Richard Rorty: Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II
(Cambridge University Press, 1991)
At the end of the day, there comes a point for many who listen to philosophers when one finally feel compelled to say, “What difference does it make?” The point where one starts to come to the conclusion that, rather than solving problems, philosophy is either useless or itself becomes the problem. This usually comes at one of two points: the former, when the discussion seems to have no relevance or impact, and the latter when a decision has to be made and there is not time to consider the options. In the former case, arguments about whether all experiences are directly intentional, or whether some are based upon intentional experiences but are not themselves intentional, and what that means about intentionality, seems pointless. Who cares about intentionality? In the latter, more pressing case, sometimes one doesn’t have time to draw out all the minute potentialities of an argument about ethical action. One has to act now, or else the hostage dies. What do you do?
Of course, philosophy responds to the two questions above. To the first, it says that these questions very much matter. Without them, we cannot be aware of our own limits. Am I to concede the quest of truth just because I don’t care about the answers, or think that they don’t matter? But don’t I myself believe I have truths, and don’t I want them defended? To the latter argument, philosophy has a simple response: what if you are wrong? An action rushed is always a foolish action, and creates disaster as often (if not more so) than it generates heroes. In both cases one sees that philosophy’s value is not utilitarian or pragmatic, but based upon its quest for truth.
When we took a look at Merleau-Ponty and embodied phenomenology, we saw a new type of response to the first of the above responses from classical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty did not claim that he could answer the questions of classical epistemology to their standards. But, he said, this was because they had bad standards; to ask for certainty about an “objective” world was an error brought about by a particular metaphysical theory. Drop the assumptions and a more sensible view (and one, he thought, that concurs with actual experience) develops. Thus the response to philosophy wasn’t to answer its questions, but to reject the questions as bogus.
Richard Rorty, writing after and about the attacks of Heidegger and post-modernism on conventional philosophy, agrees in spirit with this sort of response. Having been raised in the analytic tradition, Rorty eventually found himself questioning what that tradition could accomplish in a world that was no longer the land of essences that philosophy had thought it to be. Everyone was asking the same old questions and assuming the same standards for answers. As a result, philosophers never found themselves in a position to challenge the enterprise as a whole: “The scientistic approach to philosophy which Husserl shared with Carnap lives on, forming a tacit presupposition of the work of analytic philosophers . . . . However, there is little explicit metaphilosophical defense or development of this . . . .” (Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II 21) Problems such as that of the external world, of the “essence” of language, of discovering the way in which one can link up with reality, were questions from an ancient time (Plato, specifically). They formed the central issues about which one argued. They were also based on a hope: the hope of the philosopher that there existed a “truth” discoverable in its very selfhood and discernable by the probing philosopher: “All we philosophers have at least a bit of the ascetic priest in us. We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as opposed to narrative.” (71) It was this hope that Rorty understood and felt the need to distance himself from.
But if he sought to distance himself from the analytic tradition and its simplistic search for “truth,” Rorty was no more interested in what was happening in the continental tradition. His questioning after the value of truth and consideration of the social and historical context of philosophical arguments seem to give Rorty a post-modernist twinge. Perhaps he wanted to challenge the scheme of things, to advocate a sharp rejection of the system and its eventual overcoming. After all, one should not worship false permanence, when the real is the transitory and the transitory real. And he says, “I have sometimes used ‘postmodern’ myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as ‘distrust of metanarratives.’” Yet, “I now wish that I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth.” (1) Rorty declaimed the title of post-modernist. Nor was he a phenomenologist. Though he took a great interest in Heidegger, he was quite critical of Heidegger at times. For Rorty, these individuals and movements fell short of their own principles: upon finding that there is no “essence” to be found, they take their attacks and render them as doctrine. “The post-modern condition” or “intentionality” becomes a new dogma to be distinguished and defended. Against this, Rorty argues that
To criticize universal doctrines by way of a universal doctrine of non-universality does not solve the problem of universals, argues Rorty. The problem of seeking after essences continues so long as one declares that one has found the real story. The only way to get around this is to stop the search.
