning. Nihilism in the existential sense appears sporadically in Rorty’s writings. Its implications often need to be teased out of his work. I will mention and analyze three interesting cases in the next section.

2  Three Cases of Existential Nihilism Rorty’s first treatment of existential nihilism can be found in his review of Rosen’s Nihilism (1972). In this essay, he discusses nihilism as a potential existential danger that accompanies the rise of antifoundationalist philosophy. Rorty summarizes Rosen’s work as driven by the hypothesis that adopting a Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian attitude to language, history, and philosophy is a bad idea. For Rosen, this postmodern approach disparages efforts to provide “correct” accounts of epistemology, morality, and self‐justification, thus leading to nihilism. Rosen advocates a return to Platonism, albeit a modified version, to counter this trend. In response, Rorty offers a reply on behalf of the nihilist. He states that Rosen’s mistake lies in confusing two different things: one problem is about “despair over the success of the Platonic project” and the other is about “despair over human life” (Rorty 1972, 104). Unlike Rosen, Rorty argues that metaphilosophy and the justification for human existence are not inextricably linked. Following his interpretation of Wittgenstein (and Dewey and Comte), Rorty considers the possibility that “Platonic philosophy is, like Christianity, just one somewhat parochial development which our society may have outgrown” (Rorty 1972, 104). His view is that if our culture were to get over philosophical foundationalism, it would be incorrect to assume that it would result in the dystopia of epistemological and ethical non‐justification that Rosen dreads. Quite the reverse, Rorty hopes that our culture would instead experience a positive kind of nihilism. This culture would be a context in which human beings, not anymore answerable to Platonic Ideas, have become fully responsible for themselves. In this “all too human” future, nihilists would at best be “prudent, temperate, and just” in their complete self‐reliance, a result which would then make nihilism “the latest and best product of the Socratic tradition” in Rorty’s view (1972, 104–8). As the case above presents, the common assumption is that nihilism appears most threatening when the foundations of knowledge, morals and human meaning become flimsy and unreliable. This uncertainty can lead to existential nihilism, in the sense that the fallibility of structures of belief creates cultural conditions that are unable to sustain the experience of meaningfulness. However, Rorty also indicates that persons are at risk of nihilism even when human roles and sources of meanings are certain and fixed. In Rorty’s work, nihilism appears for the second time in “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises” (2010 [2001]) as the meaninglessness of a banal human life. Rorty concludes this more recent essay by describing a case that represents this alternate form: Although not everybody should try to overcome themselves, everybody can and should hope to end their lives with some sense of what it meant, how it hung together, what form it took. This is easy to do if one’s life was nothing but remorseless grinding dawn‐to‐dusk

485

Tracy Llanera

toil, or if it was lived within the confines of a backwoods village, or of a narrow and unquestioned faith. Yet these are just the sorts of lives that people who use novels as aids to spiritual development think of as in danger of “meaninglessness.” (Think here of the novel‐reading heroines of Madame Bovary and of Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street.) The epithet is used because such people think that a life has meaning just insofar as the person living it is able to find some unity in, impose some form on, as great a variety of persons and things and events as possible. (Rorty 2010 [2001], 406)

While repetitiveness and predictability can provide sense and value in a person’s life, they can also highlight its lack of variety and excitement. More so, the predictability of life can expose what Albert Camus (2000 [1942]) describes as human life’s fundamental absurdity, leading an individual to brood the dark question: “is there more to life than this?” In short, life’s stability can also lead to existential nihilism. Rorty explains in his essay that one way of warding off the threat of meaninglessness is by entertaining projects of self‐creation. He notes that a crucial resource for developing one’s self‐project is literature. More specifically, novel‐reading opens the possibilities of a multitude of ways that a life and its inadequacies could be justified, inspired or overcome (Rorty 2010 [2001], 406). Finally, nihilism appears for the third time in Rorty’s response to Jerome Schneewind’s essay “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy” (2003, 479–505), where he refers to nihilism as the cultural result at stake behind his theories of self‐creation and solidarity. In Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989), Rorty argues it is possible to maintain deep, personal and idiosyncratic projects while engaging in constructive dialogue and social participation in a liberal democracy. The figure that is able to attend to these two commitments is the liberal ironist, who regards self‐creation as a private interest and solidarity as a public goal. Rorty concedes to Schneewind that his previous attempts to vindicate the liberal ironist and to dichotomize the private and public were faulty philosophical strategies. They were designed to placate the moral or spiritual crises that might arise when the shared legitimation behind religious and Platonic hopes is lost. Rorty says that his blunder was that he conflated “the unruffled pragmatist” and “the anguished existential adolescent” in his writings, thinking that a person “could not be an antifoundationalist and a romantic self‐creator without becoming a Sartrean, ever conscious of the abyss” (Rorty 2010, 506). He acknowledges that the rise of antifoundationalism might not in fact lead human beings to a recurring state of anxiety and doubt. The dread of a metaphysical void could cease to be a cultural problem in a world that has learned to take nihilism for granted. Rorty thus repudiates the existential assumption that underlies the private–public distinction and his views about self‐ creation and solidarity in this reply, reverting back to his 1972 position (contra Rosen) that nihilism is a problem that could be culturally surpassed in modernity.

3  Outgrowing Nihilism Apart from these three separate illustrations, there is nothing new or interesting about existential nihilism that we can get from Rorty. Instead of nihilism, Rorty argues that among the cultural issues that are worth addressing with urgency today is what he calls 486

Rorty and Nihilism

the problem of egotism. His concern is not that we are living in meaningless conditions but the fact that most human beings today behave with a narcissistic sense of self‐satisfaction. They are too close‐minded and militant about their outlook and behavior. Given the case, one could argue that Rorty is more interested in correcting human behavior than reviving an atmosphere of personal or social significance. However, the conclusion that Rorty is not concerned about existential meaning is misleading. Rorty’s “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” (2010 [1998]), “Pragmatism and Romanticism” (2007), and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth‐Century America (1998) are works that explore and vivify our various spiritual hopes as citizens in modernity. These private and public hopes include the desire to stand in awe of something greater than the self, to hope for a better, kinder, and more egalitarian future, and to achieve personal redemption. In these writings, Rorty points to various “polytheistic” resources that aid individuals in experiencing existential meaning, self‐transformation, and collective inspiration in art, literature, and poetry. Even if Rorty does not state so explicitly, it could be argued that these strategies are capable of serving as ways of overcoming nihilism in the modern world. However, it should be made clear that Rorty’s ambitions are different compared to other thinkers who utilize transcendent or liminal resources to redeem human beings from nihilism. Unlike Charles Taylor, Rorty is not convinced that employing the “subtler languages” of art, poetry and literature can help us find our inner link with a larger order or map out our place as human beings in the world (see Taylor 2011, 1991, 81–92; Rorty 1993, 3). Unlike Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly (see 2011a, 2011b), Rorty disagrees with the idea that we can be attuned to nonhuman, sacred powers that can infuse our lives with non‐subjective meaning. Rorty thinks that problems ranging from egotism, uncertainty, and meaninglessness are human creations. Eschewing anything that approximates metaphysical comfort, he also believes that we can redeem ourselves from our self‐induced problems with the help of luck and contingency. Given Rorty’s position, is it then the case that his work is irrelevant in addressing the dangers of existential nihilism? Llanera (2016), contends that if egotism, uncertainty, and meaninglessness are regarded as interconnected issues, then Rorty’s work can be reformulated in a way that is useful in advancing the current debates on nihilism and modernity. The traditional answers to overcoming the problem of nihilism either involves returning to religion or reconnecting with plural manifestations of the sacred (see Taylor 2011, 1991; Dreyfus and Kelly 2011a, 2011b). In contrast to this approach, LLanera suggests that Rorty’s work on egotism reveals an innovative way of thwarting the problem of modern nihilism. In her interpretation, Rorty’s egotism precedes the phenomenon of nihilism: “egotists derive their self‐assurance from a deep and fundamental authority  –  whether this ‘omnipotent’ or ‘all‐encompassing’ authority wears the face of God, Nature, or the Self ” (Llanera 2016, 944). However, if this authority is challenged by self‐doubt and external uncertainty, then “the event can break open feelings of existential angst, powerlessness, and disillusionment” (p. 944). Llanera goes on to suggest that resources in Rorty’s work could be developed as preventive solutions to egotism. She states in particular that self‐creation and solidarity, if reinterpreted as redemptive paths to self‐enlargement, could be employed to deter the onset of existential nihilism. Hence, averting the event of nihilism is one way by which human culture can outgrow nihilism as an existential problem. 487

Tracy Llanera

Apart from Rorty’s possible contributions to preventing the experience of nihilism, other scholars point out that Rorty helps us rethink and accept nihilism in a positive way, a way that evades the dangers of despair and destructiveness. Marmysz points out that Rorty “undercuts the problem of nihilism by getting rid of the criteria against which the human situation looks hopeless” (2003, 83). In his view, Rorty helps us reconsider the validity of nihilism as a crisis, since the highest values that justify the crisis have never existed in the first place. Similarly, Michael Casey states that while Nietzsche and Freud view meaninglessness as a difficult predicament to confront, Rorty offers a sunnier alternative. Rorty’s perspective entails “a simple interest in the immediate possibilities of the present and a commonplace indifference about the “deep” questions of meaning and purpose” (Casey 2002, 194). Finally, Rorty’s approach to historical contingency, which bets on modern culture’s chance of outgrowing our fear of existential nihilism, is also worthy of consideration. James Edwards credits Rorty as an influence to his modern notion of normal nihilism, which goes against the traditional view that nihilism is a paralyzing individual or cultural condition of pessimism. Edwards states that like Rorty’s ironist, a normal nihilist is someone who is able to live with the “rueful recognition and tolerance of her own historical and conceptual contingency” (Edwards 1997, 46–7). In sum, despite his silence when it comes to the concept of nihilism, Rorty serves as a prominent and fascinating figure in the discussion on nihilism and the problems of modernity.

References Boffetti, James. 2004. “Rorty’s Nietzschean Pragmatism: A Jamesian Response.” The Review of Politics 66(4): 605–31. Camus, Albert. 2000 [1942]. The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. London: Penguin Books. Carr, Karen. 1992. The Banalization of Nihilism: Twentieth‐Century Responses to Meaninglessness. New York: SUNY Press. Offers an elegant and sustained argument about the historical and conceptual development of Western nihilism in modernity based on the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Barth, and Richard Rorty. Casey, Michael. 2002. Meaninglessness: The Solutions of Nietzsche, Freud, and Rorty. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Dreyfus, Hubert and Sean Dorrance Kelly. 2011a. All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age. New York: Free Press. —. 2011b. “Saving the Sacred from the Axial Revolution” (Special issue). Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54(2): 195–203. DOI:10.1080/0020174X.2011.559058. Edwards, James. 1997. The Plain Sense of Things: The Fate of Religion in an Age of Normal Nihilism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Llanera, Tracy. 2016. “Rethinking Nihilism: Rorty vs. Taylor, Dreyfus and Kelly.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 42(9): 937–50. DOI:10.1177/0191453716645151. Contextualizes Richard Rorty’s contributions to the current debates on nihilism and shows how Rorty’s work on egotism advances an impasse in the discussion. Madison, Gary. 1992. “Coping with Nietzsche’s Legacy: Rorty, Derrida, Gadamer.” Philosophy Today 36(1): 3–19. Marmysz, John. 2003. Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

488

Rorty and Nihilism

Rorty, Richard. 1972. Review of Nihilism (1969) by Stanley Rosen. The Philosophy Forum 11: 102–8. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1993. “In a Flattened World,” Review of The Ethics of Authenticity (1991) by Charles Taylor, 3. The London Review of Books. —. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth‐Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 1998 [1994]. “Charles Taylor on Truth.” In Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, 84–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999 [1994]. “Ethics without Principles.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, 72–90. Penguin Books. —. 1999 [1996]. “Relativism: Finding and Making.” In Philosophy and Social Hope, xvi–xxxii. Penguin Books. —. 2001. “Response to Daniel Conway.” In Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, edited by Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson, 89–92. Cambridge: Polity Press. —. 2007. “Pragmatism as Romanticism.” In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 105–19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010. “Reply to J. B. Schneewind.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 506–8. Chicago: Open Court. —. 2010 [1998]. “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 444–55. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell. —. 2010 [2001]. “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 389–406. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell. Schneewind, Jerome. 2003. “Rorty on Utopia and Moral Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty (2010) edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 479–505. Chicago: Open Court. Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —. 2011. “Recovering the Sacred” (Special issue). Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 54(2): 113–25. DOI:10.1080/0020174X.2011.559047. Upton, Thomas. 1987. “Rorty’s Epistemological Nihilism.” The Personalist Forum 3(2): 141–56. Wenning, Mario, Alex Livingston, and David Rondel. 2006. “An Interview with Richard Rorty.” Gnosis 8(1): 54–9.

Further Reading Mill, John Stuart. 1869. On Liberty. London: Longman, Roberts & Green. Rorty, Richard. 1995. “Taylor on Self‐Celebration and Gratitude,” Review of Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity by Charles Taylor. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54(1): 197–201. DOI:10.2307/2108368.

489

30 Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility CHRISTOPHER J. VOPARIL

So when the pragmatist says that there is nothing to be said about truth save that each of us will commend as true those beliefs which he or she finds good to believe, the realist is inclined to interpret this as one more positive theory about the nature of truth: a theory according to which truth is simply the contemporary opinion of a chosen individual or group. Such a theory would, of course, be self‐refuting. But the pragmatist does not have a theory of truth, much less a relativistic one. As a partisan of solidarity, his account of the value of cooperative human inquiry has only an ethical base, not an epistemological or metaphysical one. (Rorty 1991, 24)

This chapter seeks to illuminate the ethical concerns that animate Richard Rorty’s philosophy. I argue that Rorty’s ethics foregrounds as its central priority the issue of responsibility and frame Rorty’s work as offering us a picture of ethical comportment in a postfoundational, pluralistic milieu, where citizens not only recognize the contingency of their own deepest beliefs but give up any sense of responsibilities owed to nonhuman authorities. To paraphrase Rorty, from any number of occasions, all we have to be responsible to is each other. Yet Rorty goes even further than antiauthoritarianism in ethics. He not only shifts to thinking about ethics in terms of our relations to others; he specifically attunes this ethics to those who are suffering or excluded or merely previously unnoticed. What emerges is an alternative Rorty to the smirking gadfly blithely shrugging off criticism and incapable of inhabiting a position of moral seriousness and making a distinct contribution to ethics. After tracing this concern with responsibility from his earliest published essays to his later work, I advance an understanding of Rorty’s approach to ethics that places him squarely within the tradition of classical pragmatism. Like the classical pragmatists, Rorty eschewed transcendental reason, fixed principles, and Kantian conceptions of universal moral obligation, appealing instead to a historically situated and contextualized account of the imagination, felt sentiments, and our relations to others. Specifically, I call attention to a largely unrecognized Jamesian strand in Rorty’s normative ethics.

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

490

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

Like James, Rorty recognizes that others hold values – often different values – as dear to them as ours are to us, and that commensuration cannot be attained without damage for which we must take responsibility. For Rorty, ethics begins not with intellectual doubt or generic discordances in experience but clashes in our relations with other human beings. Rorty’s profound shift is exemplified in his remark that the “moral educator’s task is not to answer the rational egoist’s question ‘Why should I be moral?’ but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question ‘Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?’” (Rorty 1998, 185). Rorty’s explicit engagement with moral and political issues in the early 1990’s has received significant commentary. More recent scholarship has begun to elucidate moral and political concerns at work in Rorty’s philosophical stances as well.1 The specific topic of Rorty’s ethics has been relatively neglected, at least until the recent book by William Curtis (2015). Curtis argues Rorty is “above all else, a political and moral philosopher” who can be read as “a proponent of a liberal virtue ethics” (2015, 33, 4). While broadly in keeping with and sympathetic to Curtis’s reading, my account differs in emphasizing a specific concern with ethical responsibility that runs from Rorty’s earliest published work to his last writings, focused directly on those we exclude from our communities, as his distinctive contribution.

