O PR O Christopher J.Voparil F General Introduction U N C O R R EC TE D 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.1 Catapulted to the intellectual heights by the 1979 publication of his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature – recently called “the most widely discussed philosophy book of the second half of the twentieth century” – Rorty’s influence transcends the walls of discipline and culture.2 Books of his have been translated into over twenty languages and his ideas debated in leading journals in fields as diverse as political theory, sociology, legal studies, international relations, feminist studies, literary theory, business ethics, educational theory, and of course philosophy.3 His work has spawned a body of secondary literature beyond the limits of a single human being to master and played a pivotal role in the revival of the tradition of American pragmatism.4 Following his death on June 8, 2007, Rorty was heralded by a chorus of prominent intellectuals as “the most influential philosopher of the last three decades,” “the most famous philosopher in the world,” and nothing less than “a great philosopher, who, daringly swimming against the tide of modern analytic philosophy, single-handedly revived pragmatism, with great impact on a variety of fields.”5 1 Anthony Gottlieb, “The Most-Talked About Philosopher,” New York Times ( June 2, 1991): sec. 7, 30. Harold Bloom’s statement appears on the back cover of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (CIS). 2 Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Deep Humanism,” New Literary History, 39 (2008): 17. 3 See Alan Malachowski, Richard Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 184–6, and passim. 4 An annotated bibliography of the secondary literature on Rorty in 2002 lists over 1,200 entries. See Richard Rumana (ed.), Richard Rorty: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002). On the pragmatist revival, see Richard J. Bernstein, “The Resurgence of Pragmatism,” Social Research, 59, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 813–40; and Morris Dickstein (ed.), The Revival of Pragmatism New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). Dickstein puts it this way in his introduction, “If pragmatism began with James’s strong misreading of Peirce, it came to life again with Rorty’s strong misreading of Dewey” (p.11). 5 Danny Postel, “High Flyer: Richard Rorty Obituary,” New Humanist 122, no. 4 ( July/August 2007): 38; Mark Edmundson and Richard Posner, Quoted in Stephen Metcalf, “Richard Rorty: What Made Him a Crucial Philosopher?” Slate Magazine, June 18, 2007, http://www.slate.com/ 9781405198318_4_000.indd 1 11/24/2009 8:07:02 PM 2 general introduction PR O O F Yet this is of course not the whole story. The publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature infuriated then dominant analytic philosophers, who viewed Rorty’s tome as a Judas-like betrayal from within.6 American philosophers were incensed by Rorty’s use and abuse of John Dewey and the apparent insouciance with which he embraced or ignored at whim the key ideas and commitments of the pragmatist tradition.7 As his writings began to engage more explicitly social and political themes in the 1980s, Rorty was vilified from the Right and the Left, as both a dangerous relativist and an apologist for the status quo.8 Although there were other contributing factors behind his decision to leave Princeton University in 1982 after two decades, he would not hold a post in a philosophy department again for the rest of his life.9 On the most sympathetic view, as one commentator put it, “Seemingly everyone who is impressed with one facet of Rorty’s work harbors severe reservations about another.”10 But even that seems too generous. Of the over 1,200 entries in the annotated bibliography of the secondary literature on Rorty compiled in 2002, only a handful are “friendly to Rorty.”11 Still, whether U N C O R R EC TE D id/2168488/, accessed May 25, 2009. This piece contains brief eulogies by Jürgen Habermas, Daniel Dennett, Stanley Fish, David Bromwich, Simon Blackburn, Morris Dickstein, and others. See also Habermas, “‘And to define America, her athletic democracy’; The Philosophy and the Language Shaper: In Memory of Richard Rorty,” New Literary History 39, no. 1 (2008): 3–12. 6 Bernstein, “Rorty’s Deep Humanism,” p. 17. 7 The literature on Rorty’s misuse of Dewey was for a time a cottage industry. Noteworthy early forays in this area include, Thomas Alexander, “Richard Rorty and Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 5 (1980): 24–35; Richard J. Bernstein,“Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind,” Review of Metaphysics 33, no. 4 (1980): 745–75; Gary Brodsky, “Rorty’s Interpretation of Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17, no. 4 (1982): 311–38; James Campbell, “Rorty’s Use of Dewey,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 22, no. 2 (1984): 175–87; Abraham Edel, “A Missing Dimension in Rorty’s Use of Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 (1985): 21–38; Konstantin Kolenda, “Rorty’s Dewey,” Journal of Value Inquiry 20 (1986): 84–95; and Ralph Sleeper, “Rorty’s Pragmatism: Afloat in Neurath’s Boat, But Why Adrift?” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 21, no. 1 (1985): 9–20. For additional references, see Rumana (ed.), Richard Rorty. More recent work on the two thinkers has seen the relation more amicably. See for example, Colin Koopman,“Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Hope: Emerson, James, Dewey, Rorty,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2006): 106–16; and Ken McClelland,“John Dewey and Richard Rorty: Qualitative Starting Points,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 44, no. 3 (2008): 412–45. For Rorty’s extended treatments of Dewey, see esp. Dewey’s Metaphysics (chapter 2, this volume);“Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress (TP); and “Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics (PCP). 8 Rorty discusses these reactions in his quasi-autobiographical essay, Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (chapter 30, this volume). Of the many examples of vitriol that could be cited here, one of the most entertaining is John J. Stuhr,“Rorty as Elvis: Dewey’s Reconstruction of Metaphysics,” in his Genealogical Pragmatism: Philosophy, Experience, and Community (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), where he writes, “Rorty is the Milli Vanilli of liberalism, merely lipsynching the old Elvis refrain: ‘Don’t Be Cruel’” (p. 126). 9 For an excellent discussion of this background, see Neil Gross, Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), pp. 190–233. 10 James Ryerson, “The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Pilgrimage,” Lingua Franca 10, no. 9 (Dec. 2000/Jan. 2001), p. 42. 11 Rumana, Richard Rorty, p. ix. For a more in-depth discussion of the unique nature of the critical reaction to Rorty, see Christopher Voparil, “On the Idea of Philosophy as Bildungsroman: Rorty and His Critics,” Contemporary Pragmatism 2, no.1 (2005): 115–33. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 2 11/24/2009 8:07:02 PM 3 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F Rorty is a Socratic gadfly – “the bad boy of American philosophy” – stinging the philosophical establishment where it hurts, or a “slipshod iconoclast” who has done more harm than good, there is no getting around the fact that, as Richard Rumana observed, “a lot of people from a wide variety of disciplines and perspectives have something to say about him.”12 Indeed, the massive body of work on Rorty itself has been called “an aid for understanding the philosophical and intellectual issues that have preoccupied thinkers for the past several decades.”13 In the end, though, there remains a suspicion that Rorty’s work has been “more influential than understood.”14 If this is indeed the case, it may be forgivable, given the sheer size of Rorty’s oeuvre. Rorty was a prolific writer who in nearly five decades of writing penned three books, two essay collections, four volumes of “philosophical papers,” an influential edited volume, and a co-authored book, plus scores of uncollected essays and reviews in academic journals, as well as numerous pieces in newspapers, magazines, and popular publications.15 Rorty also was a prolific reader, with expansive interests and an uncanny ability to drop names not only from the entire philosophical tradition, but of novelists, poets, literary critics, legal scholars, historians, and political theorists. A mainstay in contemporary intellectual debates for several decades, he traveled to all corners of the globe and engaged with the leading thinkers of the day across many fields. Widely recognized for his collegiality, Rorty himself was a consummate collaborator, enthusiastically promoting the work of others and always willing to engage even his harshest critics in the hope of furthering ongoing debates.16 One historian called Rorty the embodiment of the contemporary, a barometer, perhaps, of intellectual pressures across so many discourses […] Rorty – moving as he does with such ease across the entire intellectual terrain – expresses some of the arguably most vibrant areas of contemporary intellectual life.17 U N C O This collection of Rorty’s writings was assembled to assist those who seek a deeper understanding of Rorty and his philosophical and political projects. His vast oeuvre spans multiple traditions and disciplines; without a roadmap of sorts, it can be daunting. The 12 Jonathan Rée, “Strenuous Unbelief,” London Review of Books 20, October 15, 1998; Malachowski, Richard Rorty, p. 1; Rumana, Richard Rorty, p. ix. 13 Richard J. Bernstein, “Foreword,” in Rumana (ed.), Richard Rorty, p. vii. 14 Malachowski, Richard Rorty, p. 2. Malachowski later adds this wrinkle: “Rorty’s sternest philosophical critics deny his main claims. They think he is wrong on just about every front. But they seem unable to state their denial in terms that do not beg the question or tacitly assume what Rorty himself denies” (p. 168). 15 The best bibliography to date of Rorty’s works can be found in Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself (TCF), pp. 161–205. 16 For examples of Rorty dutifully responding to his critics, see Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (ed.), Rorty and Pragmatism:The Philosopher Responds to his Critics (Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press, 1995); Robert Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (eds.), Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). Amazingly, in all of these collections, Rorty wrote an individual response to each and every contributor’s essay. 17 Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’: From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 4. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 3 11/24/2009 8:07:02 PM 4 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F essays that follow were chosen with an eye to illuminating Rorty’s own positions and commitments, particularly with regard to the more explicitly political concerns that emerge after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, while painting as full a picture as possible of the overall development of his thought. Like all such collections, many tough choices were involved. A virtuoso of the essay form, Rorty’s many treatments of various prominent intellectuals, though insightful and of interest, could fill an entire volume themselves; most could not be included. The full scope and depth of Rorty’s analytic philosophy is not represented, in part because this more specialized work falls outside his broader influence. But also because, while of interest to some, not all of this previous work is essential to grasp his larger project, though, as we shall see, he did occasionally lean on particular figures and ideas from the analytic tradition in articulating his later stances. With the exception of the first two essays, The Rorty Reader covers his work from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature until his death in 2007; the facets of his pre-Mirror work that bear on his later stances are discussed in the introduction below, following a brief biographical sketch. The introduction traces the development of his thinking from his influential edited volume, The Linguistic Turn (1967), to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and the somewhat unexpected defense of political liberalism that follows in its wake. The striking continuities in Rorty’s interests and overall orientation are highlighted, while charting the changes in his relation to the pragmatist tradition and to analytic philosophy. Roughly the latter half of the introduction is devoted to exposition and framing of his broader philosophical and political projects, including both their challenges and promise, in the hope of laying the groundwork for subsequent inquiry and engagement. I. Rorty’s Life U N C O Born on October 4, 1931 to James Rorty and Winifred Raushenbush, Richard McKay Rorty was an only child. “Bucko,” as his parents affectionately called him, was intellectually precocious from the start, with a clear gift for the written word.18 He wrote a play about the coronation of Edward, Prince of Wales, at age 6. At 7 he composed a letter to the Harvard College Observatory inquiring about the possibility of his becoming an astronomer, and at 8 penned a note of congratulations to the new Dalai Lama, accompanied by a present, for “a fellow eight-year old who had made good” (p. 000, this volume).19 Although briefly educated in a private school in Brooklyn, the young Rorty was fonder of the Walpack Township School in rural Flatbrookville, New Jersey, the location of a summer property that his family inhabited full-time in the late 1930s, where he delivered a commencement speech at age 12 and began editing the school’s newspaper at 13. Still, he found school life less than challenging. With insightful input from their son, in 1946 his parents made the decision that he would attend the innovative program designed by Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago, just shy of his 15th birthday.20 18 Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 47. For the details of the biographical sketch that follow I rely heavily on Gross’s insightful and exhaustive account, which covers Rorty’s life and work up to 1982. 19 Ibid., p. 88. 20 Ibid., pp. 88–90 and chapter 3, passim. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 4 11/24/2009 8:07:02 PM 5 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F A household and upbringing more conducive to the development of a politically engaged intellectual is hard to imagine. Both Rorty’s parents were not only fixtures in the New York intellectual scene for several decades, but committed leftist activists. In Rorty’s words, they “more or less accepted” the description ‘Trotskyites’ after breaking with the American Communist Party in 1932 (p. 000, this volume). James Rorty was an accomplished author, poet, and muckraking journalist. Son of an Irish immigrant and a New York schoolteacher, he served as an unarmed stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver in World War I, for which he was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross. After the war, he worked for a period as an advertising copywriter in New York, his work appearing frequently in publications like The Nation, with dispatches on his war experiences. He authored several collections of poetry and later wrote an attack on the advertising business, Our Master’s Voice, which bore the influence of his friend,ThorstenVeblen.21 Winifred Raushenbush was a graduate of Oberlin College who studied sociology at the University of Chicago, where she worked as a research assistant to Robert Park and took classes with George Herbert Mead. Her father was Walter Rauschenbusch, the theologian and seminal figure in the social gospel movement, from whom she inherited a social and political consciousness that informed, among other things, her notable research on race riots. She also wrote actively, publishing a biography of Park, a book on women’s fashion, numerous pieces of social and political criticism in outlets like Commentary, and a review of Jane Addams’s The Second Twenty Years at Hull House. The novel she worked at diligently during the 1950s and 1960s, a political tale situated in the Cold War, never made it to publication.22 Taken as a whole, the combination of his parents’ intellectualism, the circles in which they moved, and the overall milieu of his upbringing, had an extraordinary effect. As biographer Neil Gross characterizes it, Rorty’s childhood “involved constant exposure to settings in which propriety demanded and social approval rested in part on how well one could argue and turn a phrase.”23 As a child, Rorty served sandwiches at a party where John Dewey was present, was bounced on the knee of Sidney Hook, and not infrequently encountered a Robert Penn Warren or Allen Tate or A. Phillip Randolph at the dinner table. When for a few months in 1940 his parents harbored John Frank, a secretary of Trotsky’s in flight from Stalin’s assassins, Rorty was asked to keep their guest’s identity a secret, though he later noted that his schoolmates at Walpack Elementary were unlikely to have cared (p. 000, this volume). Later in life his parents’ wide network would afford him the ability to write Daniel Bell with questions about the University of Chicago or turn to Hook for advice on graduate programs in philosophy.24 In addition to the cultivation of his intellectual and writing abilities, what Rorty also took from this milieu are his parents’ political commitments and deep sense of injustice. In an interview Rorty explains, “I was just brought up a Trotskyite, the way people are brought up Methodists or Jews or something like that. It was just the faith of the household.”25 If he had not already absorbed it from the atmosphere, he knew from the 21 Ibid., pp. 33–40. Gross devotes a chapter each to exhaustive accounts of the lives and work of Rorty’s parents. 22 Ibid., pp. 16, 64, 75, 81, and chapter 2, passim. 23 Ibid., p. 92. 24 Ibid., pp. 91, 93. 25 Quoted in Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 93. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 5 11/24/2009 8:07:02 PM 6 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F Workers’ Defense League documents he messengered around Manhattan to places like the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters office in the early 1940s for his parents, who themselves would later become champions of civil rights, that “the poor would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome.” A self-described “red-diaper anticommunist baby” and “teenage Cold War liberal” (AOC, p. 58), Rorty flatly stated that “at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice” (p. 000, this volume). However, as he recounts in his quasi-autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” what the young Rorty did more than anything with “the vast amount of spare time given to a clever, snotty, nerdy only child” was to read. Solitude also afforded opportunities to spend time in the mountains around his New Jersey home, where he pursued the elusive wild orchid, a subject on which the young botanist made himself expert, as well as escaped the bullies who he said “regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school” (p. 000, this volume).26 Upon arriving at the so-called Hutchins College in 1946, to the extent that the young Rorty had a project in mind, by his own lights it was “to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids.” Having fully internalized the political and intellectual identity of his parents, what he sought in his challenging new academic environment was an overall intellectual or aesthetic framework that would in his words, “let me – in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats – ‘hold reality and justice in a single vision.’ ” That is, what he hoped to find was both a philosophical or moral justification for his idiosyncratic pursuit of wild orchids, given the apparent uselessness of this endeavor for the quest for social justice, and a moral identity that would allow him to be both “an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity – a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice” (p. 000, this volume).27 The commitment to philosophical absolutes that Mortimer Adler had provided to Hutchins’ “Great Snippets” curriculum, which, it is interesting to note, was quite hostile toward Dewey’s pragmatism, offered precisely such a framework. Actually, it offered two: religion and absolutist philosophy.28 As a result of what he called his “prideful inability to believe what I was saying when I recited the General Confession,” Rorty gradually gave up his “awkward attempts to get religion.” That left the philosophical route – specifically, Plato – whom Rorty read intensively during the summer after his first year. While Rorty said he did convince himself that “Socrates was right – virtue was knowledge” and for a time espoused the view that there were indeed timeless truths about human existence that it fell to philosophers to uncover, his attempt, roughly from the time he was 15 until he turned 20, to become a Platonist “didn’t pan out” (p. 000, this volume). Nevertheless, despite earning two Cs in philosophy, which were apparently the result of a bout of the depression he shared with his father, the lack of viable options for 26 Rorty was an avid bird-watcher as well (TCF, p. 1). 27 Rorty discusses his parents’ politics and their view of justice in greater depth in “The Eclipse of the Reformist Left,” in Achieving Our Country (AOC), pp. 41–71. 28 Rorty believed that it was only for “those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by nothing save the thought of social justice” that “whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one’s heart and soul and mind” (his wild orchids) are united with “one’s moral responsibilities to other people” (his Trotsky), (p. 000, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 6 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 7 general introduction PR O O F graduate study that existed in 1949 for this “very serious, shy, sensitive boy”29 who held a BA at age 18 after only three years of coursework led the young Rorty to decide to remain at the University of Chicago to pursue graduate work in the philosophy department. The reasons behind the failure of Platonism to take hold as a viable intellectual stance are significant. While the quest for stable absolutes was certainly not derailed by the courses he took, along with classmate Allan Bloom, with Leo Strauss, who had joined the University of Chicago in 1949, Rorty did acquire an interest in social and political philosophy that would continue throughout his life and later emerge more prominently in his own thought.30 Significantly, he also started to question “how one could get a noncircular justification of any debatable stand on any important issue.” As he explains in retrospect, R R EC TE D The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them 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. (p. 000, this volume) U N C O As he began his graduate study of philosophy, his inability to take a de-historicized view of philosophy came to the forefront. Drawn to the metaphysician Charles Hartshorne, under whom Rorty wrote his masters thesis on the role of potentiality in Alfred North Whitehead’s metaphysical thought, he sought out books like Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and Arthur Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, that nourished his interest in the history of philosophical ideas. He soon came to the realization, as Gross puts it, that “his métier was historically oriented philosophizing.”31 Despite the overt hostility at Hutchins toward pragmatism, especially toward Dewey, the extent to which pragmatist ideas and influences were within Rorty’s orbit at this early stage is noteworthy.While Rorty’s masters thesis remained in the mold of the metaphysics of Whitehead and Hartshorne, and he himself did not identify with pragmatism explicitly 29 This description was offered by the writer James Farrell, a friend of Rorty’s father who had attended the University of Chicago as well, and who wrote a letter on the young Rorty’s behalf. Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 103. On Rorty’s depression, see Gross, pp. 98–105. 30 Rorty not only tended to socialize more with the students in the Committee on Social Thought than with fellow philosophy students, on the completion of his MA he seriously considered taking his doctoral degree from the Committee. His having already been at Chicago for some time, combined with doubts about the ability of this new interdisciplinary doctoral program to place its graduates in academic positions, apparently led him to rule out this option. See Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 115, 126–7. 