If one follows Rorty’s argument through, one can’t help but feel that one has arrived at total relativism, if not nihilism itself. The answer appears to be to give up all hope of finding any sort of truth. The last two and a half thousand years of argument have been for nothing, then, not only because there was no Form of the Good to find, but because the very question itself is pointless. In that case, why do philosophy at all?
The problem with the question just posed is that it assumes that philosophy is pointless if it doesn’t search for truth. In other words, it assumes that the only good thing to ever come out of philosophy is truth. Given the conventional understanding of philosophy and its mission, this seems obvious. But when historically considered, it also seems perfectly reasonable to say that philosophy has had and can still have good consequences that have little or nothing at all to do with the truth. Did philosophy not give us the detailed study of ethics? Didn’t logic help us develop the first conceptual computer? Doesn’t philosophy continue to drive societies, direct leaders, and create new worldviews? Certainly, then, philosophy doesn’t do nothing, and this holds true even if philosophy itself has never found a single truth about the world.
It is from this perspective that Rorty engages the philosophical tradition, by way of an rarely considered (within the traditions, anyway) type of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatism appeared in the mid-1800s with C.S. Peirce as a different way to think about problems within philosophy. Certainly pragmatism existed before that: who doesn’t think about the best consequences as being the deciders of a course of action more often than not? But to turn it into a complete philosophical position was novel. After the early 1900s, however, not much was heard about it. Instead people moved on with their arguments about language and reality, and about criticisms of that view. But as metaphysico-lingustic theories started to fall apart, Rorty argues, pragmatism started creeping its way back in: “The context in which my essays put post-Nietzschean philosophy, is, predictably enough, pragmatism.” (2) By the latter half of the 1900s, he think, pragmatism became quite fashionable, even if no one admitted to it.
Not only is this what happened to some philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. According to Rorty, this is how it should be: “The big esoteric problem common to Heidegger and Derrida of how to ‘overcome’ or escape from the ontotheological tradition is an artificial one and needs to be replaced by lots of little pragmatic questions about which bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose.” (87) On these grounds he criticizes the post-modernists (and Heidegger) for taking a metaphysical stance based on their anti-metaphysical arguments. Instead one should support “a postmodernist form of social life, in which society as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.” (176) What we decide is right should be pragmatic, based on what works. After all, we have yet to find the philosopher’s thing-in-itself: “[I]t has turned out that the only thing we can be certain about is our own desires.” (29) So why not follow pragmatism?
In order to be accepted by anyone, however, Rorty’s pragmatism will have to respond to the same two questions we posed at the beginning (here stated generally): What will we do without the truth? And how do we decide what is the best way to live? Can Rorty give a sufficient answer to these questions?
In response to the first question, Rorty wants to dispel the universal illusion among philosophers, the idea that, without philosophy, the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Where can one go when all truth has disappeared? the philosophers asks. When even the attack on truth seems useless, and one can only resort to a shallow pragmatism, can any human being actually live with herself? Well yes, actually, says Rorty. And not simply, as one might object, because they “don’t know any better.” Even the intellectuals in society, and even the ones among those who accept post-modernist ideas, seem to do quite well. For “most contemporary intellectuals live in a culture which is self-consciously without archai, without telos, without theology, teleology, or ontology.” (100) I know, says the intellectual, that my own “truths” are challenged by other societies, even at their most basic levels. But so what? Does that require me to run around like a chicken with my head cut off? Should I no longer be able to get out of bed in the morning, due to the oppressive weight of the terrible truth crushing my very soul?
This question, “So what?” is Rorty’s challenge to the classical philosophy. It’s a challenge he shares with Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey. Why should we care so much about truth? Why shouldn’t we change that emphasis, which is itself a historical product? If we can stop obsessing about truth so much, says Rorty, perhaps we can find a better way to spend our energies.
