Richard Rorty, Once More with Feeling
And now for a little break from the campaigns.
I’ve been meaning for months to post something about Richard Rorty. After he died this past June, I contributed a little thing to a a forum at Slate, but I’d misunderstood the assignment, and I'd written about 1200 words for a 300-word slot. Editors hate it when that happens! But they were judicious and kind about which 900 had to wind up on the cutting-room floor. So I was going to gather the clippings in my arms and write a followup here, partly because I devoted my very first Café post to a discussion of Rorty’s essay, “Religion as Conversation-stopper.” But the dang thing just kept getting longer and longer and less blogworthy, so I decided to make it into a full-dress Essay of some kind and to write it for this fine publication.
The first draft was about 4000 words, which, if I were writing for this medium, would've made for a blog post that would break the Internets (and I should know, having written a few long’uns on my old blog). But then TCR editor Daniel Born asked me to explain why any of this Rorty business might matter in the first place, and I replied, “uh, for that I’m gonna need some more words.” Space for more words was graciously supplied, and the essay was published earlier this week. It’s one of those .pdf things, it’s 6000 words, and if you print the thing out (as I did the other day) it’s nine pages. Just the thing for a dull December weekend at home, curled up by the fire with a down comforter and a nice bottle of absinthe! But I mention it here not only as a followup to my first Café post but also because most of the second half of the essay deals with Rorty’s contributions to left-liberal debates over the past twenty years, and might be of some interest to some Café regulars.
Also, I can’t write satire all the time. It’s too hard.
Looking forward to reading this. Rorty was a rare thing: an unparalleled intellect tempered with modesty and the capacity to engage the issues that affect the lives of everyday people. Something we could really use more of these days.
December 14, 2007 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Funny that you should mention modesty! The essay is all about Rorty's modesty, from the title to the final word.
Dang, forgot to say "spoiler alert."
December 14, 2007 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Michael it would help if you address the actual philosophical merits of Rorty's philosophical positions rather than his more benign political views.
To criticize Rorty's philosophical positions does not entail that one is somehow less committed to the Left or to "Solidarity" or what have you.
December 17, 2007 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will read this essay. But I'm afraid I'm one of those people who are inclined to think the influence of Rorty on left-liberal thought was on the whole pernicious, and has helped contribute to a decadent culture of diffident intellectual laziness and pseudo-intellectual slovenliness. He's emblematic of the fin-de-siecle malaise of late 20th century liberalism.
December 14, 2007 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
“To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true”____Aristotle (Metaphysics 1011b25)
Anyone who embraces Rorty has to realize that Rorty rejects this.
Question to ask of Rorty. If there is no truth and the epistemological enterprise is bankrupt, then what on earth is he trying to do in his writing if not articulating what he thinks is true? And if the aswer is that he is not trying to articulate any truths but merely trying to convince us to believe what he says, why should we believe it if he himself has no faith that his beliefs have anything to do with the truth.
Susan Haack, in particular, frames criticism of Rorty along these lines in moral terms; to her mind, Rorty's efforts to abandon the basic concepts of traditional epistemology are symptoms of a vulgar cynicism, which contributes to the decline of reason and intellectual integrity that Haack and others find to be characteristic of much contemporary thought.____Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Susan Haack is distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Miami)
December 15, 2007 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, OK, but let me humbly suggest that if you're going to associate Rorty -- one of the most voracious and ecumenical readers I've ever known -- with intellectual laziness or slovenliness, the burden of proof lies with you. . . .
December 14, 2007 12:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
There is a certain sort of worldly, bookish learnedness that passes for serious intellectual achievement. But it is not the same thing. Reading books in itself requires very little effort. I read piles of books, and it's easy enough to sit down and write essays off the top of one's head that excrete the verbiage one has ingested in the form of some reasonably well-polished and re-assembled blocks. And if you read enough Johnson, Shaw, Swift and Wilde, to take just a few examples, you can effortlessly pick up an easy knack for urbane wit, so you can ornament your essays with the ephemeral sparkle demanded by the Republic of Letters. The more you read, the more stuffed is your ready kit bag of tropes, literary quotations and illustrative examples for engaging in the conversational arts, and writing essays that discourse at only the conversational level. All of this requires barely any effort at all other than the effort of actually sitting, thumbing and reading. You might run through reading glasses faster than others, but the voracious reading of books is no more evidence of actual labor than is the voracious eating of cheeseburgers.