31 Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 112–13. Rorty himself came to appropriate a particular narrative of the history of philosophy himself. On this issue, see Richard J. Bernstein,“One Step Forward,Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” in The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), esp. pp. 249–53. On Rorty’s “grand narrative,” see also David L. Hall, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), chapter 1. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 7 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 8 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F for some time, in his earliest published essays these pragmatist influences are quite visible.32 From Richard McKeon, Rorty received a strong grounding in the history of philosophy. Though critical of Dewey, McKeon, who along with Adler was influential in shaping parts of Hutchins’ curriculum – McKeon was also, as Rorty put it, “the villain of [Robert] Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” (p. 000, this volume) – was a graduate student at Columbia under Dewey and influenced by the debates between realism and pragmatism going on there in the mid-1920s. In addition to Whitehead, at Harvard Hartshorne had studied with Ralph Barton Perry, a student and scholar of William James, and C. I. Lewis, a student of Josiah Royce. Hartshorne also had worked, along with Paul Weiss, on preparing the papers of Charles Sanders Peirce for publication.33 Like the philosophy department at Chicago, at Yale the technicism associated with the prevailing analytic tradition of philosophy was less dominant. When Rorty arrived in 1952 to continue his studies toward a doctorate, it was still possible to adopt the kind of approach characteristic of the broad, speculative metaphysics of Whitehead and Hartshorne.This was much less true at Harvard, which also had granted Rorty admission, where the reliance on symbolic logic characteristic of Lewis and Willard Van Orman Quine was seen as indispensable for philosophical reasoning. The pluralism of Yale’s department suited Rorty well. With his interest in the history of philosophy and classical training in the humanities, Rorty exemplified the profile of the broadly educated student of philosophy Yale valued.While he would end up writing his dissertation on the concept of potentiality in Aristotle, the seventeenth-century rationalists, and the logical empiricists, his exposure to pragmatist influences continued at Yale. His dissertation was directed by Paul Weiss, a student of Morris Cohen, who was the mentor of Sidney Hook. Rorty studied Peirce with Rulon Wells and was a teaching assistant for a course on pragmatism taught by John E. Smith.34 Rorty defended his 600-page dissertation, “The Concept of Potentiality,” in 1956. Familiar characteristics of Rorty’s approach were already apparent: the construction of a sweeping historical narrative, the emphasis on language, the contextualization of philosophical problems, and the appeal to a greater dialogue between traditions. Adopting the U N C O 32 Rorty’s first published essay begins with the line, “Pragmatism is getting respectable again,” and posits similarities between Peirce and Wittgenstein. See Rorty, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” Philosophical Review 70, no. 2 (1961): 197–223. Both Dewey and James are briefly discussed in his “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics 15, no. 2 (1961): 299–318. For a (quite critical) essay by Hartshorne on Rorty, written in 1984, as well as Rorty’s response to his former teacher, see Saatkamp (ed.), Rorty and Pragmatism, pp. 16–36. 33 Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 107, 119–20. 34 Ibid., pp. 127–9, 132, 137. Rorty himself thought he learned less philosophy at Yale than at Chicago, on account of spending less time at Yale, having less outstanding teachers, and losing himself in his dissertation writing. However, his correspondence at the time suggests he was much happier at Yale. Gross attributes this at least in part to the sense of historic mission alive in the philosophy department, which was united by a commitment to pluralism and aspired to recovering philosophy’s broader purposes from the narrowness of the dominant analytic tradition by drawing widely from ancient philosophy, contemporary metaphysics, and recent developments in Continental thought – all of which would be characteristic of Rorty’s later oeuvre. His relationship with and marriage in 1954 to Amélie Oksenberg, a philosophy student he had met at Chicago who had been admitted to the program at Yale as well, may also have contributed to his greater happiness. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 8 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 9 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F broad historical perspective to which he was given, the work drew distinctions between philosophical schools, noting the lineage of the ancient Greeks’ concern with things, the rationalists’ interest in ideas and judgments, and the logical empiricists’ preoccupation with words. Though not unsympathetic toward the logical empiricists, he critiqued the narrowness of their understanding of potentiality, as well as the then reigning view that they could solve the problems of philosophy on their own. Instead, he argued that the concept of potentiality demanded a broader approach, informed by the perspectives of other schools. He explained his focus on potentiality as the topic where “the relation between the problems of logical empiricism and the problems of traditional metaphysics and epistemology may be most easily perceived.”35 Upon completion of his doctorate, Rorty was drafted into the army, arriving at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in early 1957. As he explained in an interview, “I was drafted into the army because I stupidly didn’t delay my dissertation until past my twenty-sixth birthday. I have no idea why I was that dumb” (TCF, p. 5). After basic training, Rorty was able to land a post in the army signal corps, where he worked in computer development, ultimately earning a programming medal for persuading his superiors to adopt the more efficient Polish system of logical notation.36 Upon his discharge in 1958, with the help of Weiss’s connections he secured an instructor position at Wellesley College in 1960 that became an assistant professorship. Before long it became clear that the “conceited and aggressively ambitious twenty-seven-year-old,” as Rorty described himself in retrospect, hired by Wellesley would have other options. In the fall of 1961 he accepted a one-year visiting position at Princeton University.37 Despite failure of the initial designs of department chair Gregory Vlastos to hire him to teach Greek philosophy, Rorty nonetheless received a three-year tenure-track appointment the following year. In 1965 he was promoted to associate professor and in 1970 to full professor. His time at Princeton, which extended until his move to the University of Virginia in 1982, had an important impact on Rorty’s relation to the analytic tradition. Because it was much more analytical than Chicago or Yale, Rorty initially felt out of place in the Princeton philosophy department. “My first years at Princeton,” he recalled, “I was desperately trying to learn what was going on in analytic philosophy. Most of my colleagues had been at Harvard, and you had to know what they were talking about at Harvard in order to be with it.” Despite these efforts, before long Rorty’s wider interests and training proved an ill fit for the department and his colleagues. As he later described it, “My recollection is that for the first ten years at Princeton, I was one of the boys. But 35 Rorty, “The Concept of Potentiality,” quoted in Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 142–3. 36 Gross notes that despite doing relatively interesting work during his nearly two-year peacetime deployment, as “a left-wing anti-Communist and intellectual with refined cultural tastes,” Rorty found the experience emotionally trying and generally dehumanizing (Richard Rorty, p. 146). Former colleague Mark Edmundson reflected that Rorty’s time in the army may have had a bigger impact on him than his time at elite institutions like Princeton and Yale, noting that it was “where he learned to be one guy among a bunch, to look at life from down below, and to distrust posturing in all its forms.That Army hitch no doubt helped Dick to make one of his most important contributions: bringing American intellectual life closer to earth. Socrates, himself an accomplished ironist who did some time as a soldier, would have approved” (quoted in Metcalf, “Richard Rorty”). 37 Quoted in Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 148. Within a year of accepting the position at Princeton, Rorty would receive offers from Texas, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Connecticut, and an offer from John Smith, who sought to attract him back to Yale, (Gross, pp. 166–9). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 9 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 10 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F for the second ten years, I was seen as increasingly contrarian or difficult” (TCF 6, 8).38 He put the issue rather more specifically in a letter to Princeton president William Bowen:“Roughly speaking, I tell historical stories and everybody else in the department analyzes arguments.”39 The almost immediate popularity of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature across the humanities quickly led to multiple job offers not long after its publication in 1979. The combination of his unhappiness at Princeton, his tenuous relationship to mainstream philosophy, the receipt of a MacArthur Prize, and the lure of an interdisciplinary, university professorship with no departmental duties, led Rorty to move to the University of Virginia in 1983, a year after the publication of his essays from the 1970s under the title, Consequences of Pragmatism.40 For the most part, in his new post Rorty taught Continental philosophy to literature students. Although he missed Princeton’s top philosophy students and “had to teach in a way that didn’t allude to Quine’s criticism of the analytic– synthetic distinction,” he was generally content. Over time, though, he began to have reservations about the uses to which he observed Derrida and Foucault being put in literature departments (TCF, p. 10).41 Rorty’s 15 years at Virginia were among his most productive. Confessing in a letter to finding the new vistas opened by his move out of the “disciplinary matrix” of philosophy and transition from a Professor of Philosophy to a Professor of Humanities “both exhilarating and vaguely frightening,” he soon published his most ambitious and wideranging work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989).42 During the same period he wrote enough essays to fill the first two volumes of his philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth and Essays on Heidegger and Others, which both appeared in 1991. Before leaving Virginia, he produced material for the third volume, Truth and Power (1993), as well as his most accessible collection, Philosophy and Social Hope (1999). On the heels of the appearance of his somewhat unexpected stance in Achieving Our Country, in 1998 he accepted a position at Stanford University, this time in the department of comparative literature. That he would not be in a philosophy department was to Rorty’s mind “of no particular significance,” since “nonanalytic philosophy is, in America, more frequently taught outside of philosophy departments than within them.” During the last two decades of his career he was largely able to teach what he wanted. For instance, during his first year at Stanford he taught “a course about Nietzsche and William James, one 38 Rorty also noted other complications: “I got divorced and remarried, and because my first wife (Amélie Oksenberg) was a philosopher and a friend of my colleagues, there were problems. It was not a friendly divorce, and I didn’t handle it very well.” He married Mary Varney, a philosopher with a PhD from Johns Hopkins, in 1970, Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 17. 39 Quoted in ibid., p. 231. 40 Virginia was kind enough to grant Rorty a leave for the 1982/3 academic year so he could complete an already arranged stay at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto. The MacArthur grant helped him secure a reduced teaching load. See Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 232–3. 41 In retrospect, Rorty noted that he “did not foresee what has actually happened: that the popularity of philosophy (under the sobriquet ‘theory’) in our literature departments was merely a transitional stage on the way to the development of what we in America are coming to call the Academic Left,”TCF, p. 12. See also, De Man and the American Cultural Left (chapter 18, this volume). 42 Quoted in Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 233. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 10 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 11 general introduction about Heidegger and Derrida, and another about Foucault and Habermas” (TCF 66). He remained at Stanford until retiring from teaching in 2005. Rorty passed away on June 8, 2007 from complications of pancreatic cancer, just three months after the publication of his fourth volume of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics. F II. Early Work: Pragmatism, Technicism, and Fruitful Conversation U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O What stands out in Rorty’s dissertation and early orientation is his proclivity to take the broad view, to work in and amongst different schools of thought, rather than to stay within a particular tradition. His gift was for putting competing perspectives into dialogue, seeing connections, elucidating continuities – that is, doing “very McKeonite, comparative” work, as he termed it, informed by an acute historical consciousness. As he puts it an interview conducted a few years after the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “My interests until 1960 were historical and metaphysical.” While at Wellesley, however, he learned from his colleagues, including his department chair,Virginia Onderdonk, who had a degree from Chicago but had been a student of the later Wittgenstein at Cambridge, that he was “behind the times.” So he started reading Wittgenstein, along with “the then fashionable Oxford philosophers (Austin, Ryle, Strawson).” In Rorty’s own words, he “changed from being an old-fashioned philosopher to being an up-to-date analytic philosopher partly as a result of pressure from my peers” (p. 000, this volume). When he arrived at Princeton in 1961, this pressure only increased.43 Taking for granted the importance of the analytic project, Rorty’s earliest published essays involve efforts to put the analytic tradition into dialogue with other modes of philosophical reflection. He did this by highlighting unrecognized shared resonances and suggesting ways the tradition would benefit from the resources of nonanalytic schools.44 This search for avenues of “fruitful conversation,” as he called it, yielded a keen awareness of how rare indeed this commodity was in the history of philosophy.45 More often than not, incommensurability and stalled impasses seemed to prevail. To describe the work of sorting through these difficulties Rorty adopted the sobriquet ‘metaphilosophy,’ which in one of his earliest essays he defined as the attempt to address the following “inconsistent triad” of beliefs: 1. A game in which each player is at liberty to change the rules whenever he wishes can neither be won nor lost. 2. In philosophical controversy, the terms used to state criteria for the resolution of arguments mean different things to different philosophers; thus each side can take the rules of the game of controversy in a sense which will guarantee its own success (thus in effect, changing the rules). 43 Gross, Richard Rorty, p. 147. 44 See Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy”; “The Limits of Reductionism,” in I. C. Lieb (ed.), Experience, Existence, and the Good (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), pp. 100–16; and “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” International Philosophical Quarterly 2, no. 2 (1962): 307–22. 45 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 309. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 11 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 12 general introduction 3. Philosophical arguments are, in fact, won and lost, for some philosophical positions do, in fact, prove weaker than others.46 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F The central metaphilosophical argument, as Rorty saw it, emanates from the fact that “traditional methods of posing and resolving philosophical questions inevitably lead to dialectic impasses between competing schools.”47 While metaphilosophy “aims at neutrality among philosophical systems,” the inconsistencies inherent in the above triad lead to a paradox in that “each system can and does create its own private metaphilosophical criteria, designed to authenticate itself and disallow its competitors.” As a result, the existence of this paradox undermines the traditional philosophical assumptions of “absolute neutrality” and “a categorical imperative that would bind all philosophers equally.”48 Rorty’s primary interest was in possible responses to these difficulties.The most promising approach seemed to be linguistic analysis. At the time, he seemed pretty convinced both that “philosophy in the old style – philosophy as ‘metaphysics, epistemology, and axiology’ – needs to be replaced by metaphilosophy,” and that “only by taking the linguistic turn can we escape from such impasses” as metaphilosophy entailed.49 Using the terminology he employed in his dissertation, he rejects outright what he regarded as retrograde claims that “linguistic philosophy” should be abandoned so that philosophers could “get back to asking questions about things rather than about words,” as some critics of the linguistic turn argued.50 Yet Rorty never fully converts to linguistic philosophy. Despite his belief in the importance of the linguistic turn, he is not blind to its shortcomings; in his view linguistic analysis is vulnerable to the pitfalls of both realism and reductionism. Generally speaking, Rorty praises “the analytic philosophical movement” for “making us self-conscious about metaphilosophical issues.” But in his judgment they have too often been “reductionist” metaphilosophers, in that “they have used metaphilosophical analyses to reduce their opponents to absurdity, but they have lacked the courage to apply these analyses to themselves.”51 Rorty offers an original argument about how even ordinary-language theory, which also had taken the linguistic turn, “leads to the adoption of a realistic epistemology” virtually “indistinguishable from Aristotelianism.”52 Then there was the pragmatist response. What seems most congenial to Rorty when it comes to responding to the impasses identified by metaphilosophy is what he calls in one essay “the ‘ideal-language’ theory, or, indifferently, the ‘pragmatist’ theory,” and in another,“metaphilosophical pragmatism.”53 In the first instance he cites Peirce as the “best example,” and praises the “distinctly non-realistic set of categories” and the “ethicallycentered epistemology” toward which his work points; in the second he notes that what 46 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 299. 47 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 322. 48 Rorty, “The Limits of Reductionism,” p. 110. 49 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 301; “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’ ” p. 322. 50 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 308. 51 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 317. 52 Rorty,“Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” pp. 319, 309. Rorty cites Gilbert Ryle, Peter Strawson, and Kurt Baier as representatives of “so-called ‘ordinary-language’ analysts.” 53 Rorty,“Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” pp. 309–10;“Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 302. (emphasis in original). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 12 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 13 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F he dubs metaphilosophical pragmatism is “fairly close to the attitude which Dewey adopted toward the history of philosophy.”54 Dewey, and those like him, are dubbed “metaphilosopher’s metaphilosophers” for the way they respond to metaphilosophical thesis (1) above. What Rorty finds most attractive about these responses is that rather than despairing of the philosopher’s ability to change the rules, they take the stance that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules.’” Alluding to a notion that would emerge in his own thought almost three decades later as “redescription,” he explains the inference drawn by these metaphilosophers like this: “since any metaphysical, epistemological, or axiological arguments can be defeated by redefinition, nothing remains but to make a virtue of necessity and to study this process of redefinition itself.”55 What is most striking about Rorty’s orientation to these issues is his disinclination to regard philosophy’s failure to offer lasting solutions to traditional problems as a cause for lament. This fundamental stance is what made pragmatism so appealing. The upshot of the pragmatist responses is that they displace the function of philosophy from the pursuit of truth or certainty to simply “making communication possible.”56 The reason for this relates back to the central paradox of metaphilosophy noted above. The insight perceived by this young philosopher, only a few years beyond his dissertation defense and just shy of his 30th birthday, is that what distinguishes the pragmatist response and keeps it from falling prey to reductionism is the way it frames the problem of philosophers always being able to change the rules as “a progress rather than a regress.” In other words, pragmatists understood that “to keep communication going is to win the game.”57 All they can offer is “advice about what has to be done in order to stay in the dialogue.”58 Although it was not central to his purposes at the time, Rorty also perceives the important moral dimension of the pragmatists’ stance. On the one hand, he recognizes that an appeal to pragmatic justification always threatens to end the dialogue by demonstrating success at “getting a job done, and refus[ing] to discuss the relation of this job to other jobs” – that is, it entails “a request for the appreciation of new values” that “calls in question the value of remaining within the dialogue which we call ‘philosophy’.”Yet he also sees that the “appeal to practice transfers the question of the acceptability of a philosophical program out of metaphilosophy and into the realm of moral choice.” He called this “the dependence of criteriology on ethical norms.”59 For instance, Peirce, on 54 Rorty,“Realism, Categories, and the ‘LinguisticTurn,’” pp. 311, 317;“Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 302. Though unsurprising, given Rorty’s contact with Peirce scholars like Hartshorne, Weiss, and Rulon Wells, the centrality of Peirce to Rorty’s earliest writings, especially “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” has not received as much attention as one would expect. As Gross noted, when Rorty turned away from Peirce later in his career, “it was not a turn born of ignorance,” Richard Rorty, p. 142. 55 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 301. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., p. 302. He continues, “the plausibility of [metaphilosophical thesis] (1) is due only to a narrow, and ethically objectionable, interpretation of ‘game,’ and ‘losing’.” 58 Rorty, “The Limits of Reductionism,” p. 111. 59 Ibid., pp. 111; 116n11. Rorty explains that this “transference” to the ethical realm can be seen in the critiques of “objectivity” as the goal of philosophizing by Dewey and Kierkegaard, who both learned of this “dependence of criteriology upon ethical norms” from Hegel. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 13 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 14 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F Rorty’s view, responds by appealing to “self-control” – “a moral virtue rather than a theoretical insight” – as the only thing that “can save inquiry from anarchy.”60 Likewise, the metaphilosophical pragmatism Rorty associates with Dewey suggests that “it becomes a moral duty to keep the series [the “infinite series” of philosophers changing the rules] going, lest communication cease.”61 When nearly twenty years later Rorty insists in the closing sentence of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that “philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy,” he appeals to this same capacity for moral choice (p. 000, this volume). He knew even in this early period that “every philosophy will contrive to present a self-justificatory account of the criteria for choice between philosophies.”62 Rorty’s earliest essays, then, demonstrate the extent to which pragmatist issues and perspectives are present in his work from the outset.63 While brief moments of discussion of James and Dewey are common, not unsurprisingly, given his teachers at Chicago and Yale, by a large margin it is Peirce who receives the most sustained engagement in his early work.While Rorty finds aspects of Peirce’s stances attractive in themselves, for instance what he called Peirce’s “anti-realistic approach to knowledge,” for the most part his interest in Peirce, as the classical pragmatist with the most in common with the analytic tradition, seems primarily driven by the potential for Peirce to be a bridge – a basis for fruitful conversation – to other schools, most prominently by relating Peirce to Wittgenstein.64 Following this line of thought emphasizing Peirce’s relevance to analytic philosophy, Rorty starts building a case for the relevance of pragmatism. However, the thinkers to which he turns to advance this argument are Quine, Morton White, Wilfrid Sellars, Rudolph Carnap, Nelson Goodman, and others, rather than James and Dewey. Understanding the motives behind the technicism that characterizes Rorty’s engagement with analytic and linguistic philosophy during the 1960s enables us to see the pragmatist bent driving even this dimension of his work. Without this technical side of philosophy, philosophical dialogue would be “simply an exchange of claims and counterclaims,” with no genuine dialogue capable of moving us beyond impasses. Beginning with essays that appeared in print in 1963, discussion of metaphilosophy and pragmatism, grounded in a wide historical perspective, is displaced by highly technical analyses of topics like “the subject-property categoreal frame,” “mind-body identity theory,” and 60 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 317. 61 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 302. 62 Rorty, “The Limits of Reductionism,” p. 111. Rorty also sees that “it is nevertheless by and through such contrivance that philosophical controversy is made possible, and the dialogue permitted to continue.” If nothing else, his own contrivances over the years have succeeded in prompting a continuation of the dialogue. 63 Rorty’s fluency with the pragmatist tradition is also visible in his early reviews. See, for example, his reviews of Experience and the Analytic: A Reconsideration of Empiricism, by Alan Pasch, Ethics 70 (October 1959): 75–7; of John Dewey: His Thought and Influence, ed. John Blewett, Teacher’s College Record 62 (October 1960): 88–9; and of American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey, by Edward C. Moore, Ethics 72, no. 2 (1962): 146–7. 64 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 316. Rorty argues that, “Veridical knowledge is never a starting point of inquiry for Peirce, but only its ideal end.” For his discussion of Peirce and Wittgenstein, see “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.” 9781405198318_4_000.indd 14 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 15 general introduction PR O O F “‘topic-neutral’ translations of mentalistic statements.”65 In these essays Rorty appears quite comfortable with the methods of linguistic philosophy. However, the underlying values informing these linguistic analyses, which stem from “the lack of any clear criterion for ‘progress’ or for ‘discovery’ in philosophy,” changes little. In “The Philosopher as Expert,” an essay written before Rorty arrived at Princeton that remained unpublished until 2009, he explains the importance of logic, rigor, and “methodical care” to the philosophical endeavor: “the questioning of presuppositions will not be effective unless one can show that there exist genuine alternatives to these presuppositions, and to show this takes time, patience, and attention to detail.”66 On this view, to philosophize is “to raise questions about questions,” particularly new questions about “unexpressed assumptions” and “presuppositions.” This approach implies the primacy of “imaginative vision,” a notion that would reemerge in Rorty’s thought several decades later. Most importantly, when done well the work of technicians “may actually show, once and for all, that a certain promising line of thinking is in fact a dead end.”67 D III. From The Linguistic Turn to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature U N C O R R EC TE As we have seen, from his earliest published essays Rorty was preoccupied with the problem in the history of philosophy of “dialectical impasses between competing schools” and, as a result, with how to “distinguish good from bad regresses and vicious from fruitful circles.”68 Written in 1965, his introduction to The Linguistic Turn, a volume that brings together thirty years of prominent linguistic philosophy from England and America, once again begins with “the spectacle of philosophers quarreling endlessly over the same issues.” Rorty’s aim is to evaluate the prospects of “the most recent philosophical revolution” – linguistic philosophy – for offering a way out of these quarrels. By linguistic philosophy he understands, “the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use” (pp. 000, this volume). Any legitimate means of escaping the endless quarrels over philosophical theses must entail two things: a presuppositionless starting point that is not dependent upon a substantive philosophical thesis itself, and a criterion for success in solving a philosophical problem that admits of rational agreement (LT 4). Despite holding only five years earlier that “only by 65 See, respectively, Rorty, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” in Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy, ed. George L. Kline, 134–57; “Mind–Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories,” Review of Metaphysics 19, no. 1 (1965): 24–54; “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,” Journal of Philosophy 67, no. 12 (1970): 399–429. 66 Rorty, “The Philosopher as Expert,” included in the 30th anniversary edition of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 407. The essay was discovered by Gross, who believes the undated manuscript was written while Rorty was at Wellesley and revised after arriving at Princeton. 67 Ibid., pp. 406–9. Rorty sums up this way: “Philosophies, to repeat, aren’t killed off, but they are modified almost (but ever entirely) beyond recognition as the dialogue continues.This process of modification is the work not of great thinkers, but of the technicians” (p. 410). 68 Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 322; “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 299. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 15 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 16 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F taking the linguistic turn can we escape from such [unbridgeable] impasses,” the results of Rorty’s assessment are given in his introduction’s subtitle, which highlights the “metaphilosophical difficulties” of linguistic philosophy.69 In the final analysis, painstakingly detailed in nearly thirty pages of careful argument, he concludes that linguistic philosophy falls short of offering either a presuppositionless method or agreed-upon criteria for success in dissolving philosophical problems. To those versed in the history of philosophy, this should come as no surprise. Citing Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and the early and later Wittgensteins as examples, Rorty notes that “the history of philosophy is punctuated by revolts against the practices of previous philosophers.” These revolts all failed for the same reason: while each offered a “new method” that would remove the sources of philosophical error by replacing opinion with knowledge and promised “presuppositionless” procedures and criteria for adjudicating competing philosophical theses, none of these philosophical rebels succeeded in doing so. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and William James before him, Rorty understood that there are no presuppositionless choices: “To know what method to adopt, one must already have arrived at some metaphysical and some epistemological conclusions” – conclusions that cannot be acknowledged as presuppositions.70 To do so would involve either defending those conclusions by the use of one’s new method, thereby courting the charge of circularity, or not defending them, holding that the need to adopt the proposed method follows from those very conclusions. Either way, the new method fails as a decision-procedure for settling disputes about the conclusions themselves because there is no neutral standpoint from which to decide (pp. 000, this volume). But this is not cause for despair on Rorty’s part. On the contrary, “despite the failure of all philosophical revolutions to achieve their ends,” he assures, “no such revolution is in vain.” He continues, delivering helpful insights into his own conception of the philosophical enterprise, U N C O If nothing else, the battles fought during the revolution cause the combatants on both sides to repair their armor, and these repairs eventually amount to a complete change of clothes […] Philosophers who do not change (or at least re-tailor) their clothes to suit the times always have the option of saying that current philosophical assumptions are false and that the arguments for them are circular or question-begging. But if they do this too long, or retreat to their tents until the winds of doctrine change direction, they will be left out of the conversation. No philosopher can bear that, and this is why philosophy makes progress (p. 000, this volume). In the rest of his introduction, Rorty both repairs some armor and, by the end, calls for a new change of clothes. In the first endeavor, he suggests linguistic philosophy can be redeemed from its failure to provide agreed-upon criteria for success in the dissolution 69 For the earlier statement, see Rorty, “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn,’” p. 322, which was presented in 1960. 70 As James puts it,“Of whatever temperament a professional philosopher is, he tries, when philosophizing, to sink the fact of his temperament. Temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions.Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his strictly objective premises.” “The Present Dilemma of Philosophy,” in John J. McDermott (ed.), The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 363. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 16 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 17 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F of philosophical problems by adopting a more limited conception of its function. The linguistic philosophers only fail, he points out, if by ‘dissolution of a philosophical problem’ one means “a demonstration that there is, tout court, ‘no problem’ about, for example, perception, free will, or the external world.” If instead all that is offered is “a demonstration that a particular formulation of a given problem involves a use of a linguistic expression which is sufficiently unusual to justify our asking the philosopher who offers the formulation to restate his problem in other terms,” then indeed the linguistic turn is capable of achieving success.71 While Rorty admits this second position seems “rather wishy-washy,” his point is that “deviant” and “prima facie silly” uses of language, like that in questions such as, ‘How do we know that we are in pain?’, can be interpreted in “an interesting and fruitful way.” What this would require is asking the philosopher who employs such usages to explain why he does so, such that we are able to decide whether “we assent to the premises which generate his problems, and see some point in playing his game” (LT, pp. 32–3). Rorty calls for a complete change of clothes because the catch of adopting this “limited notion of the function of linguistic philosophy” is that it enables us to see its value for “forcing those who wish to propound the traditional problems to admit that they can no longer be put forward in the traditional formulations” (LT, pp. 32–3). Although he does not yet identify his own position with the “metaphilosophical pragmatism” that he associates with Carnap in this introduction and elsewhere with Dewey, one can see the pragmatic thrust of the conclusions he starts to draw from his metaphilosophical reflections in his realization that “the only presupposition which we must make is that if we have no criteria for evaluating answers to certain questions, then we should stop asking those questions until we do” (LT, p. 14).72 In the course of Rorty’s discussion, it emerges that the difficulties he identifies in linguistic philosophy’s analyses of statements are equally applicable to traditional philosophy’s “attempts to offer necessary truths” (LT, p. 31). This insight helps us understand how only a few pages after calling the linguistic period a “great age,” he stakes out the following position, worth quoting at length: U N C O I wish to argue that the most important thing that has happened in philosophy during the last thirty years is not the linguistic turn itself, but rather the beginning of a thoroughgoing 71 This call for a more limited function indicates the extent to which Rorty’s understanding of the linguistic endeavor differed markedly from the major figures of this school in its assumptions about the tools of linguistic philosophy and the ends to which he put them, despite the fact that he continued to publish essays in an analytic mode fairly consistently until roughly the mid1970s, and then well beyond that in his intermittent debates with those working in the analytic tradition, both identifying with and explicitly employing these same tools. One of the ways Rorty charts this path is through distinguishing his alternative reading of the later Wittgenstein from that of noteworthy analysts. See, for example,“Wittgenstein, Privileged Access, and Incommunicability,” American Philosophical Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1970): 192–205; “Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments,” Noûs 5, no. 1 (1971): 3–14; and “Criteria and Necessity,” Noûs 7, no. 4 (1973): 313–29. The origins of this reading of Wittgenstein in relation to the “dissolution” of philosophical problem date to his attempt to reconcile Wittgenstein and Peirce in his first published essay, “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language.” 72 For more on metaphilosophical pragmatism, see (p. 000, this volume); and “Recent Metaphilosophy,” p. 302. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 17 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 18 general introduction rethinking of certain epistemological difficulties which have troubled philosophers since Plato and Aristotle. I would argue that if it were not for the epistemological difficulties created by this account, the traditional problems of metaphysics (problems, for example, about universals, substantial form, and the relation between the mind and the body) would never have been conceived. If the traditional “spectatorial” account of knowledge is overthrown, the account of knowledge which replaces it will lead to reformulations everywhere else in philosophy. (p. 000, this volume)73 R R EC TE D PR O O F Striking an odd note for an introduction, Rorty closes with the prediction that the essays in the volume will likely be rendered “obsolete” by these larger developments, given the historicity of the vocabularies in which they are written. Nevertheless, the linguistic turn has instrumental value for making philosophers more self-conscious about what Rorty calls the “pattern of creeping obsolescence” in the history of philosophy, and for identifying particular dead ends, even if linguistic analysis itself turns out to be one (p. 000, this volume).74 A few years later in the 1970 essay “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” Rorty again probes the issue of the lack of fixed, agreed-upon criteria. This time the impasses under consideration, which are just as inconclusive, are those between “Absolute Idealists and Physical Realists, interactionists and epiphenomenalists, process philosophers and substance philosophers.”75 Turning to Descartes and to the ontological question, ‘What is really real?’, Rorty points out, once again, that the ways of answering this question have differed by epochs. Noting that one can trace these different answers back to the Greeks and to medieval philosophers, he decides to focus on what he calls “the ‘Cartesian’ period of philosophy – the one that stretches from the end of the seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries.” His point is that “the criteria for a satisfactory answer to this question changed in the seventeenth century, and are changing now.”76 Why these changes take place is primarily a result of specific controversies losing their interest on account of particular conceptions losing their appeal. With a nod to Sellars’ U N C O 73 Even though it would not appear in print until 1979, within a decade of penning these lines in the mid-1960s, the bulk of Mirror had been written. See Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 204–5, where he notes that most of the writing for the book had been completed by 1974 while Rorty had been on leave from teaching thanks to a Guggenheim fellowship. 74 Twenty years hence, Rorty interpreted the contribution of the linguistic turn to philosophy as initiating “a shift from talk about experience as a medium of representation to talk of language as such a medium” that made it easier to “set aside the notion of representation itself ” (p. 000, this volume). For a very helpful discussion of the linguistic turn and its relevance for pragmatism and contemporary philosophy more generally, see Colin Koopman,“Language is a Form of Experience: Reconciling Classical Pragmatism and Neopragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 43, no. 4 (2007): 694–727. 75 Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” in John E. Smith (ed.), Contemporary American Philosophy (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), p. 273. 76 Ibid., p. 274. More specifically, he argues that “the Cartesian tradition jumped on the fact that knowledge must be belief in what is true, and thought that by learning more about knowledge we could learn more about what is true. Thus we got a priori ontological conclusions deduced from sheer reflection on the nature of knowledge. The post-Cartesian tradition (exemplified by Wittgenstein, Austin, Sellars, Dewey, and Quine) rallies around the principle that empirical knowledge needs no foundation, emphasizes ‘justified’ rather than ‘true’, recognizes that ‘justified’ does not mean ‘justified now and forever, beyond the possibility of revision’”( p. 283). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 18 11/24/2009 8:07:03 PM 19 general introduction “Principle that the Given is a Myth,” Rorty terms this “the Principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility,” which holds: F That a given sentence is used to express incorrigible knowledge is not a matter of a special relation which holds between knowers and some object referred to by this sentence, but a matter of the way in which the sentence fits into the language of a given culture, and the circumstances of its user, at a given time.77 PR O O Lamenting that a full understanding of these changes in the history of ontology would require “a much broader historical account of cultural change – an account on the Hegelian scale,” he notes that the popularity of “picture-thinking,” or “thinking of the mind as an ‘inner eye’ which was capable of seeing only inner entities,” played a role. The conclusion he draws here, which offers a rationale for the technicism that still would characterize Rorty’s work for some time, is that a priori ‘overcomings’, or defenses, of ontology should be replaced by an attempt to go through the traditional ‘problems of ontology’ one-by-one, examine the premises which generate the problems, and see whether there is any reason to believe these premises. R R EC TE D The linguistic turn, in his view, already has begun this work; however, while “a necessary first step,” the “analytical jobs being done by linguistic philosophers will certainly not be enough to let us understand what happened in history.”78 IV. A Post-Philosophical Culture U N C O Rorty’s allusion in 1970 to the need for a broad account of cultural change on a Hegelian scale is instructive.79 His references to the possibility of a “post-philosophical” culture in The Linguistic Turn and to a “post-Kantian culture” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature signal what he takes to be the advent of a new “historical epoch” (pp. 000–0, this volume).While Rorty does not offer a complete map of this new epoch, he does point out a few signposts in the early twentieth century: the outstripping of the religious by the secular, the declining role of scientists in intellectual culture, and the displacement of preachers and philosophers by poets and novelists as “the moral teachers of the youth” (p. 000, this volume). Like Nietzsche’s madman, Rorty is in the midst of his philosophical brethren with a lantern and a message, trying to open their eyes to momentous changes that have rendered their most deeply cherished assumptions absurd.80 77 Ibid., p. 282. Rorty makes a similar argument in the much more technical essay,“Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,” where he nonetheless concludes, “When ontological issues boil down to matters of taste, they cease to be ontological issues […] Insistence on the ‘identity’ of the mental and the physical would seem an unnecessary rhetorical flourish” (p. 424). 78 Ibid., pp. 284, 292. 79 Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” p. 292. 80 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974 [1887]), para. 125. To be clear, as Rorty put it in “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” all this is not simply a matter of “a few mistaken epistemological or methodological premises. (That would be like saying that Western religion is a result of a failure to understand that existence is not a predicate and that there can be no atemporal causes)” (p. 292). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 19 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 20 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F Evidence of this historical awareness is apparent in Rorty’s essays of the early to mid1970s, which are often characterized by an odd mix of broad, sweeping claims about the history of philosophy, followed by pages and pages of tightly argued, point-by-point technical analysis of others’ positions, frequently cast in the terms of symbolic logic.81He continues to do the essential work he called for back in 1970 of examining the “problems” of traditional philosophy, and the premises behind them, one by one, in order to determine if there is any reason to continue believing in these premises.Yet increasingly one encounters Rorty telling a story – constructing a broad narrative – about the history of philosophy, as way to orient us toward the larger cultural shift. This approach emanates from a deeply held belief, with obvious parallels to his own experience: “The self-image of a philosopher – his identification of himself as such (rather than as, perhaps, an historian or a mathematician or a poet) – depends almost entirely,” Rorty held, “upon how he sees the history of philosophy” (CP, p. 41). Rather than evince point-by-point arguments to undermine persistent philosophical premises, Rorty begins offering alternative viewpoints or ‘redescriptions’ as a result of which we might situate ourselves differently in relation to philosophical tradition and to key thinkers. And by situating the philosophical endeavor within these alternative historical narratives, a new – or least non-Cartesian – conception of what philosophers might do starts to emerge.82 This stance yields the two-pronged enterprise that defines Rorty’s project. On one front, there is the attempt to grasp the full implications of what it would mean to move beyond “the entire cultural tradition which made truth […] a central virtue” (CP, pp. 35). Thinking through the implications of this shift for politics, ethics, justice, and religion, in addition to philosophy, as well as giving positive expression to lineaments of a culture that no longer sees itself as in need of philosophical justification or support, constitutes the bulk of Rorty’s efforts for the next three decades. On the other, lies the negative or “therapeutic” work required to assist philosophers, and ultimately everyone else, in letting go of the conceptions and assumptions rendered obsolete as a result of the larger shift. As he stated in the preface to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, from his earliest exposure to philosophy, he was “impressed by the way in which philosophical problems appeared, disappeared, or changed shape, as a result of new vocabularies.” Given his U N C O 81 See, for example,“The World Well Lost,”“Keeping Philosophy Pure,” and “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?”, collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (CP), as well as others of the time, like “Realism and Reference,” The Monist 59, no. 3 (1976): 321–40. The latter, which opens with the claim: “Our ancestors believed in many things which did not exist – gods, witches, the luminiferous ether, phlogiston, reincarnated souls, sense-data, conceptual analysis, and the like,” poses the question, “If we feel entitled to say that our ancestors quite literally did not know what they were talking about […] why should we assume we are any better off?” before turning to issues raised by “Donnellan and Kripke between ‘cluster-concept’ theories of what names refer to and ‘causal’ theories” in order to argue that “the causal Meinongianisn of common sense does not need correction nor supplementation by theories of reference.” 