1  Early Work to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty’s familiarity with pragmatism, we now know, predated his so‐called analytic period.2 As I have argued elsewhere (Voparil 2014), his initial interest in pragmatism during the early 1960s centered on the promising way out of – or around – a knot of metaphilosophical paradoxes responsible in his view for philosophy’s perennial discordance (see Rorty 1961a). Specifically, he was attracted to pragmatism’s recognition, beginning with Peirce, of how “the appeal to practice transfers the question of the acceptability of a philosophical program out of metaphilosophy and into the realm of moral choice” (1961b, 111). This recognition of the ineluctability of choice for Rorty spelled the need for an ethics to guide it – “not a ‘substantive’ ethics, for it would not tell a man which arguments to propound, but rather a ‘formalist’ ethics which would tell him what his responsibilities were to any arguments which he found himself propounding” (Rorty 1961a, 315).3 This ethical backdrop and concern with the implications of philosophical vocabulary choice and the responsibilities it entails, both for our own commitments and the impact of our commitments on our relations to others, runs throughout Rorty’s work. In his early references to ethics in the context of philosophical disagreement, Rorty claimed that “Fruitful philosophical controversy is possible only when both sides have the patience to investigate their opponents’ criteria of relevance” (1961a, 318). Already we see the appeal to particular intellectual and ethical virtues, which becomes a recurrent theme in his thought. What he calls here “metaphilosophical pragmatism” is a way to avoid both skepticism and the futility of endless philosophical disagreement: “an appeal to the moral responsibility of the participants in philosophical controversy” (p. 303). At his time, Rorty associates this metaphilosophical pragmatism with the work of 491

Christopher J. Voparil

Henry Johnstone, who evinces a conception of “bilateral” responsibility wherein “whoever undertakes to correct or supplement what another asserts in the name of knowledge must be willing to be instructed by that other person” (Johnstone 1959, 133–4). What Rorty learns from Johnstone at this early stage is that “the commitments we assume in speaking ordinary English are not to a certain story about what the world is like, but rather to a certain way of treating our fellow men” (Rorty 1961a, 316). Ultimately for Rorty this is a matter not only of fostering a willingness to learn from others but cultivating the epistemic modesty endemic to what he later terms irony: the fallibilism and openness that makes us willing to be instructed by the other. For all the commentary that followed in the wake of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN), little attention has been paid to the fundamental ethical concerns that animate Rorty’s stances in that work.4 In his post‐PMN writings this dimension is more explicit, in his effort to “modulate philosophical debate from a methodologico‐ ontological key into an ethico‐political key” (Rorty 1991, 110). Seeing its centrality to PMN is crucial for grasping the full significance of Rorty’s project, including his own motivation, and getting a window into the issues that will preoccupy him for the next few decades. The anti‐epistemological bent of PMN is unmistakable. Perhaps the best single‐sentence explanation of the book’s fundamental thrust comes in the momentous fourth chapter: “If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practice” (1991, 171). What will replace epistemology, as described in the cursory, sometimes confusing, though highly suggestive part three of the book, is less clear. At the start of the section Rorty himself confessed to finding this question “difficult” (p. 357). Indeed, the interpretive challenge of rendering coherent his (partial) embrace of Gadamerian hermeneutics, Deweyan naturalism, and appeals to edification, Bildung, and poetic conversation, combined with the mosaic of references to Marx, Freud, and Sartre, is profound. In a characteristically keen insight, Bjørn Ramberg has remarked that the final section contains the fundamental message of the book: “it is what we can make of ourselves, not what we may come to know, that requires our attention” (Ramberg 2013, 51). For Ramberg, it is our capacity for self‐creation, as a font of endless redescription and possibility, for the individual and her community, that marks the enduring center of Rorty’s ethical vision, and, more proximately, the link between PMN and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. I find Ramberg’s reading of this essential strand of PMN and broader interpretation of the development of Rorty’s thought highly compelling. My aim here is less to quarrel with his insightful elucidations, from which I have benefited greatly myself, than to make space alongside this interpretation for what I want to argue is the even more enduring emphasis on ethical responsibility and concern for others that I believe is at the heart of the Rortyan project.5 In PMN Rorty reads epistemology‐centered philosophy as “the attempt to see [patterns of justification] as hooked on to something which demands moral commitment – Reality, Truth, Objectivity, Reason” (Rorty 1980, 385; emphasis added). The problem with this traditional approach for Rorty is it absolves us of responsibility. That is, if we see truth as a matter of necessity and knowledge as “something as ineluctable as being shoved about … then we should no longer have the responsibility 492

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

for choice among competing ideas and words, theories and vocabularies” (1980, 375–6). Rorty develops this emphasis on responsibility in passages that constitute what has been called the “existential” strand of his thought (Guignon and Hiley 2003, 29; Ramberg 2013, 50). He draws on Sartre to frame the urge to see attaining truth as a matter of necessity as “the urge to be rid of one’s freedom to erect yet another alternative theory or vocabulary” (Rorty 1980, 376). He continues, “This attempt to answer questions of justification by discovering new objective truths, to answer the moral agent’s request for justifications with descriptions of a privileged domain, is the philosopher’s special form of bad faith – his special way of substituting pseudo‐cognition for moral choice” (1980, 383)  –  “pseudo” because it rests on a ­confusion of causal contact with reality with “dealing with”  –  that is, “describing, explaining, predicting, and modifying” – reality (p. 175). Rorty is so keen to establish this realm of freedom and space for choice because with choice comes responsibility. Without it, our relations to other humans are secondary to our relation to reality. Central to this shift away from representationalist epistemology is his contextualist conception of human beings as existing within a web of communal relationships. As Susan Dieleman has argued, Rorty reverses the priority of epistemology over community, arguing in a way that is consistent with some feminist epistemologists that “community comes before the postulation of these sorts of [epistemic] norms” (Dieleman 2013, 45). In places, Rorty is quite explicit about this: our notions of “mind, language, culture, feeling, intentionality, textuality, or anything else,” he writes, are “just expressions of our awareness that we are members of a moral community, phrased in one or another pseudo‐explanatory jargon” (Rorty 1982, 202). While Rorty’s attention in PMN is more narrowly on how this relationality and membership in a moral community impact the way we understand the social practice of justification, he already is establishing the framework for his later political project of expanding the scope of our democratic moral community. His keen awareness of issues of membership leads him to recognize that even our conceptions of rational agency are, in part, a function of a sense of “membership in our moral community” and “what it is to count as a moral agent” to someone in this community (Rorty 1980, 191n23; 1998, 177). Interestingly, Rorty views the attribution of normative statuses as a matter of recognition: “a courtesy extended potential or imagined fellow‐speakers of our language” (1980, 190). As a result, it also can be withheld or denied. Here in PMN already Rorty is interested in such “borderline cases” – children, pigs, koalas, and Martians, as well as fetuses and aboriginal tribes (see 1980, 182–92).6 Introducing another notion with ethical significance, he observes, “The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely” (p. 191). In the context of ethics, this stance culminates in the embrace of an alternative, noncriterial conception of rationality understood as “responsibility to larger and more diverse communities of human beings” (Rorty 2003, 46). If rationality is understood in terms of our relations with others, then to be rational is “to be willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into one’s own” (Rorty 1980, 318). Absent the assumption of commensuration, knowledge becomes more like “getting acquainted with a person than like following a demonstration.” And “getting into conversation with strangers” is for Rorty a matter of acquiring a “new virtue or skill” (p. 319). 493

Christopher J. Voparil

2  Contingency, Irony, and Responsibility Thus far, I have been developing an interpretive account that foregrounds Rorty’s ethical concern with responsibility by highlighting his attention to the relational context of human life. A central thrust of Rorty’s critique of epistemological privilege is an effort to establish democratic, nonauthoritarian relations with distant and different others. Indeed, Rorty was especially attuned to the ways that particular philosophical stances put us in undemocratic relations with others. As Richard Bernstein recently has suggested, Whether Rorty is dealing with abstract metaphilosophical topics, or the hotly debated philosophical issues concerning truth, objectivity, and the nature of reality, or ethical and political issues concerning human rights, or even with the role of religion in our daily lives, there is a dominant theme that emerges over and over again. There is nothing that we can rely on but ourselves and our fellow human beings. (2010, 211)

This comment helps orient us toward the ethical import of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS) and the reflections on responsibility – both to others and to ourselves – at its core. On his account of the relation of PMN to CIS, Ramberg highlights the focus on edification as the dominant continuity. Now free of the anti‐epistemological undercurrent in PMN, Rorty is able to provide in CIS “an account of the point of edification of greater complexity and more substance” (Ramberg 2013, 53, 61). To be sure, the picture of CIS as the working out of PMN’s emphasis on “the romantic notion of man as self‐creative” (Rorty 1980, 358), in the context of a liberal democratic polity and culture populated by “the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do” (Rorty 1989, xv), is a highly revealing one. As before, my aim is less to contest this reading than to nudge it slightly aside to point to the concerns about responsibility that also animate the book.7 My claim here is that not only is responsibility a central concern of the book; I want to suggest that CIS be read as a primer on ethical comportment in a post‐philosophical liberal culture. That is, Rorty promulgates a conception of ethics at home in “a redescription of liberalism as the hope that culture as a whole can be ‘poeticized’ rather than as the Enlightenment hope that it can be ‘rationalized’ or ‘scientized’” (Rorty 1989, 53). Negatively, in his anti‐essentialist, antifoundationalist, and, importantly, antiauthoritarian mode, his insights about ethical life in a culture that accepts the inescapability of time and chance are two: first, there is no hierarchy of responsibilities woven into an independent moral order to which to appeal to settle questions about our responsibilities; and second, there are no nonhuman authorities to which we are answerable. The “de‐divinization” in the first two chapters of language as something intrinsically hooked up to reality, and of the self as an expression of a universal human essence, clears the way by severing any logics that would put us in the role of passive, “subservient responders”8 who have abdicated responsibility. Positively, we must face a full recognition of our ties to others: there is nothing for us to derive the meanings of our lives from “except other finite, mortal, contingently existing human beings” (Rorty 1989, 45). Rorty’s name for what this demands of us is “an ethics of kindness” (p. 51). Rorty’s concern with responsibility is evident from the opening sentence of the book.9 Certainly the project of self‐creation is central to its message, as Ramberg argues. 494

0004506709.INDD 494

1/23/2020 3:46:41 PM

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

But paramount from the outset is the question of how to balance this project with our responsibility for “service to others” (Rorty 1989, xiii). Rorty immediately rules out theological or metaphysical responses that answer the question by appealing to a shared human nature, rationality, truth, or some other ahistorical source. Instead, he appeals to social virtues, on account of his liberal commitment to cruelty being “the worst thing we do” (p. xv). But for Rorty there can be no “universally shared social responsibility” (p. 30), no singular, noncontingent answer to the question, “How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects self‐creation?” (p. xv). Consequently, we are continually confronted with conflicting responsibilities: The one tells us that we need not speak only the language of the tribe, that we may find our own words, that we may have a responsibility to ourselves to find them. The other tells us that that responsibility is not the only one we have. Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language. (Rorty 1989, xv)

It remains for us, individually and collectively, to take up the project of recognizing and prioritizing our responsibilities as an ongoing daily task. CIS offers an ethics of democratic responsibility, grounded in the work of self‐cultivation yet fundamentally oriented toward our responsibility for the suffering of others. Central to this project, as Ramberg and others have argued, indeed is the project of self‐creation, of adopting a particular self‐identity or self‐image suited to the postfoundational, ­contingent culture. Also important, of course, is solidarity, the willingness “to stand by the material needs and interests of others” (Ramberg 2013, 65), particularly when they are suffering. And it is the latter commitment, endemic to Rorty’s liberalism, that creates the demand for responsibility. Ramberg’s account is especially attentive to what he calls “the destructive aspect of redescription” that is inseparable from the project of edification. What Rortyan self‐redescribers must face is that “the very act of self‐creation through redescription may be buying autonomy for oneself at the expense of the ­humiliation of another. An ironist may be cruel” (Ramberg 2013, 64). And not only liberal individuals but liberal institutions may humiliate. As we know, the main conceit by which Rorty manages these responsibilities is his infamous public–private split. I want to suggest that Rorty’s notorious divide can be seen as function and direct expression of the underlying ethical project of CIS rather than a limitation or schizophrenic application of it. In the next section, I bring this out is by juxtaposing Rorty’s approach to ethics to that of William James. While by no means central to CIS, James’s brief appearances are highly instructive, especially for grasping the ethical significance of irony, despite Rorty’s claims about privatizing it. I argue that Rorty sought to cultivate a more acute attentiveness to what James called the “cries of the wounded” and the (contingent) obligations that the claims of others place on us. Rortyan irony, on this view, is best read as an ethical form of antiauthoritarian fallibilism. Let me now attempt to untangle the knot of issues surrounding irony and the public– private split. As several recent commentators have noted, two distinct, sometimes inconsistent, senses of irony can be discerned in the pages of CIS: a moderate version and a more acute, hyperversion.10 Curtis captures the difference nicely: “The first sense is the civic virtue that all liberal citizens should ideally possess because it helps them be 495

Christopher J. Voparil

tolerant, adaptable, and just. The second sense is the more active and radical mental habit that ‘ironist intellectuals’ exhibit as they challenge the conventional wisdoms of the cultural domains in which they work” (Curtis 2015, 93). When Rorty holds that in his liberal utopia, “ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal” (Rorty 1989, xv), the relevant sense is the first one. Citizens would be “commonsense nonmetaphysicians” in the same way that increasing numbers of people are “commonsense nontheists” (1989, 87). They recognize the contingency of their own beliefs and values, but lack the kind of radical and continuing doubts that trouble the ironist intellectual. Distinguishing these two senses of irony as distinct points on a spectrum makes it possible to reconcile the apparently conflicting statements in CIS about the importance of irony for liberal citizens, on the one hand, and claims that irony is “an inherently private matter,” on the other (Rorty 1989, 87). Rorty’s argument roughly through the first three chapters aims to establish the negative point, as we have seen, that we should give up the attempt to unite, through appeal to some ahistorical, transcendental or foundational source, self‐realization and justice, that there is no necessary or automatic “bridge” between “a private ethic of self‐creation and a public ethic of mutual accommodation” (Rorty 1989, xiii–xv, 34). He accepts the premise that “The vocabulary of self‐creation is necessarily private, unshared, unsuited to argument. The vocabulary of justice is necessarily public and shared, a medium for argumentative exchange” (p. xiv), and merely wants to clear the road of contrary philosophical detritus that has outlived its usefulness and threatens to perpetuate undemocratic forms of authority. At this point Rorty isn’t making a case for why a public–private split is needed or even recognizing the possibility that the lines could be drawn differently; he is only calling attention to the problems, as he sees it, that have arisen from attempts to unite them “in a single vision.” Quite simply, and uncontroversially, there are private fantasies and public needs. Efforts to try to conflate them have done more harm than good, particularly when it comes to encouraging fanaticism and intolerance. When Rorty returns to the notion of irony late in chapter 3, and then develops it in chapter  4, he takes a very different tack. No longer is he merely describing a state of affairs; now he tells us that his defense of ironism “turns on making a firm distinction between the private and the public” (Rorty 1989, 83). Yet we see immediately in the next sentence that the context is the second, more radical sense of irony: “the line of ironist thinking which runs from Hegel through Foucault and Derrida.” His claim here that “In the ideal liberal society, the intellectuals would still be ironists, although the nonintellectuals would not” (p. 87), seems a blatant contradiction of his earlier assertions that “the citizens of my liberal utopia … would be liberal ironists” (p. 61) and the description of a liberal utopia “in which ironism, in the relevant sense, is universal” (p. xv). The way out of these apparent lacunae, as Curtis (2015) has argued, is to keep clear the two senses of irony, especially in the places where Rorty’s rhetoric gets imprecise.11 Even where he says nonintellectuals would not be ironists (in the radical sense), he nevertheless holds that they would be “commonsensically nominalist and historicist” and “see themselves as contingent through and through” (Rorty 1989, 87), which is precisely the definition of the ironist offered in the beginning of the book (p. xv). Not unlike Rorty’s depiction of irony, it is helpful to distinguish two different appeals to the distinction between public and private in CIS. While distinct, both are nonetheless a function of his concern for ethical responsibility. The first is linked to his negative, 496