The problem with philosophy, for Rorty, is that it tends to create problems that aren’t there. It talks about “truth” as though it’s somewhere out there, waiting for us. It talks about “the good” and “the just” as though they are real metaphysical entities, and we are more or less moral according to how closely we align ourselves to the entities. Such things have since been refuted. Science doesn’t pierce “true” objects, Quine argued. Nor does language, said Wittgenstein. Philosophy, nor science, nor anything else gets to “the bottom” of things. Yet even in refutation, the principles of philosophers betray their intentions: they want the right method, the right standard, in which to reach the way things should be. Today, in the form of post-modernism, philosophers think they’ve gotten to the bottom of something (namely, the lack of bottoms), and in so doing transcended time and space. In thinking thus they betray their own principles.
But even if one drops the question of a real truth, how can one decide how to live? Can’t I separate the dictator from the democrat? For Rorty the pragmatist, this is a simple question. Let us aim for the best society, where people are treated the best, and are freest to do what they want. This answer sounds simple and unreflective, but is not. If there is no truth, there is certainly no good reason to impose upon others in the name of what is “right.” And if we’re not sure who’s got the right idea, it seems best to let people figure it out on their own, insofar as they are able. People are often quite good at finding a place in life that works for them. If not, we can offer assistance, but have no right to control them; at least so long as they don’t harm others. Humans are already social animals; they won’t fall apart the moment you tell them there’s no metaphysics of morals.
In allowing the free pursuit of ideas as a way to find the best solutions to problems, Rorty also answers another question, the one we began with: what good is philosophy? For the Rorty philosophy has always been a powerful means of new expression. The greater the experience of the individual and the broader the range of his expression, the greater his abilities to analyze his world and decide what to do with it. With knowledge come options; with options comes power: “it was only the false lead which Descartes gave us (and the resulting overvaluation of scientific theory which, in Kant, produces ‘the philosophy of subjectivity’) that made us think truth and power were separable.” (175) Few things have the power that philosophy does for creating new language and new descriptions of the human experience. Those things that do compete with philosophy in expanding the human experience, such as the novel, might be seen with alarm by philosophers. Frankly, says Rorty, philosophers are just going to have to deal with it, because philosophy long ago lost the right to be as important as it claimed itself to be. Philosophy needs to understand what it does right, which is finding new ways of thinking. We need to remember how deliberation and philosophizing has helped us to become acutely aware of the ethical world: “The availability of a richer vocabulary of moral deliberation is what one chiefly has in mind when one says that we are, morally speaking, more sensitive and sophisticated than our ancestors or than our younger selves.” (155) We need to recall that, even if humans don’t have a “perfect language,” a computer, working within an artificial world, can, and does use its perfect language to great effect. By this standard it is the great creators, those who develop entirely new ways of thinking about the world, who have made the greatest contributions to philosophy. It is they who have a real impact and, by the pragmatist’s standards, have done the most for the world. That none of those thinkers proved to be right doesn’t matter, for philosophy’s contribution to society was never a matter of its being correct; if philosophy has proven anything at all, it is that such correctness doesn’t exist. And for that reason, because it has not failed its mission, but rather has a mission that never ends, it still has the right, even the duty, to exist, to expand our world, just as does the poet. “One of these privileges [that of the poets] is to rejoin ‘What has universal validity to do with me?’ I think that philosophers are as entitled to this privilege as poets, so I think this rejoinder sufficient.” (198)
At the end of the day, there comes a point for many who listen to philosophers when one finally feel compelled to say, “What difference does it make?” The point where one starts to come to the conclusion that, rather than solving problems, philosophy is either useless or itself becomes the problem. This usually comes at one of two points: the former, when the discussion seems to have no relevance or impact, and the latter when a decision has to be made and there is not time to consider the options. In the former case, arguments about whether all experiences are directly intentional, or whether some are based upon intentional experiences but are not themselves intentional, and what that means about intentionality, seems pointless. Who cares about intentionality? In the latter, more pressing case, sometimes one doesn’t have time to draw out all the minute potentialities of an argument about ethical action. One has to act now, or else the hostage dies. What do you do?