82 For early examples of this, see the following essays, all in CP: “Overcoming the Tradition,” where Rorty proposes to “offer sketches of Dewey as he would presumably look to Heidegger and of Heidegger as he would presumably look to Dewey” (p. 42); “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing”; “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” where Rorty tells us the moral seventeenth-century philosophers “should have drawn” from Galileo (193); and “Philosophy in America Today,” which explicitly defends “learning to tell a story about what one is doing” and asserts that constructing an argument or a story are “both good things to do”(CP, p. 223). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 20 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 21 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F historical sensibility, Rorty knew that a “philosophical problem” was “a product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the vocabulary in which the problem was stated – assumptions which were to be questioned before the problem itself was taken seriously.” If he could get back to these “assumptions,” and make clear that they are “optional,” he believed, it “would be ‘therapeutic’ in the way that Carnap’s original dissolution of the standard textbook problems was ‘therapeutic.’” Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he tells us, is the result of this project (PMN, pp. xiii–xiv).83 More specifically, what turns out to be “optional” in the account Rorty presents in Mirror is “the notion of knowledge as the assemblage of accurate representations” (p. 000, this volume). While this may not seem like much at first glance, the implications are revolutionary. As Rorty explains in the introduction, if culture is comprised of various claims to knowledge by science, morality, art, and religion, and if philosophy understands itself to be “a general theory of representation” whose business it is to “divide 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),” then a decline in the importance of how accurate our representations need to be will leave philosophers with a lot less to do (p. 000, this volume). Nevertheless, despite his talk, going back to The Linguistic Turn, of a “post-philosophical culture,” he consistently affirms that this spells not an end to philosophy as such, but to a particular tradition characterized by a need to answer unanswerable questions.84 That the heroes of Mirror – Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey – are exalted for having perceived the cultural changes under way and, as a result, abandoning their initial efforts to find new ways to breathe life into shopworn philosophical categories and assumptions, is not coincidental. All three “glimpse the possibility of a form 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. 000, this volume). Like these thinkers in their later work, Mirror aims to be “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.” The aims of edifying philosophy not only involve helping readers of philosophy, but “society as a whole,” to “break free 83 Although he would continue his dialogue with select analytic philosophers for the rest of his life, his landmark 1979 tome would be the last major foray on the latter front. As he indicated in a 1982 letter to the president of the MacArthur Foundation, which had granted him a so-called “genius grant,” his hopes were to become “a sort of all-around intellectual, or man of letters, or something of the sort.” It seemed that “writing lots of stuff on what was wrong with the selfimage of the Philosophical Establishment” had run its course for him. Quoted in Gross, Reading Rorty, p. 233. 84 See, for example, his statement on the last page of Mirror, assuring that “there is no danger of philosophy’s ‘coming to an end,’” (p. 000, this volume) See also, for an extended discussion, “Keeping Philosophy Pure” in CP, esp. pp. 29–36, where he states, “Philosophy resembles space and time: it is hard to imagine what an ‘end’ to any of the three would look like” (p. 29); and more specifically, “So to say that the [Wittgenstein’s] Investigations might bring philosophy to an end can only mean that this book might somehow rid us of ‘the picture which held us captive’ – the picture of man which generates the traditional problems. To say that philosophy might end is not to say that holding large views might become unfashionable, or that philosophy departments might be plowed under, but rather to say that a certain cultural tradition might die out”( p. 32). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 21 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 22 general introduction PR O V. The Return to Pragmatism and Break with Analytic Philosophy O F from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide ‘grounding’ for the intuitions and customs of the present” (pp. 000–0, this volume). As he explains in the final chapter,“Philosophy Without Mirrors,” the goal of this “edification” – helping us “become different people” – can be accomplished in two ways: Rorty’s métier, making connections between our own culture or historical period and other ones; and the “poetic” activity of imagining new possibilities. Because edifying discourse is “abnormal” or “revolutionary” discourse, in Thomas Kuhn’s sense, it will “take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” – change that would enable us to catch up with the larger cultural shift (pp. 000–0, this volume).85 R R EC TE D The principal implications of the stance Rorty adopts by the late 1970s are a more decisive break with the analytic tradition and a deeper embrace of pragmatism. If in 1970 Rorty viewed the analytic work being done by linguistic philosophers as “a necessary first step,” in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he calls analytic philosophy just “one more variant of Kantian philosophy” whose substitution of linguistic categories for mental ones “does not essentially change the Cartesian-Kantian problematic.”86 His turn to broader historical narratives of cultural change creates an opening into which the tradition of American thinkers he had been aware of since he was a child soon moves. The richness of the pragmatist tradition, not just along a philosophical plane but in its political, moral, and cultural resources, affords Rorty the kind of thematically-engaged intellectual language he needs to move beyond the problems of philosophers and take up the social and political issues to which he had been committed since he started thinking at the age of twelve that “the point of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice” (p. 000, this volume). It would take some time for the full extent of his identification with the pragmatist tradition to take hold, but as early as the 1976 essay U N C O 85 Although he is not included in Rorty’s trinity of the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Gross has noted that Thomas Kuhn is cited as often in Mirror as Dewey. Kuhn’s influence on Rorty is apparent in “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” where explicitly drawing on Kuhn, Rorty notes that “scientific epochs are defined by the solutions they take as paradigmatic, whereas philosophical epochs are defined by the problems they take as paradigmatic” (p. 275n1). For an insightful discussion of Kuhn’s importance for Rorty, see Gross, Richard Rorty, pp. 202–11. Kuhn joined the Princeton faculty in 1964, only a few years after Rorty. Gross posits that along with the later Wittgenstein, Kuhn “provided Rorty with the symbolic resources he needed to argue his way out of mainstream analytic philosophy and into a broader conception of the philosophical enterprise”( ibid., p. 209). For Rorty’s own take on his indebtedness to Kuhn, see “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks and the Laws of Physics,” in PSH, pp. 175–89; as well as, “Science as Solidarity,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (ORT), pp. 35–45, where he calls pragmatism “left-wing Kuhnianism” (p. 38). 86 Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” p. 292; (p. 000, this volume). While he admits that his critique in Mirror is “parasitic” upon the efforts of the very analytic philosophers whose “frame of reference” is being called into question – like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Ryle, Malcolm, Kuhn, and Putnam – he suggests that the reason for his use of the analytic vocabulary is “merely autobiographical,” as it is the philosophical language and literature with which he is most familiar. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 22 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 23 general introduction PR O O Beginning in the days of Goethe and Macauley and Carlyle and Emerson, a kind of writing has developed which is neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor epistemology, nor social prophecy, but all these things mingled together into a new genre. (CP, p. 66)88 F “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” delivered on the occasion of a Bicentennial Symposium of Philosophy, it is apparent.87 In Rorty’s story, the rise of the post-metaphysical culture is set in motion by inadvertent moves by Kant and Hegel that authorize the advent of an autonomous, secular, nonscientific, literary culture. Rorty uses the terms “literary criticism” or “culture criticism” for what follows, describing it in this way: U N C O R R EC TE D Not yet ready to identify his own work as pragmatist, he affirmatively cites Sidney Hook’s conception of pragmatism, the philosopher on whose knees he was bounced as a boy, as “the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control” (CP, pp. 69–70). In nineteenth-century idealism and twentieth-century textualism, Rorty draws links between the culture criticism of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century “textualism” characteristic of post-structuralists and Yale school literary critics. The common denominators of these intellectual movements are anti-scientism and anti-realism. Although he does not explicitly affiliate himself with textualism, its primary tenet of seeking “to place literature in the center [of the culture], and to treat both science and philosophy as, at best, literary genres,” is the view he espouses (p. 000, this volume). The broad contours of the Weltanschauung expressed in “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” did not change fundamentally over the next two and half decades of Rorty’s life. Combined with his important 1979 address as president of the American Philosophical Association’s Eastern Division (chapter 4, this volume, pragmatism, relativism and irrationalism), these two essays contain the bulk of the ideas and commitments Rorty would continue to work on for the remainder of his career.89 In these essays there are no traces of the finely wrought technical analyses that were his stock-in-trade and the style of philosophizing that helped him earn tenure and 87 In CP, pp. 60–71. Although there is an appearance in the 1984 essay “Solidarity and Objectivity?” (p. 000, this volume), it is not until a decade after the publication of Mirror that Rorty’s use of “we Deweyans” and “we pragmatists” becomes commonplace. See for example, PSH, p. 124; TP, p. 211n. 88 For another description of this culture, see also (p. 000, this volume). In dewey’s metaphysics, written the year before, he describes Dewey’s view of philosophy as “the criticism of culture,” (p. 000, this volume). In “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” written almost 25 years later, Rorty presents his thesis in more pat form: “the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages,” roughly from religion through philosophy to literature, (p. 000, this volume). The additional wrinkle Rorty adds to his historical account here is that philosophy was “a transitional stage in the development of increased self-reliance.” (p. 000, this volume). 89 For a more specific discussion of these ideas and commitments, see the introduction to Part I of this volume below (p.00). Rorty’s address is entitled pragmatism, relativism, and irrationalism, (pp. 000–0,this volume). Although its themes overlap with material covered in the aforementioned two pieces, one might also add “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” in CP, pp. 191–210. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 23 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 24 general introduction F a full professorship. Although he states in his address that nothing he offers is “an argument in favor of pragmatism,” only an attempt to answer “various superficial criticisms which have been made about it,” it marks his most direct engagement and positive affirmation of pragmatism itself, where this tradition is not simply marshaled to achieve some other end but framed as a salutary intellectual orientation that we would do well to make “central to our culture and our self-image” (pp. 000–0, this volume). In one of the address’s most memorable passages, Rorty offers a particularly evocative statement of the consequences of accepting this pragmatism: PR O O If we give up this hope, we shall lose what Nietzsche called “metaphysical comfort,” but we may gain a renewed sense of community. Our identification with our community – our society, our political tradition, our intellectual heritage – is heightened when we see this community as ours rather than nature’s, shaped rather than found, one among many which men have made. In the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right. (pp. 000–0, this volume) R R EC TE D Interestingly, the note on which the essay ends honors James and Dewey, not for any particular philosophical arguments, but for giving us “a hint of how our lives might be changed” (p. 000, this volume).90 Aligning himself with James and Dewey, rather than Peirce, enables Rorty to turn pragmatism against analytic philosophy.91 While his first published essay brought Peirce, the classical pragmatist whose assumptions and approach were most amenable to the analysts, into dialogue with the later Wittgenstein, here Rorty warns of “a tendency to overpraise Peirce,” dubbing him, “the most Kantian of thinkers” for his support for an historical frame of philosophical inquiry.92 Without identifying whom, he reports that “many” philosophers see pragmatism as offering various “holistic corrections” to the atomistic doctrines of the early logical empiricists. His point here is that this assumption, while not wrong in itself, permits one to overlook the fact that logical empiricism is U N C O 90 A decade and a half later, Rorty starts referring to pragmatism as “an attempt to alter our self-image.” See “Ethics Without Principles,” (p. 000, this volume). 91 Here James, who was mentioned affirmatively but mostly in passing in Mirror, becomes more prominent, though often merely lumped in with Dewey in imprecise encomia. Rorty’s most sustained engagements with the thought of James do not come until “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in PSH, pp. 148–67; and pragmatism as romantic polytheism, (pp. 000–0, this volume). James is discussed in relation to Davidson in Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth (chapter 7, this volume). 92 Rorty’s revised sense of Peirce’s relevance now holds that his contribution to pragmatism was “merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James,” (p. 000, this volume). Although Rorty’s later work contains fleeting allusions to Peirce, often positive ones – e.g., citing Peirce’s admonition not to block the road of inquiry (see, for example, PCP, p. 5; CP, p. xlvii) – Rorty does not engage Peirce in the kind of depth he did in his early work. Rorty was also fond of citing Peirce’s notion of beliefs as habits of action; see, for example, ORT, pp. 93, 118.The few later essays where Peirce receives more than passing mention include, “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin,” in TP, pp. 290–306; “Two Meanings of ‘Logocentrism’: A Reply to Norris,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others (EHO), pp. 107–18, where he (briefly) discusses Derrida’s revival of Peirce’s antiCartesianism; and Pragmatism, Davidson, andTruth, (pp. 000–0, chapter 7, this volume), esp. ORT, pp. 127–32. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 24 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 25 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F itself but “one variety of standard, academic, neo-Kantian, epistemologically centered philosophy,” presumably as he may have overlooked at one time himself. The consequences of pragmatism cut much deeper than this: “The great pragmatists should not be taken as suggesting a holistic variation of this variant, but rather as breaking with the Kantian epistemological tradition altogether.” In a thinly veiled remark, he continues, “The pragmatist tells us that it is useless to hope that objects will constrain us to believe the truth about them, if only they are approached with an unclouded mental eye, or a rigorous method, or a perspicuous language” (pp. 000–0, this volume). His break with the analytic tradition is solidified two years later in “Philosophy in America Today,” the piece that closes Consequences of Pragmatism. Here Rorty presents a new “story” on the “rise and fall of ‘Oxford philosophy’” and in the process charts a new course for himself. Taking up the analytic–Continental split in contemporary philosophy, Rorty eschews the language of dialogue and rapprochement he has employed in the past. Instead, he suggests we “put aside wistful talk of bridge-building and joining forces” and accept this split as “both permanent and harmless.” What accounts for this shift is Rorty himself taking a more radical view of his own philosophical assumptions. He does not mean to signal the “fall” of analytic philosophy; on the contrary, most philosophers today, he points out, are “more or less ‘analytic.’”93 However, there is no “agreed-upon list of ‘central problems’” for analytic philosophers to take up, leaving only a “stylistic and sociological unity.” What has changed since his analysis in The Linguistic Turn is that he now sees this as evidence of a much larger cultural shift. “Whether it likes it or not,” he asserts, analytic philosophy is now much like everywhere else in the humanities in “not knowing in advance what our problems are, and in not needing to provide criteria of identity which will tell us whether our problems are the same as those of our predecessors.” Once the assumptions that unified the community of analytic inquirers no longer hold, in the spirit of Kuhn’s analysis of the move from normal to revolutionary science, a new paradigm is in the offing. The old paradigm – the dream of philosophy as scientia scientiarum, one shared by both Plato and the analysts – shall pass: U N C O We should renounce the idea that we have access to some superconcepts which are the concepts of no particular historical epoch, no particular profession, no particular portion of culture, but which somehow necessarily inhere in all subordinate concepts, and can be used to “analyze” the latter. (CP 222) What we are left with is the more vast conception of intellectual inquiry, which Rorty sums up with Sellars’s “bland” definition of philosophy: “seeing how things, in the largest sense of the term, hang together, in the largest sense of the term.”With that shift securely established, analytic and Continental philosophers can “agree to differ on whether finding interesting new problems about which to argue, or telling sweeping historical stories, is the more profitable residual enterprise” (CP, pp. 216, 226–7).94 93 In the Introduction to CP, though, he is less ambiguous: “I think that analytic philosophy culminates in Quine, the later Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson – which is to say that it transcends and cancels itself ” (p. xviii). 94 It is interesting to note here that after leaving Princeton in 1982 Rorty taught almost exclusively nonanalytic – mostly Continental and pragmatist – philosophy. As he stated in an interview, “By that time, I wasn’t teaching in a way that required students to keep up with philosophical journals” (TCF, p. 10). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 25 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 26 general introduction Continuing the dialogue with analytic philosophy R R EC TE D PR O O F Despite intimating an end to his engagement with the analytic tradition, Rorty continued to converse regularly with analytic philosophers in their preferred style and approach for the rest of his career.95 Specifically, he resumed the work of bridging the pragmatist and analytic traditions, only now it was his particular version of pragmatism and only select analytic thinkers that on his reading contained elements congenial to his pragmatist project. Perhaps the reasons for this lasting engagement are, as he puts it in the introduction to Mirror, “merely autobiographical” – they are the vocabulary and the literature with which he is most familiar, to which he owes his grasp of philosophical issues. Perhaps it permitted him to retain a fixed pole within his intellectual identity, as he increasingly found himself before all manner of audiences and disciplines around the world. Or perhaps, as Bernstein has suggested, despite repudiating the obsessions of philosophers “there is a sense in which Rorty himself is obsessed. It is almost as if he cannot quite ‘let go’ and accept the force of his own critique.” In any case, it is clear that even if Rorty abandoned his identification with analytic philosophy, he never gave up his engagement with it.96 Still, if the “Wittgenstein–Sellars–Quine–Davidson attack,” as he dubbed it, indeed has been successful and there are no more philosophical problems to dissolve, and if the broader cultural shift away from traditional philosophy has eroded the assumptions that authorized a distinctive role for this kind of specialized philosophical inquiry anyway, then Rorty’s more expansive humanistic conception of post-philosophical culture criticism would seem to have no use for the analytic tradition or methods.97 For the most part, it U N C O 95 To give a quick overview, other than Part III of ORT, the bulk of the essays in that volume engage the analytic tradition.With the exception of “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language,” the pieces in EHO, also from the 1980s, are much more wide-ranging, discussing an array of thinkers that includes Milan Kundera, Charles Dickens, Derrida, Paul de Man, Habermas, Lyotard, Freud, Foucault, Felix Unger, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Roberto Unger. The essays of the 1990s collected in TP are split roughly equally between pieces on individual analytic thinkers and Rorty’s attempts to advance his own notion of progress and to relate his pragmatism to human rights, the fall of Communism, and cultural difference.The third part of his final volume of philosophical papers, PCP, which gathers essays from the late 1990s until 2005, is dedicated to “Current Issues with Analytic Philosophy.” 96 Bernstein, Philosophical Profiles: Essays in a Pragmatic Mode (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), p. 47. Gross notes that Rorty went through a “significant transition” in the early 1960s from being primarily a metaphilosopher to an active participant in analytic debates. He suggests that by 1966 “Rorty’s transition from Whiteheadian metaphysician and McKeonesque historian of philosophy to mainstream analytic philosopher was complete” (Richard Rorty, p. 189). In Gross’s view, Rorty’s work of the mid-1960s is best understood as “a distinct piece of his oeuvre,” which he interprets as part of Rorty’s attempt to establish himself within mainstream philosophy for the purposes of getting tenure at Princeton, which was granted in 1965. I think Gross is right about the context at that time, but as we move beyond 1982, where Gross’s book ends, it is hard to conclude that Rorty’s engagement with the analytic tradition is a distinct piece and not a lasting strand of his oeuvre. 