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

anti‐essentialist, antifoundationalist claim at the outset of the book that we give up attempts to unify the two and is grounded in the belief “that what is most important to each of us is what we have in common with others” (Rorty 1989, xiii). As we have seen, his point in this context is that assuming such unity prevents us from seeing two distinct responsibilities here, to which Rorty pledges to give “equal weight,” rather than a singular, universal demand for (public) justice and only “social virtues” (p. xiv). The problem with unifying self‐creation and the pursuit of justice is that, while potentially politically efficacious – that is, in the sense of producing a fundamentalist Christian or revolutionary Marxist bent on generating social change  –  it fails to recognize the contingency and fallibility of our individual sense of what is most important to us, and to orient us ethically toward others so that we are inclined to think we may learn something from them. The infallibility and self‐certainty characteristic of such unity militates against critical self‐reflection and ethical growth. The initial discussion of public–private is, then, far less fraught than the later one, and in keeping with his moderate sense of irony.12 As we know, the later discussion surrounding Rorty’s more extreme conception of the ironist as someone who has “radical and continuing doubts” about her final vocabulary and attendant claim that we need a “firm distinction between the private and the public” were pounced on by critics as variously incoherent, impossible, and/or irresponsible (Rorty 1989, 73, 85).13 Saddled with the more radical conception of ironism, he has to make a case for why ironism and liberalism are not incompatible, why the apparent connection between ironism and antiliberalism is merely contingent (p. 89), and to defeat the belief that “the same person cannot be, in alternate moments, Nietzsche and J. S. Mill” (p. 85), so as to undercut the prima facie assumption that a liberal ironist is a contradiction in terms. By and large, I think Rorty is able to make such a case. But in the process he lands on a number of assertions about “ironists” as distinct from liberal ironists, ironist intellectuals versus nonintellectuals, and the relation of each of these notions to the categories of public and private, that don’t cohere with other statements about these topics in the rest of the book.14 Yet for all of this apparent, if not real, inconsistency, I want to argue that there is a coherent ethical project that predominates in the book. Few interpreters of Rorty have commented on the “ethics of kindness” that Rorty introduces in chapter 3, an ethical project aimed at diminishing cruelty and injustice, defending the weak from the strong, that I want to suggest is at the core of CIS. As a liberal, Rorty argues, “the part of my final vocabulary which is relevant to such [public] actions requires me to become aware of all the various ways in which other human beings whom I might act upon can be humiliated” (1989, 92). Not only are liberal ironist commonsensically nominalist and historicist about their own beliefs, they have a concern for the harm caused by attempts to subsume others under a single description that fails to recognize and respect the pluralism of private fantasies. To return to the first, more moderate sense of irony, one of its underappreciated aspects is the extent to which the ironist needs others. Rorty is quite explicit about this: the ironist “needs as much imaginative acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies as possible, not just for her own edification, but in order to understand the actual and possible humiliation of the people who use alternative final vocabularies” (1989, 92). Or, again: “the ironist … desperately needs to talk to other people, needs this with the same urgency as people need to make love. He needs to do so because 497

Christopher J. Voparil

only conversation enables him to handle these doubts, to keep himself together, to keep his web of beliefs and desires coherent enough to enable him to act” (p. 186). The moral imperative of Rorty’s ironist is “enlarging our acquaintance” through “skill at imaginative identification” (pp. 80, 93). The project of making us more aware of forms of cruelty and suffering we may not have noticed is what authorizes Rorty’s method of “redescription” or “recontextualization.” Alternative perspectives from which to see things are precisely what break the hold of our current, often unquestioned, lenses in order to bring the previously occluded into view (p. 173), both in the context of self‐ creation and the pursuit of justice: “the liberal ironist just wants our chances of being kind, of avoiding the humiliation of others, to be expanded by redescription” (p. 91).

3  Self‐Images, “Borderline Cases” and Contingent Obligations Beginning in the early 1990s, we see Rorty’s understanding of ethics in terms of our relations to others and his abiding concern with developing a broader democratic moral community take center stage. Like the classical pragmatists, Rorty rejects an ethics that appeals to fixed principles, what James called “an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance” (1977a, 610). Against principles and rule‐following, Rorty likewise turns to attitudes, dispositions, and virtues. Indeed, his approach to ethics is on the whole surprisingly consistent with the principal shifts that Steven Fesmire sees in classical pragmatist ethics: “It replaces beliefs‐as‐intellectual‐abstractions with beliefs‐ as‐tendencies‐to act, pure reason with practical inquiry, and objectivist rationality with imaginative situational intelligence” (Fesmire 2003, 28). Rorty’s attempt to reconstruct ethics is more than a broad shift away from the metaphysical and epistemological to the ethical and political, from philosophy to democracy. His later thought is more concretely intentional and focused in its ethical priorities. What is distinctive in Rorty’s contribution to pragmatist ethics is how he draws on Dewey and James to develop a conception of ethics as responsibility to invisible or excluded others. One sees this attentiveness in his admonition that we “drop the question of how to get in touch with ‘mind‐independent and language‐independent reality’” and replace it with questions like “What are the limits of our community? Are our encounters sufficiently free and open? Has what we have recently gained in solidarity cost us our ability to listen to outsiders who are suffering? To outsiders who have new ideas?” (Rorty 1991, 13). What I want to argue in this final section is that this ethical focus is an especially Jamesian priority, first visible in CIS. Not coincidentally, the only place in CIS where James receives more than passing mention is an affirmation of the lesson about moral blindness that James draws from his interaction with the settler responsible for one of the farmed “coves” he observed in the North Carolina mountains in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (James 1977b, 630–1). Rorty relates the Freud‐inspired account of the contingency of self‐identity that he has been elaborating, the idea that any idiosyncratic constellation of meanings can “set the tone of a life,” to overcoming “what William James called ‘a certain blindness in human beings’” (Rorty 1989, 37–8). He credits James for recognizing that it is possible “to juggle several descriptions of the same event without asking which one was right … to see a new vocabulary not as 498

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

something which was supposed to replace all other vocabularies, something which claimed to represent reality, but simply as one more vocabulary, one more human project, one person’s chosen metaphoric” (p. 39).15 Given this stance, getting to know other people’s “chosen metaphorics” becomes a primary priority in Rorty’s ethics. For both James and Rorty the remedy for blindness is not just sight but sympathetic interest. Certainly noticing details of others’ lives that previously had been overlooked is necessary. But we must be ethically oriented toward the other – open to listening and learning from her – in order to hear the “cries of the wounded” (James 1977a, 626). The edifying character of their work is directed toward bringing about this shift in our ethical orientation. For James, claims made by “concrete” persons create an obligation (p. 617). Yet he also notes that we will hear the cries of the wounded only “so far as we are just and sympathetic instinctively, and so far as we are open to the voice of complaint” (p. 626). What James’s perspective gives Rorty is a non‐Kantian conception of moral obligation. “One of James’s most heartfelt convictions,” Rorty tells us, “was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only to ask which other claims – ‘claims actually made by some concrete person’  –  it runs athwart” (Rorty 1999, 148).16 While “deeply suspicious of the notion of obligation,” Rorty believes that a nontranscendental sense of obligation can be cultivated by expanding our contingent sense of moral identity as a member of a community who, as a result of acculturation, feels an obligation to listen (Rorty 1982, 202; 2000, 61–2). In other words, “The term ‘moral obligation’ becomes increasingly less appropriate to the degree to which we identify with those whom we help: the degree to which we mention them when telling ourselves stories about who we are, the degree to which their story is also our story” (1999, 79). We also see this in Rorty’s critique of “egotism,” which he describes as being “satisfied that the vocabulary one uses when deciding how to act is all right just as it is, and that there is no need to figure out what vocabularies others are using” (2010a, 395). “Before you decide that an action was unforgivable,” Rorty recommends, “make sure that you know how it looked to the agent” (p. 394). Rorty’s account of ethics, then, aims at moral growth or progress and proceeds along two axes. First, ethics demands “a rich and full a knowledge of other people as possible – in particular, knowledge of their own descriptions of their actions and of themselves” (2010a, 393). This ongoing work of getting to know “the needs and interests of more and more diverse human beings” demands both noticing others and taking a sympathetic interest in their perspectives (1999, 82). Second, we must expand our practical identity or “self‐image” so that this knowledge of others becomes woven into our sphere of ethical care and concern. As he explains in “Ethics Without Principles,” “Moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as whole” as “a matter of re‐marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves” (1999, 77–9). Rortyan ethics is focused on cultivating responsiveness and “increasing sensitivity” so that we are able to “respond to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people” (p. 81). As our range of possible moral identities expands, so does our ability to put ourselves in the shoes of different sorts of people. In a late essay, “Kant vs. Dewey,” he continues to advance this line of thought, depicting obligations as a function of our practical identity and interpreting ethical dilemmas as debates between “alternative moral identities” (Rorty 2007, 197, 499

Christopher J. Voparil

200).The ongoing process of “looking at the relative attractions of various communities and identities” should spark the question, “Should I retain the practical identity I presently have, or rather develop and cherish the new identity I shall have to assume if I do what my present practical identity forbids?” (2007, 198–9). In addition to Rorty’s Jamesian insights, the discussion in “Ethics Without Principles” tracks closely Dewey’s account in Human Nature and Conduct. Via Dewey Rorty develops a naturalistic conception of morality and moral behavior as byproduct of human adaption to nonroutine demands that emerge in social relationships. Both Rorty and Dewey understood, as Dewey put it, that “For practical purposes morals mean customs, folkways, established collective habits” (1983 [1922], 54). Their central focus is on the mutability and adaptability of morality and moral behavior in the face of new moral demands placed on us by the claims of others (see Dewey 1983 [1922], 224). For Rorty, this is exemplified in his discussions in “Ethics Without Principles” and “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” (2007) of starving strangers at our door whose demands for food create new claims on us and challenge our habits of putting our families first. Not unlike indeterminate or problematic situations for Dewey, Rorty’s accounts of ethics and justice center on moments when habits and custom prove inadequate: “when the individual’s needs begin to clash with those of her family, or her family’s with those of the neighbours’, or when economic strain begins to split her community into warring classes, or when that community must come to terms with an alien community” (Rorty 1999, 73). Not unlike James, Dewey saw the demands of others generating demands to which we must be responsive: “Right is only an abstract name for the multitude of concrete demands in action which others impress upon us, and of which we are obliged, if we would live, to take some account” (qtd. in Rorty 1999, 73). Where Rorty departs from Dewey is to introduce the category of moral sentiment derived from Hume via Annette Baier: “moral progress is not a matter of an increase of rationality … Nor is it what Dewey called an increase of intelligence,” since “People can be very intelligent, in this sense, without having wide sympathies” (Rorty 1999, 81). It is important to see that Rorty does not, as many have argued, rest content with the mere invocation of an ethnocentric “we.” The focus on membership, and on our relations and responsibilities toward others, gives Rorty a basis for attending to the constitution of community through exclusion and what he calls the “borderline cases”  –  individuals or groups that we exclude from membership in our moral community (1998, 168). For Rorty, to be part of a society is to be taken as a “possible conversational partner” by those who shape that society’s self‐image (1991, 203). Indeed, expanding the range of people we regard as conversation partners emerges in the 1980s as a recurring motif in his work.17 Initially, his attention to those whose views fall outside the bounds of this intersubjective agreement focused on examples of intellectual disagreement. “Enemies of liberal democracy, like Nietzsche or Loyola,” he tells us, are deemed “crazy” or “mad,” not because their views are false or incoherent or irrational, but because “the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously” (1991, 187–8). In the 1990s Rorty turned more explicitly to marginalized and excluded social groups, suggesting that moral progress is “a history of making rather than finding, of poetic achievement by ‘radically situated’ individuals and communities, rather than as the gradual unveiling, through the use of ‘reason,’ of ‘principles’ or ‘rights’ or ‘values’” (p. 189). A common thread running through Rorty’s later work is fostering an 500

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

inclusive moral identity that forms the basis of a global “community of trust” (2007, 55). At issue is “the degree to which we identify with those whom we help” (1999, 79). Even in CIS he counseled citizens to “stay on the lookout for marginalized people  – people whom we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather than ‘us’” (p. 196). Like James, Rorty’s affirmation of attitudes and virtues more conducive to tolerant, pluralistic democratic life extends to the effort to manifest such changes in his fellow citizens by undermining our contrary, nondemocratic habits and commitments. The eschewal of fixed principles and shift away from rationalism and absolutes can be seen as more than a philosophical stance; for Rorty it is an attempt to foster temperaments and self‐images, virtues and habits, that are more conducive to the pluralistic, fallibilistic, and epistemically modest practices of a democratic culture and way of life. I have argued that the fundamental ethical thrust of his work centers on the project of facing our responsibilities to ourselves and to others, with special attention to those who have been excluded or just not noticed. This ethics of responsibility was important to Rorty from his earliest writings to his last essays. Recognizing the “ethical base” of his thought should, I hope, alleviate, if belatedly, his worry that the edifying philosopher who declines to recognize “the attainment of truth as a matter of necessity” would be treated as a “relativist” who “lacks moral seriousness” (Rorty 1980, 376). After a lifetime of preoccupation with ethical responsibility – “at 12,” he says, “I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice” (1999, 6) – I think that charge can safely be dropped.

Notes 1 See, for example, Voparil (2006); Bacon (2007); Gascoigne (2008); and Dieleman (2013). 2 See Gross (2008) and Voparil and Bernstein (2010, “General Introduction”). 3 The key insight in these early essays is Rorty’s attention to “the dependence of criteriology upon ethical norms,” an idea he attributes to Hegel and suggests that both Dewey and Kierkegaard “borrow” in their respective criticisms of “objectivity” as the goal of philosophizing. See also Rorty (1961b, 116n11). 4 The exceptions here include Bernstein (2008) and Ramberg (2013). 5 I should add that Ramberg clearly recognizes this conception of responsibility and understands its importance. See, for example, Ramberg (2008, 444; 2013, 56) and I am attempting to bring to the foreground something that remains in the background of his account. I also want not only to extend this concern forward from PMN to later work but to establish its presence in Rorty’s earliest pre‐PMN writings. 6 For a fuller discussion of how this attention to borderline cases becomes a concern for marginalized groups in his later work, see Voparil (2011). 7 As I noted above, Ramberg recognizes this emphasis on responsibility in his reading. He essentially folds it into his account of self‐creation as “not a mastery of, but a recognition of and an assumption of responsibility for, the contingency of one’s hermeneutic situatedness” (2013, 62). In what follows, I wish to bring out this notion of responsibility further and to grant it independent status from the process of edification as an overarching concern of Rorty’s, as well as to highlight the responsibilities toward others that ultimately provide a check on our pursuit of self‐creation. 8 This lovely phrase is Ramberg’s (2008, 444).