But hard intellectual work - for example banging your head up against a hard mathematical, logical or scientific barrier until it hurts, and you finally get a few eureka insights that extend the frontier of human knowledge one millimeter; or actually creating a truly imaginative and challenging work of art rather than simply writing appreciatively about one - that is a different matter entirely.
I personally found Rorty's philosophical work to be lazy, and rarely found any of his essays worth laboring over, puzzling though or carefully analyzing. After a while, it becomes clear that he usually had not thoroughly mastered the distinctions, counterexamples and logical skills necessary to engage at the highest level with the people he was discussing. Most were riddled with the sorts of fallacies and reasonably competent analytic philosophy grad student could easily avoid. Reading a few works by Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis or Putnam by the armchair light, and discussing them offhandedly, does not put one in the ballpark of Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis or Putnam.
December 14, 2007 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK, so your intellectual standards are higher than those of Daniel Dennett, Simon Blackburn, and Bernard Williams, all of whom considered Rorty a worthy interlocutor. Noted.
But if you didn't find any value in the essay I cited here back in April, the loss is yours.
December 14, 2007 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't think there was much to Rorty's notions about religion as a conversation stopper. Religion is only a conversation stopper to flabby pragmatists and latter-day postmodern liberals like Rorty who have cut themselves off from the more vigorous western intellectual traditions in which specific religious doctrines and also the epistemological issues of religious faith and tradition are debated philosophically. Hume and Russell, just to take two examples, don't seem to have found their conversation stopped when religious views were put forward. That was only the beginning of the conversation for them.
If an interlocutor seeks to defend their moral or political position on the basis of religious premises with which you disagree, then you have a choice: you can either argue against their premises and try to persuade them to reject them, or you can beg off or change the subject. If you argue against the premises and the interlocutor defends them only on the basis of "faith", then you have the option of arguing that they have no business believing such things on the basis of faith. If you think their beliefs are seriously mistaken, and even harmful, one might say you even have a duty to challenge their epistemic entitlement to those beliefs. And if you can’t persuade the interlocutor to re-examine their poor epistemic habits and norms, at least you can try to convince others not to follow them. Of course to do this with any conviction and skill, you have to have some remaining notion that there exists something resembling reason that is worth defending, and you have to have the strength of will to defend it. But if you are too timid, polite or intellectually enfeebled to challenge them and argue with them, or if you have come to wear a lazy and weak-minded, pseudo-intellectual sophistication and literary polish as a badge of honor, then you have no right to complain about how your religious interlocutor stopped the conversation. You are the one who stopped the conversation.
December 16, 2007 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Um, no, Dan. Rorty was arguing that Carter was proposing religion as a conversation stopper. You probably should read more carefully before accusing people like Rorty of being intellectually lazy and weak-minded. Otherwise you run the risk of looking kinda foolish.
December 17, 2007 8:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Perhaps it is you who should do the additional reading, Micahel. In one particular passage from Rorty’s essay you cite yourself, Rorty writes:
The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper. Carter is right when he says:
Saying this is far more likely to end a conversation than to start an argument. The same goes for telling the group, “I would never have an abortion” or, “Reading pornography is about the only pleasure I get out of life these days.” In these examples, as in Carter’s, the ensuing silence masks the group’s inclination to say, “So what? We weren’t discussing your private life; we were discussing public policy. Don’t bother us with matters that are not our concern.” This would be my own inclination in such a situation. Carter clearly thinks such a reaction inappropriate, but it is hard to figure out what he thinks would be an appropriate response by nonreligious interlocutors to the claim that abortion is required (or forbidden) by the will of God. He does not think it is good enough to say: OK, but since I don’t think there is such a thing as the will of God, and since I doubt that we’ll get anywhere arguing theism vs. atheism, let’s see if we have some shared premises on the basis of which to continue an argument about abortion. He thinks such a reply would be condescending and trivializing. But are we atheist interlocutors supposed to try to keep the conversation going by saying, “Gee! I’m impressed. You have a really deep, sincere faith”? Suppose we try that. What happens then? What can either party do for an encore?