97 In “Philosophy in America Today,” written for a 1981 conference, Rorty identifies two particular fronts on which the analytic approach is inadequate for his emergent purposes: it fails to offer “a story about the present and the future which describes a significant cultural function for 9781405198318_4_000.indd 26 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 27 general introduction PR O O F did not; in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty’s most original, nonderivative presentation of his own substantive views, the analytic tools and debates that were once a mainstay are virtually absent. Generally speaking, then, Rorty’s primary focus for the rest of his career was writing in the kind of broadly humanistic, interdisciplinary mode characteristic of audiences outside of philosophy departments, where his works most widely resonated. However, there is a key caveat. Even in Contingency, Rorty continually mines individual analytic thinkers for particular conceptions or stances that comport with his positive pragmatist vision: for instance, Davidson’s conception of language, Sellars’s notion of “we-intentions,” Daniel Dennett’s idea of the self as “a center of narrative gravity,” and Mary Hesse’s concept of “metaphorical redescriptions.” While these thinkers were not always pleased with Rorty’s selective interpretations and appropriations of their work, the debates spurred by his attempts to identify what he viewed as their latent pragmatist leanings and to link them with the Wittgenstein–Sellars–Quine–Davidson line of argument – indeed, that there existed such a coherent lineage at all – mark an important chapter in the development of analytic and pragmatist thought over the last few decades.98 VI. From Antirepresentationalism to Political Liberalism R R EC TE D Few were prepared for the explicit championing of the political and moral virtues of bourgeois liberal democracy that surfaced in the wake of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.99 Recalling the highly political milieu of Rorty’s upbringing and the precociousness of his own political sensibilities perhaps makes these political commitments less surprising.100 Yet the relation of this political turn to the two decades of philosophical U N C O philosophy to perform, a continuing task”; and it writes off the resources of the Continental tradition, “writers like Heidegger, Foucault, and their nineteenth-century precursors”(CP, p. 214). In the introduction to CP, Rorty notes that he will capitalize the term “philosophy” when referring to the conception that holds we can “believe more truths or do more good or be more rational by knowing more about Truth or Goodness or Rationality.” The point he wants to make is: “Pragmatists are saying that to best hope for philosophy is not to practice Philosophy” (CP, p. xv). 98 Some of these thinkers, like Sellars, Putnam, and Michael Dummett, had been showing up in Rorty’s essays since the 1960s; others, like Dennett, Davidson, and Rorty’s former student, Robert Brandom, emerged in the early and mid-1970s. TP includes essays devoted to each of these thinkers. For Rorty’s engagement with these and other analytical philosophers, see Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). For his part, Rorty sympathized with the philosophers who repeatedly claimed that he had distorted their views: “It’s a natural reaction. They think of themselves as having made a quite specific point, and with a wave of my hand I seem to subsume their specific point as part of some great cultural movement, or something like that.” Nevertheless, he defended his approach: “I don’t see anything wrong with doing that. Regardless of how they feel about it, if you think there’s a common denominator or a trend, then why not say so?” (TCF, p. 9). 99 On this point see Bernstein, The New Constellation, p. 260. Ian Shapiro describes Rorty’s work in the decade after Mirror as a “journey from philosophical diagnosis to political prescription,” Political Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 20. The most conspicuous early example is Rorty’s brief 1983 piece in ORT: “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism” (pp. 197–202). 100 Indeed, Rorty’s political identity remained remarkably static throughout his entire lifetime. Gross depicts how Rorty’s “intellectual self-concept of leftist American patriot,” as he calls it, 9781405198318_4_000.indd 27 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 28 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F argument that precede it is not immediately apparent. The introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, the first of two volumes that collect Rorty’s essays of the 1980s, merely offers that the connection between the section of that book on anti-representationalism and the section on political liberalism is the same connection Dewey saw between “the abandonment of what he called ‘the spectator theory of knowledge’ and the needs of a democratic society” – namely, that “it suits such a society to have no views about truth save that it is more likely to be obtained in Milton’s ‘free and open encounter’ of opinions than in any other way” (ORT, p. 1). Although he had long been sympathetic to the tradition, Rorty’s own explicit identification with American pragmatism in the 1980s provides a vehicle for expressing his longstanding commitments to liberal democracy and social justice in a way that supports his critique of traditional philosophy. More specifically, his turn toward the political is a function of his perception that both the institutions and the culture of liberal democracy would be “better served” by an alternative “vocabulary” of moral and political reflection than one structured around notions of truth, rationality, objectivity, and moral obligation (CIS, p. 44). What does he mean by “better served”? For Rorty it all comes down to “a question of efficiency”: how best to bring about the “global democratic utopia,” as he describes it, bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment: “a planet on which all members of the species are concerned about the fates of all the other members” (p. 000, this volume).101 Careful readers of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature may recall that after grandly praising Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey for their collective therapeutic efforts, Rorty notes that what distinguishes Dewey from the other two is how he “wrote his polemics against traditional mirror-imagery out of a vision of a new kind of society” (p. 000, this volume). Despite their shared rejection of Kantian assumptions, in his 1979 APA address Rorty similarly distinguishes James and Dewey from Nietzsche and Heidegger on the basis of the former pair doing so “in a spirit of social hope.” That is, James and Dewey “asked us to liberate our new civilization by giving up the notion of ‘grounding’ our culture, our moral lives, our politics, our religious beliefs, upon ‘philosophical bases’” (p. 000, this volume).102 Linking his philosophical stance to a distinctly American Emersonian spirit, Rorty later frames his own emergent pragmatism as remained unchanged through both his embrace of and his disenchantment with Platonism while a student at Chicago, and argues that Rorty “acquired this identity from his parents, that it became reactivated in the 1970s in response to their deaths, the rise of the New Left, and other historical developments, and that its effect was to renew Rorty’s commitment to American pragmatism, which he saw as giving expression to the same values” (Richard Rorty, pp. 97, 322). While I think Gross is persuasive regarding the origins of this political identity and the role these factors played in its reactivation, my own sense is that his account underestimates the role played by Rorty’s underlying orientation or “temperament,” in William James’s sense, in terms of the way Rorty approached philosophical problems and intellectual issues more generally, which seemed to have a pragmatist bent long before he started calling it that. For this argument, see Christopher J. Voparil, Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2006), esp. pp. 18–25. 101 In “Justice as a Larger Loyalty,” he expands this circle of concern to include “all living creatures on our home planet.” See (pp. 000–0, this volume). 102 See also the final section of “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” where Rorty defends his claim that “[a]lthough Foucault and Dewey are trying to do the same thing, Dewey 9781405198318_4_000.indd 28 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 29 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F consistent with his sense that Dewey’s efforts to repudiate representationalist doctrines were motivated by “the thought that these doctrines had become impediments to human beings’ sense of self-reliance” (ORT, p. 17).103 By appropriating the resources of the pragmatist tradition via his somewhat idiosyncratic reading, Rorty is able to transpose his notion of philosophical change through the adoption of new vocabularies to society as a whole, and to move from a conception of inquiry to a program of social and political change. However, marshaling the pragmatist tradition in concert with his broad concept of culture criticism and understanding of moral progress generated through linguistic novelty means framing pragmatism in a particular way. Baldly put, it entails reading out the ‘scientistic’ aspects of pragmatism while highlighting its connections to romanticism.104 What Rorty wanted to avoid was “having the natural scientist step into the cultural role which the philosopher-assuperscientist vacated.”105 While James’s pragmatism is more consistent with this effort than Dewey’s, Rorty nevertheless sees essential resources in Dewey’s thought, including what he took to be Dewey’s grasp of the importance of changes in human beings’ selfimage, specifically “the change from a sense of their dependence upon something antecedently present to a sense of the utopian possibilities of the future, the growth of their ability to mitigate their finitude by a talent for self-creation” (ORT, p. 17).106 By the late 1980s, Rorty’s depiction of a poeticized, post-metaphysical culture is in full swing. The literary culture with origins in the nineteenth century alluded to in a couple of essays a decade earlier gives way to an entire political vision, culminating in his claim that “the novel is the characteristic genre of democracy, the genre most closely associated with the struggle for freedom and equality” (p. 000, this volume). His essays of this period increasingly are characterized by allusions to what he calls “a general turn against theory and toward narrative.” While Rorty was always cognizant of the role of narrative in structuring our apprehension of the history of philosophy, his defenses of U N C O seems to me to have done it better, simply because his vocabulary allows room for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity”(CP, p. 208). 103 Rorty goes on to describe the essays collected in ORT as “largely devoted to arguing, against Heidegger and others, that such a sense of self-reliance is a good thing to have.” The idea of self-reliance would become increasingly important in Rorty’s work. See truth without correspondence to reality; ethics without principles; and philosophy as a transitional genre (chapters 24, 25 and 30, this volume). 104 As he puts it, “The basic motive of pragmatism, like that of Hegelianism, was […] a continuation of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s sanctification of natural science” (p. 000, this volume). Pragmatism’s relation to romanticism comes increasingly to the forefront in Rorty’s later work. See, for example, pragmatism as romantic polytheism (chapter 27, this volume); and “Pragmatism and Romanticism” and “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” both in PCP. On the relation of pragmatism and the Romantic tradition more generally, see Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 105 “Pragmatism without Method” (ORT, p. 75). This essay marks Rorty’s most in-depth defense of this reading of pragmatism. Rorty’s turn to romanticism is motivated in part by this desire to curb the ascendancy of science, which he took to be responsible for many of the assumptions that ultimately undid analytic philosophy. 106 In the preface to his final collection of essays, he reiterates this view: “From Dewey’s point of view, the history of philosophy is best seen as a series of efforts to modify people’s sense of who they are” (PCP, p. ix). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 29 11/24/2009 8:07:04 PM 30 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F narrative and stories now take on an explicitly political cast. And his embrace of the romanticist paradigm is now less about getting traction against scientism than about a particular forward-looking orientation toward political and social change. The broad contours of the political vision that take shape during this period change little over the rest of his career.The general direction of this constellation of ideas elaborates the Romantic, literary, and imaginative strands of his thought into a more concrete strategy of self-criticism and reform of Western societies for making them more responsive to suffering and injustice, both at home and abroad. What was until now merely a rough outline of the poeticized culture that follows in the wake of our waning commitments to rationalism, realism, and the correspondence theory of truth is more fully fleshed out. Hope replaces transcendental knowledge, a lightly sketched possible future takes the place of appeals to an independent reality, stories supplant rational arguments, proto-pragmatist Hume supersedes Kant, and abstract notions of humanity and rights are abandoned for felt, emotional identifications with particular communities. Rorty offers nothing short of a full-blown program for “sentimental education” designed to cultivate the kind of inclusive moral identity that not only would alter orientations of citizens and the self-image of Western societies, but reinvigorate the ability of democratic institutions to serve social justice.107 What is essential to understand about Rorty’s fundamental orientation, including his reaction to the postmoderns, is that he sees “the culture of the liberal democracies as still providing a lot of opportunities for self-criticism and reform” (ORT, p. 15). Indeed, Rorty seems never to have wavered in his “hunch,” as he put it, that “Western social political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs” – namely, “J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering” (CIS, p. 63).108 Virtually all of Rorty’s work since the late 1980s not devoted to specific debates with particular analytic philosophers is dedicated to deepening and defending this claim and rebutting suggestions to the contrary that Western liberal democracies are in need of some more radical transformation. While this stance, not unfairly, has led some to see Rorty’s project as a defense of the status quo, there also is a deeply democratic impulse at work here, which Rorty refers to as pragmatism’s “anti-authoritarianism.”109 Although he never states it this flatly, for 107 In addition to the essays collected in this volume, see also “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future” in EHO; “Movements and Campaigns” and “The Inspirational Value of Great Literature” in AOC; and “Who are We? Moral Universalism and Economic Triage,” Diogenes 173 (Spring 1996): 3–15. During the early 1990s, Rorty wrote countless brief pieces on these topics outside of academic journals, particularly as they relate to education; see the comprehensive bibliography in TCF. “Education as Socialization and as Individualization” in PSH is a good representative example of his stance that “if pre-college education produces literate citizens and college education produces self-creating individuals, then questions about whether students are being taught the truth can safely be neglected,” PSH, p. 118. See also, “The Humanistic Intellectual,” this volume. 108 In a footnote, Rorty clarifies, writing in the mid-1980s, that this does not mean “that the world has had the last political revolution it needs. It is hard to imagine a diminution of cruelty in countries like South Africa, Paraguay, and Albania without violent revolution,” CIS, p. 63n21. 109 For the most direct presentation of this stance, see “Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,” in John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (eds.), A Companion to Pragmatism (Malden, MA: Blackwell 9781405198318_4_000.indd 30 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 31 general introduction PR O O Although I do not think that there is an inferential path that leads from the antirepresentationalist view of truth and knowledge common to Nietzsche, James, and Dewey either to democracy or antidemocracy, I do think there is a plausible inference from democratic convictions to such a view. (p. 000, this volume) F Rorty the commitments of traditional philosophy to realism, rationality, and truth, that ground its claim to epistemic privilege are simply anti-democratic, in the sense that they appeal to something outside of the necessarily ethnocentric web of beliefs and desires of any particular community in order to trump claims to pluralism and difference.Addressing the relation of his philosophical stance to democracy in the 1995 essay “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” Rorty puts it this way: R R EC TE D The reason why Rorty believes this inference is possible is because “devotion to democracy is unlikely to be wholehearted if you believe, as monotheists typically do, that we can have knowledge of an ‘objective’ ranking of human needs that can overrule the result of democratic consensus” (p. 000, this volume). Also a function of the “antiauthoritarian motif ” he associates with Dewey and with pragmatism more generally is what Rorty calls the “pragmatist objection to fundamentalism.” The pragmatist objection is not so much an intellectual but a moral objection to “attempting to circumvent the process of achieving democratic consensus about how to maximize happiness” by appealing to “the authority of something ‘not ourselves’” (pp. 000–0, this volume). This objection lies at the heart of his critique of foundationalism in philosophy and fundamentalism in religion.110 From changing philosophical vocabularies to changing society U N C O A fundamental idea informing Rorty’s understanding of the relation of philosophy to issues of democracy and social change is the notion that all of our commitments, philosophical and otherwise, are interwoven with our identity or “self-image,” as individuals and as members of a community. The principal locus of change in Rorty’s worldview is our self-image, understood as the way in which we give sense to our historical rootedness through narratives of self-understanding. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he terms this a person’s “final vocabulary” – the “set of words” or “story of our lives” that we employ to justify our beliefs and actions (p. 000, this volume). If we can succeed in altering that self-image, particularly in ways more consistent with our political ideals, like equality, freedom, and justice, then anything can be changed. As early as his introduction to The Linguistic Turn, he had written of philosophy’s function after the linguistic turn being primarily about changing our consciousness. As we have seen, Rorty’s essays of the mid-1970s suggest the importance of narrative in constituting philosophers’ identities: “the self-image of a philosopher,” he held, “depends almost entirely on how he sees the history of philosophy.” Indeed, the traditional problems of philosophy, along with conceptions of philosophy as the discipline distinctively qualified to address them, Publishing, 2006), pp. 257–66. Bernstein offers a good account of the points at which Rorty’s defense of liberalism is “little more than an apologia for the status quo,” The New Constellation, p. 233. 110 What Rorty espouses is a society where “both monotheism and the kind of metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world is really like are replaced with democratic politics” (p. 000, this volume). See also religion in the public square (chapter 28, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 31 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 32 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F persists because generations of new philosophers “grew up with a self-image” that depended upon philosophy’s ability to do this (p. 000, this volume). Similarly, Rorty appeals to “Dewey’s version of the history of philosophy” because it is “designed to purify our self-image of all the remnants of the previous epochs in the history of metaphysics” (CP, pp. 41, 51).111 The problem facing philosophers, Rorty wrote in 1981, is that “we no longer have a story to tell about the relation between our problems and those of the past” (CP, p. 217).112 In the decade after Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this is precisely what Rorty sought to do for Western culture: to tell a new story about its past in order to alter its members’ self-image in the present. In line with his larger historical narrative about a broad cultural shift, his essays of the mid-1980s highlight the work of “liberating the culture” from metaphors that have been rendered “obsolete,” not unlike the optical metaphors he critiqued in Mirror. The need for the imaginative generation of new metaphors to take their place is what authorizes the prominent role of the poet in Rorty’s post-metaphysical culture (p. 000, this volume). However, we will not be able to do this work until we 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” (CIS, p. 22).113 This is the stance he adopts in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and never abandons. Rorty had already envisioned this larger project of social change at the close of his 1979 APA address, where he intimates the need to sketch out more fully what things would look like “if pragmatism became central to our culture and our self-image” (p. 000, this volume).114 In “Solidarity or Objectivity?”, he begins more explicitly “putting the issue in such moral and political terms, rather than epistemological or metaphilosophical terms” to make clear that “the question is not about how to define words like ‘truth’ or ‘rationality’ or ‘knowledge’ or ‘philosophy’, but about what selfimage our society should have of itself ” (p. 000, this volume). The only catch is that this involves going outside of the discipline of philosophy proper. As we have seen, to construct this story Rorty goes back in his essays of the mid-1970s to the nineteenth U N C O 111 Rorty’s most grandiose statement on this topic comes in an essay on Robert Brandom: “But rhetoric matters, especially if one sees, as I do, the pragmatist tradition not just as clearing up little messes left behind by the great dead philosophers, but as contributing to a worldhistorical change in humanity’s self-image” (TP, p. 132). 112 Interestingly, Rorty laments that the overriding shortcoming of the analytic tradition, despite its salutary emphasis on language, is that it “does not really give philosophy a new selfimage” (p. 000, this volume). 113 Bernstein calls this the “dark side” of Rorty’s stance: once we get to the point where everything is treated as contingent, then “anything can be made to look good or bad by redescription.” So the flipside of Rorty’s liberal hope is “the acute awareness that there is nothing we can rely on to determine which scenario will be our future” (The New Constellation, pp. 274–5). For Rorty’s response to some of Bernstein’s criticisms of his position, see “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” Political Theory 15, no. 4 (1987): 564–80, where he argues that it is best if we treat “thugs as thugs and theorists as theorists,” instead of appealing to philosophy or theory as a guard against inhumanity and evil. Because theories are not rooted in fixed essences, in Rorty’s view they can offer no such assistance. 114 Interestingly, a decade and a half later Rorty would suggest that we think of pragmatism itself as “an attempt to alter our self-image” (p. 000, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 32 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 33 general introduction D PR O O F century to identify a much broader conception of intellectual activity – namely, culture criticism. The moral of his new story is unambiguous: “Novels and poems are now the principal means by which a bright youth gains a self-image” (CP, p. 66). As we have seen, a decade later he makes a case for the novel’s importance in “the struggle for freedom and equality” (p. 000, this volume). Yet philosophy still has a role to play. The more expansive form of culture criticism that he saw developing out of the nineteenth century entails the work of “weaving” these new metaphors into “our communal web of beliefs and desires” (p. 000, this volume). The chief way in which philosophy serves social or cultural change is this kind of reweaving of beliefs. Philosophers can help us “to get past common sense, past common ways of speaking, past vocabularies; modifying them in order to take account of new developments like Enlightenment secularism, democratic governments, Newton, Copernicus, Darwin, Freud” (TCF, p. 47).115 In the mid-1980s, Rorty describes what he was up to in this way: “I shall try to show that the vocabulary of Enlightenment rationalism, although it was essential to the beginnings of liberal democracy, has become an impediment to the preservation and progress of democratic societies.” Better suited to the latter endeavor is a vocabulary organized around “metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral obligation” (CIS, p. 44). Rorty’s work aims to provide such a vocabulary. R R EC TE Redescription as inquiry, as politics, and as alternative to argument U N C O One of the corollaries of Rorty’s vision of a post-philosophical culture no longer demarcated by Kantian–Weberian autonomous spheres is a change in the nature of inquiry toward what he calls ‘redescription’. Like so much else in his oeuvre, this change is informed by his longstanding views about the unavailability of fixed, widely accepted criteria.“A poeticized, or post-metaphysical, culture,” he explains in an interview,“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” (TCF, p. 46).116 If for historicist reasons universal transcultural criteria are unavailable to us as culturally constituted beings, the task, then, is to reconceive of inquiry as a “criterionless muddling through” – or more formally, “a Quinean picture of inquiry as the continual reweaving of a web of beliefs rather than as the application of criteria to cases” (p. 000, this volume).117 Under different names this work of redescribing was a part of Rorty’s thinking since his earliest published work, where he calls attention to the fact that “any metaphysical, epistemological, or axiological arguments can be defeated by redefinition” – the philosopher’s ability to “change the rules” of the game largely by altering the relevant 115 Here Rorty refers to this work as “what William James called ‘weaving the old and the new together’, in order to assimilate weird things like Freudian psychology with moral common sense.” For Rorty’s own attempt to do this, see freud and moral reflection (chapter 14, this volume). 116 Getting rid of this imperative, he asserts, would make it a lot easier to think of “the entire culture, from physics to poetry, as a single, continuous, seamless activity in which the divisions are merely institutional and pedagogical” (ORT, p. 76). 117 As we shall see below, this notion of ‘criterionless muddling through’ characterizes what he refers to as “cultural politics” in his most recent work. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 33 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 34 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F criteria.118 As he later establishes in “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics,” this approach looks to the imagination, rather than to inference, for the kind of “recontextualization,” as he once called it, that happens at certain points in the reweaving process, not unlike what takes place in Kuhnian periods of revolutionary science.119 Kuhn is important here because taking what Rorty calls a “post-Kuhnian” view of science gets us beyond the notion of “sticking within a logical space which forms an intrinsically privileged context” (ORT, pp. 95–6). The need to give up the idea that there exist such privileged contexts outside of the webs of belief that constitute us is central to Rorty’s pragmatism. There is no getting outside of these webs for Rorty; the notion that we can is a function of a conception of rational inquiry authorized by the assumption that everything can be translated into a single, widely available context and vocabulary accepted by any rational inquirer.Without privileged contexts and accepted criteria, all we can do is redescribe things and compare one redescription to another.120 In “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism,” Rorty takes both “Kuhn’s romantic philosophy of science” and “[Harold] Bloom’s philosophy of romantic poetry” to be consistent with the pragmatist insight of Nietzsche and James that “a new and useful vocabulary is just that, not a sudden unmediated vision of things or texts as they are.” To the pragmatist, he asserts, “there is no interesting difference between tables and texts, between protons and poems […] these are all just permanent possibilities for use, and thus for redescription, reinterpretation, manipulation” (p. 000, this volume). This is the context of Rorty’s embrace of Bloom’s notion of “strong misreading.” Once we are outside the realm of privileged contexts where the application of criteria can settle issues, argumentation loses its traction, as does representationalism and U N C O 118 Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy,” pp. 299–301. Here Rorty states that “philosophical argumentation is not a search for truth, but an occasion for inspiration.” Prefiguring what he would do in his later work, he points out that “nothing remains but to make a virtue of necessity and to study this process of redefinition itself.” Rorty’s first use of the actual term “redescription” seems to have been the 1970 essay “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” where in good historicist fashion he shows how various insights in ontology consisted in a “redescription” that had been brought about by the acceptance or nonacceptance of certain contingent premises. While he does not yet use the term to describe his own approach, he establishes the importance of the primary idea he espouses in the essay, the Principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility, noting that he has “not yet given arguments for its truth.” He then admits, “I do not know how to do this save by rebutting objections.” Intimating what seems a very pragmatic approach, he continues, “Instead of dreaming up some objections and then knocking them down, I want to introduce a new topic into the discussion – one which provides an illustration of the way in which this Principle can be put to work in practice” (pp. 278–9, 284). 119 On the idea of recontextualization, a term which Rorty seems to have abandoned for “redescription,” see “Inquiry as Recontextualization,” in ORT, pp. 93–110. Part of the reason he thinks it appropriate to refer to our culture as an increasingly poeticized one is because “the desire to dream up as many new contexts as possible” for our beliefs in his view happens more in art and literature than in the natural sciences (p. 110). 120 To be clear, Rorty holds that “there is nothing wrong with science, there is only something wrong with the attempt to divinize it, the attempt characteristic of realistic philosophy.” What such realism amounts to in this context is “the idea that inquiry is a matter of find out the nature of something which lies outside the web of beliefs and desires” that constitute human beings (p. 000, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 34 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 35 general introduction PR O O Hobbes did not have theological arguments against Dante’s world-picture; Kant had only a very bad scientific argument for the phenomenal character of science; Nietzsche and James did not have epistemological arguments for pragmatism. Each of these thinkers presented us with a new form of intellectual life, and asked us to compare its advantages with the old. (p. 000, this volume) F a correspondence theory of truth. As Rorty explains, a strong misreading is when a critic “asks neither the author nor the text about their intentions but simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose.” Whether it is “great physicist or a great critic,” from time to time this process yields “a new vocabulary which enables us to do a lot of new and marvelous things” (pp. 000–0, this volume). To illustrate this criterion-less view of intellectual progress, Rorty gives examples from the history of philosophy: By Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, redescription is virtually a bona fide method for Rorty himself. “Conforming to my own precepts,” he tells readers early on, D 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. (CIS, p. 9) U N C O R R EC TE His strategy is “changing the subject, rather than granting the objector his choice of weapons and terrain by meeting his criticisms head-on” (CIS, p. 44). Redescription for Rorty is now much more than a method of inquiry: “speaking differently, rather than arguing well,” on his view is “the chief instrument of cultural change” (CIS, p. 7). In a word, redescription is political; redescriptions have the power to change our minds. In a more recent essay, he sums up the limits of argument via Shelley: “the sort of truth that is the product of successful argument cannot, Shelley thought, improve our moral condition” (p. 000, this volume). The human use of the imagination as “the cutting edge of cultural evolution” is what enables us to make the future richer than the past. Indeed, the “ability to redescribe the familiar in unfamiliar terms” is what unites Newton and Christ, Freud and Marx (p. 000, this volume). When it comes to social change, then, if we only work toward those programs that can be supported by arguments, in Rorty’s view we are limited to that which can be made sense of within existing assumptions via currently accepted criteria. Without the political equivalent of the moves of Kuhnian revolutionary science, we will never alter our self-image, and thus will close off the possibility of a previously unimagined future.121 The problem with argument as a means of spurring belief change is that it gets its traction through appeals to antecedently accepted criteria, by “working according to the rules of some familiar language-game, some familiar way of describing the current situation.” Because of this recourse to familiar vocabularies, Rorty thought that arguments “often just get in the way of attempts to create an unfamiliar vocabulary, a new lingua franca for those trying to transform what they see around them” (EHO, pp.189, 181). This is why he appealed to the imagination as the engine of moral and intellectual 121 On this issue see the under-appreciated essay, “Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future” EHO, pp. 177–92). As we saw above, it is not coincidental that Rorty once referred to pragmatism as “left-wing Kuhnianism” (ORT, p. 38). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 35 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 36 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F progress. In ways that recall the breaking of the crust of convention that Dewey thought so essential, for Rorty the fruits of the imagination – meaning something “unforeseeable and passionate” – are capable of disrupting what Roberto Unger calls “frozen politics,” which Rorty glosses as familiar language-games that “serve to legitimate, and make seem inevitable, precisely the forms of social life […] from which we hope to break free.” Argumentative procedures, in Rorty’s view, are “not relevant to the situation in which nothing familiar works and in which people are desperately (on the couch, on the barricades) looking for something, no matter how familiar, which might work” (EHO, pp. 189–90).122 Rorty’s defense of the imagination over reasoned argument emanates from his view that social change is constrained by the appeal to “rational acceptability by the standards of the existing community” that argument entails. Acts of “courage and imagination,” then, become “the only recourse” for moral progress beyond the limits of present beliefs (p. 000, this volume). In essays of the 1990s, such as “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Rorty links this stance more directly to the pursuit of social justice. He defends pragmatism for its receptivity toward appeals “to courage and imagination rather than to putatively neutral criteria” (p. 000, this volume). By contrast, “universalist philosophers,” he argues, “assume, with Kant, that all the logical space necessary for moral deliberation is now available – that all important truths about right and wrong can not only be stated but made plausible, in language already to hand.” Without expanding this logical space through new metaphors and ways of talking, “a voice saying something never heard before” may be heard, but it will lack resonance because it falls outside of the established meanings that delimit this space, particularly in cases where this space is defined by “the language of the oppressor” (p. 000, this volume). Philosophy’s specific role, as he sees it at this point, is simply “to clear the road for prophets and poets, to make intellectual life a bit simpler and safer for those who have visions of new communities.” Only once this space has been cleared can the formation of new moral identities no longer linked to injustice and oppression be forged from “terms not presently available” to those who are suffering (pp. 000–0, this volume). The notion of philosophy as “cultural politics” that comes to the foreground in Rorty’s last collection of essays puts an explicitly political label on the work that he saw philosophy doing for some time. Cultural politics aims to subvert the idea inherent in Enlightenment rationalism that “persistent argument will lead all inquirers to the same set of beliefs” (pp. 000–0, this volume). In this new connotation, which differs from the pejorative meaning attributed to the phrase in Achieving Our Country, cultural politics amounts to a catch-all phrase for the conversation or inquiry that takes place in the absence of agreed-upon criteria to govern argument.The difference that makes a difference is that the lack of agreed-upon criteria mean there can be no final resolution of any problem. Instead, for philosophy to “intervene” in cultural politics means to join poets and other intellectuals in offering novel vocabularies and new ways of looking at the world, but also to reconcile seemingly incompatible existing visions. In the process, all it 122 Here Rorty is responding to Habermas’s claim that “[c]ommunicative reason finds its criteria in the argumentative procedures for directly or indirectly redeeming claims to propositional truth, normative rightness, subjective truthfulness, and aesthetic harmony,” quoted in EHO, p. 189n41. For his part, Dewey cited as the function of art and the imagination “to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.” The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), p. 183. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 36 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 37 general introduction O VII. The Challenges and the Promise of Rorty’s Poetic, Post-Metaphysical Liberalism F can hope to do is to change the course of humanity’s ongoing conversation about “what to do with itself.”Those forms of intellectual endeavor not engaged in helping along this process of cultural change by asking what difference, if any, an idea or vocabulary or proposal will make to our “social hopes, programs of action, and prophecies of a better future,” simply may not be worth doing (PCP, pp. ix–x). R R EC TE D PR O One of the greatest challenges of Rorty’s project is liberating Enlightenment liberalism and its lofty political ideals from their unwieldy foundations in rationality and objectivity in such a way that “our traditional liberal habits and hopes” survive. This effort of recovery is what animates his unexpected defense of the virtues of liberal democracy in his first round of post-Mirror essays in the mid-1980s. As we have seen, the primary way he does this is by turning to pragmatism and, in particular, to Dewey. Because of his critique of presuppositionless inquiry in the service of rationally agreed-upon criteria, he cannot justify his turn to pragmatism or the liberal habits and hopes he espouses in traditional fashion via transcultural rationality. The only tenable justification is a circular one – that is, a pragmatist justification.The example Rorty offers is Winston’s Churchill’s defense of democracy as the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried so far. This justification, Rorty tells us, is not by reference to a criterion, but by reference to various detailed practical advantages. It is circular only in that the terms of praise used to describe liberal societies will be drawn from the vocabulary of the liberal societies themselves. (p. 000, this volume). U N C O In the rest of this section I outline a number of areas where Rorty’s attempt to retain a conception of Enlightenment politics without its philosophical justification has been vulnerable to critique: his defense of a public–private split, his account of contingent moral obligation and program of sentimental education, his attempt to reconcile ethnocentrism and pluralism, and the tension between cultural and “real” politics in his thought. These areas reveal not only the challenges of his post-metaphysical liberalism but its promise as well; even when problematic or imperfectly resolved, the fundamental issues Rorty tackles call attention to areas in need of greater attention by intellectuals, particularly in the West. A firm distinction between public and private A popular target of Rorty’s critics has been his insistence on the need for a “firm distinction” between public and private.123 Although he had examined arguments about public and private in the context of philosophy of language debates twenty years earlier, 123 See, among others, Richard J. Bernstein, “Rorty’s Liberal Utopia,” Social Research 57, no.1 (1990): 31–72; Nancy Fraser, “Solidarity or Singularity? Richard Rorty between Romanticism and Technology,” Praxis International 8, no. 3 (1988): 257–72; Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (1990): 355–70; Scott Roulier, “Beyond Richard Rorty’s Public: Relegitimizing the Quest for Transcendence,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 9, no. 1/2 (1997): 19–38; Richard Shusterman, “Pragmatism and 9781405198318_4_000.indd 37 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 38 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F his first explicit defenses of the need to maintain this divide appear in the mid-1980s. The importance of this divide comes to the forefront in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and remains present throughout his work.124 The public–private split occupies a substantive place in Rorty’s political theory, if you will, embodied in his combination of “private irony and liberal hope.” Being an ironist when it comes to our “final vocabulary” – the set of words through which we make our actions and beliefs cohere – means recognizing and accepting the contingency of this vocabulary, along with its openness to continual revision and “redescription.” Keeping irony private ensures that our ongoing projects of self-creation do not cause us to lose sight of the importance of working to diminish cruelty and suffering in the world, given the contingent nature of such public liberal commitments. The possibility that one can fully embrace the radicalism of postmodern philosophical critiques and still be a reformist liberal becomes the linchpin of Rorty’s project – namely, that we can divide ourselves up into “a private self-creator and a public liberal,” such that we can be “in alternate moments, Nietzsche and J. S. Mill” (pp. 000–0, this volume).125 The need to insist upon this divide is a manifestation of a deeper tension in Rorty’s thought, a tension that emanates from his desire to defend both Enlightenment liberalism and a poeticized culture that continually threatens to undermine the primacy of its political goals. On the one hand, Rorty seeks to mobilize what he refers to in his last collection of essays as “pragmatism’s potential for producing radical cultural change” (PCP, p. ix) and to embrace the possibility of an undefined future open to the advent of imaginatively-generated new vocabularies, new conceptions of community – even “a new culture” (p. 000, this volume). On the other hand, he wants to protect the liberal values and practices to which he is deeply committed by insisting that “Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs.” When it comes to those who seem to suggest otherwise, like a Foucault or Derrida, Rorty makes it a point to establish that their critiques are counterproductive: “contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for his own improvement” (CIS, p. 63). Specifically, he asserts that “J. S. Mill’s suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing U N C O Liberalism Between Dewey and Rorty,” Political Theory 22, no. 2 (1994): 391–413; Keith Topper, “Richard Rorty, Liberalism, and the Politics of Redescription,” American Political Science Review 89, no. 4 (1995): 945–75; John R. Wallach, “Liberals, Communitarians, and the Tasks of Political Theory,” Political Theory 15, no. 4 (1987): 581–611; Sheldon S.Wolin,“Democracy in the Discourse of Postmodernism,” Social Research 57, no. 1 (1990): 5–30; and essays by Jo Burrows, and Charles B. Guignon, and David R. Hiley, in Malachowski (ed.), Reading Rorty. 124 See “Mind–Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories.” For references to this split in his later work, see, for example, philsophy as a transitional genre (p. 000, this volume). 125 Rorty’s softest statement of this public–private split comes in a 1995 interview: “I don’t think private beliefs can be fenced off; they leak through, so to speak, and influence the way one behaves toward other people.What I had in mind in making the distinction was this: the language of citizenship, of public responsibility, of participation in the affairs of the state, is not going to be an original, self-created language. Some people, the ones we think of as poets or makers, want to invent a new language – because they want to invent a new self. And there’s a tendency to try to see that poetic effort as synthesizable with the activity of taking part in public discourse. I don’t think the two are synthesizable, but that doesn’t mean that the one doesn’t eventually interact with the other” (TCF, p. 50). See also, Trotsky and the wild orchids (chapter 32, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 38 11/24/2009 8:07:05 PM 39 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F the balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing suffering seems to me pretty much the last word” (CIS, p. 63). The problem is that Rorty employs the public–private divide itself to ensure that there will be no new conceptual revolutions that might challenge Mill’s “last word.” His admonition to liberal societies in an early chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, previously published in 1986, is this: “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” (CIS, p. 65). From this point forward Rorty becomes more explicit about his attempts, as he described them, “to separate what is sometimes called ‘post-modernism’ from political radicalism” – that is, to “disengage polemics against ‘the metaphysics of presence’ from polemics against ‘bourgeois ideology’, and criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism and universalism from criticisms of liberal, reformist political thought.”126 In this way he can insulate liberal reformism from the more radical implications of postmodern theory, allowing him to cordon off not only Derrida, Foucault, and de Man, but also to demarcate Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Proust, Heidegger, and Nabokov, on the one hand, from Marx, Mill, Dewey, Habermas, and Rawls, on the other (CIS, p. xiv). The logic of this firm distinction between public and private allows him to embrace all that was anti-Cartesian and antirepresentationalist in Nietzsche, Derrida, and Foucault, while at the same time safeguarding his commitment to liberal culture and values, including his Deweyan sense of the importance of fellow-feeling.127 For his part, Rorty was aware of this tension almost a decade before Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” he perceptively identifies the problem facing both textualism and pragmatism as this: “the stimulus to the intellectual’s private moral imagination provided by his strong misreadings […] is purchased at the price of his separation from his fellow-humans.” The pragmatist claim, which is shared by textualism, that “all vocabularies, even that of our own liberal imagination, are temporary historical resting places” means that there is no “antecedent morality” or “common vocabulary” to which we can appeal to translate the fruits of the private moral imagination to public discourse. Because he embraces the historical contingency of such vocabularies, Rorty concludes that the primary 126 Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” p. 564. Responding to critics of these attempts, in this essay he outlines eight theses of a political credo that he believes “we” liberals share. 