501

Christopher J. Voparil

9 While I don’t have the space to develop this here, in the time between PMN and CIS, Rorty’s moral concerns predominate in his engagement with postmodernists and “textualists”: the reasons why he prefers James and Dewey over Foucault and Deleuze, he insists, are “not epistemological but moral” (Rorty 1982, 156; see also xviii, 207–8). It is noteworthy that Rorty’s essay “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism,” written in 1980, ends by noting that he is unable to backing up this preference with an argument, as this would require “a full‐scale discussion of the possibility of combining private fulfillment, self‐realization, with public morality, a concern for justice” (1982, 158) – precisely the issue on which CIS opens and that dominates its pages. See Voparil (2006, ch. 5). 10 See Pettegrew (2000); Gascoigne (2008, ch. 5); and Curtis (2015). See also the related discussions in Bacon (2005) and Ramberg (2014). 11 Bacon (2005) recognizes these issues and inconsistencies in Rorty’s account and argues that we see ironism as “a tendency to doubt” that differs only in degree between the ironist intellectual and nonintellectual (pp. 411–12). The challenge here is that Rorty himself seemed to downplay the importance of such doubts in later attempts at clarification (see Rorty 2010b). For his part, Rorty recognized that “my description of the liberal ironist was badly flawed. I conflated two quite different sorts of people: the unruffled pragmatist and the anguished existentialist adolescent” (2010b, 506). While this characteristic self‐deprecation has some explanatory power, it downplays the significance of his insights about the liberal ironist’s ethical orientation toward the self and others. 12 The discussion in chapter  3 of CIS (1989), where Rorty is concerned to circumscribe in private the ironist intellectual “who is unwilling to be a liberal” (p. 61), seems consistent with this early discussion. Rorty’s command that we “Privatize the Nietzschean‐Sartrean‐ Foucauldian attempt at authenticity and purity, in order to prevent yourself from slipping into a political attitude which will lead you to think that there is some social goal more important than avoiding cruelty” (p. 65) follows from these same ethical commitments and is of a piece with his worries about unifying self‐creation and justice in a single vision. 13 See Bacon (2005) for a good summary of these many critical reactions. I include my own (2006, ch. 5) earlier interpretation of Rorty among these as well. 14 I don’t have the space to sort all of these claims out here, and am not even sure they all can be shown to cohere. Bacon (2005) and Ramberg (2014) offer somewhat different but helpful discussions. If pressed, the interpretation I would espouse is that Rorty’s “firm distinction” is best regarded in the way he characterizes other moral principles: as “reminders of, abbreviations for … a whole range of institutions, practices, and vocabularies of moral and political deliberation” (1989, 58–9). Mere awareness of it alleviates the severity of it. Rorty’s first use of the term “ironist” comes with the qualifier “liberal” and gives us the moderate version of irony as a species of civic virtue. This sense of irony, which I think is the most crucial, is of key importance for both sides of his dual priorities of private self‐creation and public justice. It is important to note that this moderate sense of irony comes with no claim that it must remain private. In my view, the discussion of intellectual irony, for lack of a better term, as the term for the more radical epistemic and existential doubts that besets ironist theorists, though not without its importance as a separate matter in Rorty’s narrative about modernity, is what leads to much of the confusion around both irony and the public and the private. Ramberg (2014) offers a compelling, though different, way out of these problems by interpreting Rortyan irony through Jonathan Lear’s sense of ironic experience, that eschews the epistemic category of doubt altogether, such that irony becomes “an experiential awareness of the responsibility one has both for one’s practical identity and to one’s practical identity” (Ramberg 2014, 15). While I find this conception very attractive, given my focus here, how to translate Lear’s experiential resources into Rorty’s schema raises questions, though not insoluble ones, of its own. Ramberg also seems primarily concerned to rehabilitate irony

502

Rorty’s Ethics of Responsibility

“as a feature of the intellectual” (p. 16) in ways that seem unnecessarily narrow, though I agree with his basic position that irony is “an integral part of Rorty’s attempt in CIS to serve liberalism.” 15 Even though these passages mark the extent of the commentary on James in the book, Rorty remains preoccupied with the form of insensitivity exemplified in self‐absorbed aesthetes like Nabokov’s characters Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote. Indeed, this comes out most clearly in Rorty’s brilliant reading of Nabokov, which can be interpreted as a lesson about James’s “cries of the wounded.” In discussing Lolita, Rorty asserts that “the moral is not to keep one’s hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering” (1989, 164). 16 Rorty cited these lines from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” as “my favorite passage” in the writings of James: “Every de facto claim creates insofar forth an obligation. Take any demand however slight which any creature, however weak, may make. Ought it not for its own sake to be satisfied? If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a demand that went the other way” (qtd. in Rorty 2011, 15). 17 See, for example, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” in ORT (1991); the essays in part 2 of TP (1998); and “Justice as a Larger Loyalty” in PCP (2007).

References Bacon, Michael. 2005. “A Defence of Liberal Ironism.” Res Publica 11(4): 403–23. —. 2007. Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Bernstein, Richard J. 2008. “Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism.” New Literary History 39: 13–27. —. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Curtis, William M. 2015. Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press. Dewey, John. 1983 [1922]. Human Nature and Conduct. In John Dewey: The Middle Works, 1899– 1924, Vol. 14, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Dieleman, Susan. 2013. “The Contingent Status of Epistemic Norms: Rorty, Kantian Pragmatisms, and Feminist Epistemologies.” In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics, edited by Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 31–48. New York: Bloomsbury. Fesmire, Steven. 2003. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gascoigne, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: Liberalism, Irony, and the Ends of Philosophy. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Gross, Neil. 2008. Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Guignon, Charles and David R. Hiley, eds. 2003. Richard Rorty. New York: Cambridge University Press. James, William. 1977a. “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life.” In The Writings of William James, edited by John J. McDermott, 610–29. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. 1977b. “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In The Writings of William James, edited by John J. McDermott, 629–45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnstone, Henry W., Jr. 1959. Philosophy and Argument. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

503

Christopher J. Voparil

Pettegrew, John. 2000. “Lives of Irony: Randolph Bourne, Richard Rorty, and a New Genealogy of Critical Pragmatism.” In A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History, edited by John Pettegrew, 103–34. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Ramberg, Bjørn Torgrim. 2008. “Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America.” In The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy, edited by Cheryl Misak, 430–48. New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2013. “For the Sake of his Own Generation: Rorty on Destruction and Edification.” In Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics, edited by Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, 49–72. New York: Bloomsbury. —. 2014. “Irony’s Commitment: Reading Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” The European Legacy 19(2): 144–62. Rorty, Richard. 1961a. “Recent Metaphilosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 15(2): 299–318. —. 1961b. “The Limits of Reductionism.” In Experience, Existence, and the Good, edited by L. C. Lieb. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. —. 1980. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 1982. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press. —. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. —. 2000. “Response to Jürgen Habermas.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 56–64. Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 2003. “Some American Uses of Hegel.” In Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, edited by Wolfgang Welsch and Klaus Vieweg, 33–46. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. —. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2010a. “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 389–406. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell. —. 2010b. “Reply to J. B. Schneewind.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty (The Library of Living Philosophers), edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, Vol. 32, 506–8. Chicago: Open Court. —. 2011. An Ethics for Today: Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Voparil, Christopher J. 2006. Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. —. 2011. “Rortyan Cultural Politics and the Problem of Speaking for Others.” Contemporary Pragmatism 8(1): 115–31. —. 2014. “Taking Other Human Beings Seriously: Rorty’s Ethics of Choice and Responsibility.” Contemporary Pragmatism 11(1): 83–102. Voparil, Christopher J. and Richard J. Bernstein, eds. 2010. The Rorty Reader. Malden, MA: Wiley‐Blackwell.

Further Reading Gröschner, Alexander, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe, eds. 2013. Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics. New York: Bloomsbury.

504

Part VI

Coda

31 Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty CHRISTOPHER NORRIS

Hope you won’t take it as a backhand kind Of compliment, or something even worse, Like old‐score settling, if I try to find Some way to talk our issues through in verse. At best it might be something that combined Word‐magic with your talent to rehearse Dilemmas in philosophy of mind, Language, or logic and yet intersperse The expert stuff with writing of the sort That takes a larger readership on board And never sells them or its topic short. The reason was, your prose‐style could afford To mingle idioms, like modes of thought, Unworried as to how they might accord With the strict protocols set up to thwart Such ventures into regions unexplored By the rule‐sticklers. Yet, it may be said, Why rhyme and meter? when you stuck to prose, Albeit of a kind that’s likely read More often by non‐specialists than those Whose academic caution bids them tread A style‐path narrower than the one you chose As the best route for anyone who’d head Off on a high‐ground hike that might disclose Perspectives on the intellectual scene Unglimpsed and unimagined from inside The mind‐world of philosophers who’ve been Trained on the low road and thereafter tried To take short views. But that’s not what you mean, Not rhyme and meter, when you set aside A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

507

Christopher Norris

The plain‐prose indicators of routine Guild‐membership or signs of bona fide

2

Professional allegiance and advise Your colleagues in the academic game That, everything considered, they’d be wise To give up warming over all the same Old chestnuts in a slightly different guise, Or seeking out new idioms to frame The fixed agenda of an enterprise Well past its prime. Then theirs would be the aim Of coming up with such inventive tropes, Such metaphors or narratives, as might, If not too late, redeem the lost life‐hopes Of those who’d suffered the perennial blight Brought on by being forced to learn the ropes As tenure‐track required. So they should write Not just, you said, the sort of prose that copes With getting the main points across in tight, Well‐structured form but prose that tried to do What poets (and some novelists) do best, That is, discover senses to pursue Far out beyond the denotations stressed By all the hard‐nosed literalists. They’d eschew Such verbal license since it fails the test Of making sense or coming as true According to the strictest standards pressed So hard on other language‐games by just Those house‐trained intellects who’d brought about The trahison des clercs or breach of trust By which philosophers presume to flout The rule that says all living language must Transform itself by always trying out Fresh metaphors to live by. So the thrust Of how you wrote was mainly to cast doubt On the old kinds of metaphor that held Philosophy in their Cartesian grip, Or classic narratives whose upshot spelled The moral that each ephebe be a chip 3 Off the old block and strike a pose that quelled All notions of creative authorship By a strict etiquette whose code compelled Unruly types to give their guide the slip Each time they fancied penning the odd phrase Where some nonstandard idiom revealed Thoughts out of kilter with such proper ways Of monologic speech. What lay concealed, You let us know, in such communiqués

508

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Between the lines from somewhere out left‐field Was everything suppressed by the malaise Of a style degree zero that appealed Only to those in whom the wonder‐struck Thaumazein where philosophy began For Socrates has somehow come unstuck And left them, tenure‐seekers to a man, Resolved that prose of theirs should have no truck With poetry. They upheld Plato’s ban On metaphor, mimesis, and what luck Or inspiration offered to the clan Of rhapsodes and enthusiasts so lost In their wild, word‐intoxicated state As to allow no reckoning of its cost To reason’s soul or pause to estimate The civic harms poetically glossed As due to gods or muses. Still you’d rate This verse‐epistle evidence of crossed Wires or cross‐purposes since to equate Your idea that philosophy should take A more poetic form with the idea That rhyme and meter might between them make Some big improvement seems a case of clear Misapprehension. What you thought would break The spirit‐wasting rule of that austere Style without style – and maybe help to shake The sense that went along with it of sheer

4

Necessity that certain things be done In certain ways as laid down by the code For normal practices – mandated none Of those verse‐features that might grace an ode By Pindar, Keats & Co., but that you’d shun (I guess) if they turned up, as here, bestowed On writing of a kind that shouldn’t run To formal structures apt to overload The powers of concentration rightly trained, By readers of a less indulgent bent, On more substantive issues. Point sustained: You still found room for reasoned argument, Not least while telling us what’s to be gained By taking on the freedom to invent New language‐games beyond the sorts ordained By fealty to some one line of descent Against all others. So we’d better think That when you told us poetry could save Philosophy, or pull it from the brink Of a not undeserved nor early grave, The price of having its choice public shrink

509

Christopher Norris

To miniscule proportions, this meant they’ve Gone wrong, the current lot, in ways that link Way back to many another short‐lived wave Of intellectual fashion. They should learn More from the poets about how to spin Fresh‐minted metaphors, or how to turn A life‐enhancing phrase, but not begin On any verse‐led binge that bids us spurn All remnants of analysis and pin Our best hopes to those language‐games that yearn For something more upliftingly akin To that which rhyme and meter put in place Of dullard reason. So let’s not deny The obvious: when you suggest we face Philosophy’s low prospects with an eye To poetry’s high hopes, it’s not the case That you’re just asking us to versify The same old topics. What you want’s more space Between the words so language can supply The poetry that comes of hearing all The intertextual echoes that resound On cue to every signifier’s call, Or sundry connotations that surround Each letter, word and phrase when not in thrall To denotative sense but – as you found With Derrida’s best efforts to forestall The dead hand of the literal – unbound From signified or referent. Thus freed, It takes the less thought‐trodden path that winds Along whichever language‐route may lead The Denker, like the Dichter, past what binds The intellect to some accustomed creed, Or idiolect to usage, for those minds Professionally groomed to meet the need That intellect conforms to just the kinds Of usage certified to hold the line Against such vagrant thoughts. That’s why you waged Ironic war on readings that, like mine, Took Derrida as one who still engaged With topics that the derrière‐garde define As squarely philosophical since staged In just such terms as those that you’d consign To the scrap‐heap of words that once assuaged Our craving for god‐substitutes but now Must join the pile along with other such Time‐honored relics. These remind us how Hard we shall find it to escape the clutch Of outworn images or disavow

510

5

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Pythagorean echoes that still touch Some chord in us despite what we allow To be their hollow ring. The case was much

6

The same – your point again – throughout the whole Unquestionably rich and varied tale Of Western metaphysics and the role Within it of those metaphors whose trail Leads back to the idea of mind or soul As glassy essence. This would then entail The message that philosophy’s main goal Must be to see that clarity prevail, Mind apprehend that essence, and soul come, By constant mirror‐polishing, to catch Its own reflection unimpaired by some Small imperfection or minutest scratch That might obstruct its gaze. Your rule of thumb With metaphors like this was: mix and match Them as a poet might till they succumb To ordinary usage, then dispatch Them to whatever limbo’s set apart For tropes, as Nietzsche said, that masquerade As concepts. Whence the counterfeiter’s art (Among philosophers a stock‐in‐trade) Of un‐remembering, as if by heart, Those metaphoric coinages that made Philosophy from Plato to Descartes And up to now a constant dress‐parade Of figures that had undergone the shift From sensuous to abstract. This made sure Their advent as imagination’s gift To thought was long forgotten and secure From prying intellects that gave short shrift To white mythologies in quest of pure Conceptual instruments by which to lift Themselves above the thought‐distracting lure Of sensuous imagery and so attain Transcendent truths. Thus far one might agree And think you’d hit bang on a major strain Of chronic self‐delusion that might be

7

Put out of its long post‐Cartesian pain By the shrewd mix of gentle mockery And counter‐statement that you hoped would gain More converts than if tendered in a key Of odium scholasticum that left The opposition dug in deeper while Its case, however strong, appeared bereft Of basic courtesies that civil style

511

Christopher Norris

And decency should couple with the heft Of a good argument. The point that I’ll Raise once again since, despite all your deft Rejoinders, it’s the one I have on file Under “unfinished business” is your use Of that word “transcendental” to include Not only fictive entities like nous, Soul, spirit, mind, and the whole abstract brood They fathered mainly as a poor excuse To smuggle God back in, but things that you’d Deem just as bad, like all claims to deduce, From certain basic principles construed As a priori warranted or backed By reasonings in a transcendental form, Such truths as otherwise we should have lacked The means to justify. This was a norm, You thought, that held up merely through the fact That dumping it would kick up such a storm Among philosophers who’d made their pact To play along that sticking with the swarm Seemed, on the face of it, a better bet Than opting out of their protective guild, Unlearning all the codes and passwords set For members, cancelling thought‐routines instilled Through years of work, and striving to forget The job‐security that came with skilled Observance of the local etiquette. Such were the benefits if one fulfilled Conditions on sound usage of such big Load‐bearing terms as “transcendental” which, If downed in your way with a hefty swig Of irony, say you’re about to ditch The whole caboodle and help that lot twig How they’d been taken in. The only hitch With this fine plan of yours was how to rig The grand exposure so as not to stitch The thing up so completely that there’s no Room left for anything remotely like The discipline you practiced years ago, One that – an observation apt to strike Shrewd readers – still engaged you even though You came to treat its bi‐millennial Reich As more a kind of vaudeville roadshow With some enticing bits put in to spike The guns of those who’d say: let’s just call time On the whole thing, cut funding where it hurts, And block philosophy’s attempt to mime The natural sciences. Your view converts

512

8

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

To a slight variant on this paradigm And (though you’d balk at this) distinctly flirts With “end‐of‐history” wonks who make a prime Intent of rubbishing what disconcerts The currency of plain old commonsense (For which read “ideology”) and try To rouse the populace in its defense By methods that more fittingly apply In contexts where the arguments dispense With any show of reason. A far cry From the plain pragmatism you condense, In Jamesian style, as wanting to get by On a truth‐notion that at last comes down To what’s good as a matter of belief, Or what works out as the best game in town With “good” and “best” defined (to keep it brief)

9

As tending by whatever means to crown Our efforts with success, or bring relief At other times when fortune seems to frown On our endeavors. Or – for you a chief Plus‐point – it fits in with the pragmatist Desire to keep our truth‐talk within reach Of practicalities too soon dismissed By those, like Kant, who much prefer to preach From the high moral ground and so enlist Some abstract universal rule for each New case‐in‐hand which then becomes more grist To the deontic mill where every breach Of its strict regulations either throws A case‐shaped spanner in the works or churns Out some case‐crushing judgment to impose Its sovereign law. Agreed, your thinking earns High marks in this department since it goes Some way toward showing what the Kantian learns, If ever, then most often at the close Of a rule‐governed moral life that turns Out, with the unaccustomed gift of long‐ Range reckoning, to exhibit all the signs Of having gone life‐damagingly wrong Whenever force of circumstance confines The range of choice to seizing either prong Of some dilemma where instinct inclines To kindly acts and answers like a gong At nature’s call, while reason undermines All that, decrees that precept substitute For practice, and demands that instinct grant Law’s reason‐based imperative to suit Mere inclination to its rule as Kant