So here Carter describes a type of circumstance in which one individual explains his belief in a political position by saying it is supported by his religious convictions. Carter says that in a group of well-educated professionals this sort of announcement is likely to end the conversation or start an argument. Rorty agrees with him – in introducing the passage, he says “Carter is right.” In fact, Rorty goes further and says that the comment in question is more likely to be a conversation stopper than an argument starter. Rorty says the silence in conversation masks inclinations among the other non-religious members of the group to say certain things that – for some reason – they do not wish to say. Rorty then attributes to Carter the view that those inclinations are misguided in some way, and that other possible ways of continuing the conversation might be more appropriate. He considers two possibilities for keeping the conversation going, one of which he portrays as an alternative to his own inclinations, and thinks Carter would reject anyway, and the other of which he, Rorty, clearly thinks would be unavailing, and would stop the conversation anyway because it has no “encore”.
So what I take away from all this is that Rorty tends to agree with Carter that religion is likely to be a conversation stopper in certain circles, but disagrees with Carter’s diagnosis that what stops the conversation is certain invidious habits and attitudes tied to the “culture of disbelief” that prevails in those circles. Rorty thinks the conversation is stopped because there really is nothing useful to say in such circumstances, and the religious believer has produced a sort of conversational fart by introducing the uncomfortable subject of religion, which properly belongs, according to what Rorty describes as his own inclinations, to the sphere of the speaker’s “private life”.
Interestingly, Rorty never seems to consider these alternative ways the non-religious members of the group could continue the conversation:
You really shouldn’t believe there is such a thing as God’s will, because there is little evidence for the existence of any God at all, let alone a will of God. Why don’t we discuss the arguments pro and contra the existence of God?
Or maybe this:
Even if there is such a thing as God’s will, it seems like it would be a very difficult thing to know. What evidence do you have for your claim to know God’s will in this instance?”
And if the speaker insists on giving no argument, and asserts that his beliefs are held on the basis of “faith alone”, the response might be this:
Haven’t you ever read Clifford’s “Ethics of Belief”? You really shouldn’t believe such things on the basis of tradition or unargued faith alone, especially if you plan to base practical decisions on those faith-based convictions. I would be happy to discuss the moral arguments against belief based on faith alone.
And then, who knows, you might get into an interesting discussion about the ground covered by William James, Hume, Pascal and others who have discussed the issues related to the epistemology of faith and the ethics of belief. Or you may get into an interesting discussion of the 2500 years worth of arguments for and against the existence of God.
I am inclined to think this is how the ancient Greek masters of conversation would have approached the matter. They don’t seem to have had so many fussy hangups about the appropriate topics of conversations as do modern day Americans.
Somehow in America we have transformed the constitutional guarantee not to prohibit legally the free exercise of religion, and not to permit government to establish a religion, into a broad social custom not to talk about religion in polite society, and to show respect and deference for other people’s religions whenever they come up in conversation. But nobody has some sort of absolute right to ignorant views or a claim on others that those others not try to argue them out of their ignorant views. If I say, “your views are wrong, and here’s why,” I am not participating in any government action to establish religion or restrict your free exercise thereof. It might indeed be a useful social custom to avoid discussion of religion when possible, given the emotions that are attached to these matters. But if your conversation partner brings up these potentially contentious religious issues in such a way that an important questions hang upon it, then I would say he has waived the informal right, so to speak, of protection by this social custom from an uncomfortable challenge to his opinions and attitudes.
However, maybe someone like Rorty would have nothing to say at this point in our imagined conversation. In fact, given Rorty’s desiccated epistemology, it’s not clear he is in any position to draw durable distinctions between knowledge and ignorance. But his complaint then seems like that of a man has sawed off his own legs and then complains that dancing is a party stopper. Just because one has fallen for the lame pragmatism of someone like Rorty is no reason to expect everyone else to adopt the conversational norms that make life easier form lame pragmatists, but cripple everyone else’s conversational activity.
December 17, 2007 10:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Right. You're badly misreading this passage:
[Carter] does not think it is good enough to say: OK, but since I don’t think there is such a thing as the will of God, and since I doubt that we’ll get anywhere arguing theism vs. atheism, let’s see if we have some shared premises on the basis of which to continue an argument about abortion. He thinks such a reply would be condescending and trivializing. But are we atheist interlocutors supposed to try to keep the conversation going by saying, “Gee! I’m impressed. You have a really deep, sincere faith”? Suppose we try that. What happens then? What can either party do for an encore?