127 Rorty’s reading of Derrida, whose approach he found interesting and imaginative from his first reading in the mid-1970s for manifesting so many of the qualities he valued himself, highlights his blurring the line between philosophy and literature, his generating new metaphors, and of course his insouciance toward traditional philosophy. See, for example, “Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 74, no. 11 (1977): 673–81; and “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” CP, pp. 90–109. Even into the mid-1980s Rorty remains on the whole positive toward Derrida, though he distinguishes the “constructive, bad side” from the “deconstructive, good side” of his work (CP, p. 99) – see “Deconstruction and Circumvention” and “Two Meanings of ‘Logocentrism’” in EHO. By the late 1980s, Rorty is insisting that Derrida be treated as “a private writer – writing for the delight of us insiders who share his background, who find the same rather esoteric things as funny or beautiful or moving as he does,” rather than “a writer on a public mission, someone who gives us weapons with which to subvert ‘institutionalized knowledge’ and thus social institutions,” EHO, p. 120. See also de man and the cultural left (chapter 18, this volume). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 39 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 40 general introduction PR O O F objection to textualism is “moral” rather than “epistemological” in nature (p. 000, this volume). Indeed, as he moves outside the analytic and pragmatist traditions in the mid1970s and starts reading Continental thinkers sympathetic toward the spirit of his own epistemological critiques of the Plato–Kant tradition, like Derrida and Foucault, his familiar method of highlighting parallels and shared resonances between apparently disparate traditions leads him to the similarities between Nietzsche and James, and between Dewey and Foucault, particularly on epistemological grounds.128 Yet as his focus turns to sketching the political consequences of his philosophical critiques, these thinkers become strange bedfellows.129 So he draws a distinction that cuts across the pragmatism–textualism continuity, between the pragmatism of James and Bloom, on the one hand, and the pragmatism of Nietzsche and Foucault, on the other. In sum, “Bloom’s way of dealing with texts preserves our sense of a common human finitude,” while Foucault’s does not. Rorty ends “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism” on this note: D But I do not know how to back up this preference with argument, or even with a precise account of the relevant differences. To do so would involve a full-scale discussion of the possibility of combining private fulfillment, self-realization, with public morality, a concern for justice. (p. 000, this volume) R R EC TE The publication of his next book nine years later offer this full-scale discussion. Picking up precisely where he left off in “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism,” CI S opens with the following sentence: The attempt to fuse the public and the private lies behind both Plato’s attempt to answer the question “Why is it in one’s interest to be just?” and Christianity’s claim that perfect self-realization can be attained through service to others. U N C O 128 See for example, “On my view, James and Dewey were 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” (CP, p. xviii). Rorty goes on to put it this way: “textualism” adds nothing save an extra metaphor to the romanticism of Hegel and the pragmatism of James and Nietzsche” (p. 000, this volume). In general, the two key essays here are nineteenth century idealism and twentieth century textualism (chapter 5, this volume) and “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope,” in CP. 129 The most obvious instance of this dissonance was the somewhat jarring title of his 1983 essay, “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” a label he soon disavowed. In the introduction to EHO, he notes dryly that while he had sometimes used the term ‘postmodern’ himself “in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as ‘distrust of metanarratives […] I now wish that I had not.” Because the term had been “so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth,” he now proposed “post-Nietzschean” instead to describe Heidegger, Derrida, and others. But at this point (1990) he leaves no ambiguity: while Nietzsche “was as good an anti-Cartesian, antirepresentationalist, and antiessentialist as Dewey,” Nietzsche’s version of pragmatism “had, to be sure, little to do with the social hopes characteristic of James and Dewey” (EHO, pp. 1–2). A few years later he laments, “I seem doomed to be referred to as a ‘postmodernist’, even though the only time I used that term – in the title of an article called ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’ – I was trying to make a joke. No matter how much I squirm, I now cannot get the label off ” (Rorty and His Critics, p. 214n1). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 40 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 41 general introduction Two paragraphs later he gives us the conclusion at which he had arrived, introducing a stance that would become a mainstay of his political thought: F …there is no way to bring self-creation together with justice at the level of theory. 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. (CIS, pp. xiii–xiv)130 U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O One of the things that had intervened in the interim is Rorty’s engagement with Freud, who has an unexpected significance in the development of Rorty’s understanding of morality and moral reflection. It is in his discussion of Freud that Rorty first distinguishes between “public morality,” which entails “the attempt to be just in one’s treatment of others” and refers to the morality that is “codifiable in statutes and maxims,” and “private morality,” which is about the development of character, “the search for perfection in oneself ” (p. 000, this volume).131 The ultimate conclusion Rorty takes from his reflection on Freud is that this morality of character has nothing to do with politics or our relations with others. On the contrary, he observes that Freud “diminishes our ability to take seriously much of the traditional jargon of both liberalism and radicalism – notions such as ‘human right’ and ‘autonomy’ and slogans such as ‘man will prevail’ and ‘trust the instincts of the masses’,” since they rest on the Aristotelian attempt to establish a center for the self (p. 000, this volume). So while Rorty warmly welcomes Freud’s decentering of the essential self, he warns of the dangers associated with this decentering for public life. Whether they come from Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault, or Derrida, delimiting public from private is Rorty’s way of controlling for threats to solidarity and “common human concerns.” At the same time, because the private imagination is the creative engine of the new metaphors and novel vocabularies his project invites, some transaction between private and public seems necessary. This tension, which is even more pronounced in the idea of philosophy as cultural politics, remains largely unresolved in Rorty’s thought. Pinning the hope for social and political change on a rather slim reed, all he is able to claim, given his strictures on the public and the private, is that “poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need” (CIS, p. 37). Contingent moral obligation and sentimental education At times, Rorty’s poeticized, post-metaphysical culture seems to promote irony and aesthetic play without much else.132 Defending not only the philosophical but the political viability of contingent, nonfoundational commitments is the sine qua non of his political project. 130 See also trotsky and the wild orchids (chapter 32, this volume). 131 While freud and moral reflection (chapter 14, this volume) marks his deepest engagement, the first appearances of Freud in Rorty’s published work come in his early essays on Derrida: “Derrida on Language, Being, and Abnormal Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 74, no. 11 (1977): 673–81; and “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” CP, pp. 90–109. In Mirror, Rorty praises both Marx and Freud for helping us see “the change in behavior which results from change in selfdescription” (p. 000, this volume). 132 See, for example, the criticisms of Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15, no. 4 (1987): 538–63; 9781405198318_4_000.indd 41 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 42 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F By Rorty’s own lights, the “fundamental premise” of CIS, his most original and constructive book, is that “a belief can still regulate action, can still be thought worth dying for, among people who are quite aware that this belief is caused by nothing deeper than contingent historical circumstance” (CIS, p. 189).133 What this defense requires is accounting for a strong sense of responsibility and moral obligation with no grounding save an historicist, contingent, ethnocentric sense of “us” (p. 000, this volume).134 This endeavor generates the most ambitious dimensions of Rorty’s vision – nothing short of “recreating human beings,” as we shall see – which prompts questions about the viability and limits of his project. Rorty takes up these issues most explicitly in the mid-1990s, where accounting for a sense of moral obligation within an anti-essentialist and anti-metaphysical culture comes to the forefront.135 The particular language of “edification” Rorty adopts in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where he argues that “edifying discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings,” never quite takes hold in his thought (p. 000, this volume). Yet the theme persists, emerging most visibly in “Ethics Without Principles” where Rorty suggests that “we think of pragmatism as an attempt to alter our self-image” (p. 000, this volume). As we have seen, changing the way we understand ourselves through the stories we weave to make sense of our lives is at the heart of Rorty’s conception of human progress.What authorizes this malleability is Rorty’s understanding of the self, following Daniel Dennett, as “a center of narrative gravity,” rather than a fixed essence or essential human nature. Rorty explicitly links such change to the moral realm: “Moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the human species as a whole, is a matter or re-marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves.” This process of “recreating human beings” obtains not by making people more rational, but by “increasing sensitivity, increasing responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.” For pragmatists, the appeal to nonhuman notions U N C O Ronald Beiner, “Richard Rorty’s Liberalism,” Critical Review 7, no. 1 (1993): 15–31; Robert Kane, “The Ends of Metaphysics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 132 (1993): 413–28; Berel Lang, “Rorty Scrivener,” Salmagundi no. 88–89 (1990/1991): 127–48; Alexander Nehamas, “A Touch of the Poet,” Raritan10, no. 1 (1990): 104–25; Jacques Poulain, “Irony Is Not Enough: The Limits of the Pragmatist Accommodation of Aesthetics to Human Life,” Poetics Today14 (1993): 165–80; Charlene Haddock Seigfried,“Weaving Chaos into Order: A Radically Pragmatic Aesthetics,” Philosophy and Literature 14, no. 1 (1990): 108–16; and Richard Shusterman, “Postmodern Ethics and the Art of Living,” in his Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 236–61. 133 Bernstein notes that “Without this ‘fundamental premise’ his entire project falls apart” (The New Constellation, p. 280). 134 As he sums up in an interview, “I think we ought to be able to be responsible to our interlocutors without being responsible to reason or the world or the demand of universality or anything else” (TCF, p. 48). For Rorty’s attempts to defend this notion of community, see chapters 12, 13, and 26 in this volume: solidarity or objectivity?; the priority of democracy to philosophy; and justice as a larger loyalty. See also “The Contingency of Community” and “Solidarity” in CIS. For a critique of the limits of Rorty’s conception of community, see Voparil, Richard Rorty, chapter 4. 135 See for example,ethics without principles and justice as a larger loyalty (chapters 25 and 26, this volume). For a sustained discussion of his antiessentialism see “A World without Substances or Essences” in PSH. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 42 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 43 general introduction R R EC TE D PR O O F of Truth or Moral Goodness should be replaced with this idea of “getting more and more human beings into our community” (pp. 000–0, this volume). The series of lectures Rorty gave in Vienna and Paris in 1993 entitled “Hope in Place of Knowledge,” which sketch his mature “version of pragmatism,” as he termed it, contains his most suggestive phrase for this conception of social and political change: “Emerson self-creation on a communal scale” (p. 000, this volume).136 For the first time, Rorty highlights the particularly American quality of pragmatism, using this as a basis for distinguishing James and Dewey from Peirce. These lectures present the recognizable motifs of substituting hope for knowledge, imagination for certainty, and the idea of a better human future for notions of reality, reason, and nature (PSH, p. 27).137 Drawing on Dewey, he describes both pragmatism and America as “expressions of a hopeful, melioristic, experimental frame of mind” (PSH, p. 24). From this point forward, both Emerson and Whitman become fixtures in Rorty’s writing. Contrasting the European “metaphysics of presence” with Dewey’s “new” metaphysic of democracy as a “relation of man and his experience in nature,” Rorty argues that “philosophy should stop trying to provide reassurance and instead encourage what Emerson called ‘self-reliance’” (PSH, pp. 28, 34). The spirit of these lectures aligns with Dewey’s view in Reconstruction in Philosophy of philosophy as an instrument of change rather than conservation of the status quo, repudiating the idea of philosophy as, in Dewey’s words, “a substitute for custom as the source and guarantor of higher moral and social values,” as well as James’s notion that “a philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character.”138 Within this tradition, the power of ideas emanates not from foundational or metaphysical grounding, but from being embodied in a concrete life and lived. In other words, what gives our convictions weight and makes them more than randomly-arrived-at groundless assertions is that they are our convictions, rooted in our personal vision of the world and its possibilities.139 U N C O 136 The three lectures are “Truth Without Correspondence to Reality,” “A World without Substances or Essences,” and “Ethics Without Principles.” He refers to it as “my own version of pragmatism” since it “makes no pretense of being faithful to the thoughts of either James or Dewey (much less Peirce, whom I barely mention). Rather, it offers my own, sometimes idiosyncratic, restatements of Jamesian and Deweyan themes” (PSH, p. xiii). 137 See also “Philosophy and the Future,” in Saatkamp (ed.), Rorty & Pragmatism, pp. 197–205. 138 Rorty quotes this passage from Dewey (p. 000, this volume); James’s phrase is from A Pluralistic Universe, John J. McDermott (ed.), The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 489. See also James,“The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” in McDermott, Writings, pp. 362–76.When I once asked Rorty directly about this, he replied, “I never had much use for James’ claim that ‘a philosophy is an expression of a man’s intimate character’. To be sure, people choose philosophers, as they choose lovers, spouses, music and poems, because of the idiosyncrasies of their own genes and circumstances. But some people have no philosophies, just as some people don’t read poetry and some never fall in love. If one extends the term ‘philosophy’ so widely that everybody gets to have one, the connection between ‘philosophy’ in that extended sense and the topics that we philosophy professors talk about becomes so thin as to be invisible” (email correspondence with the author, October 31, 2006). 139 For more on this idea, and on this Emersonian dimension of pragmatism, see Amanda Anderson, “Pragmatism and Character,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 2 (2003): 282–301; Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Richard Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (New York: Routledge, 1997); Russell B. Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic 9781405198318_4_000.indd 43 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 44 general introduction Broadly speaking, Rorty tackles the contingency of moral obligation by outlining three areas of moral and ethical life in need of cultivation: an ability to identify with others, an emotional attachment to the societies and cultures of which we are a part (whether pride or shame), and a sense of self-reliance. In “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” he establishes the importance of sympathetic identification, holding that: PR O O F The best, and probably the only, argument for putting foundationalism behind us is the one I have already suggested: it would be more efficient to do so, because it would let us concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education. (p. 000, this volume) U N C O R R EC TE D Here too Rorty’s defends this approach on pragmatic grounds of “efficiency” and “causal efficacy”; the cultivation of sympathy simply produces better results than appeals to Kantian ideas of “unconditional moral obligation” (pp. 000–0, this volume). Sentimental education is Rorty’s term for the work done by narrative rather than theory. If philosophy’s job is to clear the road, the constructive work that this makes possible is accomplished in Rorty’s view not through increased moral knowledge – hence not traditional philosophy – but through “sad and sentimental stories” (p. 000, this volume). The vehicles of sentimental education include “genres such as the ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and especially the novel” (CIS, p. xvi). These forms manipulate sentiments simply by getting us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the oppressed. The goal is to make our moral identities more inclusive by expanding the reference of what we mean by “our kind of people” and “people like us.” For Rorty, “everything turns on who counts as a fellow human being” (p. 000, this volume). In the absence of universal norms with transcultural moral validity, on Rorty’s view justice too is best understood in terms of our moral identities. As with moral progress, becoming more just means cultivating a “new and larger loyalty” to an even more inclusive “global moral community,” ideally as wide as “all living creatures on our home planet.” Because of our ethnocentrism, this project must build “a community of trust between ourselves and others” beginning from where we are (pp. 000–0, this volume). The way to do so is by minimizing one difference at a time: …the difference between Christians and Muslims in a particular village in Bosnia, the difference between blacks and whites in a particular town in Alabama, the difference between gays and straights in a particular Catholic congregation in Quebec. The hope is to sew such groups together with a thousand little stitches – to invoke a thousand little commonalities between their members, rather than specify one great big one, their common humanity. (p. 000, this volume). As before, what is required is “imaginative power” – the ability to redescribe the familiar in familiar terms so as to create “new conceptions of possible communities” – rather than getting closer to “the True or the Good or the Right” (p. 000, this volume). Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and Richard Poirier, The Renewal of Literature (New York: Random House, 1987). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 44 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 45 general introduction Community, ethnocentrism, and pluralism R R EC TE D PR O O F As we have seen, the quasi-communitarian dimension of Rorty’s thinking dates to his 1979 APA address. There he defends the idea of a culture that gives up the ambition of transcendence – one that accepts “our inheritance from, and our conversation with, our fellow-humans as our only source of guidance” – as central to pragmatism. Giving up the hope of escaping the contingency of human existence may spell a loss of “metaphysical comfort,” he tells us, using one of Nietzsche’s phrases, but our gain is “a renewed sense of community” (p. 000, this volume). Using the label ‘communitarian’ is misleading, since, as he establishes in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” Rorty rejects the basic premises of most communitarians, primarily on philosophical grounds, even though he concedes that if one wants a theory of the self that “comport[s] well with liberal democracy,” the communitarian view of the community as constitutive of the self is “pretty much the right view” (p. 000, this volume).Yet if we restrict it to the sense in which Dewey’s thought is communitarian, it can be helpful – that is, one in which the identities of citizens are defined to some extent by the communities of which they are a part, rather than a merely instrumental or sentimental conception. Rorty’s claim that “our glory is in our participation in fallible and transitory human projects” comes pretty close (p. 000, this volume).140 Often overshadowed by Rorty’s effort to cultivate a shared moral identity and invocation of national pride is the extent to which his vision entails an embrace of pluralism and difference.141 A contributing factor here is his naked, unabashed ethnocentrism. In the late 1980s, this ethnocentrism surfaces as one of the links between Rorty’s antirepresentationalism and political liberalism. That is, the antirepresentationalist conception of inquiry Rorty advocates leaves us “without a skyhook” from which to escape from the ethnocentrism produced by acculturation (ORT, p. 2). In the absence of an Archimedean standpoint from which to stand objectively apart from this ethnocentrism, there can be no noncircular justifications of our beliefs. In this sense, “everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate, no matter how much realistic rhetoric about objectivity” (p. 000, this volume)142 To say everybody is ethnocentric, it is worth noting, is not to put us on the U N C O 140 My discussion here has benefited from Bernstein, The New Constellation, pp. 233–8. Although Rorty does not deem Dewey a communitarian in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” he calls him “a fervent communitarian” elsewhere. See Rorty, “The Communitarian Impulse,” Colorado College Studies 32 (1999): 58. Here Rorty also notes that “The communitarian– individualist quarrel is about abstractions that cannot be made relevant to any actual political choices.” Leaving aside these stale debates about abstractions, as Rorty’s notion of “Emersonian self-creation on a communal scale” suggests, like Dewey he sought to do justice to the claims both of the individual and of the community. See also (p. 000, this volume). 141 Such pluralism is the chief virtue of the secular “polytheism” Rorty offers as a redescription of pragmatism. “You are a polytheist,” he tells us, in a conception that covers not only Nietzsche and James but John Stuart Mill and Isaiah Berlin, “if you think that there is no actual or possible object of knowledge that would permit you to commensurate and rank all human needs” (p. 000, this volume). 142 Rorty clarifies that what he means here is not reference to a particular ethnos, in the sense of “loyalty to the sociopolitical culture of what Marxists used to call ‘bourgeois democracies,’” but rather ethnocentrism as “an inescapable condition – roughly synonymous with ‘human finitude’” (ORT, p. 15). 