Would you be willing to expand (for us non-initiates) on the vitalism/liberalism divide?

Having avoided Nietzche to date, I will guess that the difficulty is matching the amorality of Nietzche to some kind of ethic. It's not a question only for specialists, since it seems to underlie the "relativist" worry, along with religious/ethical worries. For example, how can we justify morality if it is "merely" evolved?

If I guess right, I think I would be sympathetic to some Nietzcheian argument, since I segregate the mechanics of human life from the "inside" view. Observed from outside, we can show that there are in fact mechanical underpinnings for mental states and emotions, but felt from inside we experience the world of meaning and the rich detail of emotion.

Individually, we must act on our feelings. But in public questions, such as politics, we have to acknowledge the necessity of reductionist explanations for our nature. The alternative is constant struggle for the winning illusion.

We've lost one of our best minds. This is really sad news.

All the best to Richard Rorty's family, should any of them happen up Mr. Gitlin's excellent eulogy.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

Thanks for this, Todd.

Richard Rorty defended the notions of a progressive, pragmatic left against what he considered to be the defeatism touted by the "critical left," exemplified by figures like Foucault.

We indeed enjoy grappling with Rorty's writings, likely because social grappling is so essential to his spirited notions of democracy as practiced. For the uninitiated, probably the best place today to start reading Rorty is a collection of his essays for a general audience Philosophy and Social Hope.

Grace be upon him, so filled with graciousness in this life,

Tish

Rorty meant a lot to me, too. (Philosphers don't matter, Reece? I imagine you don't lose too many tears for writers period. What are words and ideas in this cold, cruel world.)

I was just out of a college, where my closest friend had taken Rorty's class, effectively the notes toward Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Meanwhile at work a co-worker who'd majored in philosophy got me to read Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," which indeed also turned out to be one of two centerpieces of the book (along with an argument of Wilfred Sellar's). Together, this got me into years of reading and thinking, and I'm grateful for that. I guess they're still my framework.

I'd my doubts whether Rorty ever became a great philosopher rather than a popularizer of others. I also had mixed feelings about his change of gods to the American pragmatists, although I've read them avidly, too; and I was skeptical of his reading of them as far more sociological and relativist than I found myself. I wanted to ask him about Davidson's argument against worldviews as a third dogma of empiricism. But he really did contribute with this synthesis, and I appreciate the hope it gave many for dialogue and (yeah) liberal politics.

He disappointed me the one time I saw him. It was a panel at Columbia, day long, dedicated to James's view of religious experience. Rorty pretty much took the line of religion in its own court, to do with emotional apart from cognitive exploration. Given the long thrust of his work toward Quine and Dewey as foundations for a greater holism than that, I was surprised. But I guess he always had surprises.

John

http://www.haberarts.com/

I've never found myself able to follow Richard Rorty on any topic of interest. The fault for that probably lies with me; but in any event I don't know what, if anything, qualifies Rorty as a "Pragmatist." I think he did tend to personify the now-well-established view of contemporary philosophy as "just what philosophers do," so I suppose he "did something," and I hope someone got some value from his contributions. What that means in the history of philosophy others can say with more expertise than I possess.

For my part, I basically stick with Charles Sanders Peirce, the obscure inventor of Pragmatism, rather than those religionists like William James whose misunderstanding of the subject compelled Peirce to relabel it "Pragmaticism," a name he called "ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers." Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes also didn't share James' views, since as Louis Menand wrote in The Metaphisical Club: "[Holmes] thought that James had made scientific uncertainty an excuse for believing in an unseen world. 'His wishes made him turn down the lights so as to give miracle a chance.'" As a practicing scientist and seminal modern logician, Peirce and his Pragmaticism labored under no such willful misapprehension about how close we could come to knowing something real and yet still make predictable use of the knowledge without having to know "everything."