The point of this passage is that the atheist does indeed have a reply to the religious person, and that it consists of the "OK, but" sentence; however, the religious person (as Carter presents him or her) will not credit this as a legitimate response.
December 17, 2007 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Michael, the whole point of Rorty's essay is to defend the "Jeffersonian compromise". Rorty describes the compromise this way:
This compromise consists in privatizing religion - keeping it out of what Carter calls 'the public square', making it seem bad taste to bring religion into discussions of public policy.
He later goes on to say that the exclusion of religious premises from discussion of public policy "is at the heart of the Jeffersonian compromise," and continues by saying that
"Contemporary liberal philosophers think that we shall not be able to keep a democratic political community going unless the religious believers remain willing to trade privatization for a guarantee of religious liberty, and Carter gives us no reason to think they are wrong."
And Rorty then immediately goes on to assert, "The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation stopper."
So I don't see why you're now bent on holding that Rorty does not see religion as a conversation stopper after all, when he directly asserts that position. Rorty clearly thinks there is some special problem here about the introduction of religious premises into discussion of public policy. And its not just that religious premises are particularly challenging to deal with, but that their introduction violates the terms of some implicit democratic compromise to keep religion out of discussions in the public sphere.
Of course, neither Carter nor Rorty thinks raising the religious premise must literally stop the conversation dead in its tracks, and push it into a conversational grave from which there is no hope of resurrection or salvage. Both agree that it is likely to create some serious dead air, but each suggests some ways that the conversation may go on from there. However, Carter seems to be suggesting that when one of the parties to the conversation introduces the religious claim or premise, one conversational option is then to continue the discussion over the merits of the religious claim itself.
Rorty seems to argue, on the contrary, that the only way for "the atheist" to continue the conversation is to try to change the subject back to some non-religious topic he would prefer to talk about (whether one changes the subject with the "so what" response or the "OK, but" response). So Rorty's view might be re-described as the view that pursuit of the religious topic stops fruitful conversation about public policy in the public sphere, and that the only way to continue a fruitful conversation is to turn the conversation back away from religion.
But why is this? Surely many atheists purport to offer reasons for their views, and are perfectly willing to argue for their own views and against opposing views. Why must the conversation become fruitless if it turns to a conversation of the religious claims themselves? Suppose that in the course of that discussion one of the discussants successfully convinces the person who offered the religious premise that that premise is wrong. Isn't that a fruitful result?
Throughout the essay, Rorty seems to indulge a number of extremely crude stereotypes about religious claims: that they are all defended solely on the basis of "faith"; that their moral claims mostly have to do with matters such as sexual behavior; that no religious believer ever had his opinions changed as a result of rational argument; that religions are mainly concerned with the pursuit of "private perfection", etc. He seems to be using Reformed Christian fideism as the standard bearer for all religion.
December 17, 2007 9:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . nobody has some sort of absolute right to ignorant views . . . . Dan K
Of course, they do -- if, that is, the "ignorant view" is based on faith. Anyone who is willing to argue* the truth of the propositions s/he subscribes to is no longer basing his or her argument on faith.
* as philosophers understand that term
December 17, 2007 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Whether or not people are willing to entertain arguments for or against their views is not related to the question of whether they have a right to those views.
What I object to is the idea that religious views represent a sphere of protected opinion, protected not only in the sense that the government is prohibited from establishing contrary opinions of limiting one's free exercise of the religion based on those opinions, but protected also in the sense that everyone else is required to leave your religious opinions be, and argue with or criticize only those opinions that fall outside of your self-designated religious turf.
December 17, 2007 12:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Get thee behind me Dark Lord!
Any person who invited/permitted his or her religious opinions to be subjected to rational disputation would be abandoning his or her religion -- at least, as to the particular proposition under examination. Satan -- as we all know -- oft comes clothed in the guise of reasonableness. Sometimes, he even looks like Dan K.
December 17, 2007 6:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, it appears to me that Dan is insisting that Rorty should simply reply to religious people by making arguments grounded in the principles of universal reason. Let's just wish him luck with this, because I'm not inclined to reason with him any longer. I call it "Irrational Rorty-hatred as a Conversation-stopper."