513

Christopher Norris

Sadistically enjoined. Such absolute Conceptions of the moral good got scant Respect from you since lying at the root Of all bad creeds whose technique is to plant

10

Abstraction in the place where those to whom Such thoughts appeal had better cultivate Breadth of acquaintance as advised by Hume, Make reason slave to passion, and sedate Through social intercourse the will to doom All absolutes but theirs to the same fate Reserved for infidels by tribes with room For no gods but their own. At any rate Your laidback style does nothing to promote Such sermonizing and reminds us, when We’re tempted by it, of how well you wrote About the need to stand back, now and then, From our most cherished values and devote Some uptime to imagining again, Like a good novelist, how to keep afloat In these high seas. The finest of them pen Inventive variations on the way Your liberal ironist might come to view The issue from all sides and not betray That purpose by a sneaky will to skew The moral compass‐points and so convey Home‐truths as universal. Still, if you Think back a bit, you’ll know I’ve kept at bay A bunch of issues that ensured we two Were seldom in accord beyond what I’ve Set out as motivation just enough For my verse‐aided efforts to contrive This late rapprochement. Where the seas got rough On previous trips was when we took a dive Into that choppy “transcendental” stuff And you said that the best way to survive The maelstrom was to call Poseidon’s bluff, Go with the flow and take it all in stride, As pragmatists commend, by holding fast To something large and light enough to ride The storm out – empty barrel, chunk of mast,

11

Your choice – since centrifuged out to the side And buoyed up high as all the rest streamed past, Then corkscrewed down. Most likely I’ve applied This metaphor in ways that must be classed Pedestrian or frankly bottom‐grade For creativity when set against The scale you drew up as a reader’s aid

514

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

For sorting texts conservatively fenced Around with the exclusion‐signs displayed By faithful exegetes, from texts that sensed Quite other possibilities but strayed Only so far, and then texts that dispensed With the whole rule‐book. This served just to vex Free spirits – poets, critics, novelists, Philosophers, all those who long to flex Creative muscles – since the book insists They not relax the standard range of checks That help to straighten out the teasing twists Of connotation that can so perplex Plain readers. It’s the transcendentalist Gene‐sequence in your DNA, I’d guess, That evokes Blake and Wordsworth, maybe Keats, With Shelley, Byron, and – by more or less Predestined westward passage – what completes Their project in the visionary sagesse Of Emerson and Thoreau, then retreats (If that’s the word) to a downtown address In pragmatism’s stroller‐friendly streets. That’s the back‐story that has most to tell About the two ways “transcendental” went, The Kantian way that cast its lingering spell On each new cohort in the regiment Of armchair ruminants whom it befell Like Noah’s curse, the other what you meant By telling us they go together well, The canny pragmatist and those whose bent

12

Runs more to the imaginative heights Of a sublime whose transcendental modes Would stretch the power of reason that unites Our faculties until the strain explodes Their fragile links. Yet in its highest flights Of streamlined uplift still the mind bears loads That keep it tending earthward since, by rights, Its journey’s end is that of all the roads You said converged on the one truth‐shaped thing Worth seeking. This was how to keep the charm Of fantasy alive, and maybe bring Its wish to pass, yet let it not do harm As you thought every fine utopian fling So far had done, and thus helped to rearm The thought‐crusade of those who sought to swing Opinion round by sounding the alarm And tarring liberals with McCarthy’s brush. The trouble is, this fell in all too pat With something very like that same old rush

515

Christopher Norris

To judgment, and too comfortably sat With what you took as freedom’s cause: to push, If not all things American, then that Transcendent form of them that, at first blush, Might seem a fine thing to be aiming at, Yet loses something of its first appeal When thoughts of all that’s happened in the name Of those high sentiments begin to steal Upon us and suggest that we reframe Our notions of how real world and ideal Should properly relate. Then what’s to blame, In large part, for the regular raw deal Inflicted on the losers in this game, Misfits or rogue‐states, is that very knack Of managing to mix the highest‐toned Professions of intent with a laidback Or downright cynic outlook that condoned, As fit for its high purposes, a stack Of wrongs, home and abroad, that you disowned Only in passing. It’s that curious lack Of joined‐up thought by which a double‐zoned Weltanschauung – the transcendental linked With a pragmatic view of things that veered, At times, way off the moral path and winked At motes and beams alike – adroitly cleared Its conscience, though the issues stood distinct, By a well‐practiced trick of thought that steered A zigzag course from high to low and blinked At just the moments when its pilot feared Too close a view of what might else have posed A real and present danger to its hard‐ Won sense of certain moral truths disclosed Only to some choice few. The message jarred, As you found out, not just on folk disposed By hopes long disappointed to regard The holdout hopers from a viewpoint closed Against them, or on those too deeply scarred By various gods that failed, but on a bunch Of new‐left types and radicals. We shared A lot of your beliefs but had this hunch, Quite early on, that we should be prepared To work out why, when it came to the crunch Of prime allegiance openly declared, You’d count the US‐bashers out‐to‐lunch And start to say more plainly that we’d erred By thinking its high beacon might be crazed, Cracked, and its beams distorted so that we Could best do a repair‐job on the glazed

516

13

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Top dome by calculating the degree To which its beams were discrepantly phased With more progressive thought. Then we might see Clean through the ideology that dazed Believers in that old “land of the free”–

14

Type spirit‐raising stuff cooked up to fool Us into swallowing the usual lies Put out by those whose most effective tool For mind‐manipulation in the guise Of soul‐perfection came straight from a school Where pragmatism reigned. Here the top prize Went to the firmest sticker to that rule Which said: give them the transcendental highs Once in a while and then there’d be no end To the stuff they’d put up with when required, Or benefit of doubt they’d soon extend When principle and circumstance conspired To make sure any principle would bend As circumstance decreed. No doubt you tired Of having constantly to dodge and fend Off brickbats from a bunch of leftists fired By social passions you’d have thought in tune, At least on all the basic points, with your Idea of how our best selves might commune In a pragmatic way that knew the score And saw small chance of any big change soon, Yet still had social hopes worth living for Since neither prone nor yet auto‐immune To disappointment. This said: don’t ignore The history of failures and the sad Track‐record, most especially, of calls For social transformation that went bad Or came to naught but rather seek what falls Within the range of upgrades we can add Without the plane becoming one that stalls Because its rate of climb’s more than a tad Too rapid. Yet if their response still galls You now, those types (like me) who started out Your champions in the literary camp But later found increasing room for doubt, Then maybe it’s because they saw the stamp

15

Of ideals turned ironically about And so deployed first shrewdly to revamp Those social hopes, then as a way to scout Their proper limits and, if need be, cramp Their militant or rebel‐rousing style By timely inculcation of the taste

517

Christopher Norris

For solvent ironies that bid us smile With fond indulgence on that chronic waste Of energies. All this, remember, while Us lefties, whether Brits or US‐based, Saw their beliefs chucked on the rubbish‐pile By neocons who cynically embraced High‐minded and hard‐headed in the clinch That an old pragmatist like William James Could still keep more than decent at a pinch, And even turned right round against the aims Of warhawk paleocons – men every inch The dark precursors of the bunch whose names I’ll spare you now – since not a man to flinch At chronicling his nation’s sins and shames Along with its strong points. Let us be clear: There’s nothing in the least ad hominem About the issues I’ve been raising here, Or nothing that would please the likes of them, Those analytic types who chose to sneer At your supposed apostasy, condemn Your style as an affront to their austere Word‐habits, and decline a more ad rem Engagement with your work. Thus nod and wink Implied that you’d now given up the sort Of real tough‐minded stuff they wouldn’t blink At and elected rather to hold court In the soft company of such as think Philosophy’s an intertextual sport Or just one more excuse for spilling ink In literary ways that won’t support Examination of the rigorous kind That tells which arguments have hit the mark For colleagues of an analytic mind. Thus it presents, or so they’d say, a stark Memento of the world you left behind When, mid‐career, you opted to embark On a more wayward course and then fly blind Since the downside of that free‐as‐a‐lark Or giddy aerobatic stuff ’s to leave You looping wildly just when their technique Of concept‐parsing might have helped retrieve Terrestrial reference‐points by which to seek Familiar landmarks. Talk like that would peeve A saint at length, so you did well to tweak Their verbal dress‐codes now and then, or weave New styles around them, rather than critique The enterprise head‐on since then you’d just Be falling back on something like the ruse –

518

16

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

As you perceived it – that the Kantians trust As a good fall‐back strategy to use, Either when momentarily nonplussed Or else when there’s some point too big to lose So that the game‐plan says: just go for bust With transcendental back‐up and j’accuse As stock refrain. No question: you emerge Much better placed on all the tick‐box counts Of moral decency than those who’d urge We read your work in readiness to pounce On anything that might invite the scourge Applied so vigorously to denounce Your every thought as teetering on the verge Of “continental,” or – what this amounts To in their language‐game – far out beyond The intellectual pale. Thus devotees Of Kant are just as likely to respond That way as all those others prone to seize

17

Their every chance to reinforce the bond Of guild‐endorsed philosophers and squeeze Out all such dwellers in the demi‐monde Of disrepute. Thus hard‐won expertise Like theirs sells at a discount while the price Of shares in Continentals Inc is chalked Sky‐high and sure to double in a trice (They grumble) when some current fad gets talked Up in a hybrid style that lets you splice The chat with old philosophemes that stalked Mind’s corridors till Ockham’s fine device Henceforth ensured that all sound thinkers balked At such scholastic garbage. Let’s accept That they were wrong, that you were far from sold On all things continental, that you kept Close ties within the analytic fold, And – above all – that you were too adept At finding subtler ways to break the mold Than to wish their whole culture might be swept Aside and so give them good cause to scold Your Jacobin designs. Then there’s the deep And not just anecdotal link between The various sides of you that often leap Together off the page – the sense of keen Yet gentle irony, the will to keep All aspects of the intellectual scene Somewhere in view, the scintillating sweep Of Ideengeschichte that could glean So much from a review of past ideas, Like Hegel naturalized, and the belief

519

Christopher Norris

That we do best to hold a course that steers As far as can be from the moral reef Marked “cruelty.” Add to them your two‐cheers‐ For‐reason outlook that takes half a leaf From Hume’s congenial book, and then the fears That thought too closely tied to the motif

18

Of sovereign Truth might readily be pressed Into official service by some Grand Inquisitor whose idea of the test For truthfulness will certainly not stand A moment’s scrutiny against the best Of your unholy virtues. This I’d planned To bring out all along, but then (you guessed!) The argument got somewhat out of hand Or (more like) tended to revert to type And re‐stage quarrels that are running still In quarters where they’ve not absorbed the hype About how everyone’s now had their fill Of truth‐talk and forgotten the old gripe That Socrates once aimed at those whose skill In speaking well enabled them to pipe Such pleasing tunes that they subdued the will To truth in their rapt auditors. It’s more, For me, the snag that comes up every time We want to find some intimate rapport, Some near‐equivalent of perfect rhyme, Between a thinker’s predilection for The one thought‐ladder that could help them climb Above their own life‐indurated store Of prejudices, and (the point that I’m Now keen to make in case I’ve seemed to pick Too many bones) all those integral traits Of mind and character – what made you tick, In short – which, present orthodoxy states, May have their proper role in any thick Description or biography that rates Them on their proven tendency to click With readers, but which protocol dictates Should count for nothing more. The only place You really take a line on this is where You talk about a different sort of case – Flat contrary to yours – and say that there

19

Can be no valid reason to embrace A creed that has us solemnly declare, As touching on the amply‐vouched disgrace, Political and moral, of one Herr Professor Heidegger, the need to take

520

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Account of man and work viewed in the round And therefore not permit ourselves to make Exceptions from the rule for such renowned Philosophers, if only for the sake Of hanging on to some last common ground Where intellect and ethics hope to stake Their claim of being each‐to‐other bound In virtue’s cause. You didn’t go for that High‐minded but, you thought, misguided brand Of earnest moralizing since the flat Refusal, among some, to understand How great minds might just not know where it’s at, Ethically speaking, or have morals and Behavior like those of an alley‐cat, Was too apt to promote the sort of bland Consensual thinking currently the most Depressing trademark of a discipline That’s raised conformity to a high boast And used group‐feeling as its means to pin A “Steer well clear of this one!” sign or post A “Keep off!” notice, then proceed to bin The offending work. For readers over‐dosed On warnings, you advised: give it a spin, Give him a hearing, and allow (since it’s Now pretty much beyond dispute) that there’s Another label that quite aptly fits The thinker in whose work the logos shares Deep truths unplumbed by all the sharpest wits From Plato down, and that’s the one he bears In your phrase “Schwarzwald redneck.” So the bits In Heidegger worth saving for the heirs

20

Of Western metaphysics can be cut And pasted so as to produce a script Less vibrant with the call of Being but Much likelier to chime with those who’ve skipped A lot of that historic stuff and shut The book on Dasein’s epic. What this stripped‐ Down version also skimps is how the hut He famously hung out in, though equipped With stove and other basics, put across The same old tale incessantly rehearsed Throughout his lucubrations on the loss Of truth’s authentic voice, as in the worst Of those texts that the faithful try to gloss As aberrations but which readers versed In his life‐history won’t be apt to toss So quickly out of court. Granted, my first Intention here (remember?) was to press,

521

Christopher Norris

Despite your offstage ironies, the need That thinking hold its nerve and not regress To the idea that arguments succeed By suasive force alone (since what’s success, You might ask, if not getting folk agreed To see things our way?) or that answering “yes, That notion fits in very well indeed With my belief‐set” adds up to a good Or half‐way adequate account of what Most rightly is – or should be – understood When words like “truth” or “knowledge” fill a slot That “best belief ” won’t fill. I said it would Be better for philosophy (and not Just so as to provide a livelihood Or timely academic booster‐shot For tired philosophers) if it hung on To the most basic item in the stock Of brand‐name goods you thought had long since gone 21 The way of all such woefully ad hoc Contrivances or strategies to con The laggards into putting up a mock Display of expertise whereby to don The robes of science. This means, pace Locke, Still searching for some last sine qua non Of true philosophy, that is, the mode Of transcendental reasoning that alone – Or so its adepts claim – affords a road To a priori truths that can be known For sure and quite aside from knowledge owed To mere sense‐certainty. Although we’ve grown Suspicious of ideas like this that load (As you’d say) such a deal of otiose Conceptual baggage on the heaven‐hook Left dangling from the days of grandiose High‐flying metaphysics, still the book May not be shut or epilogue be close In that long thought‐adventure that it took For Geist to bid a first brave adios To myth or criticism cock a snook At custom‐bound belief. I’d say that we’ve A middle course to steer that won’t just tip This way or that and resolutely cleave To “honest Uncle Kant” or simply flip, Like you, the other way, resolve to heave That stuff clean overboard, and thereby clip Scientia’s wings. That is, we’d best conceive Some way that reason can retain its grip On our beliefs yet, so as not to yield

522

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Straight off to the assorted booby‐traps You laid down for it, come prepared to wield The kind of argument that fills the gaps In any concept‐system vacuum‐sealed On a priori grounds against a lapse Of knowledge with the sorts of truth revealed By opting to revise the mental maps

22

That drew such clear‐cut demarcation lines Between the twin imperia of Hume’s “Matters of fact” and “truths of reason.” Mine’s Not the conclusion everyone assumes Must follow if one takes the force of Quine’s “Two Dogmas” as an argument that dooms All such distinctions or that undermines Thought’s last defense against the threat that looms (Although of course you’d find the claim absurd) When the whole question as to what’s a sound Or reputable case fit to be heard And acted on, and what’s with justice found Deficient on that count, goes by the word Of those best placed to put the word around Among those likewise placed. So it gets blurred, The precept most philosophers felt bound To honor until recently, that truth May come apart from any of its near (Or not‐so‐near) replacement terms for sooth‐ Saying generally, or – lest this appear A choice of phrase offensive or uncouth – Those sundry substitutes for the idea Of truth sans phrase. These the Sherlockian sleuth Would deem defective since designed to steer Far wide of any thought that “truth” defined As “best belief,” or even as what stands At journey’s end for those brave souls inclined To seek it, cannot all the same join hands With truth in the objective sense assigned To word and concept by the strict demands Of those whose compasses remain aligned With true magnetic North and point to lands As yet unreachable by any routes Marked on our atlases. So there’s the nub Of all I’ve said: that this, like most disputes That periodically disturb the club

23

Of old philosophy’s new‐found recruits, Is one where both belligerents could rub Along quite well if those false absolutes, Like truth and reason, that you’d have us scrub

523

Christopher Norris

From our vocabularies don’t reside Above, beyond, or in a realm remote From the mundane contingencies you tried To make us see were all that underwrote The shape and meaning that events supplied To lives whose genre was the anecdote, Not grand recit, and whose narrators vied One with another not just to promote Their own‐brand truths but more in hope to lend A new spin to the old roman à fleuve Of braided story‐lines. This then might bend The talk toward new topics that could serve At last to knock away all those dead‐end Delusion‐props that helped supply the nerve For spirit’s age‐old hankering to transcend Necessity’s iron grip without the swerve Of hooked Lucretian atoms whose slight nudge This way or that did nothing to assuage Such all‐too‐human yearnings. Though you’d judge It merely a reversion to the stage Of Kantian tutelage or a hopeless fudge, Still we need some thought‐instrument to gauge Just what philosophy can do to budge Our stubborn preconceptions or engage Creatively yet critically with ways Of story‐telling that may strike a chord So sympathetic as to gain straight A’s From everyone or get them all on board And yet, by some unlooked‐for turn of phrase Or stray plot‐detail, show how they’d ignored The one thing that, when hit upon, betrays How many of the reasons why it scored So high in their joint estimation came Down chiefly to group‐pressure plus a touch Of wishful thinking and the need to frame A tale around all this that bears no such Unwelcome implications as to shame Our better selves. No doubt we’ll often clutch At straws, or straw‐polls, so as to disclaim All thought of leaning on the feeble crutch Of self‐reliance that the poor old moi Haissable uses to fend off the gibes Aimed at it by the crowd whose guiding star Is one whose kindly light gives back the tribe’s Own predilections, whether such as are Reliably adjusted to the vibes Of a whole culture and its thought‐bazaar, Or else the sort the specialist imbibes

524

24

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

Once they’re inducted (by all the techniques Of guild‐recruitment you exposed to view As an ex‐member) into various cliques Or expert subdivisions like the crew Of trained philosophers. Yet this bespeaks Another requisite that maybe you Don’t emphasize enough: that any tweaks To their consensus not go in for too Much talk of how philosophy has run its course, Run out of steam, drained all its rivers dry, And so forth, since that might seem to endorse A narrative denouement that would fly Clean in the face of your big plan: to force, Or better yet persuade, that lot to try Some way around the guild‐approved divorce Between what lets the tenured types get by With least risk and what lets those with a yen For certain riskier, more inventive “kinds Of writing” do their thing. Then they can pen Texts of the sort no rule of genre binds,

25

Or no such rule as served, time and again, To house‐train undomesticated minds And save them from their own devices when Some tell‐tale touch of metaphor yet finds Their weakness out. That’s how you seem to treat The two types as flat opposite, as if Inventiveness were something so offbeat, So apt to run a syncopating riff On thought’s four‐in‐a‐bar, that a complete Exclusion‐rule (or else another tiff Like Plato’s with the rhapsode) must defeat All efforts to remove the lingering whiff Of scandal that attaches to topoi Such as – think Nietzsche/Derrida – the role Of figural devices they employ, Those concept‐frontiersmen, while on patrol To make sure nothing like the fate of Troy Befall philosophy should that old mole, Horse‐shaped or metaphoric, redeploy Within its city limits. What this whole Verse‐colloquy has tried to do is state The case (I hope not too perverse a slant On things) that all your arguments relate Both ways, that is, to concepts that transplant By metaphoric means or conjugate “Poetically” and metaphors that can’t Be subject to exchange at some low rate Determined by our willingness to grant

525

Christopher Norris

“Poetic license.” Curious, then, that it’s Avowedly your one great aim to coax Us off all versions of the creed that splits Apart the unity our mind evokes When not compelled to test its native wits Against a thought‐predicament that pokes Up only if the intellect permits Itself to perpetrate a crafty hoax Of just that sort. I trust your genial shade Won’t take it ill that I’ve seen fit to nag Once more at issues you’d hoped to persuade Us we’d do best at this late stage to tag “Cut‐price old stock,” or just allow to fade From view like those (as Hegel said) that lag Behind the Zeitgeist in a dull parade Called by the Owl of Minerva to drag Out their sad afterlives. Then there’s the now Far off yet vivid memory of a walk With you round Monticello and of how, Predictably enough perhaps, the talk Turned toward Jefferson (no sacred cow For you but better than the tales they hawk About him currently), his splendid vow Against all tyrants, and – where our paths fork, Now as back then – your faith (that seems an apt Word here) that “our America,” though yet To be achieved, was the sole nation mapped By dream‐cartographers with compass set For gorgeous palaces and towers cloud‐capped, To me a baseless fabric though a threat Should it materialize beyond such rapt Imagining, to you the unpaid debt Thought owes to hope. Truth is, although I try To sort out man from work, or get a fix On how far hopes like that may underlie (Let’s not say “undermine”) the various tricks Of your old trade you’d later re‐apply To non‐trade purposes, the effort sticks Each time around at the same point where I Can’t manage to disintricate the mix Of reasons, motives, causes, temperament, And class. Then factor in the side effects Of US academe on one whose bent Ran counter, and what any eye detects, In “Trotsky and Wild Orchids,” as intent To make amends as well as pay respects To him, your father‐activist, who’d spent His life (a self‐reproach your piece deflects

526

26

Poetry as (a Kind of) Philosophy: For Richard Rorty

But can’t quite lay to rest) in ways that went To further emphasize the disconnects So keenly felt in yours. Yet you present, As well, a case for writing that neglects (“On its own time”) that duty to augment The public good and privately directs Its energies to helping us invent New styles of self‐description that the sects May do with as they wish. But, since you’ve lent My verse a lot more time than it expects, Best if I now let go (or “circumvent” – Your favored term) these issues one suspects You never had much time for, and content My quibbling soul with all that interjects To conjure up the Rorty text‐event As kindliest of modern grapholects.

27

527

Internet Resources

The Richard Rorty Society https://richardrortysociety.org Richard Rorty Papers Online Archive of California https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/kt9p3038mq Richard Rorty digital files 1988‐2003, UCI space & the libraries ucispace.lib.uci.edu/handle/10575/7 Richard Rorty: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty Richard Rorty: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy https://www.iep.utm.edu/rorty/ Richard Rorty Research Papers: Academia.edu www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Richard_Rorty Richard Rorty’s Hopes for Liberalism and Solidarity https://aeon.co/essays/richard‐rortys‐hopes‐for‐liberalism‐and‐solidarity

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

528

Index

Achieving Our Country, 100, 135, 273, 487 actions, 184–185, 301 chained, 437, 438, 440 Act of Killing, The, 52–53 actual entities, 259–261 Adams, John, 436 Adler, Mortimer, 337 “adolescent revolt”, 337 Adorno, Theodor, 130 aesthetics, 169 affirmation, 248 After Finitude: The Necessity of Contingency, 237 Agony of the American Left, The, 136 Akhmatova, Anna, 448 Albrecht, James M., 308 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 435, 437–441 aletheia, 283–284, 287 Allen, Barry, 308 Allison, Dorothy, 302 Amen, Miguel, 326 American Philosophical Association (APA), 119 American Pragmatism, 129 analytic philosophy, 88, 211–227, 299, 309, 359–360 Anderson, E., 154 Anglophone philosophy, 61 animals, 308 anthropocentrism, 308 anti‐authoritarianism, 350 anticlericalism, 392, 445 anticommunism, 136, 138

anticommunist revolutions, 468 antifoundationalism, 101, 102, 231–233, 237–238, 241, 246–247 Antipodeans, 51–52, 89, 90, 215 antirealism, 28, 385 anti‐representationalism, 371–372 aporia, 68 appropriation, 293–294 arguments, 18, 239, 277, 404, 429 see also transcendental arguments Aristotle, 86, 181, 207–208, 220 art, avant‐garde, 419 and life, 316 philosophical definition, 169 politicized, 247 Art After Philosophy and After, 236 assertions, 153–155, 157 assumptions, 215, 221–222 atheism, 302, 465 attitudes, attribution of, 325 prepositional, 28 Aufhebung, 263–264, 291 Austria, 468 authority, 448–452 avant‐gardism, 247 babies, 308, 324–326 see also infants Bacon, Francis, 123, 129 Badiou, Alain, 241, 243–244 Baier, Annette, 181

A Companion to Rorty, First Edition. Edited by Alan Malachowski. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

529

INDEX

Bauman, Zygmunt, 475, 476 behavior, and consciousness, 50 explaining and predicting, 28 “Being”, 281–294 Being and Nothingness, 255 Being and Time, 283, 284, 287 beliefs, acquisition of, 323, 383–384 and eliminative materialism, 28–30 false, 33, 69, 322 fundamental, 225–226 as “habits in action”, 399 and knowledge, 217 legitimacy of, 63 nonphysical, 88–89 religious, 48, 301–302 and sensations, 91, 373–372 as “sentential attitudes”, 399 and truth, 70, 321–322, 378–380, 435 Bellaire, Hillock, 124 Bĕlohradský, Václav, 469–470 Bense, Max, 126 Berlin, Isaiah, 138, 140, 144, 195, 196, 297, 301 Bernstein, Richard J., 38, 120, 298, 307, 494 Bersani, Leo, 316 Berthelot, René, 273, 276 Beyond Good and Evil, 275, 278 biological evolution, 15 Birth of Tragedy, The, 276 Blake, William, 130, 202, 206–209 Bloom, Harold, 314, 315 Blumenberg, Hans, 272 Boffetti, Jason, 483 Boros, János, 471, 473 Bouveresse, Jacques, 318 brain states, nature of, 34, 36 and pain, 38 and sensations, 32–41 Brandom, Robert, 254, 344, 447, 449, 451, 462, 472 Brassier, Ray, 236–237, 240–241 British empiricism, 47, 298, 304, 306 Brueckner, Anthony, 64–69 Brumbaugh, Robert, 212 Bryant, Levi R., 235 Budapest School, 472 Bush, Eric, 27, 28, 40

530

Camus, Albert, 486 Caputo, John, 54, 422, 424 Carnap, Rudolf, 259, 367 Carr, Karen, 483 Carter, S.L., 459 Casey, Michael, 488 causal fundamentalism, 170 causal order, 170 causation, differentiated from justification, 103 Cavell, Stanley, 21 Central Europe, 467–478 chained action, 437, 438, 440 Chalmers, David, 43, 47, 54 change, cultural, 128, 185–186, 314, 461 revolutionary, 432 social, 430, 432–434, 436–437 via reform 433–434 charity, 377, 379 Christianity, 274–275, 450, 456–457 Churchland, Patricia, 28, 360 Churchland, Paul M., 28, 34 CIS see Contingency, Irony and Solidarity civil rights, 137 classicism, 194–195 Cohen, Joshua, 149, 157, 158–160 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 199, 201 Common Faith, A, 340 common sense, 51, 113, 236, 397 communities 20–21 Comte, Auguste, 55 Conant, James, 336 concepts, 371 creation by philosophy, 242 eliminative materialism, 28, 31 mental, 29, 30 Congo, Anwar, 52–53 consciousness, 43–55 and behavior, 50 Cartesian conception of, 46, 49, 53 eliminativism, 28, 43–44, 55 first‐person perspective, 53–55 “hard problem”, 47 intrinsic nature, 45–46 linguistification, 48 mechanization, 90 moral and political sphere, 52 and natural science, 44–45 prelinguistic, 46, 50

INDEX

and religion, 55 as “sentential attitudes”, 399 simulation, 48 see also self‐consciousness conscious subjectivity, 52 consensus, 159, 400–401 decision‐making, 20 human, 16 and judgment, 275 moral, 406, 420 “rational”, 436 “rhetorical”, 436 social, 188, 222 and truth, 152, 160, 277, 397 Consequences of Pragmatism, 221, 222, 245–246, 299–300 contingencies, 315–316, 318 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (CIS), 83, 84, 186, 486 ethics, 492, 494–497 introduction, 269 ironism, 100–115 liberalism, 112–115, 138, 140, 300 on Nietzsche, 268–271 convention T, 70, 74 Conway, Daniel, 341 Copernican heliocentrism, 127 Copernican revolution, 51, 54, 68, 299 Copernican Revolution, The, 428 Copernicus, 30 Cornman, James, 38, 43 Cotkin, George, 307 Critchley, Simon, 145 Critique of Pure Reason, 86 Croly, Herbert, 141–142 cruelty, 114, 139, 140, 182, 189, 269, 440 Nietzsche on, 275–276 cultural change, 128, 314 cultural criticism, 236, 241, 300, 415–416 “cultural Left”, 137–138, 142 cultural novelty, 421–422 cultural politics, 45, 82, 84, 108, 163, 172, 461–464 cultural practices, 461 cultural studies, 416–417 culture, and evolution, 421 liberal, 113, 131 literary, 225, 416 nonempirical criticism of, 60

postmetaphysical, 103, 111, 163, 171–174, 465 postphilosophical, 139, 224, 226, 300, 494 transforming, 113 see also culture wars culture wars, 445 Curtis, William, 491, 495, 496 Czechoslovakia, 467–470 Danto, Arthur, 414 Darwin, Charles, 343–344 Darwinism, 47, 304 Davidson, Donald, 60, 70–71, 92, 104–107, 130, 150, 285, 370 external word skepticism, 170 holism, 321–322, 325–326 on language, 261, 324 on mind, 318–320 on representation, 370–390 theory of meaning, 376–377 theory of triangulation, 385–387 on truth, 345, 380–381, 385–387 DC see disjunctive conception Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski, 475 decision‐making, by consensus, 20 simulation of, 29 Delbanco, Andrew, 142 Deleuze, Gilles, 233–234, 242–243, 248 democracy, and change of culture, 185–186 and conversation, 448 “deep”, 154 deliberative model, 156 Dewey on, 154–157, 189–190, 348–351 epistemic model, 154, 160 justification of, 153, 157, 160 liberal, 101, 143, 182, 208, 272, 276, 500 Nietzsche on, 275 Peircean conception of, 155–157 and pragmatism, 149, 152–157, 351 and religion, 273, 450, 452–454, 459 and truth, 149–150, 152–154, 156–160, 275 Democritus, 45 “demonical possessions”, 32, 36 demons, 28, 30, 35–37 Dennett, Daniel, 43, 51, 84, 120, 224

531

INDEX

Derrida, Jacques, 109, 122, 138, 230, 232, 239, 242, 244, 314 on Heidegger, 294 Descartes, 46, 49 conception of mind, 46–47, 54, 213–216 on thoughts and sensations, 89 desires, 28, 184 Dewey, John, 82, 101–101, 121, 136, 141, 145–150, 184–190, 258, 273, 281, 335–352, 499–500 biographical entanglements with Rorty, 337–338 on democracy, 154–157, 189–190, 348–351 on ethics, 348–350 on evil, 142, 406 on experience, 342–344 on freedom, 190 on inquiry, 345–348 on morality, 190 on objectivity, 344–346 on religion, 458 on scientific method, 345–348 on truth, 150 Dialogues, 234 Dickstein, Morris, 301 Dieleman, Susan, 427, 431–432, 437, 493 “differance”, 244 dignity, 46 Discourse on the Method, 130 discrimination, 436 disjunctive conception (DC), 73–74 divinity, 270 Doyle, Brian, 121 Driver, Julia, 435 drug addicts, 52 Dummett, Michael, 222, 361 Earth, 30, 34, 51, 85 Eco, Umberto, 476 Edmundson, Mark, 313 education, and change of cultures, 185–186 Edwards, James, 488 ego, 316–317, 320 egocentricity, 259–264 egotism, 487, 499 elimination, 30 eliminative materialism, 27–41, 89, 257 beliefs, 28–30 concepts, 28, 31

532

consciousness, 28, 43–44 desires, 28 identity theory, 34–36 mental states, 27–31, 35 pain, 27–29, 38–39 see also weak eliminative materialism (WEM) Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 318 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 124, 125, 129, 418 empathy, 53 empirical naturalism, 206 empiricism, 46, 91 British, 47, 298, 304, 306 classical, 304 radical, 233, 303–305, 307, 343 employment, 90 Engel, Pascal, 220 Enlightenment, 195, 272–273, 405, 450 environment, 308, 482 Epicurus, 45 epilepsy, 30 epistemic injustice, 438 Epistemic Injustice, 438 “epistemic restraint”, 159–160 epistemology, 92, 216, 299 foundationalist, 104 and hermeneutics, 415 modern, 138, 166 representationalist, 103–105, 196 Epistemology of Resistance, The, 438 epistocracy, 160 “essayism”, 131 essays, 119–132 Essays on Radical Empiricism, 297 essentialism, 165, 172 Estlund, D. 160 ethics, 348–350, 417–420 and pragmatism, 179–191 and responsibility, 490–501 ethnocentrism, 141, 205, 323, 379, 396, 428 evil, 142, 406 evolution, biological, 15 of culture, 303, 431 historical, 183 intellectual, 15 of practices, 429 existentialism, 97, 471 experience, 304–305 Dewey on, 342–344 disjunctive conception (DC), 73–74