In my opinion, John Dewey came closer to Peirce, who taught Dewey logic at the then-new Johns Hopkins graduate school, but then Dewey in turn felt it necessary to relable Pragmatism as "Instrumentalism" (i.e. using philosophical thought to propose falsifiable hypotheses) because of the same "Social Darwinism" kidnappers who expropriated and bastardized the Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection while not understanding a word of it any more than they understood philosophical Pragmatism.

The ongoing research and revitalization of Peirce may someday recover something of what Pragmatism meant to him who first conceived it, but till then I don't think that any significant writer other than Alfred Korzybski -- certainly not Richard Rorty -- has caught the essential thrust of Peirce's Pragmaticism as a tool for the study of language itself in relation to thought as a productive human purpose, both scientific and psychoanalytical -- meaning "real" and conducive to not just sound thinking, but sane (i.e., non-delusional) mentality as well.

We could certainly use a lot more of Peirce and Pragmaticism rather than the current diet of fiction, fable, foolishness, fantasy, fortune-telling, fabrication, and fraud. We've certainly heard from -- and suffered enough at the hands of -- the "faith-based" theologians than whom Peirce said he could think of no less qualified custodians of philosophy.

Heaven forbid that we ever break with the traditions of Hume, Jefferson, Madison, HHalimton, Lincoln or Roosevelt!

I'll take Rorty.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.comHea

I had long valued Rorty's work when I first laid eyes on him at a teach-in on the labor movement at Columbia University. Looking at the speakers from a distance, I noticed one husky fellow in a plain suit and heavy shoes; I  assumed that he most be a local union official. He turned out to be Rorty. In my book, any professor who can pass for a labor leader has a special claim on greatness.

Could someone get a better picture for Todd Gitlin? This one makes me think of Hunter Thompson.

Interesting that you invoke William James in the same passage that you open with the rather rude dismissal of the death of an individual, as if being a philosopher made him inherently less of a person.

The comment above instantiates the voyeuristic self-loathing of a failed semi-intellectual, and is a sad distraction from this real loss.

but when you come into the public realm, put your will to power aside and don't expect it to the work of the public good.

It's not delineated quite so black and white of course.

Nietzsche would argue that all is fundamentally "the will to power" including all the various strategies adopted for different spheres of life, depending on complexity in relation to an individual's ability to predict all outcomes.

Basic morality such as empathy was rejected by many Social Darwinists unable to either feel it or fit it into their understanding of humanity, including the Nazis who misappropriated "will to power" to include only the simplest predatory strategies unfit for intelligent social species, which was their limitation not the theory's.

Buckminster Fuller preferred "a pattern integrity" to describe life; which is less anthropomorphic and wouldn't be so easily reduced to simplistic ideology or weaponized, as it describes fungus as well as humanity, competitive as well as cooperative strategies.

I think recent breakthroughs in primatology and neurobiology are far more enlightening.

but what use is dogma? I have no use for it.

Really? You sound pretty certain of that. Dare I say dogmatically certain.

I also have pragmatic tendencies, so I ask that before you make such assertions you game out every possible usage of dogma in every possible situation towards every possible outcome, to assure us there may never be an efficiency gain by the usage of dogma in rendering opinions.

Upon completion, if you assert dogma has no function, charismatically enough, I may accept it on blind faith.

Morality is precisely where modern biology can offer help. The successful gene will benefit from any strategy, and Life has utilized both competition and cooperation, but the specific issues of empathy and altruism are settled by kin selection. If the replicating unit is the gene, not the individual, then the gene ensures replication by helping children, or cousins, or (stretching only a little) tribe.

A little more stretch, and one is helping any stranger in need. Extend the principle to its maximum and all life on Earth carries at least a few of the same genes as you. So the best stratey for ensuring survival of (some of) your genes is diversity for all kinds of Life, and most certainly all kinds of human.

And since, absent God in the argument, the only reliable values available for an ethical system are ways to preserve Life, altruism is Good, genocide is Bad, and we can be moral and subject to scientific explanation simultaneously.