December 17, 2007 7:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not insisting Rorty should have done anything. Everyone is free to converse about whatever the hell they want to, and if there are certain conversations Rorty preferred not to have, he need not have had them. What I reject to here is his line of argument that purports to elevate these personal preferences to the status of a general rule for conversation of public policy in the public sphere.
Of course I don't personally see my opposition to Rorty's philosophy and my concern about what I see as its pernicious influence on liberal intellectual culture as either irrational or hatred. But I can understand if you would rather not talk about it.
December 17, 2007 10:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't want to talk about it to disingenuous interlocutors, Dan. First you say, "And if you can’t persuade the interlocutor to re-examine their poor epistemic habits and norms, at least you can try to convince others not to follow them. Of course to do this with any conviction and skill, you have to have some remaining notion that there exists something resembling reason that is worth defending, and you have to have the strength of will to defend it. But if you are too timid, polite or intellectually enfeebled to challenge them and argue with them, or if you have come to wear a lazy and weak-minded, pseudo-intellectual sophistication and literary polish as a badge of honor, then you have no right to complain about how your religious interlocutor stopped the conversation. You are the one who stopped the conversation." Here you come off as some kind of ubermensch of reason, ready and willing to body-slam religious believers and all those timid, polite, weak-minded pragmatists like Rorty. Boo-yah!
Then you write, "given Rorty’s desiccated epistemology, it’s not clear he is in any position to draw durable distinctions between knowledge and ignorance. But his complaint then seems like that of a man has sawed off his own legs and then complains that dancing is a party stopper. Just because one has fallen for the lame pragmatism of someone like Rorty is no reason to expect everyone else to adopt the conversational norms that make life easier form lame pragmatists, but cripple everyone else’s conversational activity." Lame, lame, legless, crippled -- what a weird insistence on disability! I have to admire the restraint with which you refrained from adding, "Rorty is retarded." Still, we're talking about how to handle fundamental disagreements about how to converse here (that's one of the things Rorty's essay is about), and I have to say that Rorty does disagreement much better than you do.
Now for the more substantial point. In this most recent comment, you write, "Throughout the essay, Rorty seems to indulge a number of extremely crude stereotypes about religious claims: that they are all defended solely on the basis of 'faith'; that their moral claims mostly have to do with matters such as sexual behavior; that no religious believer ever had his opinions changed as a result of rational argument; that religions are mainly concerned with the pursuit of 'private perfection', etc. He seems to be using Reformed Christian fideism as the standard bearer for all religion." My epistemology may be dessicated and lame and crippled and weak-minded and timid, etc., but even I can see that this is simply false. In that essay, the primary religious belief Rorty speaks of is the belief in the immortal soul; I see no crude stereotyping of religious belief in the essay, and I find it disingenuous of you to pretend to defend real religion from Rorty's "crude stereotypes" here. In answering the believer who cites God as the source of his "moral knowledge" (in Carter's phrase), Rorty adduces Rawls and Habermas in order to argue that "we should be suspicious of the very idea of a 'source of moral knowledge.'" The reason he objects to Carter's insistence on religion as "moral knowledge," in turn, is that he considers "knowledge" to be "justifed true belief" (his words, in that very essay); and speakin' of epistemology, he concludes, "I take the point of Rawls and Habermas, as of Dewey and Peirce, to be that the epistemology suitable for such a democracy is one in which the only test of a political proposal is its ability to gain assent from people who retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human life, about the path to private perfection. [You really shouldn't take those last two words out of context like that. It's bad manners.] The more such consensus becomes the test of a belief, the less important is the belief's source. So when Carter complains that religious citizens are forced to 'restructure their arguments in purely secular terms before they can be presented,' I should reply that 'restructuring the arguments in purely secular terms' just means 'dropping reference to the source of the premises of the arguments,' and that this omission seems a reasonable price to pay for religious liberty."
As I said at the outset, I'm not usually inclined to argue with people who fundamentally distort the positions of their interlocutors. But I didn't want your many unwarranted sneers at Rorty, or the condescension toward me in your final sentence in this most recent comment, to go unremarked.