9781405198318_4_000.indd 45 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 46 general introduction U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F slippery slope of relativism. As Rorty explains in “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” there is a difference between “saying that every community is as good as every other [relativism] and saying that we have to work out from the networks we are, from the communities with which we presently identify [ethnocentrism]” (ORT, p. 202).143 If everybody is ethnocentric in this sense, it is no longer possible to claim “that a single moral vocabulary and a single set of moral beliefs are appropriate for every human community” (p. 000, this volume). Such a stance would require the kind of rational agreement on criteria that, as he has shown, philosophers routinely have failed to attain; that such agreement would be forthcoming in moral or political realms seems even less likely. The obstacle, of course, is that not everyone agrees on “who counts as a decent human being and who does not” (ORT, p. 209). This lack of agreement mirrors the problem of interminable philosophical quarrels between schools that had long preoccupied Rorty. He keenly observes that one’s “ethnos” is comprised of “those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible” (p. 000, this volume). When we deem people “irredeemably crazy, stupid, base, or sinful,” we fail to see these people as “possible conversation partners” (ORT, p. 203).This is a key insight.The remedy he proposes in the context of politics is the same he proposed for philosophers: conversation. Liberal culture’s only redress for ethnocentrism, other than turning back to metaphysics, is to make a virtue of necessity and avoid the disadvantages of this condition: “to be open to encounters with other actual and possible cultures, and to make this openness central to its self-image.” Liberal culture can then take pride in “its ability to increase the freedom and openness of encounters, rather than on its possession of truth” (ORT, p. 2). What makes such encounters so essential is that perspectives which do not fit into “the scheme of beliefs and desires which we [currently] would claim as ours” are needed for the self-criticism of cultures to take place. As we have seen, for Rorty moral progress is “the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us’” (CIS, p. 192). His appeal to novels, particularly social-realist novels or “the novel of moral protest,” offers a basis for telling a contingent story about the progress of the West, rather than a metanarrative of the gradual realization of some antecedent truth that the West has “gotten right.” Inspired by reflections of Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera on the relevancy of the tradition inaugurated by Cervantes, in “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” Rorty posits the centrality of “narrative, detail, diversity, and accident” in the novel as a way to subvert the essentialism grounded in traditional philosophy’s privileging of “theory, simplicity, structure, abstraction, and essence.” Importantly, rather than culminating in a stance that amounts to saying “what matters for me takes precedence over what matters for you, entitles me to ignore what matters to you, because I am in touch with something – reality – with which you are not,” in what Rorty frames as the “democratic utopia” implicit in Kundera’s vision of the novel, “it is comical to believe that one human being is more in touch with something nonhuman than another human being” (p. 000, this volume). Moving effortlessly from Kundera to Dickens, Rorty calls attention to “the unsubsumable, uncategorizable idiosyncrasy” of the 143 See also, (p. 000, this volume), where Rorty notes that “it is not clear how to argue for the claim that human beings ought to be liberals rather than fanatics without being driven back on a theory of human nature, on philosophy.” For a more in-depth presentation of Rorty’s views on ethnocentrism, see his “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” ORT, pp. 203–10. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 46 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 47 general introduction O A society which took its moral vocabulary from novels rather than from ontotheological or ontico-moral treatises would not ask itself questions about human nature, the point of human existence, or the meaning of human life. Rather, it would ask itself what we can do so as to get along with each other, how we can arrange things so as to be comfortable with one another, how institutions can be changed so that everyone’s right to be understood has a better chance of being gratified. (p. 000, this volume) F characters that populate Dickens’ novels as symbolic of the rich, irreducible diversity and plurality of moral viewpoints traditional philosophy never came to terms with: U N C O R R EC TE D PR O One of Rorty’s most suggestive statements of his ideal of pluralism and diversity comes, strangely enough, in “American National Pride.”144 Against what he saw as an unhelpful multiculturalism of “a morality of live-and-live” and “side-by-side development in which members of distinct cultures preserve and protect their own culture against the incursions of other cultures,” Rorty advocates the idea of a “poetic agon,” in which “jarring dialectical discords would be resolved in previously unheard harmonies.” Without the “competition and argument between alternative forms of life” he believed necessary for the criticism of culture from within, citizens would be unable to see the limitations of the belief-systems into which they have been acculturated (p. 000, this volume). Although perhaps not asserted enough, for Rorty “[t]he value of free discussion of possible changes by participants in a culture should always take precedence over the value of preserving cultural identity.” Without such discussion, “nobody will ever know which cultural traditions are excuses for the strong to oppress the weak and which are traditions that even the weak would, given the option, prefer to preserve.”145 If ethnocentric, it is a cosmopolitan ethnocentrism that Rorty seeks, where individuals are “articulate and reflective enough to make intercultural comparisons without much strain.”146 The flipside of our ethnocentric condition is that human beings are “centerless webs of beliefs and desires” whose “vocabularies and opinions are determined by historical circumstance” and therefore are contingent and alterable. Beliefchange and altering our self-image are central to Rorty’s project, their ethnocentrism notwithstanding, because he believes not only that cultures are capable of self-criticism and self-improvement, but that this cultural criticism must be actively fostered.The catch is that enough overlap must exist for fruitful conversation to be possible (p. 000, this volume). Since there is no transcending our ethnocentrism, all we can do is to “reweave” and “recontextualize” the beliefs we happen to have in light of the new people or new beliefs we encounter. Whether this reweaving is adequate to address the injustices and conflicts of the twenty-first century is the question. Rorty’s point, though, is that once we see the ethnocentrism of putatively universal appeals to Reason or a core human essence or categorical imperative, this reweaving is all we have. 144 Rorty was fond of noting the lineage running from Mill’s invocation in On Liberty’s epigraph of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s commitment to “the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” to Whitman’s discussion of Mill and call for “full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions” in the opening paragraph of Democratic Vistas to James’s dedication of his Pragmatism lectures to Mill. See (p. 000, this volume); and PCP, p. 28. 145 Rorty, “The Communitarian Impulse,” p. 60. 146 Ibid., p. 58. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 47 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 48 general introduction Cultural politics, real politics, and the postmodern Left U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F Rorty’s appeals to identities and self-images sound a lot like the kind of cultural politics he railed against in Achieving Our Country. Generally speaking, two distinct registers of politics exist in Rorty’s thought that are usefully distinguished, although Rorty himself does not always do so. One is the immediate, organized efforts to rectify concrete forms of injustice and suffering, primarily along economic lines of basic needs and making people’s lives better in banal ways, that he once dubbed “real politics.”This politics is the province of what he calls the “Old” or “reformist” Left, which existed roughly from 1900 to 1964, and entails reducing economic inequality and insecurity in the hope that prejudice too would gradually disappear, mostly through labor unions, coalitions, and changing laws.147 The other conception is contained in the notion of politics alluded to in the title of Rorty’s final collection of philosophical papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics: the broad, generational cultural change that takes place through “gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking” prompted by the advent of new metaphors, new vocabularies, and new stories that are then woven into the larger culture and promulgated, primarily through changing the books read by the young (PSH, p. xix). More akin to a Kuhnian paradigm shift than a concrete series of reforms, this second conception is impelled by a lightly sketched utopian vision of a society and a culture that is more tolerant and just and thus characterized by less suffering and greater happiness for all its members (PCP, pp. ix–x). As we have seen, this latter conception has been present as part of the Romantic backdrop of Rorty’s thinking for almost three decades.148 However, in the past he refers to this kind of social change as “moral progress,” “altering our self-image,” or “modify[ing] people’s sense of who they are,” rather than cultural politics. Indeed, in Achieving Our Country, the phrase “cultural politics” has a distinctly pejorative connotation aimed at those in the “academic, cultural Left” who are dismissive of “real politics” because of their view that “the system, and not just the laws, must be changed. Reformism is not good enough” (AOC, p. 78). Even in the 2000 essay, “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept for Leftist Politics?” he confesses his “scepticism” about “the recent vogue of ‘cultural studies’ in departments of literature,” pointing out that “the growing ‘cultural studies’ literature does not amount to much as a form of leftist 147 See is “cultural recognition” a useful concept for leftist politics? (chapter 29, this volume); and “The Eclipse of the Reformist Left” and “A Cultural Left” in AOC. 148 For example, he refers to “the romantic sense that everything can be changed by talking in new terms” in “Nineteenth Century Idealism and Twentieth Century Textualism,” (p. 000, this volume). One could argue that his recent idea of “philosophy as cultural politics” comes full circle from a claim in the 1976 essay “Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture,” where he speculates, “It may be that American philosophy will continue to be more concerned with developing a disciplinary matrix than with its antecedents or its cultural role,” CP, p. 69. At the time, he was rather sanguine that philosophy “may or may not” take up this cultural role, insisting only that philosophy “not try to beat” the genres doing this cultural work by claiming epistemological privilege. Not only the title of his final volume, but his assertion in the preface, suggest Rorty may have been less sanguine about philosophy’s role toward the end of his life: “The more philosophy interacts with other human activities – not just natural science, but art, literature, religion, and politics as well – the more relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful,” PCP, p. x. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 48 11/24/2009 8:07:06 PM 49 general introduction O F political activity.” That said, he also admits to having “the feeling of just not getting it” and the possibility that this lack of appreciation might just be a blind spot (p. 000, this volume). Plausible as this admission is, his account of the “extraordinary success” of the cultural Left in Achieving Our Country suggests that on some level he does get it.There he asserts, “Except for a few Supreme Court decisions, there has been little change for the better in our country’s laws since the Sixties [when the Old Left was supplanted by the New Left]. But the change in the way we treat another has been enormous.” He attributes the decrease in “sadism” that resulted, in a word, to education: PR O This change is largely due to the hundreds of thousands of teachers who have done their best to make their students understand the humiliation which previous generations of Americans have inflicted on their fellow citizens. By assigning Toni Morrison’s Beloved instead of George Eliot’s Silas Marner in high school literature classes, and by assigning stories about the suicides of gay teenagers in freshman composition courses, these teachers have made it harder for their students to be sadistic than it was for those students’ parents. (AOC, p. 81) U N C O R R EC TE D It would probably be more accurate to say that Rorty’s problem is less with cultural politics in this sense than with the cultural academic Left itself. For one, as he states in “Is ‘Cultural Recognition’ a Useful Concept,” this Left’s overestimation of the utility of philosophy – “that terms like ‘deconstruction’, ‘subject-position’, and ‘power’” are essential for rectifying injustices – has inured it to the belief that spinning out increasingly sophisticated theoretical critiques itself amounts to valuable political work in Rorty’s first sense of alleviating concrete forms of suffering. For another, as a result of becoming enamored of a certain brand of radical critique, the rhetoric of the cultural Left is revolutionary rather than reformist, longing for “magical transformations” that spell a collapse of “the system” instead of working to realize a concrete platform of reforms (AOC, pp. 102–5). What most troubles Rorty is the degree to which this Left is unable to engage in “national politics.” In Achieving Our Country, Rorty offers an historical narrative to contextualize this “semiconscious anti-Americanism,” locating it in the New Left’s perception that “the Vietnam War, and the endless humiliation inflicted on African-Americans, were clues to something deeply wrong with their country, and not just mistakes correctable by reforms.” No longer believing that social justice is possible by working within the system, these intellectuals underwent a change in their moral identity or self-image, but not for the better; on the contrary, it made it easier “to stop thinking of oneself as a member of a community, as a citizen with civic responsibilities.” As he explains, “For if you turn out to be living in an evil empire (rather than, as you had been told, a democracy fighting an evil empire), then you have no responsibility to your country; you are accountable only to humanity” (AOC, pp. 65–6). As a result, for the cultural Left connecting with those outside of academia – namely, the “voting public” that “must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square” – is abandoned (AOC, p. 104). For Rorty, absent an emotional attachment to the targets of social and political criticism, like pride, the transformative potential of projects of democratic self-renewal is lost, leaving us with detached, spectatorial critiques whose theoretical sophistication offers a false sense of engagement. On the one hand, his call for national pride is an effort 9781405198318_4_000.indd 49 11/24/2009 8:07:07 PM 50 general introduction PR O O F to counterbalance the tone of pessimistic self-mockery dominant among those on the Left who have read Foucault and Heidegger and are eager to participate in the “America Sucks Sweepstakes.” Despite the attempts of Paul de Man and other deconstructionists to “reinvigorate leftist social criticism by deploying new philosophico-literary weapons,” what resulted instead, in Rorty’s view, is a “spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country,” in the phrase he borrows from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, who have succeeded in making a “principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness” fashionable (pp. 000–0, this volume).149 On the other, the emotional attachment inherent in pride – and shame – becomes a central ingredient in Rorty’s political theory, if you will. We learn in the opening sentence of “American National Pride,” that national pride is “a necessary condition for [collective] self-improvement.” He continues: D Those who hope to persuade a nation to exert itself need to remind their country of what it can take pride in as well as what it should be ashamed of.”This commitment to America, via a shared moral identity, as an ongoing project is the essential ingredient in the stances of Whitman and Dewey, but also Baldwin, who in Rorty’s view combined “an unwillingness to forgive with a continuing identification with the country that brought over his ancestors in chains. (pp. 000–0, this volume)150 U N C O R R EC TE To be sure, this effort was never simply an exercise in nostalgia for Rorty. One of his more trenchant criticisms of the post-Sixties cultural Left is that during the same period when sadism declined, economic inequality increased. Citing data that has since worsened, he discusses how the decline in real wages since the early 1970s, combined with the rising costs of day care, health insurance, and college tuition, have contributed to the what he calls “the formation of hereditary castes” – all of which is being insufficiently addressed by the academic Left, if at all (AOC, pp. 83–7). Often lost amidst his polemics against the cultural Left is Rorty’s longstanding concern with the costs of globalization, particularly on the economic side, both at home and abroad. While he did call for an international legal structure and “global polity” that would make it possible to address these costs through his first kind of politics, for the most part his response to globalization led him to the realm of cultural politics in its second iteration, where “encouraging people to have a self-image in which their real or imagined citizenship in a democratic republic is central” is the most promising path to change.151 In the end, the relationships between cultural and real politics, and between national pride and international sympathetic identification, were never adequately worked out. 149 As Rorty puts it in an interview, “I was surrounded by what seemed to me an idiot Left in the literature departments, people who claimed to be politically involved but who, as far as I could see, weren’t” (TCF, p. 11). See also “A Cultural Left” and “The Eclipse of the Reformist Left” in AOC. Rorty attributes the phrase “America Sucks Sweepstakes” to Jonathan Yardley. See p. 000, this volume). 150 In addition to pride and shame, Rorty also discusses the “generous anger” that fueled the concern for social justice in Dickens, Orwell, Stowe, and Martin Luther King, Jr. See (pp. 000–0, this volume). 151 Rorty, “Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope,” PSH, p. 238. See also his “Can American Egalitarianism Survive a Globalized Economy,” in Patricia H.Werhane (ed.), New Approaches to Business Ethics (Ruffin Series in Business Ethics, vol. 1, 1998), pp. 1–6. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 50 11/24/2009 8:07:07 PM 51 general introduction VIII. Looking Forward U N C O R R EC TE D PR O O F Taken as a whole, Rorty’s work bequeaths us a compelling picture of a post-metaphysical culture, including novel metaphors and vocabularies that prompt ways to reimagine ourselves and our relations to others. It is a vision still oriented toward the fundamental political goals inherited from the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. In that sense, Rorty’s ideals are not postmodern, though his critiques of traditional philosophy may have this quality. Despite his emphasis on novelty and proliferating forms of inquiry, Rorty never gave up “the search for a single utopian form of political life – the Good Global Society” (p. 000, this volume). Yet his embrace of historicity, contingency, and pluralism opens multiple, revisable paths and urges more inclusive conversations about how to get there. To conceive of a society where there are no privileged standpoints or ways of knowing, and where the desire to escape time and chance is no longer woven into the way we understand ourselves, is in many ways to move beyond prevailing modernisms.152 Rorty helped initiate a sea-change in our thinking, prompting us to realize that our deepest and most cherished beliefs and values and ways of life are contingent. His role in spurring a renewal of interest in American pragmatism, propelled by his attention to previously unseen connections between pragmatist concerns and an array of other traditions, altered the intellectual landscape of the late twentieth century. If our intellectual discourses prove unwilling or unable to engage and ameliorate social problems, he tirelessly taught, they should be abandoned for others that do. More broadly, his example of clear yet complex, engaged interdisciplinary writing, in the words of a former colleague, “established a standard for a whole generation of younger writers” and “invited people into the discussion who had been sidelined for not knowing all the key terms,” effectively democratizing intellectual life in the process.153 By all accounts, Rorty lived his commitments to conversation and democratic discourse; for all of his ability to play the stinging gadfly and to provoke, his openness, modesty, and indefatigable willingness to engage each and every critic and interlocutor will not soon be surpassed. Whether the metaphors and redescriptions Rorty offers find a resonance and a use or collect dust at the bottom of the twenty-first century’s toolbox remains to be seen. As he himself asserted, “poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress” comes down to “the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need” (CIS, p. 37). Only time and chance will tell if his obsessions will spur the kind of progress toward a global democratic utopia he envisioned, progress spurred by his own hopes for 152 Michael Berubé captures the implications of this stance very nicely: “One of the reasons Rorty’s view of the world seemed so attractive was that it offered us humans a useful way to think about why it is that we disagree with each other about what those moral truths actually are: If you think you are acting in accordance with the eternal moral truths of the universe, after all, it is likely that you will think of people who think and act differently as being defective, deluded, or downright dangerous. On the other hand, if you think that morality is a matter of contingent vocabularies, you don’t have to become a shallow relativist – you can go right on believing what you believe, except that you have to give up the conviction that there’s no plausible way another rational person could think differently.” Quoted in Metcalf, “Richard Rorty.” 153 Mark Edmundson, Quoted in Metcalf, “Richard Rorty.” 9781405198318_4_000.indd 51 11/24/2009 8:07:07 PM 52 general introduction PR O O F “a global, cosmopolitan, democratic, egalitarian, classless, casteless society” (PSH, p. xii). Although he did not live to see the election of America’s forty-fourth president, the commitments, orientation, and rhetoric of Barack Obama, with their invocation not only of a pragmatist spirit but of the need to fulfill the unfinished project of America outlined in Achieving Our Country, suggest Rorty’s vision may have not yet outlived its usefulness.154 For his part, Rorty confessed toward the end of his life to being “very pessimistic” about the chances of achieving the kind of democratic utopia he espoused (p. 000, this volume) His greatest fear after September 11 was that democratic institutions would prove too fragile to withstand the threats to liberty that accompany the national security state.155 Nevertheless, as he once quipped, “what else have we got except hope?”156 Indeed, this undying hope for a better human future may be Rorty’s defining quality and perhaps his greatest legacy. Of his many expressions of this hope, few surpass this one: R R EC TE D My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, 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. In such a society, communication will 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 literature and well-education electorate.157 Other times, though, he put it much more simply: “if we can work together, we can make ourselves into whatever we are clever and courageous enough to imagine ourselves becoming” (p. 000, this volume). U N C O 154 See, for example, Christopher Hayes, “The Pragmatist,” The Nation (Dec. 10, 2008): http:// www.thenation.com/doc/20081229/hayes.; and Mitchell Aboulafia, “Obama’s Pragmatism (or Move Over Culture Wars, Hello Political Philosophy),” Dec. 17, 2008: http://tpmcafe. talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/mitchell_a/2008/12/obamas-pragmatism-or-move-over. php. For additional resources, see the website, “Barack Obama’s Pragmatism,” http://www. obamaspragmatism.info/ 155 See for example, “Fighting Terrorism with Democracy,” The Nation (Oct. 21, 2002): 11–14; “Post-Democracy,” London Review of Books (April 1, 2004): 10–11; and his brief contribution to a symposium on the 2004 presidential election, The Nation (Dec. 20, 2004): 17–18. Rorty gives a more comprehensive account of the reasons for his doubt in PSH, pp. 271–6. 156 Interview by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, “Richard Rorty,” The Believer (June 2003): http://www. believermag.com/issues/200306/?read=interview_rorty, accessed July 31, 2009 – one of Rorty’s most open and revealing interviews. The full quote is “If I had to lay bets, my bet would be that everything is going to go to hell, but, you know, what else have we got except hope?” 157 “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, p. 40. 9781405198318_4_000.indd 52 11/24/2009 8:07:07 PM