Of course, philosophy responds to the two questions above. To the first, it says that these questions very much matter. Without them, we cannot be aware of our own limits. Am I to concede the quest of truth just because I don’t care about the answers, or think that they don’t matter? But don’t I myself believe I have truths, and don’t I want them defended? To the latter argument, philosophy has a simple response: what if you are wrong? An action rushed is always a foolish action, and creates disaster as often (if not more so) than it generates heroes. In both cases one sees that philosophy’s value is not utilitarian or pragmatic, but based upon its quest for truth.
When we took a look at Merleau-Ponty and embodied phenomenology, we saw a new type of response to the first of the above responses from classical philosophy. Merleau-Ponty did not claim that he could answer the questions of classical epistemology to their standards. But, he said, this was because they had bad standards; to ask for certainty about an “objective” world was an error brought about by a particular metaphysical theory. Drop the assumptions and a more sensible view (and one, he thought, that concurs with actual experience) develops. Thus the response to philosophy wasn’t to answer its questions, but to reject the questions as bogus.
Richard Rorty, writing after and about the attacks of Heidegger and post-modernism on conventional philosophy, agrees in spirit with this sort of response. Having been raised in the analytic tradition, Rorty eventually found himself questioning what that tradition could accomplish in a world that was no longer the land of essences that philosophy had thought it to be. Everyone was asking the same old questions and assuming the same standards for answers. As a result, philosophers never found themselves in a position to challenge the enterprise as a whole: “The scientistic approach to philosophy which Husserl shared with Carnap lives on, forming a tacit presupposition of the work of analytic philosophers . . . . However, there is little explicit metaphilosophical defense or development of this . . . .” (Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume II 21) Problems such as that of the external world, of the “essence” of language, of discovering the way in which one can link up with reality, were questions from an ancient time (Plato, specifically). They formed the central issues about which one argued. They were also based on a hope: the hope of the philosopher that there existed a “truth” discoverable in its very selfhood and discernable by the probing philosopher: “All we philosophers have at least a bit of the ascetic priest in us. We all hanker after essence and share a taste for theory as opposed to narrative.” (71) It was this hope that Rorty understood and felt the need to distance himself from.
But if he sought to distance himself from the analytic tradition and its simplistic search for “truth,” Rorty was no more interested in what was happening in the continental tradition. His questioning after the value of truth and consideration of the social and historical context of philosophical arguments seem to give Rorty a post-modernist twinge. Perhaps he wanted to challenge the scheme of things, to advocate a sharp rejection of the system and its eventual overcoming. After all, one should not worship false permanence, when the real is the transitory and the transitory real. And he says, “I have sometimes used ‘postmodern’ myself, in the rather narrow sense defined by Lyotard as ‘distrust of metanarratives.’” Yet, “I now wish that I had not. The term has been so over-used that it is causing more trouble than it is worth.” (1) Rorty declaimed the title of post-modernist. Nor was he a phenomenologist. Though he took a great interest in Heidegger, he was quite critical of Heidegger at times. For Rorty, these individuals and movements fell short of their own principles: upon finding that there is no “essence” to be found, they take their attacks and render them as doctrine. “The post-modern condition” or “intentionality” becomes a new dogma to be distinguished and defended. Against this, Rorty argues that
The trouble with making a big deal out of language, meaning, intentionality, the play of signifiers or différance is that one . . . takes the irreducibility of the intentional – the irreducibility of descriptions of sentential attitudes such as beliefs and desires to the descriptions of the motion of elementary particles – as somehow more philosophically significant than the irreducibility of house descriptions to timber descriptions, or of animal descriptions to cell descriptions. (4)
To criticize universal doctrines by way of a universal doctrine of non-universality does not solve the problem of universals, argues Rorty. The problem of seeking after essences continues so long as one declares that one has found the real story. The only way to get around this is to stop the search.