December 20, 2007 5:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
I personally found Rorty's philosophical work to be lazy, and rarely found any of his essays worth laboring over, puzzling though or carefully analyzing. After a while, it becomes clear that he usually had not thoroughly mastered the distinctions, counterexamples and logical skills necessary to engage at the highest level with the people he was discussing. Most were riddled with the sorts of fallacies and reasonably competent analytic philosophy grad student could easily avoid. Reading a few works by Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis or Putnam by the armchair light, and discussing them offhandedly, does not put one in the ballpark of Dummett, Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis or Putnam.
I tend to agree with this assessment.
December 15, 2007 3:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
"[B]anging your head up against a hard mathematical, logical or scientific barrier until it hurts..."
does not answer the question of what we value and how to approach it; unless that is you prefer a government of experts to a representative democracy. Democracy is the rule of amateurs.
Communication amongst people (the only kind there is) is always like a game of Telephone. Look it up if you don't know how that game works. Mathematicians are not moral philosophers, and I do not want an astrophysicist put in charge of agricultural funding any more than I'd want the head of General Motors as head of the public transportation committee. He'd probably steer all the money towards a super-collider.
Your argument seems to be that the only things worth thinking about are those things that can be known absolutely. Do you put politics in that category? If so I have a few books you should read. Hint: they're history books.
In a social and political world of unaided reason we wouldn't even need laws. Laws are customs. They allow people to get away with a crime by virtue of "technical" errors by the authorities or their representatives. What a terrible thought.
"But we know he killed them! We have the videotape!"
"I know, but the law says..."
How barbaric is that? How illogical? How unreasonable?
Kripke is to intellectual life what General George Mcclellan was to war.
That's true of a lot of academic thought these days,
None of this is a defense of Rorty. What I've read makes him sound all warm and fuzzy, and I hate warm and fuzzy.
January 10, 2008 10:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm very much looking forward to it. While I'm perhaps not always sympathetic to Rorty's take on liberalism, he turned me onto philosophy, and I reread Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature for the first time in ages this fall.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 14, 2007 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, John, I wasn't always sympathetic to Rorty's take on liberalism either. That's one of the reasons I wrote this thing--
December 14, 2007 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K: it's easy enough to sit down and write essays off the top of one's head that excrete the verbiage one has ingested in the form of some reasonably well-polished and re-assembled blocks
Far from easy for some of us, Dan. Don't rub it in.
December 14, 2007 2:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, Rorty's a tough case, because he became a "wise man" early in his career, with the inevitable decline in what he contributed. Already, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he's articulating concepts of liberalism and irony I can't endorse, but it's a major work to grapple with. And after that he really does start to pontificate in unfortunate ways.
I've probably said this before, but I caught him on a panel on Williams James and religion that comfortably asserted how we could separate religious experience from other aspects of experience, in order to salvage them all. It seemed to repudiate everything he'd said in his original work as holist or ironist. I myself wrote an essay about a defense of feminism of his that relied on the concept of utopias. It had for me the fallacies of accepting a pre-Davidson concept of distinct conceptual schemes and a pre-Marxist denial of contradictions, making ideals all to easy to endorse, even if they're my ideals.
Yet, conversely, his early epistemology seems to me only to have grown in stature. He presented it just as salesmanship: read Quine and Sellars ... and get over the fact that they didn't altogether embrace each other. In retrospect, that makes it an original synthesis, with quite original remarks on what indeed can be salvaged from reductionists like Ryle or relativists like Kuhn.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 14, 2007 5:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
My (mis)reading of Rorty gave me permission to follow and admire Nietzsche (his irony and perspectivism), and for that I will always be grateful.
December 14, 2007 8:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
What--if you had to summarize--do you find so attractive about Nitzsche?
I took a graduate course on Nietzsche. I had the same problem I've had with Wittgenstein: those darn aphoprisms!!!
December 15, 2007 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
"There are no facts, only interpretations."
December 16, 2007 2:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are you presenting this as a self-evident truth? or any truth for that matter? And if so what you say corresponds to what? nothing at all? empty verbiage? can't be to any facts since you rule them out.
December 16, 2007 10:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're right. I shouldn't have left it to a translator's idea of what he said. Therefore ---
Gerade Tatsachen gibt es nicht, nur Interpretationen.
December 17, 2007 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
The point is, without facts to (at least theoretically) anchor interpretations, there is no reason to adjudicate between them insofar that some might be better than others, so the whole motive for favoring one interpretation over the other is gone. Or at least becomes a matter of caprice.