INDEX

highest common factor (HCF) conception, 73–74 and language, 304–305, 307–308 meaningful, 307 and pragmatism, 307 Experience and Nature, 341–342 experts, government of, 160 extensionalism, 45, 258–259 Facebook, 276 faith, 450–452, 459–460 see also religion “fallibilism”, 129 fallibility, 73 fantasies, 324 Farrell, Frank, 370 Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 308 Fehér, Ferenc, 472 Fehér, István M., 474 feminism, 427–441 and pragmatism, 428–430 and truth, 435 feminist movement, 137 see also feminism Fesmire, Steven, 498 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 222, 255, 260 Fides et Ratio, 475 “field linguist”, 130, 261, 377–379, 382, 385 Findlay, John N., 264 Fish, Stanley, 120, 232 Fodor, Jerry, 30 Fogelin, Robert, 325 “folk” psychology, 28, 29 Foucault, Michel, 240, 242, 249 foundationalism, 106, 106, 212, 273, 348, 446 epistemological, 104 transcendental, 239 see also antifoundationalism Frankfurt School, 129–130 freedom, 94 Dewey on, 190 political, 188 and redescription, 254, 257 free speech, 140 Frege, Gottlob, 323 Freud, 326 Freud, Sigmund, 312–327, 422 Fricker, Miranda, 437–438, 440, 441 Fry, Marylin, 429

Frye, Northrop, 195 fundamental beliefs, 225–226 Future of Religion, The, 274 Gadamer, H.‐G., 405–406 Gaia theory, 308 Galileo, 85, 88, 346–347 Gallagher, Kenneth, 51 Gass, William, 120, 125 gay marriage, 433, 434 gay movement, 137 Gay Science, The, 301 Geddes, Patrick, 187 Geertz, Clifford, 182 gender, 433 geneaology, 229–230, 248 generalizations, 241 German idealism, 47 globalization, 144 God, 47, 48, 85, 108, 200, 274, 275, 302, 403, 444, 448, 466 authority of, 450 death of, 270–271 questions of existence, 461–465 Gouinlock, James, 345 Gozzano, Simone, 326 grammar, 173 see also language; vocabularies Grant, Ian Hamilton, 240 Great Community, 187, 190, 351 Great Depression, 135, 144 Gross, Neil, 337–338 Guattari, Felix, 234, 242–243 Guess, Raymond, 164 Guignon, Charles, 126 Haack, Susan, 415 Habermas, Jürgen, 100–101, 139, 140, 395–406, 422 on Nietzsche, 276 on truth, 402–403 habits, 184–185 Hacking, Ian, 268 happiness, 180–181 Hardison, O.B., 123, 124, 129 Harman, Graham, 235 Hartshorne, Charles, 309, 337 hate speech, 140 Havel, Václav, 468–470 Hazlitt, William, 124

533

INDEX

HCF conception see highest common factor (HCF) conception Hegel, 254 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15, 82, 253–264 as an ironist, 109 on judgments, 262 as a metaphysician, 108 on moral principles, 141 on recognition, 255–259, 261 on religion, 452–453 on self‐certainty, 260 on standards of rationality, 18 Heidegger, Martin, 82, 109, 138, 201–202, 212, 230, 314 on “Being” and “beings”, 281–294 criticism of, 281–294 on metaphysics, 289, 292 on truth, 284 Heller, Ágnes, 472, 474 hermeneutic injustice, 437–440 hermeneutics, 415 highest common factor (HCF) conception, 73–74 Hiley, David R., 126 holism, 321–326, 361, 371–372 of meaning, 322, 330 Holub, R.C., 401 Homer, 49 Hook, Sidney, 189, 337 hope, 186–190 human agency, 143 human flourishing, 154 humanism, 16, 273 modern, 216 and naturalism, 420–423 humanity, 313 human nature, 21 Human Nature and Conduct, 184, 500 human rights, 451 human values, doctrine of incommensurability, 301 Hume, David, 109, 173, 196, 197, 239 humiliation, 139, 140, 141, 188 Hungary, 468, 470–474 Hunter, James Davidson, 445 Husserl, Edmund, 212, 468 Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 337 hyperboles, 234–235, 238–239, 241, 248

534

idealism, 88, 236, 247 absolute, 254 ascetic, 231 German, 47, 167, 240, 242, 470 linguistic, 383 modernist, 246 Platonic, 400 traditional, 95 transcendental, 71 identity, creation of, 181 cross‐category, 35 mind‐brain, 27, 34, 36, 92 moral, 18, 499, 501 personal, 53 practical, 499–500, 502 see also identity‐formation; identity theory; self‐identity identity‐formation, 242, 246 identity theory, 215 defense of 35 disappearance” version of, 31–34, 38–39, 41 and eliminative materialism, 34–36 and mental states, 31–32 imagination, 173, 182 deficiency of, 306–307 moral, 418 as a noncognitive faculty, 200 primary, 199 and reason, 198–200 and social norms, 201 “imaginative rehearsal”, 121, 185 Imbert, Enrique Anderson, 120, 124, 126 imperialism, 307 incorrigibility, 89 individuality, 186 Individuals, 61 ineffability, 48, 50 “inexistance”, 243–244 infants, 184, 185 prelinguistic, 305, 308 see also babies injustice, 114, 140, 428, 495 epistemic, 438 hermeneutic, 437–440 root of, 183 social, 1, 141, 144, 245, 447 see also justice

INDEX

inquiry, activity of, 13 capacity for, 19 constraints on, 203, 206 Dewey on, 345–348 first‐order, 11, 13, 15–16, 21–22 Plato on, 14 rationality of, 14–15, 22 second‐order, 11, 13–15, 22 and truth 16–17, 388 insecurity, 94 intellectualism, 305–307, 309 intellectuals, 468, 469 “intensionality”, 258 intentionality, 213–214, 258–259 “internal realism”, 150 international law, 406 Introduction to Metaphysics, 283 introspection, 34 intuition, 222–224, 371 ironism, 153 in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 100–115 liberal, 226–227 and metaphysics, 102–111, 202 and romanticism, 206–209 see also irony; liberal ironists irony, 18–20, 129, 495–496 and private morality, 180 see also ironism; liberal ironists irrationality, 319, 404 Jackson, Frank, 44 James, William, 150, 182–184, 186–187, 189–191, 242, 297–310, 397 on pragmatism, 298–299 on religion, 458 Janicaud, Dominique, 294 Jay, Martin, 307 John Paul II, 475 Johnson, Mark, 307 Johnson, Samuel, 119, 122 journalism, 141 judgment, of determinate being, 262–263 “extensional”, 262–264 false, 51–52, 54 “intensional”, 262–264 and knowledge, 16–17 moral, 128, 179

of reflection, 262–263 subsuming, 264 subsumptive, 263 value, 184 justice, abstract, 306 and love, 182 Plato on, 306 and morality, 181 social, 6, 140, 143, 429, 437, 440 theory of, 139 see also injustice justification, differentiated from causation, 103 scientific, 405 rational, 140, 217 and truth, 17, 380 Kant, Immanuel, 54, 60, 68, 82, 86, 234–235 on dualism of the phenomenal and the noumenal, 197–199 invention of philosophy, 91–93 on knowledge, 217–218 on metaphysics, 171–172 see also Kantianism Kantianism, 139, 140, 220, 232, 239 inverted, 206 Kelly, Áine, 127–128 kenosis, 450 Klaus, Carl H., 122, 129 Klein, Melanie, 324 Kloppenberg, James T., 308 Knapp, Steven, 245 Knausgard, Karl Ove, 277 knowledge, 125, 216–217 analytic‐synthetic distinction, 216–218 and beliefs, 217 capacity for, 17 causal explanation of 91–92 and conscious mind, 46 empirical, 15 and human reason, 46 and judgment, 16–17 and mind 257 of oneself, 258 Plato on, 11–13 and religion, 465 theory of, 104, 373

535

INDEX

knowledge (cont’d) and truth, 269, 405 utility of, 398, 405–406 value of, 241 Kojève, Alexandre, 255 Kołakowski, Leszek, 475 Kosuth, Joseph, 236 Krémer, Sándor (Alexander), 474 Kripke, Saul, 92, 219–222 Krogh, Antjie, 406 Kuhn, Thomas, 126–127, 131, 397, 414, 416, 428 Kwiek, Marek, 477 Labensphilosophie, 131 Lacan, Jacques, 243 Lamarque, Peter, 413 Lamb, Charles, 124 Lampert, Laurence, 278 language, as a cultural habit, 184–185 Davidson, on 324 definition, 308 and experience, 67, 304–305, 307–308 and feminist justice, 437 knowledge of, 169 as “marks and noises”, 170–171 and meaning, 323 as a medium of representation, 105, 130 and mental states, 30 new, 401–402, 419–420 object, 261 philosophy of, 237, 338, 360, 363 and pragmatism, 344 private, 49–50, 66–67, 385–386 and reality, 15, 130–131 representational adequacy, 438–439 shadows of, 50 social nature of, 324 social norms of use, 173 and truth, 261, 361 universal, 46 usefulness of, 179 Wittgenstein on, 360–363 and the world, 168, 173 see also vocabularies Lasch, Christopher, 136 Latour, Bruno, 237, 238 Lear, Jonathan, 326

536

Legislators, and Interpreters, 476 Legitimation of Modernity, The, 272 Leibniz Law, 40 Leiter, Brian, 309 Leninism, 434 lesbian movement, 137 Levine, Joseph, 45 liberal culture, 113, 131 liberal democracy, 101, 143, 182, 208, 272, 276, 500 liberal ironism, 226–227 see also liberal ironists liberal ironists, 102–103, 115, 138–140, 269, 300, 486, 497–498 liberalism, 101, 102, 121 collapse of, 143 in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 112–115, 138, 140, 300 definition of, 139, 269, 428 inspirational, 135–146 and truth, 152 liberal metaphysicians, 138, 141 liberal pluralism, 233, 247 liberal societies, 120, 139, 141–143, 424 liberal utopia, 120, 143 Library of Living Philosophers, 476 life, meaning of 87 lightning, 31 linguistic idealism, 383 “linguistic turn”, 68, 211, 255–259, 298, 308, 339, 344, 348, 364 literary criticism, 108–109, 269, 414 literary culture, 225, 416 literary theory, 236 literature, 413–425 and formation of individual character, 418 replacement of metaphysics, 200 Llanera, Tracy, 487 Locke, John, 91, 259–260 logical positivism, 82 Logics of Worlds, 243 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, 341, 344, 346 London Review of Books, 114 Lopate, Philip, 125 love, and justice, 182 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 194–195 Lovibond, Sabina, 435–436 Loyola, St. Ignatius, 272 Lukács, Georg, 129, 472

INDEX

Lycan, William, 28, 39, 40 Lyotard, Jean Francois, 138, 236, 400–401 machines, 90 Madison, Gary, 483 Making It Explicit, 449 Malachowski, Alan, 84, 477 malapropisms, 121 Malcolm, Norman, 66 Man, Paul De, 233 Man Without Qualities, A, 131 Margalit, Avishai, 139 Margolis, Joseph, 276 Márkus, Georg, 472 Marmysz, John, 483, 488 Marxism, 45; see also Marxism‐Leninism Marxism‐Leninism, 469, 470; see also Marxism masculinism, 431 materialism, 47, 236 as morally benign, 47 see also eliminative materialism; Marxism McDermott, John, 189 McDowell, John, 16–17, 60, 70–74, 378, 382, 384 McKeon, Richard, 211, 212 McTaggart, John, 264 meaning, 213 Davidson’s theory of 376–377 holism of, 322 and language, 323 of life, 87 and truth, 240, 322 meaningfulness, 64, 257, 367, 485 Meaning of Truth, The, 304 mechanization, 90 Medina, José, 437–438 Meillassoux, Quentin, 235–241 meliorism, 186, 190 mental concepts, 29, 30 mental content, 68, 261 mental events, 319 “mental eye”, 68 mental illness, 30 mental states, and brain states, 32–37, 41 Cartesian, 46 and dispositions to act, 57 distinctiveness of, 213

and eliminative materialism, 27–31, 35 and identity theory, 31–32 and language, 30 and neurological states, 31 metalanguage, 261, 263 metaphilosophy, 43, 44, 81–85 metaphors, 121, 127, 275, 276 metaphysical quietism, 165–170 metaphysical realism, 383 metaphysical scientism, 55 metaphysical thinking, 171, 172 metaphysicians, liberal 138, 141 metaphysics, 44, 46, 47, 52, 54, 106 descriptive, 168–169 elimination of, 200, 208 empirical, 343 end of, 101, 163–174, 269 Heidegger on, 289, 292 inevitability thesis, 167, 169, 172 and ironism, 102–111, 202 Kant on, 171–172 key aspects, 164 literary, 127 naturalistic, 343 overcoming of, 201–202 and pragmatism, 165–169, 203–206 reality/appearances, 203 replacement with literature, 200 revisionary, 168–169 speculative, 113, 165, 256 Wittgenstein on, 166, 167, 171–173, 202, 203 Michaels, Walter Benn, 245 Mill, John Stuart, 114, 138, 140, 226, 434, 464 mind, as an area of thoughts and feelings, 48–49 of babies, 308 Davidson on, 318–320 Descartes on, 46–47, 54 irreducibility of, 48 and knowledge, 257 as a mirror of nature, 85–88, 91–93, 166, 204 modern concept of, 46 and moral worth, 47 Plato on, 46 as point of contact with the world, 47 unity of, 88

537

INDEX

Mind and World, 70, 71 mind‐body problem, 86, 88–90, 213–216, 224, 299 mind‐brain identity, 27, 34, 36, 92 Min Kamp, 277 minority dissent, 155 mob‐oratory, 16 modernity, 197, 263 end of 270–271 Gadamer on, 406 and Plato, 278 monotheism, 301 Montaigne, Michel de, 123, 124, 129 Moore, Adrian, 238 moral courage, 189 moral dilemmas, 140, 154 moral imaginations, 418 morality, 348–349 Dewey on, 190 Nietzsche on, 275–276 and political life, 190 private, 180–183, 186, 189, 227 public, 180–182, 186–187, 226 and solidarity, 179–180 moral judgments, 128, 179 moral laws, 141, 198, 348, 482–483 moral luck, 17 moral obligation, 188, 338, 348, 456, 468, 490, 499 moral order, 406 moral principles, 141, 468 moral progress, 188, 350, 406, 418 moral sensibility, 317 moral worth, 47 multinational corporations, 144 Mumford, Lewis, 187 Murdoch, Walter, 122, 124, 418 Musil, Robert, 131 “Myth of the Given”, 46, 48, 91–94, 104, 130, 216, 373, 382 Nabokov, Vladimir, 413, 422 Nagel, Thomas, 223–224 Naming and Necessity, 220 national pride, 143 naturalism, empirical, 206 and humanism, 420–423 Nehamas, Alexander, 268, 272, 276

538

Neibuhr, Reinhold, 142 neo‐pragmatism, 60, 163, 246, 338–340 neurological disorders, 30, 35 neurological states, 31 neurophysiology, 48 neuroscience, 33, 38–39 New Deal, 136, 144 New Left, 136–137 Newton, Isaac, 30 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 109, 138, 201, 229, 236, 240–241, 246, 248–249, 268–279 on Christianity, 25 on cruelty, 275–276 on democracy, 275 on polytheism, 301 on truth, 269, 272, 275 see also post‐Nietzschean philosophy Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 268 nihilism, 231, 236, 237, 278, 482–488 epistemological, 482 existential, 482, 485–486 moral, 482, 484 ontological, 482 Nihilism, 483, 485 nonexistent entities, 36–39, 41 nonhuman organisms, 308, 309 novels, 53, 141, 417, 418 Nussbaum, Martha, 418 Nyírö, Miklós, 474 objectification, 261 objectivity, Dewey on, 344–346 rhetoric of, 390 and solidarity, 16, 17, 21, 22 Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 182 oddity, 34 Odyssey, 49 On Liberty, 114 On the Genealogy of Morals, 248, 276 On Time and Being, 284 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 52 Orban, Jolan, 471 orchids, 447 Ordinary, the, 21 Ortega y Gasset, José, 131 Orwell, George, 20, 21 Otto, Max C., 337

INDEX

pain, 437 as a brain state, 38 eliminative materialism, 27–29, 38–39 and identity theory 32–34 and mind‐body problem, 214–215, 224 and pain‐behavior, 48 representational criterion for, 440 panpsychism, 343–344 Papini, Giovanni, 303 Pappas, George, 28, 39, 40 parasitism, 64–69 Parfit, Derek, 53–54 Patočka, Jan, 468, 469 patriotism, 136, 143 Peacock, T.L., 197 Pears, David, 361, 363 Peckham, Morse, 196 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 150, 154, 156, 157, 164, 346, 358, 458 perception, 59, 306, 429 and imagination, 199 and knowledge, 13 “veil of ”, 86 personal identity, 53 personhood, 52 perspectivism, 269–270 phenomenalism, Humean, 59 transcendental, 206 Phenomenology of Spirit, 108, 253–255, 260, 452 Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, 218 Philosophical Investigations, 358, 360, 361, 364, 365 philosophical materialism, 236 philosophical ontology, 47 Philosophical Papers, 100, 229, 231 philosophical revolutions, 430 philosophy, analytic, 88, 211–227, 299, 309, 359–360 creation of concepts, 242 definition, 299–300 “edifying”, 94–95, 299 emergence, 85 function, 351–352 history, 86 invention of, 91–93 of language, 237, 338, 360, 363

“modern”, 212 “narrative”, 238 nature of, 81–83, 85 “of organism”, 257 post‐Nietzschean, 229–232, 269 practical, 405–406 professionalization of, 414 and science, 167–168, 308 therapeutic approach, 165–167, 359 “without mirrors”, 299 Philosophy and Social Hope, 122, 139, 142–143, 273–274 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 43, 46, 60, 68–70, 83–97, 104–105, 125, 299, 338, 357, 484 on analytic philosophy, 212 on ethics, 492–494 on Freud, 313 on inspirational liberalism, 138 on Nietzsche, 271 on representation, 371–372 on Wittgenstein, 357–360 Philosophy as Cultural Politics, 179, 273 Philosophy of Language, 362 physical causation, 170 physical descriptions, 45 physicalism, 44–45, 48–49, 89–90, 170 language of, 45 nonreductive, 47 ontological, 55 physics, and nature of reality, 45 Picón‐Salas, Mariano, 126 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 222, 399 planets, 30, 34 plants, 308 Plato, 11–14, 50, 86, 93 Apology, 12 on knowledge, 11–13 on mind, 46 on nature of inquiry, 14 Republic, 12, 19, 277 Theaetetus, 11–15, 19, 22 Platonism, 139, 140, 153, 277, 398, 400–402 and Christianity, 274 inverted, 197, 201, 206, 276 negative, 468 pluralism, 44, 90, 121, 154, 233 liberal, 231, 233, 247 political, 152

539

INDEX

Pluralistic Universe, A, 297 poetry, 197–200, 203, 277, 300, 316, 447 Poland, 468, 474–477 “policies of difference”, 137 political freedom, 188 politics, aestheticized, 247 cultural, 45, 82, 84, 108, 163, 172, 461–464 utopian, 187, 189, 190 Politics of Reality, 429 polytheism, 274, 297–310, 461–462 definition, 301 positivism, 200, 224, 298 logical, 82, 200 “possibilitarianism”, 131 postmetaphysical culture, 103, 111, 163, 171–174, 465 postmodernism, 97 post‐Nietzschean philosophy, 229–232, 269 postphilosophical culture, 139, 224, 226, 300, 494 postructuralism, 236–237, 240, 241, 245 pragmatic realism, 345 pragmatism, 70–71, 74, 92, 100, 121, 128, 130 classical, 338–340, 346 criticism of, 186 and democracy, 149, 152–157, 351 and ethics, 179–191 and experience, 307 and feminism, 428–430 as inverted metaphysics, 203–206 James on, 298–299 and language, 344 and metaphysics, 165–169 and the Protestant Reformation, 298 and realism, 222–223 and religion, 458 and romanticism, 197–203 and truth, 149, 152–157, 387–388 see also neo‐pragmatism Principia Mathematica, 256 Principle P, 215 Prior, Arthur, 264 private, the, 111–115, 138, 446 see also public–private distinction private discourse, 464 private language, 49–50, 66–67, 385–386

540

private morality, 180–183, 186, 189, 227 Process and Reality, 257 Promise of American Life, The, 141 prophecy, 429 Prospect Magazine, 119 Protestant Reformation, 298 Proust, Marcel, 253–255, 269 psychoanalysis, 313–317, 320, 324, 326 psychosis, 32, 36 Ptolemaic cosmology, 127 Ptolemy, 30 public, the, 111–115, 138, 446 see also public–private distinction public discourse, 464 public morality, 180–182, 186–187, 226 “public square”, 446–448, 450, 453 public–private distinction, 446, 448, 453, 497 Putnam, Hilary, 44, 94, 128–129, 150, 204–205, 207–208 quaestio juris, 60, 61, 66 quietism, metaphysical, 165–170 semantic, 166 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 91, 92, 104–105, 130, 150, 360 on knowledge, 216–218 on language, 170 on metaphysics, 203 on representation, 371–372 racial prejudice, 135, 143 racism, 136, 137, 436 radical empiricism, 233, 303–305, 307, 343 Ramberg, Bjørn, 167–168, 170, 387, 492 Ramsey, William, 150 rape, 439–441 rational argumentation, 18, 404, 429 rationalism, 144, 195, 476 transcendent, 237–239 rationality, and science, 164–165 standards of, 18 and truth, 404 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 135, 456, 459 Rawls, John, 100–101, 138, 139 on truth, 152–153, 159–160 real essence, 18

INDEX

realism, “internal”, 150 metaphysical, 383 and pragmatism, 222–223, 345 speculative, 232–242, 249 technical, 222, 224 truth in, 387–389 reality, 388 “contact with”, 93 God’s eye‐view perspective, 205 “in itself ”, 206 and language, 15, 130–131 nature of, 18, 45, 47, 54–55, 165, 173, 387, 399 “nonhuman”, 204 and science, 46–47, 54, 90 and truth, 275 usefulness of, 95–96 reality/appearances distinction, 203–204 reason, 46 and imagination, 198–200 “mechanization” of, 422 in romanticism, 195–198 “reasonableness”, 152, 157 recognition, Hegelian, 255–259, 261 the master–slave dialectic, 256 and self‐consciousness, 255 struggle for, 255, 257 Reconstruction in Philosophy, 340 recontextualization, 126 redescription, 173, 179, 226, 239, 498 and Hegelian recognition, 254–259 linguistic, 305 reduction, 48 reductionism, 30–31, 34–36, 41 “reductive materialism”, 40 reference, causal theory of, 92 relativism, 139, 395–399 religion, 96, 274, 301–302, 444–466 and authority, 449–450 and consciousness, 55 and democracy, 273, 450, 452–454, 459 Dewey on, 458 eradication of, 55 and free conversation, 458–459 future of, 464–466 Hegel on, 452–453 James on, 458

and knowledge, 465 power of, 88 and pragmatism, 458 privatization of, 446, 448, 450, 459 and public morality, 181 in the public sphere, 460 and science, 301–302 see also Christianity; polytheism religious organizations, 444–446 Remembrance of Things Past, 253, 452 Renegar, Valerie R., 436–437 representation, 370–390 representationalism, 446–447 and language, 438–439 representationalist epistemology, 103–104 retention, 30 revolutions, 434–435 existential, 469 philosophical, 430 Rieff, Philip, 316 romance, 302, 460 romanticism, 194–197, 461 definition of, 194–196 as ironism, 206–209 and liberalism, 207 and pragmatism, 197–203 and reason, 195–198 Rosen, Stanley, 483, 485 rules, 286 Russell, Bertrand, 256 Ryan, Alan, 145 Ryle, G., 43–45, 47, 50–51 sadism, 137 Santayana, George, 343 Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 97, 138, 255, 365, 493 Savitt, Steven, 29, 41 Schneewind, Jerome, 486 scholasticism, 82, 89 Schumpeter, Joseph, 144 science, and consciousness, 44–45 empirical, 308 faith in, 54 history of, 29 limits of, 45 natural, 44–45 and philosophy, 308 and rationality, 164–165

541

INDEX

science (cont’d) and reality, 90 and religion, 301–302 social, 184 Science of Logic, 262, 291 scientific method, 345–348 scientism, 164, 171 metaphysical, 55 and physicalism, 45 Scripture, 449, 450, 451 Scruton, Roger, 277 Searle, John, 55, 215, 240 secularism, 145, 165, 445–446, 453 secularization, 351, 450, 453, 473 self, 315–316, 318, 323–324, 349–350 multi‐person model, 320–323, 325 self‐affirmation, 278 self‐attributions, 258 self‐certainty, 255–256, 260 self‐consciousness, 255, 261, 423, 452 self‐correction, 15, 22 self‐creation, 180, 183, 269, 277, 278, 419, 423, 458, 495 self‐criticism, 359 self‐deception, 319 self‐development, 301 self‐doubt, 18, 19 self‐enrichment, 320 self‐expression, 208 self‐identity, 495, 498 self‐image, 321, 498–501 self‐reliance, 298, 300, 303 Sellars, Wilfrid, 15, 49, 82, 104–105, 188, 216–217 on incorrigiblity, 89 on knowledge, 216–217 “Myth of the Given”, 46, 48, 91–94, 104, 130, 216, 373, 382 on representation, 371–372 semantic quietism, 166 sensations, ambiguity of, 40 and beliefs, 91, 373–374 and brain states, 32–41 claims about, 32 conceptualization of, 91, 93 and neurological states, 31 as nonphysical, 88–89 private, 50, 51 and thoughts, 46

542

sentences, 375–378 sentimental fallacy, 308 sex addicts, 52 sexism, 435, 436 sexual harassment, 440 sexual slavery, 437, 439 Shelley, P.B., 197–200 Shklar, Judith, 139, 182, 269, 428 sinfulness, 142 skepticism, 47, 61–69, 72–73 ancient, 129 external world, 170 pragmatic, 128–129 Skowroński, Krzysztof Piotr, 477 Skrbina, David, 308 Smart, J.J.C., 32 Smith, John, E., 304 Soames, Scott, 218–219, 362 social change, 430, 432–434, 436–437 social collectivism, 424 social development, 95 social hope, 153 social justice, 135, 140, 440 social media, 276 social norms, 201 social problems, 93 social reform, 144 social responsibility, 247 social science, 184 social unrest, 90 social utility, 303 Socrates, in the Apology, 12 in the Theaetetus, 12–13, 19 solidarity, 141, 180, 187–188, 207, 269–270, 396 creation of, 419 and morality, 179–180 and objectivity, 16, 17, 21, 22 Songs of Experience, 307 Sontag, Susan, 119, 120 Sowards, Stacey K., 36–437 speculative metaphysics, 113, 165, 256 speculative realism, 232–242, 249 Speculative Turn, 235, 241 Spinoza, Baruch, 234 Stalin, Josef, 136 Stout, Jeffrey, 389, 390 Stow, Simon, 276, 277 Strauss, Leo, 277

INDEX

Strawson, Galen, 43, 55 Strawson, P.F., 60–63, 65–66, 69, 71 on metaphysics, 168–169 on truth, 151 Stroud, Barry, 61–65, 68, 69, 71–72 Structure of Scientific Revolution, The, 428 Stuckey‐French, Ned, 129 subjectivity, 52, 257 substitute gratification, 324 suffering, 306, 428, 437–441 syllogisms, 263–264 sympathy, 141, 306 synthesis, the principle of, 197 Szahaj, Andrzej, 476–477 Szubka, Tadeusz, 477 Table Talk, 124 Talisse, R. 155 Tarski, Alfred, 70, 150, 259, 261, 264 Tartaglia, James, 324 Taylor, Charles, 254 teletransportation, 53 temperature, 31 temporality, 284–285, 287, 291, 293 “tense logic”, 264 “theory‐theory”, 28–29 therapeutic philosophy, 165–166, 359, 364–365 Thomas, Edward, 321 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 66–69 thought experiments, 51 thoughts, and sensations, 46 Thousand Plateaus, A, 234 Tillich, Paul, 456 time‐space, 284–285 tolerance, 303 Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus, 262, 361–362, 364 transcendence, 48 transcendental arguments, 59–74 “conceptual dependence” view of, 60, 64–69 modest form, 71–72 “realist”, 61 “satisfiable criteria”, 62, 65–66 “suppressed premise” 62 transcendent rationalism, 237–239 translation, indeterminacy of, 130 transvaluation, 229–231, 234, 241–245, 248–249

triangulation, theory of 385–387 Trilling, Lionel, 128, 316 truth, 11, 14, 15, 22, 103, 277–278, 395–397 absolute, 125, 345, 428–429, 431–432, 435–436 acknowledgment of, 17 of Being, 283–284 and beliefs, 70, 321–322, 378–380 and consensus, 152, 160, 277, 397 Davidson on, 345, 380–381, 385–387 definition, 150 and democracy, 149–150, 152–154, 156–160, 275 Dewey on, 150, 344–345 doctrinal, 158 and feminism 435 Habermas on, 402–403 Heidegger on, 284 importance, 149, 156 and inquiry, 14, 16–17, 388 intrinsic nature, 396 and justification, 17, 380 and knowledge, 269, 405 and language, 261, 361 and liberalism, 152 “love of ”, 461 and meaning, 240, 322 “necessary”, 219, 260 non‐absolute, 435–437 nonempirical, 60 non‐metaphysical concept of, 159 objective, 43, 45, 54, 88–89, 92, 94, 96, 165, 376, 380–381, 386 and pragmatism, 149, 152–157, 387–388 and rationality, 404 Rawls on, 152–153, 159–160 and realism, 156–160, 387–389 and reality, 275 redemptive, 87, 88, 96 theories of, 149–152, 221–222 ultimate, 222, 224, 484 universal, 46, 436, 483, 436, 452 Truth and Truthfulness, 153 tyranny, 351 unconscious, the, 316, 320 Unconscious, The, 320 universal language, 46 universal validity, 404

543

INDEX

universe, 45 universities, 404 University of Chicago, 211 University of Pécs, 471–472 Upton, Thomas, 483 usefulness, and reality 95–96 utilitarianism, 298 utopias, 187, 303 feminist, 432–433 liberal, 120, 143 utopian politics, 187, 189, 190 Vajda, Mihály, 472 value judgments, 184 Varieties of Religious Experience, 297 Vattimo, Gianni, 274, 450, 451, 465 veil of perception, 86 Velvet Revolution, 468 verificationalism, 48, 63–71, 154 “verification principle”, 62–63 Versenyi, László, 282 Verstand, 263 Vietnam War, 137 vocabularies, 231 final, 18, 106–107, 138–139, 180–181, 484 of moral deliberation, 317 new, 258–258, 313–314, 316–317, 401, 419–420, 422, 433–434 private, 447 and social change, 433–434 see also language Voparil, Christopher, 341

544

Wall, Alan, 131 Walzer, Michael, 141 Wampole, Christy, 121, 123, 124 Warnke, Georgia, 405, 435, 436 “warranted assertability”, 345–346 Wasserman, Earl R., 199 weak eliminative materialism (WEM), 39–40 Weber, Max, 302 Weitz, Morris, 169 WEM see weak eliminative materialism West, Cornel, 300 What Is Philosophy?, 234 Whitehead, Alfred North, 254, 256–257, 259–260, 446 Whitman, Walt, 136, 141 Williams, Bernard, 17, 153–154 Williams, Michael, 84 Williamson, Timothy, 81 wishful thinking, 319 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 50, 61, 67, 68, 71, 72, 82, 232, 357–368 on language, 360–363 on metaphysics, 166, 167, 171–173, 202, 203 Wojtyła, Karol, 475 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 451 Woodbridge, James, 41n1 World and Object, 360 Wright, Crispin, 166 ̇ rdecka‐Nowak, Magdalena, 477 Za Žižek, Slavoj, 240, 242–243, 469