If one follows Rorty’s argument through, one can’t help but feel that one has arrived at total relativism, if not nihilism itself. The answer appears to be to give up all hope of finding any sort of truth. The last two and a half thousand years of argument have been for nothing, then, not only because there was no Form of the Good to find, but because the very question itself is pointless. In that case, why do philosophy at all?
The problem with the question just posed is that it assumes that philosophy is pointless if it doesn’t search for truth. In other words, it assumes that the only good thing to ever come out of philosophy is truth. Given the conventional understanding of philosophy and its mission, this seems obvious. But when historically considered, it also seems perfectly reasonable to say that philosophy has had and can still have good consequences that have little or nothing at all to do with the truth. Did philosophy not give us the detailed study of ethics? Didn’t logic help us develop the first conceptual computer? Doesn’t philosophy continue to drive societies, direct leaders, and create new worldviews? Certainly, then, philosophy doesn’t do nothing, and this holds true even if philosophy itself has never found a single truth about the world.
It is from this perspective that Rorty engages the philosophical tradition, by way of an rarely considered (within the traditions, anyway) type of philosophy called pragmatism. Pragmatism appeared in the mid-1800s with C.S. Peirce as a different way to think about problems within philosophy. Certainly pragmatism existed before that: who doesn’t think about the best consequences as being the deciders of a course of action more often than not? But to turn it into a complete philosophical position was novel. After the early 1900s, however, not much was heard about it. Instead people moved on with their arguments about language and reality, and about criticisms of that view. But as metaphysico-lingustic theories started to fall apart, Rorty argues, pragmatism started creeping its way back in: “The context in which my essays put post-Nietzschean philosophy, is, predictably enough, pragmatism.” (2) By the latter half of the 1900s, he think, pragmatism became quite fashionable, even if no one admitted to it.
Not only is this what happened to some philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Donald Davidson. According to Rorty, this is how it should be: “The big esoteric problem common to Heidegger and Derrida of how to ‘overcome’ or escape from the ontotheological tradition is an artificial one and needs to be replaced by lots of little pragmatic questions about which bits of that tradition might be used for some current purpose.” (87) On these grounds he criticizes the post-modernists (and Heidegger) for taking a metaphysical stance based on their anti-metaphysical arguments. Instead one should support “a postmodernist form of social life, in which society as a whole asserts itself without bothering to ground itself.” (176) What we decide is right should be pragmatic, based on what works. After all, we have yet to find the philosopher’s thing-in-itself: “[I]t has turned out that the only thing we can be certain about is our own desires.” (29) So why not follow pragmatism?
In order to be accepted by anyone, however, Rorty’s pragmatism will have to respond to the same two questions we posed at the beginning (here stated generally): What will we do without the truth? And how do we decide what is the best way to live? Can Rorty give a sufficient answer to these questions?
In response to the first question, Rorty wants to dispel the universal illusion among philosophers, the idea that, without philosophy, the world wouldn’t know what to do with itself. Where can one go when all truth has disappeared? the philosophers asks. When even the attack on truth seems useless, and one can only resort to a shallow pragmatism, can any human being actually live with herself? Well yes, actually, says Rorty. And not simply, as one might object, because they “don’t know any better.” Even the intellectuals in society, and even the ones among those who accept post-modernist ideas, seem to do quite well. For “most contemporary intellectuals live in a culture which is self-consciously without archai, without telos, without theology, teleology, or ontology.” (100) I know, says the intellectual, that my own “truths” are challenged by other societies, even at their most basic levels. But so what? Does that require me to run around like a chicken with my head cut off? Should I no longer be able to get out of bed in the morning, due to the oppressive weight of the terrible truth crushing my very soul?
This question, “So what?” is Rorty’s challenge to the classical philosophy. It’s a challenge he shares with Nietzsche, Peirce, James, and Dewey. Why should we care so much about truth? Why shouldn’t we change that emphasis, which is itself a historical product? If we can stop obsessing about truth so much, says Rorty, perhaps we can find a better way to spend our energies.
If we ever have the courage to drop the scientistic model of philosophy without falling back into a desire for holiness (as Heidegger did), then, no matter how dark the time, we shall no longer turn to the philosophers for the rescue as our ancestors turned to the priests. We shall turn instead to the poets and engineers, to the people who produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number. (26)
The problem with philosophy, for Rorty, is that it tends to create problems that aren’t there. It talks about “truth” as though it’s somewhere out there, waiting for us. It talks about “the good” and “the just” as though they are real metaphysical entities, and we are more or less moral according to how closely we align ourselves to the entities. Such things have since been refuted. Science doesn’t pierce “true” objects, Quine argued. Nor does language, said Wittgenstein. Philosophy, nor science, nor anything else gets to “the bottom” of things. Yet even in refutation, the principles of philosophers betray their intentions: they want the right method, the right standard, in which to reach the way things should be. Today, in the form of post-modernism, philosophers think they’ve gotten to the bottom of something (namely, the lack of bottoms), and in so doing transcended time and space. In thinking thus they betray their own principles.
But even if one drops the question of a real truth, how can one decide how to live? Can’t I separate the dictator from the democrat? For Rorty the pragmatist, this is a simple question. Let us aim for the best society, where people are treated the best, and are freest to do what they want. This answer sounds simple and unreflective, but is not. If there is no truth, there is certainly no good reason to impose upon others in the name of what is “right.” And if we’re not sure who’s got the right idea, it seems best to let people figure it out on their own, insofar as they are able. People are often quite good at finding a place in life that works for them. If not, we can offer assistance, but have no right to control them; at least so long as they don’t harm others. Humans are already social animals; they won’t fall apart the moment you tell them there’s no metaphysics of morals.
Letting us see the narratives of our own lives as episodes within . . . larger historical narratives is, I think, as much as the intellectuals are able to do in aid of morality. The attempt of religion and metaphysics to do more – to supply a backup for moral intuitions by providing them with ahistorical ‘authority’ – will always be self-defeating. (163)
In allowing the free pursuit of ideas as a way to find the best solutions to problems, Rorty also answers another question, the one we began with: what good is philosophy? For the Rorty philosophy has always been a powerful means of new expression. The greater the experience of the individual and the broader the range of his expression, the greater his abilities to analyze his world and decide what to do with it. With knowledge come options; with options comes power: “it was only the false lead which Descartes gave us (and the resulting overvaluation of scientific theory which, in Kant, produces ‘the philosophy of subjectivity’) that made us think truth and power were separable.” (175) Few things have the power that philosophy does for creating new language and new descriptions of the human experience. Those things that do compete with philosophy in expanding the human experience, such as the novel, might be seen with alarm by philosophers. Frankly, says Rorty, philosophers are just going to have to deal with it, because philosophy long ago lost the right to be as important as it claimed itself to be. Philosophy needs to understand what it does right, which is finding new ways of thinking. We need to remember how deliberation and philosophizing has helped us to become acutely aware of the ethical world: “The availability of a richer vocabulary of moral deliberation is what one chiefly has in mind when one says that we are, morally speaking, more sensitive and sophisticated than our ancestors or than our younger selves.” (155) We need to recall that, even if humans don’t have a “perfect language,” a computer, working within an artificial world, can, and does use its perfect language to great effect. By this standard it is the great creators, those who develop entirely new ways of thinking about the world, who have made the greatest contributions to philosophy. It is they who have a real impact and, by the pragmatist’s standards, have done the most for the world. That none of those thinkers proved to be right doesn’t matter, for philosophy’s contribution to society was never a matter of its being correct; if philosophy has proven anything at all, it is that such correctness doesn’t exist. And for that reason, because it has not failed its mission, but rather has a mission that never ends, it still has the right, even the duty, to exist, to expand our world, just as does the poet. “One of these privileges [that of the poets] is to rejoin ‘What has universal validity to do with me?’ I think that philosophers are as entitled to this privilege as poets, so I think this rejoinder sufficient.” (198)
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