To put it another way: All interpretations are equal, so what reason does anyone have to favor YOUR perspectivalist view of things over any other. Nothing!!!
Here are things that become epistemologically/metaphysically neutral: the law on non contradiction is just as good as maintaining that reality has flat out contradictions.
That you Ellen wrote something on the TPM cafe blog recently is just another interpretation of reality equally valid as the one that maintains that Santa Claus exist or that, better yet, Santa Claus wrote under the name Ellen, nay, that Santa Clause wrote under the name Santa Clause the sentence that "Gerade Tatsachen gibt es nicht, nur Unsinn" in this blog, nay that this whole blog does not exist...etc
"Oh the tangled web we weave when we first practice to deny that reality exists!!!"___me
Oder "was Ich jetzt sage ist Unsinn" what are you going to make out of these things?
That you Ellen exist (to use a Cartesian example) is a matter of interpretation.....not just for me or others, but for you yourself? If there are no facts then Ellen, you don't exist because that you exist is contrary to Rorty and other irrealists insistence that there are no facts.
That's just the tip of the iceberg of absurdities that you wind up with.
A more reasonable position is epistemological skepticism which maintains we cannot know anything to be true. This does not deny facts but perhaps puts them out of our reach to be recognize as such. Still metaphysical relativism (and let’s face it although Nietzsche and Rorty et al might not want to be called relativist they just are)--the view that there are no "facts"...in other words that there is nothing that corresponds with reality, is totally absurd and those who assert it contradict themselves by their very act of asserting it. So much Aristotle, Descartes and any reasonable philosopher recognized as basic long ago.
Pyrronian skepticism is what we throw at students to get them shaped up for the real task: to see how much in fact can be known or how much in fact is real.
December 17, 2007 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Aha! A "faith based" epistemology.
Kosmotropic is confident the Real exists, but recognizing it is "out of our reach." Sort of like God, eh wot?
December 17, 2007 6:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I never said reality is out of our reach. I said that one can maintain that position without sinking into the absurdity of Rorty. I myself am perfectly convinced that reality is NOT out of our reach in many respects, so I'm a realist of sorts.
December 18, 2007 1:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, kosmotropic, you've convinced me. I can't wait for facts to stand up and speak about reality in their own voices, without all these damn interpretations in the way. Because it would make things so much simpler -- and it would put those pettifogging hermeneuts out of business tomorrow.
More seriously: I agree with John Searle that there is a difference between the world of brute fact and the world of social fact. I just want to know whether the distinction between brute fact and social fact is a brute fact or a social fact.
December 17, 2007 7:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Terrific essay, and I hope to have a chance to add a few comments before the post goes too far down the page. Funny to be reminded of Wild Orchids and Trotsky, which I remember admiring so much but don't remember a darn thing about. Gosh, that means I read you ages ago.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 15, 2007 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks so much, John! It was ages ago -- I wrote my essay for Wild Orchids just after turning 30, which was precisely sixteen ages ago. . . .
December 15, 2007 8:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just a few rambling thoughts before I forget. First, I admired how well the essay pulls off what usually feels stale or phony, the weaving of personal accounts with analysis and weighing of the subject. (I've also always loved that Woody Allen joke.) It's hard to place the strengths and weaknesses of Rorty's genial liberalism in politics or philosophy, and the essay does it by building an evaluation throughout.
I also liked many of the small judgments along the way. I'm convinced that Stanley Fish has become so visible in the media, as indeed Rorty himself never was, because he reinforces that annoyingly persistent media theme of "they all do it." Give him an example of a lie, and he'll be glad to supply examples of constructions of reality, as if they were identical. It's rather ironic that, as you say, he also feels one can't connect politics to philosophy. Besides, Rorty's liberalism so obviously does.
In the same way, I'll say that I don't necessarily agree with Rorty in the argument about de Man's politics or Heidegger's. I agree with his conclusions, that de Man's mature writings remain valuable and that one can't reduce philosophy to the philosopher's personal politics. I might get there differently in de Man's case, since we're talking two periods in his life, not to mention the problem of so much of Europe tainted by the Nazis. If conservatives can embrace, or be led by, so many nuts (like Hook) who had conversion experiences experiences, they should hardly deny de Man his maturation.
But I'd call the connection from philosophy to politics more like that of work to life. Biographers always have to cope with that, how to avoid reductionism while seeking insights. I've tried myself to praise Heidegger's philosophy despite his life while looking to that period in his life to illuminate what I saw as the windier or less practically engaged tone of some late work, but I'll spare you the link. (More ramblings next...)
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 16, 2007 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
I also loved just reading some of the nicely put oppositions among names, as a way of getting at the strengths in Rorty's openness or skepticism, however you'd phrase his balance. That's a great one about Derrida between Joyce and Rawls, because I'm so fond of all three (but also most of Joyce, even if I couldn't manage the Wake).
Maybe the longer list is even more fun. Is Habermas too optimistic and Foucault too cynical (and maybe at times a brilliant, at times an iffy historian)? Is Quine too reductive and Derrida too evasive? Is Quine too unwilling to pursue the implications of his best ideas and Davidson all too willing? I still can't think of a cooler set of models.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 16, 2007 11:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
One other thing, and it may relate to the stages in Rorty's thought and when you encountered him. I seem to recall in one early book, maybe Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, his preferring Heidegger's late work. That is, he cites Wittgenstein and Heidegger together as thinkers who tried too hard at first for a system before realizing they couldn't have one.
I myself come closer to the Rorty you cite, feeling that Being and Time is the demolition of Husserl's system much as Wittgenstein eventually went so far (and anyway Wittgenstein still writes in the analytic tradition I prefer even then), while much of the rest is wind. But who knows! I'd never have come up with the comparison to Kuhn either, but the idea of a paradigm as not a conceptual scheme in Davidson's sense but an openness to new avenues helps me be more sympathetic to Kuhn.
Well, end of my blather for the day. Sorry it's actually my worst reasoning, all in context of philosophy, but I guess deaths do that to people.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 16, 2007 11:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks so much for all these wonderful remarks, John, and (of course) thanks for reading the thing in the first place. About the genetic fallacy and Heidegger and de Man, well, I'm a bit conflicted myself. I actually do think there's a possible connection between (a) a philosopher's sense that the modern West has gone badly wrong and must be rejected root and branch and (b) a philosopher's susceptibility to entertaining even the most fascist and/or theocratic challenges to the modern West (see also Foucault, Iranian revolution). But about the people who said, twenty years ago, "de Man wrote for anti-Semitic garbage for Le Soir, so therefore all of critical theory is worthless," I have nothing but contempt.
December 17, 2007 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's useful not to think of philosophy outside of culture.
The roots of sensibility go deeper than the roots of abstract logic right?
de Man and Robbe-Grillet were both wartime collaborators.
Borges was an apologist for reaction.
So what are the implications of language as formalism without reference? And what's the history? It's fair to say it originates in trauma.
If there's something annoyingly wishy-washy about Rorty it's that as you say, he wants to pretend there's nothing that great at stake. But that's not true. Passion is not the problem, it's claims from absolute reason. Fistfights between poets are as valuable to democracy as shouting matches between lawyers. It's claims to objectivity that are conversation stoppers.
3 men from 3 countries. One says:
"My country has mountains and valleys and soil perfect for the vine. Our women are the most beautiful in the world and the boys are always willing. No one has ever built buildings as beautiful as ours and our craftsmen are at the pinnacle of their art."
Two says: "Wine? Whiskey! And your women are weaklings good for nothing but chatter. Just like your poets who write about nothing.
And who's interested in boys anyway? Besides your mountains suck. Not enough snow and too many rocks! How can I ski on that?"
Three looks at the others and nods slightly. Then he pulls out a calculator and types a few figures before he speaks: Logic shows that mine is the necessary country."
Now the first two either walk away from the third and continue their argument or they beat the shit out of him and then walk away. But the point is that they continue their argument.
Democratic decision-making is passionate argument. "Can't we all just get along" is a bullshit response, not less then trying to undermine argument itself. Adversarialism assumes that we and our language model the world imprecisely, sloppily, and that the best way to strengthen that model and test it is by formalized, ritualized struggle.
No pussies or pseudo-science allowed.
And of course I would argue vociferously against the any philosophy of lapsed Platonist nihilism, though I admit I indulge on occasion.
[shhh!]
Art is design made as if your life depended on it.
December 17, 2007 11:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
BTW, a typo. I meant "was Carnap too reductive."
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
December 17, 2007 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink