Richard Rorty: From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics 9781472556745, 9781441154262

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Contributors

Robert Brandom, Professor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh, USA Selected Publications: Perspectives on Pragmatism (Harvard University Press, 2011); Reason in Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 2009); Between Saying and Doing (Oxford University Press, 2008); Articulating Reasons (Harvard University Press, 2000); Making It Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994). Susan Dieleman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada Selected Publications: “The Roots of Rorty’s Philosophy: Catharine A. MacKinnon” in Pragmatism Today: The Journal of the Central-European Pragmatist Forum  (2011); “A Feminist Pragmatist Account of Epistemic Inclusion” in Maurice Hamington & Celia Bardwell-Jones (eds.), Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism (Routledge, 2012). Alexander Gröschner, Post-Doctoral Researcher TUM School of Education, Technische Universität München, Germany Selected Publications: Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik [Pragmatism as Cultural Politics] (co-edited with Mike Sandbothe, Suhrkamp, 2011); Innovation als Lernaufgabe [Innovation as a Learning Task] (Waxmann, 2011). Jürgen Habermas, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy University of Frankfurt, Germany Selected Publications: The Crisis of the European Union (Wiley, 2012); Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays (Wiley, 2008); The Future of Human Nature (Blackwell, 2003), Truth and Justification (Polity Press, 1998); The Theory of Communicative Action (Beacon Press, 1981).

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Colin Koopman, Assistant Professor of Philosophy University of Oregon, USA Selected Publications: Genealogy as Critique: The Problems of Modernity in Foucault (Indiana University Press, 2013); Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty (Columbia University Press, 2009); “Rorty’s Linguistic Turn: Why (More Than) Language Matters to Philosophy” in Contemporary Pragmatism (2011). Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg, Professor of Philosophy Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN), University of Oslo, Norway Selected Publications: Reflections and Replies: Essays on Tyler Burge (MIT Press, 2003); Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language (Blackwell, 1989); “Rorty, Davidson, and the Future of Metaphysics in America” in Cheryl Misak (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2008). Esa Saarinen, Professor of Applied Philosophy Aalto University, Finland Selected Publications: Essays on Systems Intelligence (co-edited with Raimo P. Hämäläinen, Systems Analysis Laboratory, Aalto University, 2010); Systems Intelligence in Leadership and Everyday Life (co-edited with Raimo P. Hämäläinen, Systems Analysis Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, 2007); Imagologies (co-edited with Mark C. Taylor, Routledge, 1994). Mike Sandbothe, Professor for Culture and Media Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences, Jena, Germany Selected Publications: Pragmatic Media-Philosophy (online publication: sandbothe.net, 2005); The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy (co-edited with William Egginton, SUNY, 2004); The Temporalisation of Time (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001). Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought Columbia University, New York, USA Selected Publications: Territory, Authority, Rights (Princeton University Press, 2008); A Sociology of Globalization (W. W. Norton, 2007); Cities in a World

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Economy (4th edn. Sage, 2011); Denationalization (Princeton University Press, 2005). Richard Shusterman, Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture Florida Atlantic University, USA Selected Publications: Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2012); Body Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Surface and Depth (Cornell University Press, 2002); Performing Live (Cornell University Press, 2000); Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (Routledge, 1997); Pragmatist Aesthetics (Blackwell, 1992, and translated into 14 languages). Christopher J. Voparil, Graduate Faculty Union Institute and University, Cincinnati, USA Selected Publications: The Rorty Reader (co-edited with Richard J. Bernstein, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

Preface Alexander Gröschner, Colin Koopman, and Mike Sandbothe This volume of essays offers a series of reflections on the work of one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century from the pens of a diverse set of scholars, both international and interdisciplinary in its scope. The book, we hope, attests to the enormous impact of Richard Rorty’s work today. Few thinkers from the past century, and even fewer philosophers of recent memory, have achieved quite the orbit and gravity of Rorty. Observe how Rorty simultaneously appealed to and aggravated academics and non-academics across the spectrum. For instance, to those on the radical left end of contemporary academic culture (and their non-academic readership), Rorty’s combination of revolutionary philosophy and moderate politics was a curious source of inspiration and frustration. To those on the political and cultural right, Rorty’s style of philosophy was often received as a dangerous set of ideas, even though that same style was often disparaged by those on the left as culturally conservative. Meanwhile, moderates in all kinds of center positions (politically, culturally, and morally) found, and continue to find, in Rorty’s works a characteristically fluent expression of the ideals of tolerance and inclusiveness that so many of us recognize as the lingua franca of our liberal democratic sensibilities. An eminent intellectual historian, whose work often brought him into contact with Rorty, once remarked to one of us that—despite his own quite strong philosophical and political disagreements with Rorty—it would be nearly impossible not to admire the generosity with which Rorty made his thought available as a public terrain upon which contemporary intellectuals could debate the issues of their day. How Rorty’s work first became such a public terrain is no doubt one of those inexplicable contingencies of the ever-present world of letters, but surely one important factor was Rorty’s often-noted willingness to engage his critics in dialogue after dialogue once his work became a subject of simultaneous criticism and celebration. Hoping to carry forward the spirit of that engagement, this volume attests to the importance of the debates that continue over Rorty’s work. The history of the volume you hold in your hands begins in June 2007 in Scandinavia, specifically in Denmark, and to be completely precise in the Café

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‘Ib Rene Cairo’ in the Danish university town of Aalborg. On June 24, 2007 the Reading Rorty Memorial was held there. We quote from the announcement: ‘Suzie Neslund reads out passages of Rorty’s “Love and Money”, Mike Sandbothe comments on Rorty, and Sine Bach Ruettel (Copenhagen) plays banjo between readings.’ And a few days later, in ‘Café Wagner’ in the German university town of Jena: ‘Alexander Gröschner, Yvonne Förster, and Kenton Barnes read passages from Rorty’s autobiographical “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” as well as from some of his more political and philosophical essays; music by Indicat.’ That is how it began for two of the three editors of this book. Later on, in 2009, Colin Koopman joined the editorial team, having himself learned much from Rorty’s work in the context of his dissertation. This joining was made possible by Barry Allen, of McMaster University in Southern Ontario, Canada. In the 1990s, Barry along with Dick Rorty attended a conference at the University of Bamberg in Germany that had been organized by Mike Sandbothe. Dick introduced Barry and Mike to each other, and the resulting friendship between like-minded pragmatists endures to this day. Later, just as Dick had brought Barry and Mike together, Barry mediated the collaboration between Mike and Alexander in Germany and Colin (who had written his dissertation with Barry’s guidance a few years previous) in North America. The resulting synergy and the common faith in the editorial project made the emergence of this book possible. For this, we all three thank Barry. In Germany, most of Richard Rorty’s books have been published by Suhrkamp Verlag. Eva Gilmer—Rorty’s editor—supported Alexander and Mike with the planning and realization of the German ancestor of this book. It was published in 2011 under the title Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik, and thereby laid the foundation for the present volume, which reprints (now in English) selected papers from the German edition along with a selection of newer papers from a set of upcoming North American scholars of Rorty’s work. We thank Eva Gilmer and her colleagues Philip Hölzing and Janika Rüter for making the successful cooperation between Suhrkamp and Bloomsbury possible. All three co-editors would like to thank Alan Reynolds (who is among the next generation of Rorty scholars) for his help in preparing the essays for final publication and his many helpful suggestions about the pieces included herein. We thank Karl Hughes for his support as translator. We also thank our fellow pragmatists Wojciech Małecki and Eric T. Weber for their supportive insights regarding the structure and content of the volume on the whole. We are all also grateful for the opportunity to acknowledge the Oregon Humanities Center, the Department of Philosophy, and the College of Arts and

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Sciences at the University of Oregon for their support that helped make possible the preparation and production of this volume. We thank Rachel Eisenhauer and Sarah Campbell of Bloomsbury for their faith in this project. For permissions involved in reprinting previously-published material, we would like to acknowledge Suhrkamp Verlag for permission to reprint Jürgen Habermas ‘ “… And to Define America, Her Athletic Democracy”. Im Andenken an Richard Rorty,’ in Gröschner, A./Sandbothe, M., Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik. Beiträge zum Werk Richard Rortys © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2008, 2011. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin and Esa Saarinen, ‘Freundlichkeit gegenüber Babys und andere radikale Ideen in Rortys antizynischer Philosophie,’ in Gröschner, A./Sandbothe, M., Pragmatismus als Kulturpolitik. Beiträge zum Werk Richard Rortys © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 2011. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint an adapted version of Richard Shusterman’s ‘Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: From Rortyan Textualism to Somaesthetics.’ first published in New Literary History, 41, 1 (2010), 69–94 (©2010 New Literary History, The University of Virginia). Our final and most special thanks go to Mary Varney Rorty, who supported the idea and development of both the German-language and English-language volumes and kindly supported the project from the beginning. The collaboration with the authors was characterized by respect for the work of Richard Rorty and his memory.

Abbreviations of Works by Richard Rorty AOC

Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

CP

Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1982.

CIS

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

EHO

Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

LT

The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, 2nd edition, ed. Richard Rorty. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992 [1967].

ORT

Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

PSH

Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

PMN

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 30th anniversary edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009 [1979].

PCP

Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

RRP

Richard Rorty Papers, MS-C017, Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California.

TCF

Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

TP

Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Introduction

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From Pragmatist Philosophy to Cultural Politics An Overview of the Contributions in this Volume Alexander Gröschner and Mike Sandbothe ‘What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.’ This famous statement by Ludwig Wittgenstein may serve as the motto for Richard Rorty’s engagement with modern professional philosophy. In his metaphilosophical investigations, the concern of the American neo-pragmatist (1931–2007) was to help philosophical spirits threatening to drown in the sweet juice of the academic fly-bottle to come back down to earth so that they might find their wings again.

Cross-section of a fly-bottle (© Rainer Zenz)

The present volume deals with Rorty’s concerns in three parts, following an introductory personal assessment of the path of Rorty’s thinking by Jürgen Habermas. In the first part, Robert Brandom, Susan Dieleman and Bjørn

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Torgrim Ramberg reconstruct Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy. In the second part, Colin Koopman and Christopher J. Voparil bring Rorty’s shift from pragmatist philosophy to cultural politics into historical perspective. In the third part Saskia Sassen, Esa Saarinen, and Richard Shusterman present different versions of cultural politics. With recourse to Wittgenstein’s analogy, it can be said that the authors in the first part put forward a reconstruction of Rorty’s description of academic philosophy’s fly-bottle and lay out the possible exit strategies he suggests. The authors in the second part demonstrate the extent to which his cultural-political orientation not only bears on Rorty’s later writings, but is traceable through all his work and constitutes a return to Dewey. Finally, the authors of the third part claim not only to reconstruct the exit routes suggested by Rorty, but also to have used them. As they see themselves, they are already out of the fly-bottle. In his introduction, Habermas sketches the development of Rorty’s thinking and its claim ‘to offer a philosophy that cleans up with all extant philosophy’ (p.  14). Rorty’s ‘double front line taken against metaphysics and scientism’ (p. 15) culminates in his ‘rhetoric of debunking, of forget it, of shrugging off or filing away’ (p.  15). The aim of this rhetoric is to prepare not only academic philosophy but our culture as a whole for a new vocabulary, a vocabulary that avoids ‘first, the assumption of an objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and, secondly, the innerworldly transcendence of universalist claims to validity’ (p. 14). In Part One, Brandom shows how the category of objectivity in Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy could be conceptualized in a less provocative way than Rorty himself did. To this end, Brandom turns to Rorty’s early work on eliminative materialism. Rorty’s argumentation with regard to the category of subjectivity there may be carried over to the category of objectivity in Rorty’s later work. The ‘notion of responsibility ​​ to some non-human authority’ (p. 28) would not then appear as incoherent. Instead, it pertains to a meaningful, reconstructable product of social practices, which is optional and contingent and can be replaced where necessary by other practices. That this need for replacement actually exists in Rorty’s view, Dieleman underscores in her chapter. From her point of view, the particular applicability of Rorty’s pragmatist philosophy to contemporary feminism lies in the fact that he makes the epistemic norms presupposed by the ‘Kantian pragmatists’ (p. 31) such as Habermas and Putnam into an object of cultural-political debate. With recourse to feminist philosophers such as Iris Marion Young, Nancy Fraser, and Jane Braaten, Dieleman makes it clear that the formal conditions of access



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to the public discourse have often served ‘to marginalize women and members of the plebeian classes’ (p.  34). For this reason, she continues, ‘a specifically Rortyan version of a pragmatist feminism’ (endnote, p.  47) focuses ‘on the politics of real-life conversations’ (p.  44). Thus the social hope for a greater human solidarity might succeed in making the objectives of worldwide feminist activism ever more a reality. In his chapter, Ramberg describes a charateristic signature of the innovative aspects of Rorty’s thought. According to Ramberg, the central power of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is to bring in a balance between the constructive ‘openness to what is new and different’ and the destructive ‘disparaging of what is old’ (p. 65). This achieves a specifically cultural significance, where the concern is no longer the debunking of abstract theories, as in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but the filing away of the self-image of a concrete individual or an existing society. It is against this background that Rorty’s ‘simple and seemingly very rough move’ (p. 65) of drawing a distinction between private self-creation and public solidarity can be understood. It serves as ‘a political tool designed to enable us to cope with the creative destruction wreaked by intellectuals in a manner that will help us win from their achievements what we can put to good use while securing the survival of liberal norms’ (p. 71). In Part Two, Koopman and Voparil develop various proposals for an historical reconstruction of Rorty’s ‘philosophy-as-criticism-of-culture’ (CP, p. 74). Koopman concentrates on the evidence of a continuous development of cultural-political questioning in Rorty’s work. He also points out that in recent years professional philosophy has moved closer to Rorty’s proposed ‘kaleidoscopic shift in philosophy’s self-image’ (p.  77) than Rorty would have dared hope. That, Koopman continues, has, among other things, to do with the fact that in times of crisis, the orientation-giving function of philosophy is socially in higher demand. Voparil also takes account of this issue when he suggests understanding ‘cultural politics’ in Rorty’s sense of a ‘catch-all phrase for conversation or inquiry that takes place in the absence of agreed-upon criteria to govern argument’ (p. 111). In keeping with Dewey, Rorty extrapolates Kuhn’s distinction between normal and abnormal discourse to political issues. Thereby, argues Voparil, Rorty manages to ‘offer the basis for a restructuring of a Deweyan conception of philosophy as an instrument of social change to make it more responsive to marginalized and excluded groups’ (p. 113). While Dewey went to the ‘reconstruction of face-to-face communities’ (p. 120), which could be described under normal conditions within a national configuration, Rorty’s concern exists in

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a globalized world ‘with expanding our communities and felt identifications to include distant and different others in ways that move us beyond current assumptions and practices’ (p. 120). In Part Three, Sassen is inspired by cosmopolitan patriotism, which Rorty developed with regard to America in Achieving Our Country. Her culturalpolitical suggestion is that a large part of what in academic research is described as ‘globalization,’ in relation to the current ‘transformation of citizenship,’ may be understood as a process within nation states themselves. This would mean, according to Sassen, that in matters of citizenship, globalization proceeds (counter-intuitively) from the inside outwards. As examples, the author mentions ‘the granting of dual nationality and the incorporation of international human rights norms in national law’ (p.  141). Sassen expands Rorty’s proposal to reevaluate cosmopolitanism as an aspect of American national pride in her outline of the ‘possibility of a cosmopolitan national disposition/ sentiment’ (p.  142) within the dynamics of a ‘denationalizing of citizenship’ (p. 136) that is not confined to America. Amplifying Rorty, Saarinen stresses that ‘the key point of pragmatism is not to come up with a theory of pragmatism, but to direct our attention to conduct’ (p. 146). Saarinen’s endorsement of Rorty’s desire, ‘to awaken philosophy from its self-indulgences and bring it to the realm of the relevant’ (p. 154) is fleshed out in his proposal for a cultural-political line of thought and action which states that ‘kindness to babies is a relevant criterion for philosophy’ (p.  152). By means of this recommendation, which Saarinen develops in connection with a remark from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the ‘explosive power’ (p. 152) of Rorty’s cultural political stance is made explicit. This force consists in an ‘emotional energy’ (p. 152), which is oriented to the ‘mother-infant dyad’ (p. 156). In her successful interaction with her baby, the loving mother promotes the growth of her child rather as Rorty’s cultural-political philosopher is exhorted to do in her dealings with ‘the common man and woman, for ordinary life and its improvement, and above all for the future’ (p. 161). In a similar way Shusterman’s project of ‘somaesthetics’ (p.  165) is characterized by the hope that ‘philosophy’s cultural politics could take the eminently pragmatic form of seeking to benefit life not merely by writing texts but by other forms of concrete praxis in the world’ (p. 178). Shusterman, a professional Feldenkrais practitioner, suggests that the integration of somatic disciplines (e.g. Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, meditation) into our education system ‘not only offers suggestions for personal cultivation but also resources for “social hope” ’ (p.  181) and the elimination of the ‘pervasive body/mind and



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materialist/spiritual schisms in our culture’ (p.  181). Although Rorty himself ‘seems, however, unwilling to go this far’ (p.  178), he (Rorty) nevertheless ‘suggested that he might be growing more receptive to it’ (p.  187). Rorty’s untimely death, Shusterman concludes, ‘ended a life of bold and wide-ranging philosophical inquiry but left us with a legacy to pursue the conversations he shaped in ever more adventurous and experimental ways’ (p. 187). The collection of essays in this volume shows how useful and close to life philosophy can be when it escapes from the fly-bottle. In his popular texts, Rorty himself repeatedly appealed to the public via his cultural-political interventions. Through his academic contributions he succeeded in supervising his own Fach and developing new cultural and political fields of activity for philosophers. An impressive speaker, he was a passionate college lecturer and believed in the future of universities. The philosophers and cultural critics whom he inspired are performing the shift from pragmatist philosophy to cultural politics by treating universities (as well as cities and countries) as places where on the basis of a democratic school system there should be as much freedom as possible for individuality and idiosyncrasy, creation and mutation. In the concluding part of Achieving Our Country, ‘his most personal and moving book’ (Habermas, p.  18), Dick Rorty compared the value of great and inspiring works with romantic love. As a starting point for academic engagement with the great neo-pragmatist, this beautiful passage may be useful: If it is to have inspirational value, a work must be allowed to recontexualize much of what you previously thought you knew; it cannot, at least at first, be itself recontextualized by what you already believe. Just as you cannot be swept off your feet by another human being at the same time that you recognize him or her as a good specimen of a certain type, so you cannot simultaneously be inspired by a work and be knowing about it. Later on—when first love has been replaced by marriage—you may acquire the ability to be both at once. But the really good marriages, the inspired marriages, are those which began in wild, unreflective infatuation. (AOC, pp. 133–4)

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“… And to Define America, Her Athletic Democracy” The Philosopher and the Language Shaper. In Memory of Richard Rorty Jürgen Habermas Dear Mary, dear Friends and Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, Given the highly personal occasion that brings us together here today, please allow me to start with a private memory. I first met Richard Rorty in 1974 at a conference on Heidegger in San Diego. At the beginning of the convention, a video was screened of an interview with the absent Herbert Marcuse, who in it described his relationship to Heidegger in the early 1930s more mildly than the sharp post-War correspondence between the two men would have suggested. Much to my annoyance, this set the tone for the entire conference, where an unpolitical veneration of Heidegger prevailed. Only Marjorie Green, who had likewise studied in Freiburg prior to 1933, passed critical comment, saying that back then, at best, the closer circle of Heidegger students, and Marcuse belonged to it, could have been deceived as to the real political outlook of their mentor. In this ambivalent mood I then heard a professor from Princeton, known to me until then only as the editor of a famed collection of essays on The Linguistic Turn, put forward a provocative comparison. He tried to strike harmony between the dissonant voices of three world-famous soloists in the frame of a strange concert: Dewey, the radical democrat and the most political of the pragmatists, performed in this orchestra alongside Heidegger, that embodiment of the arrogant German mandarin par excellence. And the third in this unlikely league was Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations had taught me so much; but he, too, was not completely free of the prejudices of the German ideology, with its fetishization of spirit, and cut a strange figure as a comrade of Dewey.

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Certainly, from the perspective of Humboldt and philosophical hermeneutics, a look at the world-disclosing function of language reveals an affinity between Heidegger and Wittgenstein. And that discovery must have fascinated Rorty, given that Thomas Kuhn had convinced him to read the history of science from a contextualist vantage point. But how did Dewey fit in this constellation—the embodiment of that democratic wing of the Young Hegelians that we had so sorely lacked in Europe? After all, Dewey’s way of thinking stood in strident contrast to the Greco-German pretension, the high tone and elitist gesture of the Few who claim a privileged access to truth against the many. At that time, I found the association so obscene that I quite lost my cool in the discussion. Surprisingly, however, the important colleague from Princeton was by no means irritated by the resilient protest from the backwoods of Germany and instead was so kind as to invite me into his seminar. For me, my visit to Princeton marked the beginning of a friendship as happy and rewarding as instructive. On the bedrock of shared political convictions we were easily able to discuss and endure our philosophical differences. Thus, the kind of ‘priority of politics over philosophy’ that Dick defended as a topic tacitly served as a source of our continuing relation. As regards Heidegger, incidentally, my initial agitation was unfounded. Dick likewise felt a greater affinity to the pragmatic Heidegger of the early parts of Being and Time than to the esoteric thinker who devoutly listened to the voice of Being (PSH, pp. 190–7). After the first meeting, Dick sent me an offprint of his essay ‘The World Well Lost’; 1 at the time, the title’s ironic allusion could itself have drawn my attention to the intellectual and the writer behind the philosopher Richard Rorty. However, I read the essay, with its stringent analytical argumentation, the way one tends to read articles from the Journal of Philosophy. Only with hindsight did I realize that it was a preliminary piece for that critique of the modern paradigm of epistemology that he was to publish a few years later as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a book that was to have such an impact. What was revolutionary in the study was less the careful explication and critical reconstruction of the linguistic turn performed in different ways by both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, but more the insistence on one crucial consequence of the shift from ‘consciousness’ to ‘language.’ Step by step, Rorty deconstructs the spectator model of ‘representative’ or ‘fact-copying’ thought. And this critique went to the heart of a discipline that since Russell and Carnap was concerned with achieving scientific respectability by a logical and semantic treatment of fundamental epistemological issues first raised in the seventeenth century.



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Allow me to briefly remind you of the key issue here. If facts cannot be construed independently of the propositional structure of our language and if the truth of opinions or statements can only be corrected by other opinions or statements, then any idea of truth as a correspondence between sentences and facts ‘out there’ is misleading. We cannot describe nature in a language we assume to be nature’s own language. According to the pragmatist interpretation, the ‘copying’ of reality is replaced by a problem-solving ‘coping’ with the challenges of an overcomplex world. In other words, we acquire our knowledge of facts in the course of a constructive approach to a surprising environment. Nature only provides indirect answers as all its answers refer to the grammar of our questions. What we call the ‘world’ therefore does not consist of the totality of facts. For us, it is the sum total of the cognitively relevant constraints imposed on our attempts to learn from and achieve control over contingent natural processes through reliable predictions. Rorty’s painstaking analysis of the assumed representative function of the knowing mind deserves the respect also of those colleagues who are not willing to follow the ambitious thrust of the author’s conclusions. This ambition was revealed back then by the way the English title was expanded on for the German translation. Here, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was sub-titled A Critique of Philosophy—meaning philosophy as such. I myself first grasped the entire range of Rorty’s project, and thus the meaning behind that strange constellation of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey, when I read the introduction to his essay collection, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982). If one knew the author in person it was not easy to match the extraordinary claims of this philosopher, writer, and political intellectual with the modest, shy, and sensitive habit of the person of the same name. His public appearances were characterized by rhetorical brilliance, controlled passion, the charm of a youthful, at times, polemically acute mind, indeed by a certain pathos. Deflation and understatement can have a pathos of their own. But behind the aura of the impressive speaker and writer and the passionate teacher lay concealed that honest and soft, nobly restrained, and infinitely loveable man who hated nothing more than any pretense of profundity. Yet, for all our reverence for the character of a friend, we must not fail to mention the pretensions of the philosophical claims he championed. Richard Rorty had in mind nothing less than to foster a culture that liberated itself from what he saw as the conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy—and a fetishism of science that sprouted from the furrows of that metaphysics. What he understood ‘metaphysics’ to mean and what he criticized about it can be

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best seen if we bear in mind what this critique was borne of: ‘Philosophers became preoccupied with images of the future only after they gave up the hope of gaining knowledge of the eternal’ (Rorty, 1995, p. 199). Platonism keeps its gaze fixed on the immutable ideas of the good and the true and spawns a web of categorical distinctions in which the creative energies of a self-generating human species ossify. Rorty does not construe the priority of essence over appearance, of the universal over the particular, of necessity over contingency, or of nature over history as a purely theoretical matter. Because this is a matter of structuring ways of life he seeks to train his contemporaries in a vocabulary that articulates a different view of the world and of ourselves. A second, radical boost of the Enlightenment, so Rorty hoped, would rejuvenate the authentic motifs of a shattered Modernity. Modernity must scoop all normativity from within itself. There is no longer any authority or foundation beyond the opaque ebb and flow of contingencies. No one is able to exit from her local context without finding herself in a different one. At the same time, the human condition is characterized by the fact that the sober recognition of the finitude and corruptibility of human beings—the recognition of the fallibility of the mind, the vulnerability of the body, and the fragility of social bonds—can and should become the motor driving the creativity of a restless self-transformation of society and culture. Against this backdrop, we must, so Rorty argued, learn to see ourselves as the sons and daughters of a self-confident Modernity, if in our politically, economically, and socially torn global society Walt Whitman’s belief in a better future is to have a chance at all. The democratic voice of hope for a brotherly and inclusive form of social life must not fall silent. The moving songs of the public intellectual Richard Rorty—his interviews and lectures, his exoteric doctrines of ‘contingency, irony, and solidarity,’ the treatises that were disseminated worldwide—they are all infused with the peculiarly romantic, and very personal triple voice of metaphilosophy, neo-pragmatism, and leftist patriotism. For this life and work I can think of no more fitting an epitaph than an inscription by Walt Whitman dating from 1871. Under the heading of To Foreign Lands, these are words that Dick might have also directed to his European friends: I heard that you ask’d for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.2

Ladies and Gentlemen, for this hour you invited a philosophical colleague to speak and can thus expect that I will attempt to explain how Richard Rorty



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proceeded from that ‘metacritique of knowledge’ that I drew to your attention to a critique of metaphysics and from there to the cosmopolitan patriotism of a very American democrat.3 The pragmatist conception of knowledge that Rorty develops in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature should be seen in the context of a Hegelian naturalism. In this view, the basic conditions for a culture created by man are the result of natural evolution. All cultural achievements in the past can be construed functionally as ‘tools’ that have proved their worth in practical as well as instrumental interaction with risky environments. This way of looking at anthropology and history leads only to a ‘soft’ naturalism, as the Darwinist language does not undermine the everyday self-understanding of socialized individuals as autonomous, creative, and learning actors. By contrast, the line between soft and hard naturalism is crossed by those reductionist explanations that in a speculative manner combine insights from biogenetics and neurology in the framework of a neo-Darwinist theory of evolution. They cross the boundary of a naturalist self-objectification of man, beyond which we can no longer grasp ourselves as the authors of our actions, discoveries, and inventions. Under the sway of such objectivistic self-descriptions, if they purport to be the only true ones, it is the awareness of a ‘self ’ that disappears. They treat exactly that as an illusion which neopragmatism—a kind of Lebensphilosophie—so celebrates in man, namely the consciousness of freedom, creativity, and learning. Rorty quite simply had to protest this move toward scientism. Because he fully elaborates his own concept of man in a Darwinist language, he had now to introduce a stop rule into this kind of soft naturalism. In order to be able to reject the hard naturalism of a Daniel Dennett as ‘scientism,’ he has to offer an explanation of the uncautious inflation of objectifying research approaches to the status of a pseudo-scientific objectivism. He hoped to find such an explanation by embedding the spectator model of knowledge in a sweeping deconstruction of the history of metaphysics. In this broader context he established scientism’s affinity to Platonism. Both share the bad habit of conceiving of human knowledge as a vision from nowhere, thus moving all of our constructive research practices beyond the limits of our or of any world: ‘The last line of defense for essentialist philosophers is the belief that physical science gets us outside ourselves, outside our language and our purposes to something splendidly nonhuman and nonrelational’ (PSH, p.  59). With the help of Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s critique of the ontological implications of the language of physicalism, Rorty claims to uncover even in the reductionist strategies of cognitive scientists and biologists the Platonic heritage of

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the assumption of world-less objectivity that supposedly allows for a view from nowhere. Rorty’s critique of metaphysics pays the price of an anti-realism that Dewey had not paid in his key anti-Platonist text, Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rorty felt he had to combine soft naturalism with radical historicism if he wanted to keep it from sliding into scientism. He felt that a modern culture, exclusively standing on feet of its own, would only avoid an appealing scientistic selfreification if it forewent both traps: first, the assumption of an objective world that exists independently of our descriptions and, secondly, the innerworldly transcendence of universalist claims to validity. Also our standards of rationality to which we performatively lay claim bow down to the ups and downs of cultural practices. Rorty may have found it easy to take this rather controversial step, because he obviously found Heidegger’s deconstruction appealing for another reason, too. There is a streak of nostalgia about claiming to offer a philosophy that cleans up with all extant philosophy, a sentiment resulting from deep disappointment with metaphysic’s unredeemed promises. The melancholy in this gesture of breaking away and surpassing reveals a Platonist motivation behind Rorty’s anti-Platonism, as in Heidegger’s. Rorty bemoans the state of a discipline that retains the name philosophy but has forfeited any public relevance. In particular, the analytical orthodoxy whence Rorty himself originated has eased and accelerated philosophy’s transformation into a highly specialized and departmentalized discipline. Here, only those questions are considered serious as are raised by the profession, and no longer by ‘life.’ Rorty was troubled by this development as early as 1967 and it pained him. At that time, his doubts in the state of the art led him to taunt the profession by denying even the basic presupposition of our business ‘that there are philosophical truths to be discovered and demonstrated by argument’ (LT, p. 36). A quite different perspective arises from the question as to what can or should remain of philosophy after the end of metaphysics. In Rorty’s view, the critique of Platonism can give rise only to a philosophy that has an historical consciousness of itself and captures its own time in thought, in other words that continues the discourse of Modernity once initiated by Hegel. At this point, the paths of Heidegger and Rorty part, however. Rorty was never tempted to pursue the arrogant self-celebration of a train of thought that felt it could dispense with all argumentation. Like Dewey, he conducted two discourses simultaneously, one with his fellow philosophers on technical questions and the other with the general public on issues relating



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to how Modernity understands itself. He conducted this exoteric discourse in Wittgenstein’s therapeutic vein. Once the human mind becomes ensnared in the conceptual network of Platonism, it is not theory that helps to cure this diseasing self-misunderstanding, but only the deflation of unnecessary theoretical claims. This accounts for a typical trait in Rorty’s public appearances, his rhetoric of debunking, of forget it, of shrugging off or filing away, his recommendation that an issue be ‘dropped’ because it ‘has become uninteresting.’ The anti-Platonist thrust is directed against a grand self-image that, because of an imagined participation in the ideal, i.e. supra-human world, in fact degrades us to being slaves of these idols. Rorty fought against the Platonist compulsion to deceive ourselves about the merely conventional and contingent aspects of daily life; in this respect, he always shared the pragmatists attitudes. Wittgenstein’s style of therapy had to step back behind Dewey’s democratic commitment because Rorty’s therapeutic practice is meant to have a transforming and liberating effect and not the quietist and thus conservative sense of restoring an undistorted status quo ante. The double front line taken against metaphysics and scientism follows objectives for which Rorty coins effective slogans. He defends the ‘priority of democracy over philosophy’ and the ‘priority of technology over theory.’ Philosophy and the sciences must make themselves useful, now that their success can no longer be measured in terms of whether statements correspond with a reality untouched by language and culture. What counts is the contribution that philosophical and scientific practice can make as well to an ever more expanding consensus on shared interests and an improved mutual understanding on competing human needs as to the development of the means to satisfy them. Just as theory formation in the natural sciences serves its possible technical success, so philosophy serves democracy and freedom: ‘if we take care of political freedom, we get truth as a bonus’ (TCF, p. 58). Be that as it may, philosophy can play a public role if it reflects sensitively on the pressing problems of the day and offers a diagnosis of its time. In this country Richard Rorty like almost no other did indeed restore philosophy’s public importance. It is a moot point whether his colleagues will thank him for that. However, a philosopher who dons the role of a public intellectual can have recourse neither to the expert knowledge of the natural and social sciences nor even to the historical and aesthetic knowledge accumulated by the humanities. In his public interventions, Rorty makes a virtue of these shortcomings by turning the task of philosophy itself into a topic. He opts for metaphilosophical

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considerations, confronts the ‘scientific’ philosophers with those who take their cue from literature. Like Nietzsche, he ponders the benefits and disadvantages of classical education, if in his own way: All of these wonderful books are only rungs on a ladder that, with a bit of luck, one day we may be able to do without. If we stopped reading canonical philosophy books, we would be less aware of the forces that make us think and talk as we do. We would be less aware to grasp our contingency, less capable of being “ironists.” (TCF, p. 79)

So that is the one task of philosophy: to exercise its addresses in an awareness of the contingencies of life on earth, in particular the contingencies that impact on the presumed foundations, on what we take to be our ‘final’ vocabularies. In this way, Rorty practiced something of what the ancients called ‘wisdom.’ And he used a word for this practice that is not by chance of religious origin, namely ‘edification.’ Private edification is, of course, only half of the business of philosophical communication. Public commitment is the other, even more important task of philosophy. As a pragmatist, Rorty can prompt citizens and elites in the world’s leading power to remember their own tradition. He recommends these cultural resources as the key to interpreting the current situation. Pragmatism is expressed by the spirit of great writers and great philosophers alike—Rorty repeatedly cites Emerson and Whitman, James and Dewey. And because this spirit is aware of its American origins, and also sees itself as a driving force of progressivism, all the pragmatist writers and philosophers more or less shared the profile of a leftist patriotism, that is one associated with cosmopolitanism. Rorty has the fortunate combination of his three rare talents to thank for the fact that he could draw on this heritage undividedly, for he was equally an important philosopher, a marvelous writer, and a successful political intellectual. Let me conclude our commemoration of Richard Rorty with one word each on the roles he so gloriously mastered, that of the philosopher, the writer, and the left cosmopolitan patriot. First, the philosopher. In his profession, Richard Rorty exchanged the most sophisticated arguments with the most prominent of his colleagues. He debated the concept of truth with Donald Davidson, he argued about realism and rationality with Hilary Putnam, about the concept of the mental with Daniel Dennet, on intersubjectivity and objectivity with John McDowell, and with his master student Robert Brandom on the status of facts.4 On the European continent



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his work is as strongly in evidence as it is in the English-speaking world, if not possibly more influential than it is here. Rorty mastered the philosophical idioms of both worlds. Two of his three philosophical heroes were, after all, Europeans. With his interpretive skills he did great service for Foucault and Derrida not only in the United States, but also in Germany. And it was also he via whom we in Europe indirectly communicated with one another when we found it hard to reach an understanding between the parties to the East and West of the river Rhine. As to the writer, we have to acknowledge the fact that among those rare philosophers who can write flawless scholarly prose, Richard Rorty came closest to the spirit of poetry. His strategy of an eye-opening renovation of philosophical jargon laid the foundations for the affinity between what he achieved with his texts and the world-disclosing power of literature. Down through the decades, no other colleague surprised me with new ideas and exciting formulations the way he did. Rorty overwhelms his readers with mind-boggling rearrangements of conceptual constellations; he shocks them with thrilling binary oppositions. He often transforms complex chains of thoughts into seemingly barbaric simplifications, but at second glance such dense formulas prove to contain innovative interpretations. Rorty plays with his readers’ conventional expectations. With unusual series of names he asks them to rethink connections. Sometimes it is only a matter of emphasis. If he names Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, Annette Baier, and Robert Brandom in a single breath, then the subliminal discrepancy that disconcerts the reader is the real message—in this case the reference to Annette Baier’s great reconstruction of Hume’s moral philosophy, which Rorty wishes to emphasize as an ‘intellectual advance.’ Finally, in Rorty we encounter an old-fashioned sort of leftist intellectual who believes in education and social reform. What he finds most important about a democratic constitution is that it provides the oppressed and encumbered with instruments with which they ‘can defend themselves against the wealthy and the powerful’ (TCF, p. 81). The focus is on abolishing institutions that continue exploitation and degradation. And it is on promoting a tolerant society that keeps people together in solidarity despite growing diversity and recognizes no authority as binding that cannot be derived from deliberation and revisable agreements of all involved. Rorty terms himself a red–diaper anticommunist baby and a teenage Cold War liberal. But that past did not leave the slightest trace of resentment in him. He was completely free of the scars so typical of former radicals as well as of many of the older and some of the younger liberal hawks. If he gave a somewhat trenchant political response, then it was the one he directed

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against a cultural Left which he felt had bid farewell to the efforts of the arena: ‘Insofar as a Left becomes spectatorial and retrospective, it ceases to be a Left’ (AOC, p. 15). With Achieving Our Country, his most personal and moving book, Richard Rorty pinned his colors to the mast of an American patriotism that the world need not fear. In the melody of this text we find a combination of the exceptional status of the world’s oldest democracy—one that can be proud of the normative substance of its principles—and the sensitivity for the new and now global diversity of cultural perspectives and voices. What is new about this global pluralism compared with the charged pluralism of a national society is the fact that within the inclusive frame of an encompassing international community the dangers of disintegration can no longer be diverted smartly onto some enemy on the outside. Today, evolutionary anthropology with its comparative research into children and chimpanzees of the same age catches up with an old pragmatist insight when it rediscovers a ‘perspective-taking’ ability to be something on which we humans have a monopoly. Bertolt Brecht suggested reciprocal perspective-taking is the essential condition of true patriotism: And because we improve this country, We love it and shield it. And it may appear most dearest to us As other people’s find their own.

Dick knew those lines from the famous children’s hymn and knew that even for a super-power cosmopolitanism is not the same thing as the global export of its own way of life. He knew that a democracy only preserves its robust and ‘athletic’ character by self-criticism. In an interview conducted on September 11, 2001, he warned against Bush’s ‘arrogant anti-internationalism’ (TCF, p.  101). He reminded us instead of the very idea that had, in the wake of the horrors of the Second World War, prompted an American president to envisage a new design for a future world order and to push the establishment of the United Nations. Yet, Rorty was not unrealistic in how he saw things: ‘That scenario now sounds less plausible. But it is the only one I can envisage that might actually have good results’ (TCF, p. 101). And he then added a sentence that expresses the spirit of this person and also the spirit of the best tradition this country has brought forth: ‘There is, to be sure, plenty of reason for pessimism, but it would be better to do what one can to get people to follow an improbable scenario than to simply throw up one’s hands’ (TCF, p. 101).



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That spirit is to be found throughout Richard Rorty’s oeuvre and will continue to live with and through it.

Notes 1 Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” in CP. 2 From Whitman’s “To Foreign Lands” in Leaves of Grass (2000, pp. 3–4). 3 Thus the title T. W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnishtheorie: Studien über Husserl und die Phänomenologischen Antinomen (1956), translated by Willis Domingo as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1982). 4 See Brandom (2000b).

3

An Arc of Thought From Rorty’s Eliminative Materialism to His Pragmatism Robert Brandom Richard Rorty used to say that he was a perfect example of Isaiah Berlin’s hedgehog: he had really only ever had one idea. Considering the vast range and diversity of the topics Rorty addressed—encompassing epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, the whole history of philosophy and of the culture more generally, literature, politics, and more—such a claim might seem literally unbelievable. But I think there is a core of truth to it. For there is an almost ballistic trajectory described by his thought from very early on—well before Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—that brought him to the mature form of his pragmatism.1 The later work can be seen as the result of an extended meditation on the lessons that could be drawn from the earlier work. Rorty relentlessly followed out the logic of his argument, no matter where it led, continuing to draw consequences long after the switch on most thinkers’ internal compasses would have flipped from the modus ponens to the modus tollens position. Indeed, one trait he shared with his Princeton colleague David Lewis is the frequency with which they, more than almost any other philosophers of their generation, found it necessary to remind their audiences that ‘an incredulous stare is not an argument,’ as Lewis memorably put it. Of course, the sort of intense, resolute, ruthless singlemindedness that regularly provokes that kind of stare has been the source of some of our greatest philosophical high adventures—one need only think of Spinoza, Hobbes, and Berkeley, or of Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. We have a pretty good idea where Rorty eventually got to.2 He thought that the biggest contribution philosophers had ever made to the culture more generally was the Enlightenment. What was important about that conceptual sea-change is that we gave up the idea of the norms governing human conduct having their source in something non-human (their being something imposed

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on us by a divine will) and came to see that we ourselves need to take responsibility for those norms—that we need to deliberate with each other and decide what sort of beings we want to be, and so what we ought to do. Rorty was finally led to call for a second Enlightenment: one that would extend to our theoretical conception of knowledge the same insight that animated the first Enlightenment’s constructive criticism of traditional ways of construing the practical sphere. Here, too, Rorty thinks, we need to find ways to free ourselves from the picture of humans as responsible to something non-human. On the theoretical side the non-human putative authority to which we find ourselves in thrall is not God, but objective Reality. Of course, no reconceptualization can free us from the friction of what Dewey called ‘problematic situations.’ But we should understand that constraint as a feature of our practices, not something external to them, binding us from the outside. We need collectively to deliberate and decide what we should say in very much the same way the first Enlightenment taught us we need collectively to deliberate and decide what we should do. And the reason is the same in both cases: Anything else is unworthy of our dignity as self-determining creatures.

Eliminative materialism and pragmatism about norms What line of thought drove Rorty to this astonishing conclusion? Here is my hypothesis: I conjecture that it starts with the ideas behind the eliminative materialism he had arrived at already by 1970. Red-diaper baby that he had been, Rorty was always going to be a conceptual revolutionary. His first target was the philosophy of mind, where he singlehandedly came up with a genuinely new response to the hoary mind-body problem.3 Picking up a trope from Hegel, Nietzsche had famously announced that God is dead. What was novel about this was not its atheism; far from it. It was rather its commitment to there having been a God, but one whose very existence depended on our thought and practices. When we moderns began to live, act, and believe in different ways, God went out of our lives—and so, the radical thought went, out of existence entirely. Just so, Rorty claimed (as against, for instance, Wittgensteinian behaviorists) that we do have Cartesian minds. But that ontological fact depends on our social practices. It is intelligible—and even, perhaps, advisable—that we should change those practices in ways that would entail that we ‘lose our minds.’ Rorty takes Descartes to have introduced a distinctively modern conception



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of the mind (as part of the ‘subjective turn’ that preceded our ‘linguistic’ one). The genus of Cartesian ‘pensées’ that subsumes phenomena otherwise as diverse as thoughts and sensations as species is defined by ‘Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental’—as the title of his classic essay has it. No one else is in a position to override my sincere, contemporaneous first-person reports of my occurrent mental events. (This is, of course, the very feature that led Wittgenstein to deny the intelligibility of construing any of our utterances as reports of things that exhibit this peculiar sort of privacy.) The thought that is decisive for Rorty is double-barreled. Its first element is the idea that incorrigibility in this sense is a normative phenomenon: a matter of the incontestable authority of certain reports. The second is a social pragmatist idea he credits originally already to the Enlightenment: that normative statuses such as authority are always instituted by social practices. It is (contra Wittgenstein) perfectly intelligible that some of our utterances should both be reports and incontestably authoritative. That is not, however, because of the antecedent intrinsic metaphysical or ontological character of what they are reports of. It is because we can say just what we have to do in order to treat a class of our utterances as incontestably authoritative reports: as incorrigible. So treating them institutes that kind of normative status. But it is our creature. Rorty thinks the ancient Greeks did not have Cartesian minds. And what we have given, by arranging our practices so as to institute norms with this distinctive character, we can take away, if we but change those practices so as to allow other sorts of evidence to have probative evidential weight in contesting the reports previously treated as incorrigible. Ironically, and radically, Rorty here makes the Cartesian’s ownmost, innermost sanctum subject to the plastic power sometimes claimed for it over other things, for instance by God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream, That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem, Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;

as Rorty’s favorite poet Yeats put it.4 The Cartesian mind is real, but it is a contingent, optional product of our mutable social practices. I think that at this point Rorty began an extended investigation of the relation between what he came to call ‘vocabularies,’ on the one hand, and ontology, on the other—a relation that the example of eliminative materialism had shown is far too complex to be captured by talk of a ‘theoretical direction

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of fit,’ according to which how things anyway objectively are has authority over what we should say about it. His way forward was guided by looking at ontology through normative lenses and understanding normativity in a social pragmatist way. From the vantage-point afforded by those strategic methodological commitments, a three-sorted ontology appears. Subjective (Cartesian) things are those over which each individual knowing-and-acting subject has incontestable authority. Social things are those over which communities have incontestable authority. So one cannot intelligibly claim, say, that the Kwakiutl are wrong about what an acceptable greeting-gesture in their tribe is. There are no facts about that sort of social propriety over and above their collective practical attitudes of taking or treating some gestures as greetings. Finally, objective things are those over which neither individuals nor communities have incontestable authority, but which themselves exercise authority over claims that in the normative sense that speakers and thinkers are responsible to them count as being about those things.

From pragmatism about the subjective to pragmatism about the objective I am now in a position to formulate more carefully my principal thesis about the argumentative thread that led Rorty from his early to his later thought. I think he came to apply essentially the same considerations, mutatis mutandis, that he had made for the subjective province of this threefold ontology to the objective province. For once ontological distinctions have been drawn in normative terms of authority and responsibility, social pragmatism about norms means according a certain substantial categorial privilege to the ontological category of the social. The pragmatist takes it that the normative statuses that distinguish the three ontological categories—the structures of authority and responsibility characteristic of each—are themselves things that fall under the category of the social. The rules and practices for making and contesting various kinds of claims belong to the linguistic communities that deploy the vocabularies in question. So among the ontological kinds of the individual-subjective, the social-intersubjective, and the objective, the social is primus inter pares. (Compare the judiciary, which at least since Marbury vs. Madison, has been taken to exercise the ultimate authority to determine what falls within the proper purview of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the U.S. government.)



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What sort of position does one end up in, if one tries to make the same move with respect to the category of the objective that Rorty made for the subjective with his eliminative materialism? I think he actually oscillates between two positions. Here it is important to remember that some of Rorty’s views are more outrageous than others—but none are less. The more outrageous view is that the structure of authority and responsibility that constitutes objectivity is actually incoherent. When we think from a pragmatist point of view about what it would require, we see that it is not possible for us to institute such a structure. For it requires granting authority to something non-human, something that is merely there, to intrinsically normatively inert things that belong in a box with Wittgenstein’s ‘sign-post considered just as a piece of wood.’ A fair amount of Rorty’s rhetoric seems to commit him to a view of this stripe. What is intelligible is a cognitive theoretical consensus on various points (contingent, partial, and temporary though it may be). But the idea of something that cannot enter into a conversation with us, cannot give and ask for reasons, somehow dictating what we ought to say is not one we can in the end make sense of. It is the idea that we are subject (responsible) to an ultimately irrational authority—one whose cognitive contentfulness is, just because of that irrationality, unintelligible. Reality as the modern philosophical tradition has construed it (‘just as a piece of wood’) is the wrong kind of thing to exercise rational authority. That is what we do to each other. That is the lesson we ought to have learned about God from the first Enlightenment, and it will take a second Enlightenment to teach us how to apply that lesson to Objective Reality: the successor candidate for our subjection forwarded not now by the Church, but by Science. Rorty often consoled himself after attacks on his intellectual character forwarded by those who saw in such views a dangerous irrationalism (as though rejecting the idea of external non-human constraint meant we could no longer make sense of the idea of constraints manifested in our giving and asking each other for reasons) with the thought of those philosophes the first time around who were confidently condemned as immoralists on the grounds that they maintained that matter contained its own principles of motion.5 We eventually learned, after all, that the sort of atheism involved in demoting that function from the divine to the mundane sphere need not lead to running-wild-in-the-streets immoralism. Perhaps someday we could also learn to put aside our initial terror and learn to live with a reconstrual of the features of our practice that the normative structure of objectivity was originally postulated to explain.

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An alternative application of social pragmatism about norms But this is not the only way to apply earlier lessons to the case at hand. Perhaps it is a cultural advance for us to find it unintelligible that a mere fact—even the fact (supposing it to be a fact) that God created us, along with everything else—should suffice to give Him moral authority over us, to determine who we should be and how we should live our lives. How, after all, in a post-feudal age, are we supposed to understand the connection between the two that is curled up tightly in the conception of our Lord? However, if we look not to the original Enlightenment, but to eliminative materialism for our model, it seems a different lesson emerges. For the claim was precisely not that the structure of individual subjective authority that instituted mental events as incorrigible was unintelligible. On the contrary: we can understand exactly how we must take or treat each other in order to institute that structure and so the ontological category of things that exercise authority of that kind. The claim was rather that that structure is contingent and optional, and that it is accordingly possible, and under conceivable circumstances even advisable, to change our practices so as to institute a different structure of authority. What if one took up that attitude toward the normative structure that constitutes objectivity? On this line, one would not deny that the notion of objectivity makes sense. One would rather investigate what structure of social practices deserves to count as one where we have instituted a special dimension of normative appraisal of our performances such that authority over whether they are correct along that dimension has been deferred to some (in general) non-human things, which we then in this normative sense count as talking or thinking about. One would look to see whether this normative social structure of practices, once identified, can be seen to be optional, in the sense that it has alternatives that are at least intelligible. And one would then consider whether there are any considerations or circumstances that could make it attractive, advisable, or effective to alter or discard practices exhibiting that structure, in favor of some that have quite another shape. The key point is that the social pragmatist claim that normativity is always instituted by our practices and practical attitudes—that normative statuses are ultimately social statuses—does not entail that only the humans who institute those statuses can exhibit or possess them. The notion of responsibility to some non-human authority is not in principle undercut by the Enlightenment pragmatist insight that any such status depends on human attitudes of taking or



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treating something as authoritative. Consider oracles. Early Chinese shamans ceremoniously put tortoise shells in the fire, and then inspected the resulting cracks for similarities to ideographic characters, searching for authoritative answers to weighty factual questions about the future. In Europe, comets and the sightings of rare birds were on occasion invested with tremendous normative significance and purport. Insofar as normative significance is up to us, we can put it where we like—however unwisely. The question, it seems to me, is not whether we can invest authority in non-human things: take ourselves in practice to be responsible to them in a way that makes us responsible to them. Of course we can. It is rather how we can institute a dimension of assessment of our sayings and doings that is properly understood as granting semantic and epistemic authority over their correctness, to how it is with the things that we then, in that distinctive normative sense, count as thinking and talking about. What structure or constellation of social practical attitudes amounts to taking or treating some things as representings, in the sense that assessments of their correctness depend on (must appeal to, are responsible to) objects and facts that are thereby represented by them? There will be as many answers to that question as there are senses of ‘representation.’ If we have learned anything since Descartes put that concept at the center of modern philosophical attention, it is that there are many such senses. We can then ask of each of them, to what extent acknowledging the responsibility of some of our states, for their correctness in that sense, to various aspects of the world (including our fellow discursive practitioners) is a contingent, optional affair. What sort of expressive impoverishment would we condemn ourselves to if we gave up acknowledging (and so instituting) the distinctively semantic structure of authority and responsibility to largely non-human things and facts characteristic of the referential species of representation? I think we still have a long way to go (well into the fourth century since Descartes) in delineating that species of normative status, and so in answering the critical question Rorty is asking about it. For what it is worth, my own answer in Making It Explicit is that once it is properly understood we can see that the referential, representational dimension of semantic content is a central, essential, and unavoidable aspect of the game of giving and asking for reasons distinctive of discursive practice as such. It is a transcendental feature of talking in that it is a necessary condition of the possibility of interlocutors navigating across the inevitable (and productive) differences in background commitments between speaker and hearer, so that we can use each other’s assertions as premises in our own inferences. It is

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constitutive of the notion of information that can be conveyed by making claims to each other. On this reading, Rorty’s two principal theses are compatible with acknowledging the existence of an objective, representational structure of semantic authority. For, first, the referential, representational, denotational dimension of intentionality is understood as a normative structure. What we are talking or thinking about, what we refer to or represent, is that to which we grant a characteristic sort of authority over the correctness of our commitments, along a distinctive dimension of normative assessment we institute by adopting those practical attitudes of making ourselves responsible to what we in that sense count as making commitments about. And, second, we understand doing that, making ourselves responsible to non-human things, acknowledging their authority, as something we do—as conferring on them a distinctively semantic kind of normative status by our adoption of social-practical normative attitudes. The only question that remains is one of social engineering: what shape do our practices need to take in order to institute this kind of normative status? That is a Deweyan question that Rorty would have welcomed.

Notes 1 See Rorty, PMN. 2 I am thinking of the line of thought Rorty presented under the title ‘Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics’ in Rorty (1996c). 3 Contrast functionalism, which had many fathers. 4 ‘Blood and the Moon’ in Yeats (1933). 5 Cf. Jonathan Israel’s wonderful book about Spinoza, Israel (2001).

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The Contingent Status of Epistemic Norms Rorty, Kantian Pragmatisms, and Feminist Epistemologies Susan Dieleman It is by measuring Richard Rorty’s views against those of the Kantian pragmatists that one is best able to understand his unique position in contemporary philosophy.1 Indeed, though Rorty’s neopragmatist position is more similar to the positions offered by his contemporaries Jürgen Habermas and Hilary Putnam than it is dissimilar from them, the significant difference to be found in their respective views, and what forms the basis of their many exchanges, is their stances toward the status of epistemic norms. Rorty’s argument against Habermas’s endorsement of transcendental conditions that ground successful communication, and against Putnam’s contention that there exists a limit conception of truth upon which the possibility for critique depends, reveals that their contrasting views regarding epistemic norms lie at the base of their disagreements. In this chapter, I explore these debates in order to detail Rorty’s belief in the radical contingency of epistemic norms. This exploration engages a feminist lens because it is feminist critiques, specifically of Habermas’s work, that draw attention to those aspects of his work that Rorty seeks to correct, inadequacies that can be translated to Putnam’s case as well. That is, approaching this issue from a feminist angle helps highlight the dissimilarities in the theoretical positions between Rorty and his fellow neopragmatists, dissimilarities that are important to grasp to fully understand Rorty’s own views on epistemic normativity.

Rorty vs. Habermas: Social hope and universal validity Rorty had identified Habermas’s focus on universal validity as the principal difference between their perspectives. He writes, ‘I think that we can get along

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without that notion [of universal validity] and still have a sufficiently rich notion of rationality … Habermas thinks that we still need to keep it’ (1996a, p. 28). According to Habermas, universal validity refers to the transcendental rules that govern all speech acts and are therefore a precondition of communication. That is, no successful communication can occur without the supposition of these rules, which create what Habermas identifies as a ‘transcendental constraint to which we, as speakers, are subject as soon as we perform or understand or respond to a speech act’ (1998, p. 22). Speakers must believe that any of their utterances are or could be vindicated in terms of these transcendental rules or validity claims that arise with each and every speech act. In Habermas’s words, ‘A participant in communication acts with an orientation toward reaching understanding only under the condition that, in employing comprehensible sentences, he raises with his speech acts three validity claims in an acceptable way’ (1998, p. 88). So, in combination with comprehensibility, or the notion that every speech act will be linguistically intelligible, every speech act will and must include further validity claims to truth, truthfulness, and rightness.2 In order to satisfy the first validity claim, speech acts must be assumed to be true. That is, in order for communication to occur, an interlocutor must be able to assume that a speaker is speaking the truth. Speech acts must also be truthful; interlocutors must be able to assume that the speaker is being sincere and honest. Finally, speech acts must also appeal to rightness, or be appropriate in light of existing norms and values. When any of these three validity claims is not met, a speech act fails. In other words, a hearer may reject a speaker’s claim, and understanding will not be possible, if a speech act appeals to states of affairs that are not the case, causes the hearer to question the sincerity of the speaker, or does not conform to accepted norms. Communication is possible, and understanding can be achieved, only when speakers are accountable for the validity of what they say. Thus, Habermas’s idea of universal validity, manifested in these rules of communication, provides a transcendental, linguistic constraint on what can be said in discussion with others. In short, Habermas argues that there are particular rules of discourse that both speakers and hearers must assume when entering into a discursive space for understanding to occur, for justification to be successful, and for agreement to be reached. In addition to the linguistic constraints Habermas places on discourse, he also posits social and material conditions for successful communicative action, which culminate in the ideal speech situation, a ‘critical standard against which every actually realized consensus can be called into question and tested’ (McCarthy, 1973, p. xviii). In the ideal speech situation, four additional



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conditions should obtain if the agreement achieved is to be truly rational and not merely a compromise or agreement of convenience. That is, when these four social and material conditions obtain, we have an example of the Habermasian ideal speech situation. Seyla Benhabib, in Critique, Norm, and Utopia, offers an excellent summary, which I quote here: The four conditions of the ideal speech situation are: first, each participant must have an equal chance to initiate and to continue communication; second, each must have an equal chance to make assertions, recommendations, and explanations, and to challenge justifications … Third, all must have equal chances as actors to express their wishes, feelings, and intentions; and fourth, the speakers must act as if in contexts of action there is an equal distribution of chances to order and resist orders, to promise and to refuse, to be accountable for one’s conduct and to demand accountability from others. (p. 285)3

According to Habermas, the ideal speech situation allows for and encourages consensus through the non-violent force of the better argument, which means that it is a rational consensus. In order to meet the requirements of the ideal speech situation, Habermas argues communicative actors ought to engage in imaginative projection so they can distance themselves from their ‘contingent interests and self-understandings in order to arrive at an impartial judgment of everyone’s interests’ (Festenstein, 1997, p. 151). This claim resembles the Rawlsian positing of a veil of ignorance, where the principles of justice are determined by individuals who abstract themselves from their own contingencies.4 However, both Habermas and Rawls come under attack, in particular by feminists, for invoking this position. Iris Marion Young has mounted an internal critique to the effect that Habermas sets up an ideal of normative reason that excludes certain types of persons. She contends Habermas retains the traditional oppositions between reason and desire and between universal and particular, which can result in ‘the political exclusion of persons associated with affectivity and desire’ (1987, p. 68). In other words, Habermas’s counterfactual ideal speech situation requires individuals to remove from themselves such intrusive elements as desire or affectivity to become sufficiently rational to participate in discourse. Young suggests ‘a more thoroughly pragmatic interpretation of dialogic reason would not have to suppose that participants must abstract from all motives in aiming to reach agreement’ (1987, p.  69).5 Thus, Young’s criticism of Habermas rests

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on the claim that he reintroduces features of modern accounts of reason that feminists have shown to be harmful and, in particular, harmful to women. Nancy Fraser echoes Young’s concern, also from within the tradition of critical theory, by suggesting that the social inequalities of interlocutors in the Habermasian public sphere cannot be and are not effectively bracketed in the search for consensus. She writes, discursive interaction within the bourgeois public sphere was governed by protocols of style and decorum that were themselves correlates and markers of status inequality. These functioned informally to marginalize women and members of the plebeian classes and to prevent them from participating as peers. (Fraser, 1997, p. 78)

Fraser’s claim here reveals that, despite Habermas’s goal of elucidating an open and accessible democratic public sphere, his discourse ethics is still built upon exclusionary assumptions, for which Habermas elaborates no corrective. To drive this point home, Fraser brings together the perspectives of various historiographers, each of whom she suggests have found fault with Habermas’s conception of the public sphere. These critics, among whom she includes herself, ‘argue that, despite the rhetoric of publicity and accessibility, the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions’ (1997, p.  73).6 Thus, the Habermasian public sphere, because of these exclusions, is unable to attain the very goal it sets out for itself, namely, a rationally-achieved consensus about the common good. Moreover, imaginative projection or abstraction from contingencies in the ideal speech situation does not guarantee progress. As Festenstein puts it, ‘what opens us up to better suggestions are considerations such as these [disagreement, conflicting evidence, new ideas], and not the abstract possibility that there is a perspective from which we may judge matters differently’ (1997, p.  184–5). He further argues, ‘when we consider moral and political judgments, thinking about what is acceptable under ideal conditions may be just as much the source of self-righteousness … as a fallibilist outlook’ (1997, p.  185). In other words, speaking in the name of an idealized community when only a particular individual or group has participated in its imaginative constitution can have exactly the same effects as speaking in the name of one’s own community. It is this idea that gets to the heart of the feminist concern with the Habermasian ideal speech situation. In particular, when an idealized community is constructed through an abstraction away from the contingencies



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of identity, it is easy to stipulate its content to suit one’s own agenda, whatever it might be. If this is the case, it follows that, even though Rorty is often accused of being a defender of the status quo by endorsing what he has called a ‘frank ethnocentrism,’7 which foregoes the possibility of criticism on the basis of universal criteria, surely Habermas is as much at fault here as is Rorty. That is, the Habermasian ideal speech situation, which is imaginatively constituted, likely runs as great a risk as does Rorty’s ethnocentrism, without recognizing this risk. This is in part where Rorty finds fault with Habermas, Festenstein suggests: ‘the rules and norms identified by Habermas do no more than articulate some of the elements of the liberal political morality which he hopes to “ground”’ (2001, p.  204). Rorty argues that the norms Habermas thinks underlie discourse are simply manifestations of the morality he seeks to justify. That is, Habermas wrongly attempts to introduce communicative reason and discourse ethics to ground a particular morality, and does not realize that his theories are really an outgrowth of that particular morality. Habermas counters that he focuses not on the content or the outcome of discourse, but rather the form it takes. Thus, he thinks his theory of the ideal speech situation does not simply reintroduce the norms he hopes to ground because his account is purely procedural. It is this specific focus that he thinks allows him to avoid the problems he associates with Rorty’s ethnocentrism. In Habermas’s words, ‘On Rorty’s view, every idealization … will founder on the problem that in idealizing we must always take something familiar as our point of departure; usually it is “us,” that is, the communication community as we are familiar with it’ (2000, pp.  45–6). Rather than proceeding on the basis of the characteristics that define one’s own culture (as Rorty suggests we must), Habermas suggests an idealization of the justificatory conditions ‘can start with the formal and processual characteristics of justificatory practices in general that, after all, are to be found in all cultures’ (2000, p. 46). That is, Habermas thinks it is his focus on form rather than content that saves him from what he sees as Rorty’s erroneous embracing of ethnocentrism. Moreover, Habermas counters that, whether or not he is willing to admit it, Rorty’s account is not all that different from his own. He writes, in stressing the open, inclusive, nonrepressive features of a communication within a more and more idealized auditorium [in his debate with Putnam], Rorty approaches willy nilly my description of “rational discourse” and Putnam’s formula of truth as “rational acceptability under idealized conditions.” (1996, p. 21)

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In other words, Habermas contends that, even though Rorty places himself in opposition to what he sees as an unrealizable and problematic idealized version of discourse, he actually presents a very similar perspective. By appealing to a ‘better us’ to whom we should justify our beliefs and actions, Rorty’s position is closer to Habermas’s and Putnam’s than he would like to admit. However, Habermas’s postulation of universal norms that condition the possibilities of understanding and regulate discourse are, like the epistemic norms that undergird the representationalist metanarrative he seeks to replace, constructed rather than found. Analyzing Rorty’s debate with Habermas, alongside feminist concerns about the latter’s attempt to define the ideal speech situation, reveals that Habermas does not succeed in his attempts to formulate a universal basis for discourse. Richard Bernstein has argued that, as a result of his unwillingness to adopt a universal basis for discourse, Rorty ‘might claim that he is a more consistent “fallibilist” than Habermas, because he makes no pretence to speak about “ideal justification” or to anticipate what new forms of justification will be adopted in the future’ (2010, p.  177). In other words, Rorty’s unwillingness to posit transcendental conditions for the possibility of communication means that he sees epistemic norms as contingent and fallible where Habermas does not. Habermas’s response to this feature of Rorty’s position—that the lack of effort to give an account of truth and objectivity leads to a self-defeating relativism and a performative contradiction—has been echoed by fellow Kantian pragmatist Hilary Putnam, to whom I now turn.8

Rorty vs. Putnam: Warranted assertibility and truth The most important differences between Habermas and Rorty are reflected in a similar debate between Putnam and Rorty over the concept of warranted assertibility. According to Putnam, the signal difference between his own work and Rorty’s concerns the topic of warrant. In Realism with a Human Face, Putnam seeks to clarify Rorty’s understanding of ‘warrant’ by posing five principles to Rorty and asking which he would accept: 1. In ordinary circumstances, there is usually a fact of the matter as to whether the statements people make are warranted or not. 2. Whether a statement is warranted or not is independent of whether the majority of one’s cultural peers would say it is warranted or unwarranted.



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3. Our norms or standards of warranted assertibility are historical products; they evolve in time. 4. Our norms and standards always reflect our interests and values. Our picture of intellectual flourishing is part of, and only makes sense as part of, our picture of human flourishing in general. 5. Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility— are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards. (p. 21) Putnam argues that pragmatists, himself included, believe all five principles can and should be held together. However, he asserts that, although he agrees with (1) and (2), he imagines Rorty would disagree with them. In other words, Putnam thinks that, while Rorty may happily agree with him about (3)–(5), he will be unlikely to support the first two principles: that warrant exists and that it exists independently of popular opinion. This assumption is borne out, for the most part, in Rorty’s response to Putnam, where he states that he has ‘no trouble with (3)–(5),’ but that he is unsure regarding (1) and (2) because of the possible ambiguities involved in the terms used to elaborate those principles (TP, p. 49). Putnam defends the first and second principles: ‘the existence of such a thing as “warrant” and its independence from the opinion of one’s cultural peers’ (1990, p.  22). While asserting the independence of warrant would lead many to presume a transcendental concept of warrant, he argues that warrant’s being independent from majority opinion is ‘nothing but a property of the concept of warrant itself … [or at least] a central part of our picture of warrant’ (1990, p. 22). That is, our use of the word ‘warrant’ is intended, Putnam thinks, to point to something beyond Rorty’s sociological interpretation of the term. According to Putnam, the way we understand and use the concept of ‘warrant’ points beyond mere agreement, not to a fact about a transcendent reality, but to the fact that it is possible to be justified in a belief or claim, even if nobody agrees with you. That is, it is possible to have a true belief, and thus be warranted in expressing that belief, even if majority opinion rejects it. Putnam writes, ‘the attempt to say that warrant (and truth) is just a matter of communal agreement is, then, simultaneously a misdescription of the notions we actually have and a self-refuting attempt to both have and deny an “absolute perspective”’ (1990, p. 26). In other words, the sociological account of warrant both misunderstands the meaning of the term ‘warrant,’ and runs into the paradoxical problem, familiar to pragmatists and other so-called relativists, of claiming it is true that there is no truth. Putnam contends that the Relativist9 gets caught up in a sort of

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performative self-contradiction (as noted above) when trying to reduce warrant to a matter of acceptance by one’s peers. He describes the inconsistency of the Relativist’s position as follows: ‘if, as a matter of empirical fact, the statement “the majority of my cultural peers would not agree that relativism is correct” is true, then, according to the relativist’s own criterion of truth, relativism is not true’ (1992, p. 71). The Relativist who endorses a sociological account of warrant invites the paradox of self-reflexivity because, if it is the case that one’s peers do not agree with relativism, and whatever is true is simply what one’s peers take to be true, then relativism itself cannot be true. Putnam recognizes that the notion that majority opinion might constitute warrant refers only to a specific part of Rorty’s overall project. That is, the idea that objectivity is nothing more than intersubjective agreement resides only within what Rorty calls ‘normal discourse.’ However, I would like to call attention to Putnam’s point, that an appeal to ‘community’ is problematic because what constitutes membership in that community is unclear. He asks whether agreement between two people, or even the agreement of an individual with himself could constitute truth. He further argues that the only way that Rorty could respond to this worry would be to postulate hypothetical cultural peers. That is, Rorty could argue that ‘a judgment in normal discourse is true just in case one’s cultural peers would agree if they were present, or if they were informed of the relevant circumstances’ (Putnam, 1992, pp.  68–9). However, this use of counterfactuals is avoided by Rorty as he believes it would bring his account too close to the realm of the ‘idealized community’ that he seeks to avoid, as seen above in his debate with Habermas. Rorty argues that a consistent reading of the principles enumerated by Putnam requires a sociological interpretation of warrant, where warrant can mean nothing more than the acceptance of an assertion by a speaker’s peers. He states, quite explicitly: ‘I view warrant as a sociological matter, to be ascertained by observing the reception of S’s statement by his peers’ (TP, p. 50). Rorty thus argues that Putnam is the one attempting to stand with one foot within his language and the other outside. He offers the following scenario to illuminate how Putnam retains a transcendental commitment in his account of warrant: [S]uppose everybody in the community, except for one or two dubious characters notorious for making assertions even stranger than p, thinks S must be a bit crazy. They think this even after patiently listening to S’s defense of p, and after making sustained attempts to talk him out of it. Might S still be



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warranted in asserting p? Only if there were some way of determining warrant sub specie aeternitatis, some natural order of reasons that determines, quite apart from S’s ability to justify p to those around him, whether he is really justified in holding p. (TP, p. 50)

Thus, Rorty insists, Putnam’s view that warrant involves something more than sociology simply reintroduces the problematic assumption that it is possible to be speaking the truth, even if nobody else agrees that one is. Since the fact of the matter in this sort of situation would be impossible to determine on a thoroughly pragmatic basis, Rorty simply dispenses with the question of what it would mean to determine whether someone is warranted in making a claim with which nobody else agrees. What is at issue for Rorty here is the hope, not only that one could be speaking the truth, but also that one could know when one is speaking the truth when everybody else says that one is not. This hope assumes a connection between warrant and truth, thereby displacing warrant from the community in which a claim is made, a move Rorty clearly resists. Of course, Rorty’s position raises the worry that it does nothing more than apologize for the status quo. That is, if warrant is nothing more than majority opinion—if there is nothing beyond the sociology of the matter–then Rorty is unable to argue against the possible existence of morally abhorrent conditions. This is why Putnam suggests that he and Rorty do not agree at all regarding principle (5) that includes the claim that ‘there are better and worse norms and standards,’ because Rorty provides too subjective an approach to the ideas of ‘better’ and ‘worse’ (Putnam, 1990, p.  21). That is, Rorty defines ‘better’ and ‘worse’ by appealing to a sense in which reforms ‘come to seem clearly better than their predecessors’ (Putnam, 1990, p. 23). Putnam replies to this formulation by stating, Just as it is internal to our picture of warrant that warrant is logically independent of the opinion of the majority of our cultural peers, so it is internal to our picture of ‘reform’ that whether the outcome of a change is good (a reform) or bad (the opposite) is logically independent of whether it seems good or bad. (1990, p. 24)

Putnam’s worry, therefore, is that Rorty will be unable to offer a normative distinction between a world where the Nazis win and a world where the Allies win.

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According to Rorty, Putnam sees me as relativistic because I can appeal to no ‘fact of the matter’ to adjudicate between the possible world in which the Nazis win out, inhabited by people for whom the Nazis’ racism seems common sense and our egalitarian tolerance crazy, and the possible world in which we win out and the Nazis’ racism seems crazy. (TP, p. 51)

Now, Rorty actually agrees that he is unable to appeal to any sort of ‘fact of the matter.’ Yet Putnam is in the same situation, he suggests. Indeed, the further question that must be asked is this: if our norms and standards, including those of warrant, are historical products as in (3), and if they always reflect our interests and values as in (4), and are capable of reform as in (5), then how is Putnam better situated than Rorty? That is, what tools does Putnam have at his disposal that could be used to challenge the ‘popular Nazi?’ Putnam introduces a limit conception of truth to help him avoid what he sees as the dangers of relativism and its attendant incapacity for critical inquiry. As Paul D. Forster puts it, ‘Putnam concludes we must either adopt a limit notion of truth, thereby ensuring that fallibilism and criticism remain intelligible, or become radical relativists’ (1992, p.  593). For Putnam, a ‘desirable distinction’ between ‘halftruths’ and ‘absolute truth’ was lost when John Dewey jettisoned the latter to focus solely on the former, renamed ‘warranted assertibility.’10 Putnam criticizes Rorty’s adoption of this Deweyan position, and proposes in its place an idealized version of warranted assertibility that firmly maintains the distinction between ‘half-truths’ and ‘absolute truth.’ The concept of truth as ‘idealized rational acceptability’ serves as a bulwark for Putnam against the sort of relativism he understands Rorty to endorse, in that ‘to claim of any statement that it is true, that is, that it is true in its place, in its context, in its conceptual scheme, is, roughly, to claim that it could be justified were epistemic conditions good enough’ (Putnam, 1990, p. vii). This positing of truth as a limit that determines appropriate or acceptable warrant is intended to maintain the critical abilities of theory which Putnam believes Rorty abandons with his sociological account of warrant. Forster summarizes the reasons underlying Putnam’s desire to maintain a limit conception of truth as follows: Positing an ideal limit preserves the gap between justification at a particular time and truth. To preserve this gap is to save the realist intuition that a statement might be false even though it follows from the best theory currently available.



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Close the gap between justification and truth and critical activity collapses; to say someone is wrong is only to say that they have different opinions. (1992, p. 593)

In short, Putnam thinks truth, rationality, and justification cannot be merely sociological; they cannot be the outgrowths of any particular paradigm. Instead, they are presupposed by the activity of criticizing paradigms, and are in this sense transcendent. Seyla Benhabib also criticizes Rorty on the basis that his position precludes the possibility of critical inquiry. Though Benhabib ultimately defends Habermas, her arguments aid in fleshing out this specific issue between Rorty and Putnam. Benhabib argues that Rorty’s attempts to avoid introducing universal norms of justificatory practices, and his resultant adoption of an ethnocentric position, leaves feminism without the tools necessary to offer ‘a certain ordering of one’s normative priorities, a statement of the methodological assumptions guiding one’s choice of narratives, and a clarification of those principles in the name of which one speaks’ (1992, p. 226). Benhabib seeks a middle ground, therefore, between representationalist theories of knowledge and the position that Rorty offers, and finds it in Habermas’s theories of communicative action and discourse ethics. She proposes ‘an epistemology and politics which recognizes the lack of metanarratives and foundational guarantees but which nonetheless insists on formulating minimal criteria of validity for our discursive and political practices’ (1990, p. 125). Having these ‘minimal criteria of validity’ is necessary in particular for feminism, Benhabib argues, because ‘Social criticism without some form of philosophy is not possible, and without social criticism the project of a feminist theory which is at once committed to knowledge and to the emancipatory interests of women is inconceivable’ (1992, p. 225). In other words, if feminist theory is something worth continuing, philosophical inquiry concerned to determine the rules of discourse ought to be maintained.

Epistemic norms and social criticism How we understand the status of epistemic norms determines our understanding of social criticism. I have noted already that Rorty’s position regarding epistemic normativity tends to breed worries that he endorses a form of relativism that precludes the possibility of criticism. However, I want to defend Rorty against criticisms that a commitment, either to Habermasian-style rules

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of discourse or to a Putnam-style limit conception of truth, is required to maintain the possibility of mounting effective social criticism. Showing how robust concepts of epistemic normativity are not required to maintain a critical enterprise, Forster defends Rorty against Putnam’s worry that his position loses its critical bite. He offers an excellent example to show why it is that a limit theory of truth is not required to maintain a critical perspective: Although it makes sense to discuss the merits of rule changes in chess such debates do not typically involve claims that a particular set of rules constitutes the real game of chess. It is odd to suggest that chess was played incorrectly before the introduction of castling and en passant yet it is intelligible to debate whether it was improved by the addition of these moves … Similarly, it is possible to discuss the relative merits of alternative political arrangements and to debate changes in particular institutions without postulating an enduring entity to which such proposals must answer. (1992, p. 594)

In other words, it is always possible to debate better and worse norms without recourse to an unconditioned possibility. Thus, in response to Putnam’s fifth principle: ‘Our norms and standards of anything—including warranted assertibility—are capable of reform. There are better and worse norms and standards,’ Rorty reasserts that such norms and standards can indeed be judged, but they must be judged against one’s own lights (Putnam, 1990, p. 21). In response to Putnam’s accusations of relativism, Rorty takes aim at Putnam’s notion of idealized rational acceptability, arguing, ‘idealized’ adds nothing to ‘rational acceptability.’ If there is no such guidance system built into human beings qua human then the terms ‘warranted,’ ‘rationally acceptable,’ etc., will always invite the question ‘to whom?’ This question will always lead us back, it seems to me, to the answer ‘Us, at our best.’ So all ‘a fact of the matter about whether p is a warranted assertion’ can mean is ‘a fact of the matter about our ability to feel solidarity with a community that views p as warranted.’ (TP, pp. 52–3)

Interestingly, Rorty elsewhere declares the question ‘to whom?’ irrelevant. In responding to his interlocutor Leszek Kołakowski, who raises ‘doubts about the criteria of “usefulness”… because of [its] vagueness and our inability to decide what, for whom, and on what time scale anything is useful or not,’ Rorty insists that such doubts are simply rhetorical exaggerations (Kołakowski, 1996, p. 54).



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He contends, ‘such decisions are made all the time, and made rationally—that is to say, by the attainment of unforced, Habermasian consensus among informed inquirers, rather than by force or fraud’ (Rorty, 1996b, p. 60). The specific route taken by Rorty in response to the ‘to whom?’ question is, in his words, to grasp the ethnocentric horn of the dilemma between relativism and ethnocentrism. Rorty argues pragmatists ‘should say that we must, in practice, privilege our own group, even though there can be no noncircular justification for doing so’ (ORT, p. 29). When faced with objections to his ethnocentrism, he argues that, if we understand ‘ethnos’ to refer to ‘those who share enough of one’s beliefs to make fruitful conversation possible,’ then all conversation that takes place—at least within the realm of what Rorty calls ‘normal discourse’—is ethnocentric (ORT, p. 30). Ethnocentrism is, Rorty argues, an unavoidable condition of the real-world context in which conversation occurs. As his debate with Habermas and Putnam makes clear, any attempt to reach beyond ethnocentrism requires worrisome assumptions, including the assumption that there are universal norms of reasoning or a limit concept of truth that create and condition the possible forms discursive practices can take. Because he believes it impossible to avoid ethnocentrism, Rorty suggests replacing the Habermasian search for the transcendental conditions for the possibility of understanding with what he calls social hope. It is the hope for a better future, rather than anything universal, that prompts and creates the conditions for successful communication, including the possibility for effective social criticism. Included in the better future Rorty envisages is greater human solidarity, which involves stretching the category of ‘us’ to include those people who are currently thought of as ‘they.’ Pragmatists, Rorty proposes, ‘deny that the search for objective truth is a search for correspondence to reality and urge that it be seen instead as a search for the widest possible intersubjective agreement’ (TP, p.  63). With broader agreement as a goal, Rorty argues democracy should come before philosophy. Thus, philosophers should stop talking about truth and turn to the question of how to persuade people to broaden the size of the audience they take to be competent, to increase the size of the relevant community of justification. The latter project is not only relevant to democratic politics, it pretty much is democratic politics. (Rorty, 2000a, p. 9)

By prioritizing democracy over philosophy, the goal becomes not truth, but increasing the breadth of one’s ethnos, those with whom one can engage in ‘fruitful conversation.’11

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In short, in opposition to Habermas and Putnam, Rorty thinks that the ‘formal and processual characteristics of justificatory practices,’ or the ‘minimal criteria of validity for our discursive and political practices’ should be up for debate. Rorty takes this position because such practices are no more than habits of normal discourse, where the practices are contingent upon the discursive community in which we find ourselves, and therefore can be the target of re-interpretation. Thus, as Rorty suggests, the most important shift in philosophical focus involves a shift ‘from the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in those standards which make up intellectual history’ (PMN, pp. 389–90). That is, it is of greater value to focus on the politics of real-life conversations than it is to pursue the perennial philosophical questions that by now have outlived their usefulness. This pragmatist conception of social criticism, which depends in part on the specific version of epistemic normativity forwarded by Rorty, would enable the work required to enhance our conversational practices.

Conclusion: Rorty and feminism Rorty’s neopragmatism relies to a great extent on his claim that epistemic norms are contingent and fallible, and it is this claim that differentiates his position from the work of the Kantian pragmatists. Moreover, this view of epistemic norms, I have been implicitly suggesting throughout, makes Rortyan neopragmatism a valuable ally for feminist theory. To render explicit the beneficial terms of that alliance, I explore Jane Braaten’s work, where she presents a perspective that supports the reasons I propose for rejecting Habermas’s and Putnam’s views in favor of Rorty’s. Although she uses different language than I do here, Braaten similarly argues that Habermas’s reliance on universal norms of reasoning undermines the usefulness of his approach for feminist theory. More specifically, it is his prioritizing of epistemic justification in the development of community of which feminists should be wary. Braaten suggests that Habermas’s ‘reliance on procedures of epistemic justification in developing this ideal as an ideal of community countervails the basic premises of feminist epistemology’ (1995, p. 145). In other words, Braaten disagrees with Habermas’s prioritizing of epistemology over community, a move which she believes places



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his position at odds with the goals of feminist theory and politics. She argues that, according to Habermas, the validity basis of speech is the set of rules of justificatory argumentation. It is the mutual recognition of and compliance with these rules, Habermas argues, that secures the possibility of relationship. The successful speech act, then, establishes a relationship between the speaker and the hearer only insofar as the epistemic confidence of each requires the justified agreement of the other. (1995, p. 148)

In other words, Habermas leaves too much in the hands of universal rules of justification, upon which speech acts, and thus community, are based. Some feminist epistemologists have suggested that community comes before the postulation of these sorts of norms, and are in fact constituted by and through the practices of communities.12 Habermas incorrectly reverses the order. Braaten points out that, ‘because our projects develop within diverse contexts to meet diverse needs, it seems at first glance hardly appropriate to identify any one set of “principles of reason” to frame their rationality’ (1995, p. 155). That is, Habermas’s claim that there are universal rules of discourse to be found in all cultures ignores the very complex goals and purposes–over time and across cultures–that determine appropriate forms of discourse for that context, an issue which feminist theory and activism rightly takes very seriously. This perspective is usefully contrasted with Rorty’s, which does not require a commitment to universal rules of justification, and thus can be read as working toward the kind of account Braaten looks for but is unable to find in Habermas. Because Rorty’s position does recognize the contingent, contextual nature of so-called rules of justification where his contemporaries do not, Rorty’s neopragmatism is one of the most promising accounts currently available to feminists interested in challenging prevailing epistemic norms and practices.13 Although the differences between Rorty and the Kantian pragmatists regarding transcendental conditions, ideal speech communities, and limit conceptions of truth seem minor, they are not as insignificant as might be thought. While Habermas contends that justificatory practices are universal and are articulated by the validity claims inherent in communication, and Putnam posits an ideal limit which enables critique, Rorty suggests that these practices and ideals too are contingent. And, because they are contingent, they can be challenged and changed. The question of how this is best accomplished, however, remains for us to answer.

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Notes 1 I adopt Richard Bernstein’s use of the term ‘Kantian pragmatist’ from The Pragmatic Turn, though it was originally used by Habermas himself (so far as I can tell). Bernstein identifies three characteristics of Habermas’s thought that render his version of pragmatism a ‘Kantian pragmatism.’ These include the ‘formalpragmatic statement of the unavoidable conditions of speech and action,’ the ‘sharp (categorical) distinction between the right and the good,’ and the ‘strict distinction between theoretical and practical reason, and consequently between theoretical and practical philosophy’ (Bernstein, 2010, p. 181). Though Habermas parts ways with Putnam regarding this final characteristic since Putnam is unwilling to accept the ‘sharp distinction between values and norms,’ both Bernstein and Habermas identify Putnam as a Kantian pragmatist (Bernstein, 2010, p. 181). The debate between Habermas and Putnam over these issues can be found in Putnam (2002), pp. 111–34, and Habermas (2003), pp. 213–36. 2 These three types of validity claims correspond to the three dimensions that constitute communicative action. According to Habermas, the assumption of the truth of a speech act reflects the objective dimension of validity, the assumption of truthfulness reflects the subjective dimension of validity, and the assumption of rightness reflects the intersubjective dimension of validity. 3 Matthew Festenstein offers another useful characterization of the Habermasian ideal speech situation. He explains that, in order for discourse to be genuine rather than strategic, the following rules must obtain: ‘no one competent to speak and act may be excluded from discourse; everyone is allowed to question or introduce any assertion, and to express other attitudes and interests; no one may be prevented by force or fraud from participating on these terms’ (1997, p. 151). 4 See Rawls (1971), pp. 136–42. 5 Young further points out that Habermas’s notion of discourse as argumentation does not leave room for alternative forms of communication, such as greeting, rhetoric, and narrative. See Young (2000), pp. 52–80. 6 Although I do not have the space to pursue their specific criticisms here, Fraser points to the work of historiographers Joan Landes, Mary Ryan, Elizabeth BrooksHigginbotham, and Geoff Eley as examples of potent criticisms of the Habermasian public sphere, as well as possibilities for reconstructing a new, more useful, conception of the public sphere. See Fraser (1997), pp. 69–98. 7 See Rorty, ORT, pp. 21–34, for his most explicit defense of ethnocentrism. 8 Bernstein suggests that Putnam and Habermas’s common opposition to Rorty’s rejection of ‘ideal justification’ is ‘one reason why Habermas views Putnam as a fellow Kantian pragmatist who justifies a post-Kantian internal realism’ (Bernstein, 2010, p. 177).



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9 Putnam uses the term ‘Relativist’ to stand in as a name for all relativists, among whom he counts Rorty. It is possible, however, that his use of ‘Relativist’ as a proper noun is simply his way of identifying Rorty specifically, without having to name him. 10 ‘Half-truths’ is William James’s term for beliefs we understand to be fallible. ‘Absolute truth’ is the term, taken from C. S. Peirce, used to denote the system of beliefs that will be affirmed at the end of inquiry. Putnam thinks the distinction between these two kinds of truths is useful, and he therefore disagrees with Dewey’s—and therefore also Rorty’s—lack of interest in the latter. See Putnam (1990), pp. 221–2. 11 See ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ in Rorty, ORT, pp. 175–96. 12 Although this clearly is a glossing-over of an important theme in feminist philosophy, more careful articulations can be found in the work of numerous theorists. See for example, Young (2000), and Fricker (2007). 13 What I offer here is the suggestion that Rorty’s views on epistemic normativity provide a compelling reason for feminists to turn their attention to developing a specifically Rortyan version of a pragmatist feminism. However, there are a number of other key issues that a fully-fledged proposal for such a perspective would need to address. See Dieleman (2010), where I present a consideration of some of these issues.

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For the Sake of His Own Generation Rorty on Destruction and Edification Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir. (Nietzsche, 1966, paragraph 6)

Destruction, edification, historicity ‘Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation’ (PMN, p. 369). Thus Richard Rorty expresses one of his well-known metaphilosophical oppositions. How well does this opposition fit Rorty’s own practice? Did Rorty edify? If he did, was it through destruction? And such edifying destruction as he was able to wreak—was it achieved in so far as Rorty eschewed construction? Is there really, in his writing, no assemblage of interconnected thought of positive and lasting (even if not eternal) value? Pressing such questions may seem to be an attempt to squeeze substance from what is only a rhetorical trope, a characteristically Rortyan exaggeration, an idealized polarization. Perhaps this is so; but perhaps these questions nevertheless are worth asking, in so far as Rorty’s greatest contribution to intellectual life is his imaginative, profound, and radical vision of what philosophy might be. That vision is shaped less like a doctrine than a struggle, a dynamic interplay of tensions in Rorty’s conception of the point and aspirations of his own intellectual activity, and this struggle comes to expression precisely in Rorty’s rhetorical oppositions of styles and kinds of philosophical thought.

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As Rorty articulated and sought to come to grips with, let us say, two basic intellectual impulses—with what we may call, respectively, the existentialist and the utilitarian impulse1—he forged a conception of philosophy that faces up to commitments and beliefs with an undeniable corrosive force, provoking accusations of relativism, cynicism, and irresponsibility. In so far, though, as these commitments and beliefs resonate with his readers, Rorty’s struggle— even, or perhaps especially, considered as a private struggle—for a vision of his own intellectual activity that offers a degree of justification, and may support a sense of pursuing, in an individual life, something worthwhile, will have interest beyond the rhetorical and the biographical. Such readers, as I imagine them, are alive to the nihilistic worry that their philosophical theorizing may be little more than a self-indulgent game. At the same time they suspect themselves of harbouring this same nihilism because, while it threatens to rob their activity of substantive point, it also promises to absolve them of the charge of any serious immorality—or at least to mitigate their fear that they may be misspending their time and resources in the face of what civic-mindedness and solidarity in our age require, by amoralizing, or aestheticizing, a persistent experience of guilt. Readers with such uneasy relations to the significance of their theoretical commitments and to the value of their own intellectual practice, might take from Rorty’s magnificent struggle not only intellectual inspiration, but also reassurance—even, perhaps, comfort. For contrary to common criticism, articulated also in this volume,2 Rorty’s Nietzschean pragmatism is rooted in an exquisite sensitivity to the complexity of the relationship between private intellectual striving and public intellectual service that the pursuit of philosophy characteristically embodies. Edification, I will here suggest, may serve as a Rortyan term for the achievement of a cultivated ability to manage this complex relationship judiciously in the conduct of one’s own intellectual life. To set the stage, let us consider the idea of destruction as a philosophical strategy. What might that be? Could it, flourish and hyperbole aside, amount to anything but the production of a devastating argument against some position? The question points toward the last chapter of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, ‘Philosophy without Mirrors,’ where the connection between edification and destruction is first made (PMN, pp.  357–94). This chapter opens with a discussion of hermeneutics. Gadamer’s Truth and Method, Rorty tells us, distils from German Idealism just what he at this point is looking for: an idea of self-creation that does not rely on a conception of human essence—does not rely, that is, on a specifiable template, a set measure, or a predefined goal.



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As Rorty explains, Gadamer thereby provides an essential service to the line of thought developed in PMN so far: He … helps reconcile the ‘naturalistic’ point … [made] in the previous chapter—that the ‘irreducibility of the Geisteswissenschaften’ is not a matter of metaphysical dualism—with our ‘existentialist’ intuition that redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do. (PMN, pp. 358–9)

At this late point in PMN, after 350 pages of genealogical and analytical criticism of epistemology-based philosophy, Rorty unveils the fundamental message of the book: it is what we can make of ourselves, not what we may come to know, that requires our attention. It is our capacity to create ourselves, rather than our ability to reflect the world, which makes us creatures of moral worth and dignity. And so it is the elaboration of possibility, not the legislation of constraint, which should be the basic concern of humanistic reflection. As a first pass at articulating the spirit of a philosophical conversation thus oriented, the brief third part of PMN—incomplete, coarse-grained, suggestive—sets Rorty’s philosophical agenda for the next three decades. However, the critical part of PMN—the bulk of the book—is also in service of that same agenda. For why should we not respond to Rorty that epistemology-based philosophy is exactly the elaboration of human possibility, in the most general way possible? Imagining ourselves different in various ways from our past and from our present selves is well and good, but unless our imaginary efforts are disciplined by knowledge of such intransigent constraints as there may be on what we as thinking, acting beings are, then our efforts of imagination are idle, only worthless fantasies. What is really humanly possible is a subject of theoretical knowledge. Such knowledge is just what philosophy has sought since its Greek inception, and what it continues to seek. Now, this response rejects a basic contrast animating Rorty’s entire oeuvre, one that constitutes, to put it oxymoronically, the essence of his pragmatist view of philosophy; the contrast, that is, between the elaboration of particular human possibilities and the rational determination of general constraints on human thought and agency. Rorty’s programmatic goal is exactly to persuade philosophers to give up on the latter just so that we may in full awareness focus our efforts on the former. A fundamental aim, then, of the deconstruction of the epistemological tradition that occupies the bulk of PMN—a task, also, to which Rorty returns at various points in later writings—is to undermine the idea that

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the imaginative elaboration of possibility, on the one hand, and the rational determination of general constraint, on the other, are simply two sides of the same coin. ‘The rational determination of general constraint on human thought and agency’ is a description of vast scope—in fact, it should to be taken as more or less coextensive with ‘metaphysics.’ And it is with respect to metaphysics that the concept of destruction has application in PMN. There will be no devastating arguments against metaphysics, for metaphysics, vagueness of the concept aside, just is not the sort of thing you argue against. By the time you have specified what you argue against sufficiently clearly to frame an argument, the game is up; you are doing metaphysics.3 Opposing metaphysics, as Rorty does, may well require arguments against specific metaphysical theses (and one finds such arguments in PMN), but the upshot had better not be support for an alternative metaphysical thesis; the upshot must be that the particular framework of assumptions within which a set of pro-and-con arguments are mounted gives way. We should think of this not as a matter of our being brought to abandon specific theses, to change our minds about truth values, but, in accord with Rorty’s romanticism, of coming to doubt the point of determining the truth values of a range of propositions that earlier mattered to us. Throughout his counter-metaphysical writings, Rorty directs his destructive efforts at essentialism in its various guises, in so far as essences are just the sort of things that may (in principle, one might wish to add) be definitively described once and for all. In PMN the particular point is to show that neither the world, nor the mind, have features that are both perfectly general, and yet of sufficient substance to provide real constraints on what we may know and how we may come to know it. In the later essays on truth, the aim is to shift the discussion so that we consider the notion of truth pragmatically, in light of its conversational purposes. Effecting this shift, Rorty hopes, will cause us to abandon the idea that truth is a substantive relation, something with a determinate nature about which discoveries may be made such that inquiry may be improved or virtues bolstered.4 In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, a chief aim is to discredit the attempt to find a vocabulary that withstands all possible circumvention, protecting what it describes—or those who use it—from the destabilizing effects of further redescription. In this context, anti-essentialism takes the form of the claim that ‘anything can be made to look good or bad by redescription’ (CIS, p. 73). Re-evaluation through recontextualization, thereby changing saliencies and significance, is always a possibility. Pragmatism, however, even in Rorty’s variety, is not principally a destructive



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philosophy. A fundamental aspect of Rorty’s contribution to philosophy in the spirit of pragmatism consists in drawing up, and attempting to implement, proposals for how we may, using language, do various things differently from the way we have been doing them up to now. Thus we may want to treat democracy as a commitment to the continuous expansion of a circle of contingent solidarity, a kind of continually self-transcending ethnocentrism (cf. CIS). So conceived, democrats will be committed not to a specifiable, albeit idealized, institutional arrangement, but to an open-ended process of institutional reform, the direction of which will be determined by the actual encounters, always to be sought out, between people, groups, and communities whose practices diverge and whose descriptions may clash. These two philosophical strategies—the destruction of essentialist conceptions and the elaboration of alternative depictions and proposals—both trade on the hermeneutical point that Rorty, in PMN, extracts from Gadamer. It is what Gadamer calls the historicity of understanding that Rorty deploys against the very idea of the kind of knowledge that epistemology-oriented philosophy seeks to establish.5 And it is through the lens of this same historicity that Rorty conceives of philosophical innovation as redescription. Indeed, it is only against the backdrop of historicism that the conditional, practical, and experimental nature of what we may still call a constructive form of philosophizing avoids ending up either as an irrationalist shirking of the responsibilities of philosophical thinking, or, alternatively, as a garden-variety form of fallibilism. This is because historicism requires a conception of philosophy that construes it neither as sheer, self-sufficient innovation, a display of subjective imagination, nor as an attempted gradual approximation to a good or a truth that lies already in waiting. With Gadamer, it depicts philosophy instead as a conversational or dialogical comportment where successful interpretation or redescription both expands the horizon of a conversing community and enriches the nature of what is to be understood. In PMN, Rorty proposes edification as the name for this conception, in which the normative and descriptive elements are inextricably intertwined. The proposal that edification is what gives content to philosophy may be understood—putting the point in hermeneutic terms—as a strategy of redescription available to historically-effected consciousness.6 I elaborate the point below. I then go on to suggest that the philosophical story offered in PMN, culminating with the idea of edification, is developed significantly in CIS. Here a change in focus and scope, and a development of Rorty’s conception of his purpose, provide material for a richer notion of edification. In CIS, the central theme

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is the question of how to construe, and how to cope with, conflicts between two sets of aims or desires, namely, the wish to make something distinctive of one’s particular self, to assume ownership for oneself as an individual, and the wish to be a member of and a contributor to a just community. Rorty’s working out, in CIS, of the complex relationship between the private and the public as purposes of redescription lead to an understanding of the opposition between destruction and construction not just as an element in the articulation of a historicist response to the pretensions of metaphysics, but as a tension of intellectual activity conceived in practical-ethical and personal terms.

Pragmatism and the hermeneutic subject Let us proceed, in appropriately circular fashion, by returning to Rorty’s appropriation of Gadamer. For present purposes, there are two key ideas to take from Gadamer’s account of understanding. The first is the idea that ‘prejudices are the conditions of understanding’ (Gadamer, 1994, p.  277ff.). Prejudices here must be taken to encompass those cognitive resources that are not (at least not as they are active or activated) under reflective or deliberate control, and by virtue of which we experience the world and what goes on in it as meaningful. These resources, moreover, are those that are bestowed on us as we are acculturated into the particular languages, practices, and vocabularies that make up our cultural-historical situatedness; they are cultural particulars. Gadamer’s point is that prejudices are not something we need to get rid of, as the negative to critical reflective reason’s positive, but rather a condition for there being any form of experience or understanding at all. Another way of putting the point is to say that there can be no understanding, no experience, of anything except against the background of expectations and orientations, and that expectations and orientations can never be fully rounded up by reflective reason. The second idea is that application is a critical moment in all understanding. The point is quite general, but it is easily made in relation to Gadamer’s own illustration: the nature of the knowledge possessed by Aristotle’s practically wise agent. This is someone whose knowledge of what is good—in part, at least— consists in the ability to judge rightly in concrete situations. So descriptions of the virtue that the phronimos possesses will be inescapably circular as long as they abstract away from reference to actual judgments made. What for Aristotle is true of moral precepts is true, for Gadamer, of any meaningful structure; meaning comes to be in the historical unfolding of actual appropriation or use.



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Hence, the question for any particular appropriation or interpretation cannot be whether it gets the already available meaning of the object right, but whether it is a good, or useful, or interesting application. Evaluation of an interpretation inevitably refers back to the purposes that we may want a particular interpretation to serve. Well-known and much discussed lines of criticism of Gadamer, such as those originating with Jürgen Habermas, with E.D. Hirsch, and with Emilio Betti, focusing on the notion of validity in criticism and interpretation, have targeted exactly the semantic historicism (as I will call it) characteristic of his conception of meaning. Now as readers of Gadamer will know, his reflections on the historicity of meaning and consciousness foreground not what consciousness does, but rather, what happens to it—what goes on in and with consciousness behind our backs, as he puts it, beyond our saying and doing. In Gadamer’s story, a central strand in the recovery of what is of lasting value in German Idealism is the rejection of subjectivism, and this means that he counters subject-based epistemology by offering a description of understanding that is, in his terminology, ontological. Rorty, of course, disparages ontology, he wishes people would ‘just forget about it.’7 And so we may wonder to what extent Rorty is able to take on board this dimension of wirkungsgeschichtliches bewusstsein. The contrast, however, that Gadamer wishes to highlight is not the appearance-reality distinction that Rorty criticizes, and which shores up our traditional idea of ontology. Rather, Gadamer is undermining the idea of the deliberating, reflective consciousness facing the world, with direct and immediate access, if not to the objective world, then at least to its own cognitive resources. His account, developing Heidegger’s depiction of understanding as primarily a matter of involvement, gives us a subject that comes upon itself as already immersed in the world, discovering not only that world but also itself through the application and modification of its prejudices. When Gadamer calls his account of the hermeneutic subject ontological, he is emphasizing the fact that the dimension of meaning itself is historicized, coming into being in time, along with the subject. If the subject is always ‘more being than consciousness’ (Gadamer, 1967, 38), this means that reflective consciousness can never catch up with the presuppositions of its own activity; it is ‘thrown,’ and can know itself only indirectly as it encounters itself through its experience of a meaningful reality.8 Indeed, the hermeneutic subject lacks cognitive self-sufficiency in a profound way—even as it attains a degree of reflective self-knowledge, an awareness of its own modes of understanding, the very application of its own cognitive resources in this fragile achievement renews, alters, and extends the force of the prejudices that Gadamer calls tradition. Semantic historicism implies

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that the world of meaningful phenomena encountered in understanding itself evolves and grows in complexity and depth in a process that is inseparable from the expansion of human understanding of it. Far from being at odds with Rorty’s critique of philosophy as metaphysics, however, this historicization of thought that Gadamer articulates as ontology reverberates at the core of Rorty’s work. Critics of Gadamer have typically responded to his thoroughgoing historicism as a limitation of the scope of reason, bringing against him charges of relativism. Rorty, however, takes Gadamer to be making in historicist terms the same fundamental point that Donald Davidson urges in his rejection of the scheme-content distinction.9 The process of understanding or of attaining knowledge cannot be broken down into a traceable interplay between subjective resources and objective contents. In Gadamer’s account of the hermeneutic subject, this is expressed as the impossibility of separating the process of self-discovery from the process of developing further the meaningful structures of the world in which we operate. As I have already emphasized, the specifically historicist aspect of this point that is at the core of hermeneutics—and not a theme in Davidson’s writings—is of great significance to Rorty’s campaign against metaphysics understood as the most general form of exploration of human possibility. For semantic historicism ties the very content of our concepts to unfolding practice. Conceptual abilities, too, are place-time bound, temporally plastic. Thus semantic historicism denies that we can rely on our conceptual abilities to gain knowledge of significant truths that must apply substantively to any possible way of being human. Concepts, for the semantic historicist, in any actual application, always carry with them an indeterminacy in the form of an unrealized potential for different applications in the future. A central claim for Rorty in PMN, then, is that for the historicized hermeneutic subject, metaphysics cannot take the place of the imaginative exploration of possibility, nor eliminate the openness, the risk involved, in allowing new descriptions to guide practice. Indeed as I read Rorty, it is hard to overemphasize this point. This openness and ineliminability of risk in redescription is at the heart of Rorty’s vision of the practice of philosophy. It holds out the promise of a vision of human beings as responsible to and for themselves, and of a view of responsibility as something that cannot be discharged through a purely theoretical comportment but as something that must be exercised through cautious experimental practice. This is because, so claims the semantic historicist, only commitment in action—praxis—brings about the semantic enrichment of concepts that we rely on also in philosophical theorizing.



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This emphasis on the inability of theoretical reflection to fully illuminate, exhaust, or account for the commitments that we make in our practical living in the world is center stage in the account Rorty develops in CIS, as we will see. However, the antimetaphysical import of the Gadamerian lesson is clearly in evidence already in PMN: ‘The importance of Gadamer’s book,’ Rorty comments, is that it manages to separate off one of the three strands—the romantic notion of man as self-creative—in the philosophical notion of spirit from the other two strands with which it became entangled. Gadamer … makes no concessions either to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of ‘transcendental constitution.’ (PMN, p. 358)

Rorty then goes on to apply this idea of self-creation as he introduces his notion of edification: the ‘project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking’ (PMN, p. 360).

Construction, revolution, edification In PMN this hermeneutic notion of edification is offered as ‘an expression of the hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled—that our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer felt’ (PMN, p.  315). Presenting the idea of edification, Rorty offers three contrasts: that between normal and revolutionary philosophy, between constructive and therapeutic philosophy, and between systematic and edifying philosophy. The first contrast is an application of Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between normal and revolutionary science. Rorty’s revolutionary philosophers are those whose innovations destroy existing patterns of commensuration—whose efforts recast questions in such a way that there is no longer agreement as to what counts as settling a particular issue. Revolutionary philosophers, in other words, shake up our concepts to such an extent that they change what it is we think we are asking by the philosophical question we pose. The pair of remaining contrasts Rorty in PMN treats in effect as interchangeable. Here is what he says: For my purposes, what matters is a distinction between two kinds of revolutionary philosophers. On the one hand, there are revolutionary philosophers who […] see the incommensurability of their new vocabulary with the old as

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What Rorty provides in this telling paragraph is a vision of two forms of destruction. A successful revolutionary philosopher always brings about the destruction of a vocabulary in which straight philosophy, the pursuit of truths of an agreed-upon kind, has been pursued. But some destroyers—perhaps most— are also constructive and systematic; they are, as they indeed aim to be, sources of new, stable vocabularies for normal philosophical discourse. Such systematic philosophers preserve epistemology by changing it, Rorty maintains, while edifying philosophers, by contrast, take as their point of departure suspicion toward the very pretensions of epistemology. ‘These peripheral, pragmatic philosophers are sceptical primarily about systematic philosophy, about the whole project of universal commensuration’ (PMN, p.  368). So their form of destruction is different: all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition—trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. This sort of hermeneutics with polemical intent is common to Heidegger’s and Derrida’s attempts to deconstruct the tradition. (PMN, pp. 364–5)

This stance is, as Rorty emphasizes, paradoxical; these writers are, as Rorty reads them, philosophers who do not want to argue (PMN, p. 370). They ‘are reactive and offer satires, parodies, aphorisms. They know their work loses its point when the period they were reacting against is over. They are intentionally peripheral’ (PMN, p.  369). Their vehicles of attack must be quick enough to evade the argumentative guns being wheeled in and slowly trained on them as metaphysicians mount logical lines of defence against these doubt-inducing assaults. But it is, of course, hard to convincingly argue the claim that you are not comical, or ridiculous, or pathetic, or pointless. If only the claim were that you were wrong! But edifiers—philosophically abnormal, as Rorty puts it, at the meta-level—would not be caught dead making that charge (PMN, p. 370). So



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metaphysicians will typically respond by restricting the notion of philosophy such that these annoying satirizers are excluded from the set of those to whose challenges one is professionally obliged to respond. These are lively, suggestive images, and Rorty’s point is easily missed if one takes them too literally. The phenomenon he is diagnosing is not primarily or even very interestingly regarded as a matter of fitting individual philosophers into one box or other. The point, rather, applies more convincingly to patterns in the development of wirkungsgeschichte—history of effect—in particular to competing possibilities of reading oeuvres such as Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Augustine—or Plato. Metaphysical reading is the extraction of doctrine. Edifying reading is the extraction of doubt—at Rorty’s meta-level. Really interesting philosophers are rich sources of both. The charge against metaphysics, then, is not that it is metaphysics. Rather, the charge is that by co-opting whatever is counted as philosophy metaphysics turns philosophy into a self-reproducing practice that distances itself from the very sources of renewal that might preserve its openness and its freshness and its relevance to human concerns. In contrast to this diagnosis of metaphysics, edifying philosophy is supposed ‘to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings’ (PMN, p.  360). However, in PMN the scope of this transformation process is in one sense quite narrow: edification, if successful, will make us into new—non-epistemological—philosophers. As Rorty presents the notion of edification in PMN, the salient contrasts are between forms of philosophizing—revolutionary/normal, therapeutic/constructive, edifying/ systematic. The great edifying philosophers praised in that book are, in Rorty’s version, reacting to epistemology; they are attempting to leave us with ways of regarding philosophy that will help us avoid being epistemological, philosophical creatures. The notion, and the distinctions Rorty designs around it, are deployed in Rorty’s own exercise of ‘hermeneutics with polemical intent’ deployed on behalf of the Romantic idea that what matters most is which vocabulary we employ and against the representationalist idea that there is an idiom where truths may be stated that are prior to any optional or contingent evaluative stance or commitment (PMN, p. 365). Still, the potential of the idea of edification remains undeveloped. The oppositions that are meant to flesh out Rorty’s notion of hermeneutic philosophy in PMN certainly are not without content, but as I have already intimated, their use is primarily retrospective, as categories for constructing narratives of philosophy, of conceptual change and development. They are useful, too, for making us think of philosophy as a scene

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of intellectual struggle that ever since Plato has been providing us, whatever its billing at any given time, with ‘new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking’ and not as a search for a commensurating super-vocabulary (PMN, p. 360). But just as the opposition between the edifying and the systematic needs to be abstracted away from the individual writer and applied at the level of the constitution of authoritative canons, so it cannot be bluntly applied to distinct styles of philosophy or particular kinds of projects, either. The sense of any work, no matter how systematic, constructive, and commensuration-seeking it purports to be, and however silent about its own historicity, is beholden to a tradition. And on the other side—short, perhaps, of pure satire, if such a thing exists—therapeutic, reactive philosophers are invariably trying to show us something as yet unglimpsed, something that they really want us to see, to appreciate.

From philosophical therapy to self-creation We might sum up the points I have just been making this way: in PMN the notion of edification remains subservient to an attempt to say something about what philosophical culture may be like when conducted without mirrors, without the aim of producing a super-vocabulary of commensuration. Rorty develops an answer shaped by his commitment to Gadamerian semantic historicism. This conception produces a different account of what philosophers have been up to, and what their achievements have been, than the story we tell if we take the representationalist project on its own terms. Rorty insists, moreover, that if we take onboard this conception, we will find ourselves not only reading differently the achievements of the past, but also doing philosophy differently; ‘edifying philosophy aims at continuing a conversation rather than at discovering truth’ (PMN, p. 373). Still, in PMN Rorty does not tell us much about what that difference may actually amount to. The hermeneutic subject, no longer able to think of her task as getting herself into correspondence with something which is there, complete, waiting to be known, must take herself to be doing something different—striving for ever new descriptions, ‘better, more fruitful’ and so on, that is, for edification. But this notion of thinking remains abstract, programmatic, negatively defined. In CIS this changes. Here, Rorty is no longer asking what philosophy without representationalist assumptions amounts to. That question, the set-up for Part III of PMN, is in an important sense a dead end; by asking it, we run the risk



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of taking for granted assumptions that made general epistemology seem like a pressing task in the first place. As long as we are considering philosophy as such, the only to way safeguard against this risk is to refuse to assign any particular content at all to the conversation that we should want to continue. This is exactly Rorty’s position in PMN. So it really is no wonder that Rorty here is open to the criticism that he offers only hope and gestures, and nothing of substance, when he talks about the philosophical conversation after epistemology. What should philosophy be like when it is no longer authoritarian? Rorty is, of course, perfectly cognizant of the treacherousness of that question. Yet in PMN, a critique of the vocabulary of metaphysics, he gets himself into a position where this question arises. His response is to describe what he sees as the salient features of the responses of others who have faced, at a high level of reflective awareness, the very same conundrum. In CIS, by contrast, the priority that structures the account of edification in PMN is reversed; an account of intellectual maturation, both individual and historical, is worked out now explicitly in terms of the Romantic idea of selfcreation. This is the primary concern and point of entry. No longer is Rorty held captive by the notion of edification defined in terms of a reactive attitude to epistemology. How can historically situated hermeneutic subjects make sense of their lives? How should we best arrange a society of such creatures? These are now the driving questions. Rorty’s attempt to provide answers also gives an elaboration of the idea of edification, of Bildung, which was the hermeneutic virtue put into metaphilosophical service in PMN. To the extent that there remains in CIS a question whether philosophers are doing what they ought to be doing, this is addressed in political and sociological terms, and is in fact quite disconnected from any concern with defining the nature of philosophy. A result of this shift is that we are offered in CIS an account of the point of edification of greater complexity and more substance than any that the explicitly polemical abstractions of PMN could yield, abstractions that remained anchored to the level of generality at which Rorty’s reactive anti-representationalist case was made. The clearest indication of this reversal is the development of the fundamental element in Rorty’s constructive legacy, his historicist reinterpretation on behalf of a liberal polity of the traditional distinction between the private and the public. To get there, though, we need to consider the emblematic selfcreating figure in CIS, the ironist. The ironist recognizes the contingency of the cultural and historical situation that informs her prejudices, her hermeneutic horizon. She ‘spends her time worrying about the possibility that she has been initiated into the wrong tribe,

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taught to play the wrong language game,’ she fears she may have been ‘turned into the wrong kind of human being’ (CIS, p. 75). But the notion of wrong here is up for grabs—‘she cannot give a criterion of wrongness’ (CIS, p. 75). The only strategy available to such a subject in the face of perpetual doubts about the virtue of her own cognitive resources, her own habits of mind, her own ethnos, is to try to expand her own vocabulary, acquaint herself with alternative patterns of evaluation, other standards of significance. She cannot step outside her language and her horizon, but she can set out to refine, expand, or modify them, in an ongoing effort to compare and contrast, to see herself from other points of view, and thereby change herself. It is this process—not a mastery of, but a recognition of and an assumption of responsibility for, the contingency of one’s hermeneutic situatedness—that is the kernel of Rorty’s concept of self-creation. The point of the ironist’s struggle for autonomy is not, evidently, to locate and give expression to an inner reality, or essence, but to reshape herself by generating a vocabulary that is not simply the language that she is socialized into, the common language of the tribe. The self-creating—self-generating—ironist is after a vocabulary that allows things, including herself, to appear in ways not yet seen. She recognizes that this is not primarily a matter of reflection, of working out the consequences of what she already knows, but of exposure, of experience. In hermeneutic terms, the ironist is someone who takes to heart Gadamer’s dictum that application is an indispensable element of all understanding. She has come to see that in the meaning-producing friction and resistance that results from application of her vocabulary to what is new, concretely different, there lies also self-understanding, and self-modification. Rorty’s principal image of this idea is the artist, the strong poet. This is someone who succeeds in forging a vocabulary that makes even her own predecessors, the material out of which she moulds her own poetic expressions, appear in new ways, as subject to reactions and evaluations that were not previously available. However, while the archetypal image of the self-creating ironist is the poet, the philosopher, the artist, the idea has wider application. As hermeneutical subjects, we are all ‘incarnated vocabularies’ (CIS, p. 88). The desire to be an individual, to find our own expressions, our own personal mix of tastes, attitudes, and priorities, does not depend on artistic or philosophical expression, but on the general possibility of giving shape to one’s means of expression. The longing for the sublime (as Rorty calls it, alluding to Kant) is the desire to trace one’s own contours ‘by breaking out of some particular inheritance (a vocabulary, a tradition, a style) that one feared might bound one’s



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entire life’ (TP, p.  324). That would seem pretty precisely to describe Rorty’s relationship with metaphysics. To create oneself in this sense, while it may well be a matter of writing original interpretations of one’s predecessors, as Rorty did in PMN, may also be, for instance, a matter of breaking away from—or returning to—the religious tradition in which one was raised. It might be the steady pursuit of a skill. It might be sobering up afters years of substance abuse. Or it might be finally to be able to forgive, to let go of the bitterness that locked one’s life in tight circles around some experience of grievous injury. Whatever form it takes, such a tracing of a self as emerging out of that which one has been, but with which one is no longer wholly identical, should not be confused with a search for selfsufficiency. The creation of a self is not a matter of uncoupling oneself from the social realm, but of allowing oneself to be altered by the forms of description that some other community, some sustained dialogue, some batch of powerful narratives, has made available to one—indeed it is a matter of searching for such change. It is a matter of continually striving to stand for one’s community memberships, one’s habits of speech and thought, the narratives one relies on in making sense of one’s life, by trying them out in new ways. Rorty’s elaboration of self-creation as the ironist’s response to the contingency of her own perspective has implications for our understanding of edification as an intellectual goal. Framed in terms of the effort of self-conscious hermeneutic subjects to become responsible for the selves that they are, Rorty’s call for new descriptions, for a pluralizing of perspectives, for making available to oneself a wide range of alternative points of view, is given an existential content. This very content, though, brings in its trail the main challenge that Rorty poses in CIS; the striving for autonomy, thus conceived, is an activity with significant destructive potential. Moreover, just because edification now becomes linked to the worth of the individual, its destructive potential can no longer be handled with the insouciance of PMN. As we saw, the destructive aspect of edifying discourse is certainly acknowledged in PMN, in the description of the dynamics of therapeutic and constructive philosophy and of edifying and systematic philosophy. However, the point that Rorty convincingly makes there is that any significant philosophical innovation, in so far as it changes the vocabulary we are working in, will kill off projects and problems; rather than resolving problems, philosophical innovation as Rorty conceives of it leaves them lifeless, uninteresting, and pointless. But just as these oppositions between kinds or styles of philosophizing are abstractions from

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what is a much messier and multifaceted actual practice, so the destruction thus characterized is in an important sense abstract; it is victimless, because it is impersonal. Indeed, to note the destructive potential of therapeutic or edifying philosophy is really just a dramatic way of being a naturalized Hegelian; to insist that progress in the development of ideas is not linear and cumulative, nor defined by any particular point of arrival. Once autonomy by redescription is construed as a task of self-realization of the individual, however, and it is acknowledged also that for any one of us, the possibility of relative success hangs on the availability of resources of which none of us is in control, then the destructive aspect of redescription becomes real and ominous, and of ethical and political significance. This is because historically situated subjects for whom edification is an existential task, for whom autonomy is attained through redescription, are unlike philosophical projects and paradigms in that they have quite specific vulnerabilities—they are susceptible, precisely as self-creating beings, to humiliation; self-creating creatures may both humiliate and be humiliated. A central line of argument of CIS is a response to this fact.

Humiliation; private and public Self-creation is the working out of an answer to the question: What is the point of me? Humiliation is a resounding: Not much! And the challenge we face is that the very act of self-creation through redescription may be buying autonomy for oneself at the expense of the humiliation of another. An ironist may be cruel: redescription of a common vocabulary, in an effort, perhaps, to break its unreflective hold on oneself, may by the same token leave others with words that suddenly seem less important, with goals and narratives that suddenly look boring or pathetic. Now, there is no way in general to neutralize this aspect of self-creation, in so far as no language is private, and any attempt to get out from under the habits of thinking or the immediate evaluations that are embedded in some vocabulary will often be an attempt to get away from how some people are doing things, ultimately, how some people are conducting their lives. And typically, as I strive to expand and develop my own final vocabulary, these people will be ones of whom I have been one. As I change myself, I distance myself from ways of being that I will, in the usual case, have shared with others. No doubt it is possible to do this in ways that are respectful of others, but the



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potential for humiliation is built right into the notion of edification as a project of individual self-creation. Rorty’s response to this challenge is to identify a specific moral and political ideal, borrowing Judith Shklar’s notion: ‘liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do’ (CIS, p. xv). For such people, the chief virtue is solidarity. This entails the willingness, certainly, to stand by the material needs and interests of others. But it implies also recognition of the right and need of each to make sense of their own life without being subject to humiliation. Recognizing the fragility of the project of self-creation, liberals will be disposed, at least, to a certain restraint of style in their experimentation with final vocabularies; a liberal attitude is an openness to what is new and different, rather than a disparaging of what is old. This line of thought seems to anchor liberalism at some distance from the explicitly political. However, not only individuals but also political institutions may humiliate. A liberal will be concerned to minimize the systematic humiliation that institutions always risk imposing on citizens in so far as they demand uniformity and conformity, or in so far as they sustain material conditions that leave groups without the resources required for a life not confined to the struggle to satisfy basic needs. The liberal political ideal is one where political institutions and the stewardship of common interests leave as much room as is possible for individual selfcreation. This vision requires a clear distinction between the role of the polity in securing the conditions required for the flourishing of citizens and the actual pursuit of meaning in the lives of individual citizens. This is where Rorty imposes the distinction central to his understanding of a liberal polity, one where a culture of edification may flourish: ‘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, p. xiv). This simple and seemingly very rough move has provoked a great deal of critical discussion. Is Rorty just not interested in the political dimensions of the intricate interrelations between the individual and the social? Is he prepared to ignore the way that socially sustained power relations, economic and others, give shape to and infect what we think of as the private sphere? Is he prepared to impoverish the political to the point of pure procedure? Such worries do latch on the fact that Rorty is indeed suggesting a limitation of the scope of the political, in this specific sense: as liberals we must keep to a necessary minimum the areas and occasions of discourse where commensuration, and submission

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to the institutionalized vocabulary, is required as the price of admission to citizenship. But this, of course, is itself a political proposal. Moreover, Rorty’s distinction floats entirely free of the subtlety and the variety of the ways that social embeddedness shapes private aspirations, inclinations, and orientations, the way that our individuality is, if one likes, socially constituted through and through. Rorty rejects the very idea that we should determine the scope of the political by trying to sort out such relations. Rorty’s idea of a set of private concerns of the self is at the same time an idea of a self that is a social thing through and through. The proposal must be understood, as Neil Gascoigne emphasizes in his insightful discussion, as subject to what he calls pragmatic justification.10 That is to say, we should regard Rorty as placing a bet: handling a certain range of any individual’s concerns and aspirations such that they are not subject to legislation or institutionalized governance, or to justification in the shared vocabulary that marks our commitments as citizens, is the best way, politically, to ensure the greatest opportunity for most to make meaningful lives for themselves. In order to as much as place such a bet, however, not to mention to begin to assess its plausibility, one needs to know something about how the line that Rorty proposes is to be drawn. Rorty handles this question in CIS not by formulating a demarcation line, or a pair of definitions, but by reminding us, in a series of discussions of controversial thinkers’ literary works, of what is at stake when we decide how far to push the demand for commensuration, for justification in shared, public terms. Rorty seeks in these chapters both to create sympathy for thinkers and writers who push far their resistance to this demand, and also to reflect back to us the temptation we always face to go beyond what fairness requires by way of commensuration and push for conformity on moralistic grounds. If he is successful, the reader may be better equipped than before to deal with her own illiberal tendencies. If that happens, there has been a gain precisely in edification. Edification, in the terms developed in CIS, is the hermeneutic subject’s awareness of the openness of and of the risk involved in any redescription, an awareness that, in the vocabulary Rorty develops, takes the form of a practically honed ability to sort commitments and interests in terms of the categories of the private and the public; edification is the ironist’s judicious handling of ironic capabilities, her own and others’. Edification is the socially responsible and responsive development of the form of autonomy available to historical consciousness, that is, self-creation through development of one’s vocabulary. In Rorty’s insistence on the preservation of a space for self-creation which is



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not—precisely not—a matter of recognizing oneself as a part of a larger whole, an instance of a worthy kind, or partaker of a valued essence, he is, I suspect, giving expression to a fundamental motivating concern—a master drive in Nietzsche’s sense. This is Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism—his drive to resist, wherever it looms, the obliteration of the individual and her unique, idiosyncratic strivings and longings. Let us, with that thought in mind, turn back to the initial question of this chapter—what sort of a philosopher is Rorty, a destroyer, and edifier, a builder? I intimated that these categories pertain to Rorty’s struggle with his own ‘blind impresses,’ they are the categories of his own self-creation. In what remains, I should like to elaborate on this point. In PMN, Rorty at once identifies himself with and observes the paradigms of edifying philosophy that he holds up to the reader. In CIS, he portrays and dissects the self-creating ironist, the liberal, and their antitheses, recommending a form of intellectual life, while fairly consistently standing at one analytical remove from it. This suggests the possibility that readers might be able to pull Rorty in rather different directions. The reading I have emphasized so far is a Nietzschean one, which ties Rorty’s struggle against metaphysics to his political efforts by way of antiauthoritarianism. However, a reading that brings out Rorty’s contribution to constructive philosophical theory, where the project of self-creation disappears to a vanishing point, is certainly and unsurprisingly also available. An effective way to make that point is to juxtapose Rorty with perhaps the most creative and innovative pragmatist writing today, Robert Brandom.

Public constructions and private reservations Robert Brandom is a pragmatist and a systematic and constructive philosopher. Brandom’s inferentialism portrays the institution of the normativity that makes linguistic behavior of various kinds into precisely linguistic behavior as entirely non-mysterious in a Darwinian perspective. The norms are us, and there is no temptation to move from theorizing about semantics into ontology, epistemology, or metaphysics, in the senses of these terms that Rorty gives them in PMN.11 Moreover, the view of concepts that Brandom provides, as vehicles of material inferences composing the commitments we endorse as we use sentences assertively, can be used, as Brandom does in ‘Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,’ to develop one of Rorty’s central

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ideas. Rorty’s romantic pragmatism relies on the idea of vocabularies as the things we as philosophers should care about. The reasons for this is by now familiar; both in its innovative and its critical mode, philosophy addresses larger swaths of linguistically infused practice. Vocabularies manifest our needs and interests; they are the medium of human transformation. But for all that, Rorty, in CIS, never tells us anything very precise regarding what a vocabulary is. Brandom provides us with a real grip on the notion of a vocabulary and its use. Every claim and inference we make at once sustains and transforms the tradition in which the conceptual norms that govern that process are implicit. The vocabulary vocabulary that replaces meaning-belief talk must incorporate and express our realization that applying conceptual norms and transforming them are two sides of one coin … The only practical significance of conceptual norms lies in the role they play in governing the use and application of those concepts, in concert with their fellows. The use consists largely in making novel claims and novel inferences. And doing that leads inexorably to changes, not just in the claims we are disposed to make, but thereby the concepts themselves. To use a vocabulary is to change it. This is what distinguishes vocabularies from other tools. (2011, p. 177)

This construal has some consequences that Rorty accepts, even enthusiastically endorses (Rorty, 2000b). For one, Brandom deliberately downplays the difference, in practice, between using vocabularies and renewing them. At the same time, he emphasizes the transformative power of vocabularies—they let us do new things, and become new things, things we couldn’t even think of doing or becoming before we developed and used the vocabulary that made it possible. And, significantly, Rorty endorses the vision of Brandom’s constructive efforts that is offered in this exchange. ‘The modest metaphysician,’ says Brandom, sees her task as that of constructing a vocabulary that will be useful for the purposes of the contemporary intellectual: the one who by definition is concerned with seeing the culture whole, trying to make the vocabularies it now seems useful to employ to get various sorts of practical grips on things hang together … The special research interest of the metaphysician, I am suggesting, is to build vocabularies useful for the purposes of intellectuals. The only authority such vocabularies can claim is derived from the success of the various vocabularies they address, and the illumination it can provide concerning them. (2011, p. 181)



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And there is more, as I read it: for one might suggest that the critical dimension of philosophy, taking vocabularies as expressions of needs and interests to be assessed and evaluated, is provided with something like a method by the detailed carrying through of the program that Brandom has provided. For it is precisely the particular material inferences that a cluster of concepts builds into our thinking as we rely on them that we need to articulate and make thematic for that kind of criticism to make sense. In recent work, Brandom suggests how to use his version of pragmatism to pry open—make explicit—structures of power, repression, and cruelty, to catch them as they do their work in our articulate practices.12 Brandom’s example suggests that the opposition between therapy and construction was simply given too general a scope—perhaps the point properly ought to have been directed at a particular kind of construction only. At the same time, though, there are interesting differences between Rorty and Brandom. There is the proposed rehabilitation of ‘fact’ talk that Rorty objects to in his reply to Brandom. ‘My fear,’ says Rorty, ‘is that countenancing these dangerous idioms will be taken as a concession by the bad guys’ (2000b, p.  187). That may sound like a merely strategic disagreement. But that’s not all it is. ‘These bad guys are the people I think of as “authoritarians,”’ adds Rorty (2000b, p. 187). And here we are closer to the basic matter. Rorty could not, I think, have launched the constructive project that Brandom has given us. As Nietzsche says, ‘Every drive wants to be master—and it attempts to philosophize in that spirit’ (1966, §6). Rorty is first and foremost an anti-authoritarian thinker. What I suspect Rorty always knew even about philosophizing in the utilitarian mode, what I take to be the thought that always moved him, and moved him on down the road, also in the sphere of public philosophy, is that there is no resting place—no resting conception—for the anti-authoritarian thinker. In Habermasian terms, Rorty sees that there cannot be such a thing as domination-free discourse; there is not a kind of discourse, no particular vocabulary or meta-vocabulary, no specific, work-outable way of understanding what we do when we think and talk, that is so constituted that it can inoculate against the corruption of power or be rendered unserviceable as a tool of oppression or obliteration. Nor, then, is there a conception of philosophy such that it will always be on the side of the struggle for freedom—other than: philosophers, side with freedom! What that might mean, however—what it means to side with freedom—we must discover anew, again and again. Don’t forget, Rorty warns us, in the long run, the best we can hope for is not victory; the best we can hope for is the opportunity to continue to struggle, to maintain a continuous discursive fight against subjection and obliteration of individual strivings and longings. And in

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its most insidious form, in the shape of our own individual will to dominate, the matter must be addressed privately—that is, as an obstacle to self-creation, as a challenge to edification. So while the constructive, utilitarian side of Rortyan pragmatism, culminating in the work of Brandom, offers a constructive theoretical approach that may be commended as a public philosophy for our time, for our generation, it cannot for the self-generating intellectual provide an answer to the personal need that philosophizing might serve, it cannot be a resting place, a destructionfree zone. The Nietzschean thought is that edification always stems from a destructive intellectual activity, that the understanding of the significance of the private-public distinction and the stakes involved in implementing it, is always rooted in a private struggle, a fight to break free of the given possibilities that both make us and constrain us. This is what it means to be a historical creature: to give up the dream of a human essence, to abandon the thought that we can, at least in principle, know ourselves once and for all and see—at an abstract, general level, at least—what is and what is not humanly possible.

What to make of Rorty—what to make of ourselves I made the claim early in the chapter that we should think of Rortyan pragmatism as having a critical side and a constructive side—the one destructive of intellectual manifestations of the impulses both to master and to submit, the other a working out of proposals for non-authoritarian thinking. However, this distinction has turned out to be an abstraction from an activity that cannot be creative without also destroying. For a hermeneutical subject, to forge new descriptive options, whether for narrating individual lives or for construing a common good, is to take something and make something else of it. Thus, to redescribe epistemology with Rorty is to go against the self-understanding that gave obvious point to the activity. To come to understand one’s moral self in Freudian categories is to undermine the categories of sin and salvation one may previously have applied. Edification, whether of individuals or of communities, always involves understanding what we are in altered terms. In this there will typically also be a loss, a goodbye to what now seems a limited, previous self or a form of social life sustained by a partial or distorted vision of the common good. So the opposition between the critical and the constructive does not in the end represent two distinct kinds of philosophizing. Rather they are two aspects of philosophy considered from the point of view of semantic historicism. The



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matter is quite different with respect to the distinction between the private and the public, between philosophy as a search for autonomy and as a contribution to public reason. This distinction is above all a political tool designed to enable us to cope with the creative destruction wreaked by intellectuals in a manner that will help us win from their achievements what we can put to good use while securing the survival of liberal norms. The private-public distinction must be applied and interpreted again and again as we, readers, interpreters, Rortyan liberal democrats, decide what to do with the vision that some powerful imagination offers up, or with the new terms that some forceful movement of innovation eagerly presses upon us. As for Rorty—redescribing himself, creating a vision of himself as a philosopher out of the vocabularies into which he was socialized—he spent his intellectual life tracing, lighting up, and reacting to the authoritarian current that seems always to run intimately intertwined with liberating thought. His painstaking generation of a philosophical self that could tell just this story was a matter of continuously nurturing and developing a sensitivity to the ways in which the very tools he relied on could backfire in his own hands, and so end up closing off, rather than opening up, space for discursive invention, constructive redescription, expansion of imagination, and the positive freedom for an individual to think differently. Coming very publicly to terms with this ambivalence toward the traditions which sustained him, and out of which his philosophical self had to be made, Rorty along the way wreaked havoc on familiar forms of programmatic theorizing that had become self-assured and settled, that were simply ‘doing the job,’ ‘solving the problems.’ This was a process of self-discovery and at the same time one of self-creation, of ‘breaking free from …’ And that certainly was a process of destructive power. Was it, however, also a contribution to public reason? Will we recognize as a genuine contribution to social good the image of edified selves who continuously and precariously sift strivings for private autonomy from efforts at solidarity and communal identification? That will depend. Certainly Rorty’s protracted and provocative act of destruction toward the frameworks of metaphysical thinking has left some of us who grew up reading his writings with new ways of thinking about what a philosopher can be, what challenges she may face, how she may indeed contribute—perhaps only very marginally—to public progress, while never turning away from the existential project of self-creation. For such readers, Rorty has offered a sense of intellectual rejuvenation and possibility; an exemplar of edification that we can recognize as also pertaining to the politics of our time. Or perhaps the better emphasis is achieved if we speak of a liberal

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whose articulation of liberalism is shaped by a personal struggle for autonomy, for existential responsibility. Other readings, however—hostile, dismissive— abound. Fans of Rorty who attempt, in line with the present effort, to read him also as a valuable public philosopher, we do realize that notions like semantic historicism and the idea of the hermeneutic subject simply may not turn out to be built to last. The idea of edification may come to seem both un-philosophical and without political import. Philosophy may persist in attempting to understand the private and the public and the self and the social in commensurating theoretical terms, rather than as terms marking practical, political, and existential challenges. In other words, pragmatists understand that things just may not go our way; metaphysics may prevail. Perhaps this sense of the fragility of the vocabularies we are trying to read out of Rorty—I have no doubt that this would have been Rorty’s view—is a humble beginning of edification.

Notes 1 In a useful and sympathetic discussion of Rorty, Charles Guignon and David Hiley diagnose ‘a deep tension between the existentialist and the pragmatic strands in Rorty´s thought […]’ (Guignon and Hiley, 2003, p. 29). I prefer to reserve the term ‘pragmatism’ and its cognates for what I take to be Rorty’s way of handling this dynamic tension. 2 See, for instance, Richard Shusterman’s ‘Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: Variations on a Rortyan Theme,’ in Chapter Twelve of this volume. 3 I elaborate this claim in Ramberg (2008) and Ramberg (2011). 4 See Rorty’s ‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth,’ and ‘Representation, Social Practice, and Truth,’ in ORT. In these chapters Rorty offers what we may call a conversationalist or a social-practice view of truth. In TP, Rorty includes eight chapters dismissing ‘various questions and controversies [about truth] as leading nowhere’ (TP, p. 11). 5 For Gadamer’s elaboration of the idea, see Gadamer (1960), pp. 265–307. 6 See Gadamer (1960) for some of the ideas influencing Rorty on these matters. 7 This is how Rorty once put it in conversation. Compare his proposal of ‘benign neglect’ as the best attitude to strike vis-à-vis ‘the problems of philosophy.’ 8 See also Heidegger (1927). 9 See Davidson (2001). 10 For this discussion, see Gascoigne (2008), pp. 147ff. 11 The full and detailed working-out of Brandom’s inferentialism is given in Brandom (1994). 12 See, for instance, Brandom (2009), Ch. 4.

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Challenging Philosophy Rorty’s Positive Conception of Philosophy as Cultural Criticism Colin Koopman Richard Rorty is often described, and just as often derided, as the most unabashedly anti-philosophical philosopher of recent vintage. No one has been more incisive in provoking anxiety within our philosophical establishments— for no one has been more unrelenting in offering detailed criticisms of the failures of we philosophers to deliver the desiderata we have been promising to the rest of culture for the past few hundred years. But how should we construe Rorty’s criticisms of philosophy? Was Rorty writing the death of philosophy itself on its own walls? Or was Rorty offering an internal critical challenge to philosophy, meant as a provocation toward a transformation of philosophy itself? Insofar as Rorty was the paradigmatic, anti-philosophical philosopher of the twentieth century, he resembled in more ways than one David Hume, who was the most unabashed philosophical critic of philosophy back in the eighteenth century when modern philosophers first began making the kinds of earnest promises that Hume and Rorty were both dubious about.1 Not only did Hume’s central intellectual project aim at debunking much of what was taken as ‘philosophy’ (both in his day and in ours), but indeed after he completed his monumental Treatise of Human Nature and his two popularizing Enquiries he largely abandoned what we today think of as philosophy for pursuits that are more properly seen as historical and cultural-critical, producing a number of inflammatory writings on religion, plus a massive History of England in six thick volumes. Hume, long before Rorty, and with equal verve and wit, had also said that philosophy was capable of precious little. Interestingly, no serious thinker today would dream of denying that Hume was a philosopher despite the fact that a wide number of philosophers, in their

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fullest seriousness, deny that Rorty was a philosopher in any meaningful sense. Why does nearly everyone today insist that the eighteenth-century skeptical ironist is a paradigmatic philosopher and that the twentieth-century pragmatic ironist ought to be stripped of that honorific title?

Challenging philosophy Rorty’s philosophical contributions should not be dismissed, if only because the challenges they pose to contemporary philosophy come from deep within the center of the very philosophical establishments and traditions he provokes. It is in this respect that he is most like Hume. And as Hume had his Kant, so too Rorty deserves his retort. Not that Kant refuted Hume. The point is that Kant knew how to take Hume seriously in a way that other post-Humean philosophers who persisted in traditional empiricisms and rationalisms (most of whom are now obscure figures in most narratives of modern philosophy) did not. By analogy, we today ought to find ways of taking Rorty seriously, lest we persist in parading down paths that Rorty has shown to be severely out of touch with current cultural requirements. Rorty’s criticisms of the philosophical tradition are known by so many to be so forceful because they were issued by an insider who possessed a deep fluency with the very traditions, systems, and programs he criticized. Rorty possessed a sophisticated grasp of a wide range of philosophical territory, not to mention an almost-equally expansive range of literary, historical, and social scientific territories. Few philosophers of his day managed to be inside so many different philosophical traditions. Rorty ranged, seemingly effortlessly, across Davidson, Derrida, and Dewey in a single sentence and with indisputable erudition. His combination of range and depth suggest that Rorty’s provocations to contemporary philosophy, like Hume’s skeptical provocations, cannot be simply dismissed. Hume knew how to unravel the consequences of the Lockean and Cartesian assumptions that Kant saw he would have to overcome. Rorty, likewise, has rolled out the implications of Davidsonian disquotationalism and Derridean deconstruction with the result of decided disquiet. After Rorty, there is no going back to Russell and Husserl. For much of modern philosophy, the philosophers had fashioned themselves as intellectuals capable of delivering on certain promises that they were never really able to make good on. Many of Rorty’s arguments can be read as attempts



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to show that we philosophers had failed to make good on these promises such that it is now high time for them to find a different description of their value in the context of liberal democratic culture. Taking Rorty’s arguments seriously implies that we cannot respond to his challenge by simply making some new move midst the existing range of philosophical positions. To take Rorty seriously means accepting that the existing philosophical positions really do need to be rearranged in their entirety. We might say that Rorty provokes a kaleidoscopic shift in philosophy’s self-image–grasping the force of his challenge requires only the smallest of nudges in our existing philosophical frameworks but the nudge is on a level at which an ever-so-slight turn changes everything–all that had once seemed stable quickly goes tumbling such that an entirely new vision suddenly and brilliantly appears before us. Rorty’s challenge was dismissed by so many because it was so often taken to be a polemic against the very idea of philosophy itself. But a criticism of one mode of philosophizing is not for that reason a polemic against all modes. Rorty should be read as having sought to establish a counter conception of the work that philosophy might yet become. Against the stale crust of the systematized and professionalized philosophical culture he challenged, Rorty sought out a more enlivened conception of philosophy as the criticism of culture. So I shall argue in what follows. For, admittedly, Rorty’s elaborations of a positive image for philosophy were not often as clear and concise as his negative briefs against all the old philosophical fashions. They require some teasing out. This is my task in what follows. I begin by offering some distinctions that help us sort out Rorty’s negative briefs against (professionalized) philosophy from his positive calls for a new conception of (cultural-critical) philosophy. I then turn to leveraging these distinctions by offering a reading of an arc of writings from across the full length of Rorty’s own philosophic career.

The very idea of a Rortyan philosophy I want to propose some new terms that I think enable us to capture the spirit of Rorty’s intellectual agenda better than those existing interpretations that always end up with a casual dismissal of Rorty. One reason why Rorty is so often dismissed by philosophers is because he sometimes offered bold pronouncements of a hopefully-imminent end of philosophy. One point I hope to establish in what follows is that Rorty never thought that philosophy must

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come to an end. What he thought should come to an end is a certain inherited self-image of philosophical practice as professional, foundational, and systematic philosophy. Once we have dispensed with this pernicious self-image we can, and Rorty thought we positively should, go on to continue to contribute our critical intellectual abilities to the most serious problems facing our liberal democratic culture. Rorty sometimes referred to his alternative to traditional philosophy as akin to cultural criticism. My claim here is that a post-foundationalist and postuniversalist philosophy should be understood as a cultural-critical philosophy that locates itself in its own time and place. It is helpful to begin by stating what is quite likely already painfully obvious to most readers. The overwhelming majority of his commentators and critics fail to illuminate the positive side of Rorty’s metaphilosophy. Most, indeed, are downright hostile to the very idea. Rorty, we are told, is not so much wrong as just wrong-headed, not so much a gadfly as a gaffe. One of Rorty’s most incisive critics amongst his philosophical contemporaries, Joseph Margolis, offers a representative read of Rorty’s standing in his strong claims about Rorty’s ‘unbridled rejection of every form of philosophical discipline’ and of Rorty as ‘never ventur[ing] any philosophical improvement’ (2002, pp.  76, 75). It needs be underscored that nearly everyone agrees with Margolis here, whose criticisms of Rorty (unlike those of most of the other critics) are always well-argued and carefully-posed (and hence, unlike most of the other critics, actually worth arguing with). Despite these merits, the criticism on this point is also, at least to my thinking, quite wrong. There are, to be sure, a handful of prominent exceptions to the rule in the work of a small number of scholars who discern something more promising, and most positive, in Rorty’s philosophical imaginary.2 But the drift, on the whole, is decidedly in the other direction. I should like to offer here some terminology that might help us make sense of Rorty as a philosopher who, after all, had something positive to say about philosophy’s relevance for our lives, our polities, our cultures, and our selves. Those who deny that Rorty was a philosopher in any positive sense are probably operating with some entrenched conception of what philosophy is and can be. Those of us who take Rorty’s challenge seriously, by contrast, worry that this entrenched conception will make philosophy soon go stale. Those who take Rorty’s challenge seriously tend also to want to fashion a different conception of philosophy than was prominent 50 years ago and which has, in many quarters, already begun to fade from view, though without sufficient selfconsciousness regarding what new forms of philosophy are emerging in the stead of the increasingly-discarded entrenched models. If these newer conceptions of



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philosophical practice add much depth and breadth to philosophy itself, then one way of understanding Rorty’s metaphilosophical writings are as an attempt to help us gain additional self-consciousness regarding how we might achieve the new requirements we have begun to impose on ourselves. Thus, instead of taking Rorty as sounding the death knell for philosophy, we might instead take him to have insisted upon a profound transformation within philosophy such that it might one day again be able to amply inform the modern liberal democratic culture in which we all today find ourselves. Rorty’s work makes the best sense when read in light of an implicit metaphilosophical distinction. Rorty tended to write about philosophy in two senses. This has led to enormous confusions, insofar as critics exploit the ambiguity in thinking it an equivocation. But, as I shall argue, Rorty’s ambiguous uses of philosophy can be parsed according to a workable, if not always working, distinction. The device of distinct senses of philosophy enabled Rorty to both offer negative portraits of philosophy as practiced by some of his professional peers and at the same time put forward positive alternatives to what he regarded as a professionalized deformation. In the first place, the operative distinction can be described in temporal terms, as between philosophy-as-it-has-been and philosophy-as-it-might-be. A closely-related distinction can be cast in more purely conceptual terms, as one between systematic-professional philosophy on the one hand and cultural-critical philosophy on the other. There are doubtless other ways of casting these distinctions as they appear in Rorty’s work.3 My point is just that the tension inherent in each of these ways of carving out a distinction between two ways of conceiving philosophy should not be seen as a confused ambiguity so much as a distinction through which is released a crucial challenge to contemporary philosophy. This clarifying distinction, and the challenge it mounts, is valuable just insofar as the general shift in philosophical practice that Rorty was urging is already underway in many quarters of contemporary philosophy, though again without sufficient self-consciousness. Many philosophers in our midst have begun important new research projects that break from the traditional self-image of philosophy that dominated the discipline throughout much of the twentieth century. Many of these new projects are interdisciplinary, or better yet cross-disciplinary, to the core (such as the work taking place at the intersection of epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology or at the intersection of moral philosophy, moral psychology, and sociology, or at the intersection of political theory, political history, and political anthropology), some are forthrightly and proudly both empirical and philosophical

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in orientation (such as work in science and technology studies on a range of scientific enterprises from studies in probability to psychiatric assessment or, in a different vein, recent work in analytic ethics and epistemology under the banner of ‘experimental philosophy’), others involve metaphilosophical projects attempting to reread and rewrite the history of philosophy for the purposes of a more effective cultural criticism in the present (such as can be noted in feminist histories of philosophy), and still others are engaged in a deep reconstruction of philosophy itself for radical political, social, and moral purposes (recent debates over the status of ideal theory in political philosophy are one instance of this, though clearer cases are found in much recent work in critical philosophy of race, feminist philosophy, and queer theory). Many of these projects could barely have been envisioned from the entrenched vantage points of the highly-professionalized and discipline-centric practices of philosophy that dominated academic philosophy in the middle decades of the last century. Despite that erstwhile dominance, many of us today are traveling down the paths that Rorty himself was encouraging us to explore well before we took our first few steps in this direction (this is literally true in my case, for I was taking my first real steps when a 48-year-old man published his first book). My hope, then, is that the very idea of Rortyan philosophy can be of some use in helping us to gain a little more self-consciousness about what we are doing when we are in the midst of reconstructing the practice of philosophy itself. We could all use a little more self-consciousness about what it means to be interdisciplinary, empirical, historically revisionary, radical, and political in our philosophical work. Very few of us were trained (not just by our mentors but above all by our selves) to do any of these things very well. We shall all do them better if we have a clearer sense of what is at stake in our new forms of philosophical self-fashioning. Rorty knew well how high these stakes can be.

Two conceptions of philosophy across Rorty’s thought To help develop my argument I shall draw on a wide range of Rorty’s writings that help flesh out an implicit distinction therein between, on the one hand, a professionally-dominant and presently-entrenched mode of philosophy, and on the other hand, a more cultural-critical and potentially-future mode. Before doing so, I begin with a brief clarification of the terms of this distinction that will help organize the discussion to follow.



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Rorty quite often wrote about philosophy as if he were merely offering a descriptive account of contemporary philosophical practice, namely as the kind of thing that the Analysts were doing in philosophy departments in the 1960s and the Continentals were doing in the 1980s (but mostly in literature departments rather than philosophy departments). This conception of philosophy is generally featured in contexts where Rorty is debunking the pretensions of the philosophical canon, insisting that philosophy does not play the great role in the story of humanity that it thinks it does, and holding that philosophy is best regarded as a private pastime which some of us are lucky enough to get paid for. When Rorty is debunking philosophy, in other words, we should read him as debunking the puffed-up claims of 1960s-era Analytic and 1980s-era Continental philosophy, insofar as those two philosophical eras can be characterized as making some pretty grand world-historical promises on their own behalf. At other times Rorty wrote about philosophy in a more positive and prescriptive sense as a kind of intellectual exercise that is of abiding value for modern liberal democracies like America. Here is where Rorty invoked Dewey and James and Emerson in the context of defending a kind of pragmatist engagement in cultural criticism that amounts to thoughtful reflection about our most serious ethical, moral, social, and political problems. Rorty used a variety of labels for this more positive side of philosophy in his early work, but as the years went on he increasingly gravitated around the idea of what he once called, in a throwaway reference to Hegel in an early 1977 essay on Dewey, ‘philosophyas-criticism-of-culture’ (CP, p.  74). Where philosophy is an achievement for Rorty, where it is a kind of practice capable of normative success, it functions as a means for criticizing our selves and boldly whomping up new concepts that help us make sense of who we are becoming and who we have been. My argument is just this: in seeking to nudge things over from professional philosophy toward cultural criticism, Rorty was not abandoning philosophy at all. Rather, Rorty sought to abandon only a provincial self-conception of philosophy which had dominated the discipline through the middle of the twentieth century and which has in recent decades begun to give way to a broader image for which we can take Rorty as one of our models. Rorty should be seen as someone who sought to champion those of us who aspire to a more capacious conception of philosophy. Rorty would not agree with all of us all the time about what we say when we do all these things. But we need not solicit his agreement on everything. The point is that from a Rortyan perspective, these are exactly the kinds of things a philosopher should be doing once he/she has learned how to give up on the professionalized pretences of foundationalism.4

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At this point, I shall shift gears and turn to matters more gray. In what follows, I offer what amounts to a barrage of textual evidence for the claims I have thus far been making. The evidence comes from a range of writings that, despite their multiplicity, comprise only a small portion of Rorty’s extensive discussions of metaphilosophy. The writings I shall consider are drawn from across the full arc of a philosophic career that spanned more than half a century, the earliest dating from 1958 and the most recent from 2007. Seen together, these writings show a lifelong interest in the idea that philosophy can continue to play a positive role after the demise of foundationalist forms of philosophy. To be more specific, the narrative I offer below shows that Rorty in his earliest writings lacked the full degree of self-consciousness about the uses of philosophy he would only gradually come to develop in later work, after no small number of halting early starts. Early stammers notwithstanding, Rorty’s work always evinced at least some positive image of philosophy. By the time we come to his most original philosophical contribution, namely his 1989 book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, we find a developed conception of the positive role of cultural critique that philosophy may someday soon come to play.5

“The Philosopher as Expert” (1958) I begin with an early, unpublished essay of Rorty’s that only recently made its way into print as an appendix to a new edition of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.6 At the core of Rorty’s discussion in ‘The Philosopher as Expert’ is a question about whether or not the ‘professional’ philosophy of the ‘experts’ is getting its due in contemporary intellectual life. In other words: are we philosophers being unjustifiably ignored by the literate public at large? Rorty answers this question in uncharacteristically circuitous fashion (indicating that the trademark clear prose of his mature work was not automatic to him but an achievement that first had to be perfected). The answer he develops can be boiled down to the essay’s core contrast between philosophy as science and philosophy as art. According to the latter conception, philosophy is something like cultural criticism, for it involves clear articulation and assessment of ‘the unexamined assumptions of a previous philosophy, or of culture’ in a fashion that ‘will make itself felt in a rapidly expanding series of extraphilosophical concerns’ (PMN, p. 406). This is cultural criticism on a grand scale, to be sure, but Rorty’s conception here in many ways anticipates what he would later think of when he wrote of certain canonical philosophers as changing the terms in which some historical culture was able to see itself.



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Interestingly enough, this early essay is in many ways focused on a different conception of philosophy, one less centered on ‘vision’ and more focused on ‘method’ (PMN, p.  406). According to the picture of philosophy as science, philosophy is a technical discipline, of which one might gain a mastery sufficient to establish oneself as an expert. Rorty describes the philosopher as expert in this way: Insofar as he does this kind of job, the philosopher puts aside the role of questioner of questions and sets himself the task of working within a quite restricted framework of questions, assumptions, and criteria. He is no longer a spectator of all time and all eternity, but is simply asking ‘If we say X, can we then consistently say both Y and Z?’ (PMN, p. 410)

Philosophical expertise, in this more scientific sense, is a matter of squaring the work of the visionary philosophical artists with certain of our other beliefs as well as with certain of the assumptions internally assumed by whatever visionary program is under consideration. These expert philosophers are in many ways under-laborers whose job it is to explicate those compelling creative visions fashioned by the artists (philosophical and otherwise) who possess a truly culture-wide range. Rorty’s conclusion in the essay is simply that expertscientific philosophy performs a crucial role in our culture, but that it is not the kind of role that deserves to get more attention than it actually does. The expert-scientific philosopher talks in a highly technical language that only other experts can understand, but this is the only way in which they can get their job done. This is justifiable even if this technicality can be purchased only at the expense of unintelligibility to the broader culture at large. The division of labor that gets us to expertise, in other words, also implies a disciplinary divide that is not easily crossed. Rorty, at least in 1958, appears quite content with all of this. The central contrast in this essay between the big synoptic capacities of intellectual thought as artistic cultural criticism and the narrower rigorous charge of intellect as methodical expertise would persist throughout Rorty’s career. This contrast is just the earliest iteration of what I described above in terms of the distinction between two senses of philosophy that we find in any number of Rorty’s writings. Yet what is most interesting in this early essay is not the contrast between scientific and artistic philosophy (for the terms in which this contrast gets developed are somewhat clumsily formulated in the essay). Rather, what stands out is how Rorty appears quite content with the first of

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these conceptions, such that philosophy might seem to be rightly restricted to the technical matters of its own self-produced arcana. Whereas in many of his later writings, Rorty would favor a conception of the intellectual as a synthetic thinker with big ideas and wide cultural-critical capacity, in this essay Rorty offers a brief on behalf of a narrow, indeed almost bureaucratic, kind of philosophical professionalism. What this essay shows, then, is that Rorty had long wrestled with the metaphilosophical questions at the heart of his best mature work. It also shows, I think, that Rorty was very early on quite willing to simply give the professionals free reign over the way in which we conceive of philosophy. Rorty throughout his career would remain ambiguous about whether ‘philosophy’ should refer to the narrow practice of the professionals or to the broader possibilities of a long historical tradition. In this early essay, Rorty is happy to let the professionals own the word (perhaps because he was at this point still an earlycareer junior scholar defending his own career choice). His strategy here might be seen as analogous to institutionalist definitions of art according to which ‘art’ just is whatever passes as such in the institutions of the art world. Those who, by contrast, insist on purveying a theory of what ‘art’ is against the grain of the art world too often find that they are simply not talking about the same thing that contemporary artists, curators, gallery owners, and gallerinas are talking about—they tend to slowly and surely slip into the kind of quaint irrelevance destined for those who display no interest in the chic. In many of his later writings, Rorty would somewhat surprisingly continue to define philosophy in terms of what these expert-scientist professionals tend to do. These are the writings in which Rorty suggests that we do our best when we leave ‘philosophy’ (i.e., professional philosophy) behind in order to take up ‘literary criticism’ (i.e., cultural-critical philosophy). Observing Rorty’s tendency toward a sociological or institutionalist definition of ‘philosophy’ in terms of ‘what professional philosophers do’ helps clear up the target of many of his criticisms of philosophy. It enables us, at the very least, to affirm a point that should have been obvious all along, namely that when Rorty disparages philosophy he is not disparaging the activities of his favorite philosophers like Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. But Rorty’s strange move, offering what amounted to an institutionalist definition of philosophy, was not the only move in this essay. For Rorty here also at least gestures toward a different conception of philosophy, one that exceeds the confines of the professional under-laborers, and that is more akin to expansive artistic practice than to cold technical expertise. In his later



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writings, Rorty would come to favor this image of the philosopher. Those are the writings in which he would suggest that perhaps we ought to retain the word ‘philosophy’ for a more important mission of cultural criticism. In this early essay Rorty indeed wrote about ‘the role of critic and conscience of culture’ and noted that ‘the professional philosophers have abdicated it’ in a way that enabled ‘literary intellectuals to take over’ (PMN, p. 397). One hears in these words an inchoate expression of the worry that the ‘professional’ philosophers have given up precisely what matters most. If the younger Rorty, then only a budding early-career philosopher, wanted to gloss over this worry, then the older Rorty, by then a thinker capable of dazzling the philosophical establishment, found the worry incurable within the confines of the bounds of philosophy as it then existed.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was without doubt the landmark event of his career. It is the book that both made him a philosopher whose work is obligatory for every philosopher to know and that made him a philosopher that many, perhaps most, philosophers love to despise. The book itself is rather curious in terms of the philosophical genres it situates itself within. Mirror is best read as a mix of modern intellectual history and metaphilosophy, both of which are combined with a solid dose of rigorous argumentation in his contemporary philosophical vernacular. This combination produced a brilliant rhetorical maneuver. Rorty used the best tools of contemporary philosophy in order to show why those tools, and the broader intellectual contexts in which they were situated, can always be outflanked by using other tools that had long fallen out of favor in the discipline, namely the tools of interrogating philosophy for its own history (intellectual history) and its own presuppositions (metaphilosophy). Rorty, in short, used marginalized philosophy against centralized philosophy in order to put the margins back at the center. After Rorty, it is clear that no philosopher can now afford to ignore the history and meta-critique of their own discipline. In the final part of this book, the part where the metaphilosophy really comes to the fore, Rorty surveys the conclusions of the historical criticisms he developed in exquisite detail across the first 300 pages. If the upshot of that criticism is that the modern project of epistemology at the heart of contemporary professional philosophy has failed, then the upshot of the final part is that modern intellectual culture is now in a good position to develop new projects under

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the guidance of new conceptions of the work of thought. With epistemology finished, Rorty suggests, we might begin to turn finally to hermeneutics. At the core of the contrast with which Rorty ends one of the most infamous books of the second half of the twentieth century is a restatement of his basic, career-long contrast between the professionalized philosophy of technical expertise and the visionary philosophy of cultural criticism. Rorty’s conception of hermeneutics offered at the end of Mirror is an early but still-halting iteration of what I have been referring to as Rorty’s cultural-critical philosophy, just as the conception of epistemology that is his prey throughout the book should be seen as a paradigm of what I have been calling modern professionalized philosophy. Mirror, in short, is the first work in which Rorty really presses this contrast into service for the sake of metaphilosophical argument. While Mirror thus crystallized this contrast central to so much of Rorty’s philosophical force, it did not in the end fully deliver the contrast in a way that Rorty would remain content with. As he admitted years later in an autobiographical piece written in the last months of his life: ‘Part III [of Mirror] now strikes me as a false start: the contrast I drew there between “systematic” and “edifying” philosophy was not the one I wanted’ (2010, p. 13). Rorty is at his best in Mirror where he presses his critique of epistemologycentered systemic philosophy. He summarizes that critique as follows: ‘the desire for a theory of knowledge is a desire for constraint—a desire to find “foundations” to which one might cling, frameworks beyond which one must not stray, objects which impose themselves, representations which cannot be gainsaid’ (PMN, p.  315). Epistemology provided us with a constraint that is bigger and better than ourselves such that we can submit ourselves to its undeniable authority. The demise of the foundational project, Rorty notes, ‘is often felt to leave a vacuum which needs to be filled’ (PMN, p.  315). But Rorty’s offering is not that hermeneutics will perform the role left emptied by the impending endgame of epistemology. It is rather that a culture which has abandoned epistemology will find itself freed up to turn its attention elsewhere, that is toward pursuits more hermeneutical in orientation, such that ‘our culture should become one in which the demand for constraint and confrontation is no longer felt’ (PMN, p. 315). Rorty much later wrote of himself that, I am a hedgehog who, despite showering my reader with allusions and dropping lots of names, has really only one idea: the need to get beyond



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representationalism, and thus into an intellectual world in which human beings are responsible only to each other. (2004, p. 474)7

Once philosophy can get beyond foundational epistemology, and the representationalism that has been its most convincing iteration, it can assume a new self-conception according to which the only form that constraint takes is self-constraint (and yet is no less normatively authoritative for that reason).8 But this raises a problem, central to the argument of Mirror, and indeed central to all of Rorty’s metaphilosophical meditations thereafter. What remains of philosophy on such a self-conception of philosophy? Why, in other words, insist on preserving the ‘philosophy’ in ‘post-foundational philosophy’? Rorty wrestles with this tension, but unsatisfactorily so, in the last chapter of Mirror. He contrasts his humble edifiers from the despised bully systematizers as follows: ‘Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation’ (PMN, p.  369). Rorty’s idea of edifying philosophy takes its cues from philosophical hermeneutics and existentialism. The final hundred pages of Mirror are peppered with generous references to Heidegger, Sartre, and especially Gadamer. Rorty would later recast the image of post-foundational philosophy in an idiom more Deweyan than Gadamerian, confessing that he had never really understood what Gadamer was up to.9 At the time, though, Rorty’s best efforts went something like this: To drop the notion of the philosopher as knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so well would be to drop the notion that his voice always has an overriding claim on the attention of the other participants in the conversation. (PMN, p. 393)

The image given in Mirror is strongly Gadamerian in its focus on the philosopher’s familiarity with the history of philosophy. Under the greater influence of Dewey in subsequent writings Rorty would come to emphasize more and more the idea of post-epistemological philosophy as attending to a diverse range of pressing cultural subjects. The Gadamerian strain remains in the Deweyan idea insofar as a cultural-critical philosophy is one that will proceed through a thorough saturation in the history of philosophy, the history of ideas, and the history of culture itself. Gadamer embraced history because he was obsessed with the ancient Greeks. By contrast, Dewey embraced history because he was

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obsessed with his contemporary America. Gadamer, like Heidegger, gives the impression through learned historical discourse of something like profundity. Dewey, like James, gives the impression through colloquial talk of something much more like engagement. The common thread that runs through both lineages, though, is that we philosophers should become edifiers who do not claim to know what we know by virtue of what we know about knowing, but rather claim to know what we know by virtue of our having patiently learned a great deal about whatever topic we happen to be talking about as well as having put hours of study into the various pitfalls and potentials of the various argumentative positions commonly assumed in debates about that topic. The impending shift toward an explicitly pragmatist conception of philosophy was indeed already anticipated in Mirror. In that book Rorty had already appeared uncomfortable with his proposed alternative to epistemology. ‘The notion of an edifying philosopher is, however, a paradox,’ he admits (PMN, p.  370). The paradox, in part, has to do with insisting that post-systematic philosophy really is philosophy. Rorty announced at the outset of Mirror that the book is ‘therapeutic rather than constructive’ (PMN, p. 7). But cures are not really a part of the diseases they cast away. If edifying philosophy teaches us to give up on philosophy, then in what sense is edification still philosophy? Why not call Mirror something else instead, such as a contribution to ‘the culture of the man of letters’ (PMN, p. 4)? This term would indeed prove fecund for Rorty later in his life, but in Mirror he appears wanting with respect to how what he does remains philosophy. ‘It is difficult,’ Rorty finally confesses at the end of the book, ‘to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be’ (PMN, p. 357). Yet Rorty is firm that he wants to find his way to this brave new form of philosophy. He explicitly affirms on the final page that ‘There is no danger of philosophy’s “coming to an end”’ (PMN, p.  395). All that will end, Rorty argues, is epistemology. This ending frees us from the desire for confrontational constraint such that we can take seriously another modality of philosophy that will pursue only conversational constraint. But the details of what this other philosophical modality might be spells out a challenge not only at the heart of both Mirror itself and Rorty’s many metaphilosophical exercises after Mirror, but more poignantly the difficulty of late-twentieth-century philosophy itself, at least insofar as we are willing to finally give up on all the foundationalist, metaphysical, and epistemological pretense that contingently characterized our discipline over the past few centuries. Working out the dialectic of these concerns would be one of Rorty’s central philosophical preoccupations in nearly everything he would subsequently write.



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Consequences of Pragmatism (1982) The publication of Mirror with its claims about the roles and potentialities of philosophy was the cause of no small stir amongst many cliques in the profession of philosophy. Rorty soon found himself leaving Princeton philosophy for a non-departmental university professorship at Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Rorty may have officially departed philosophy as a profession at this time, but I shall be arguing that he did so only in an official sense. As the author of Mirror prepared for the move down the East Coast he put the finishing touches to a volume of essays most of which were written at the same time as Mirror. A central concern in many of the essays in his 1982 Consequences of Pragmatism is what happens to philosophy once we take pragmatism, that is, the conclusions reached in Mirror, seriously. Just as Rorty’s answer to this question in Mirror was uneasy and ephemeral, so too is the discussion found in most of these essays. In a 1976 paper on Wittgenstein he asks, ‘Does it make sense to speak of a new philosophical view as bringing an end to philosophy?’ (CP, p. 22). In another 1976 essay on Heidegger and Dewey he spends a good deal of time worrying about varying claims about tendencies toward ‘a disastrous abandonment of philosophy’s proper function’ (CP, p. 45). And in yet another 1976 paper explicitly thematizing the rise (and potential fall) of professional philosophy Rorty confidently states that ‘philosophy as a technical academic subject will remain as remote from highbrow culture as is paleontology or classical philology’ (CP, p. 65). That asserted, he nonetheless struggles to explain what philosophy might become such that it may be more proximate to ‘highbrow culture’. One suggestion arrived at as the third of these 1976 essays meanders is what Rorty refers to as the ‘genre’ of ‘literary criticism’ (CP, p. 66). And though he does not manage to be at all clear about this notion in any of his writings that year, the suggestion would prove fruitful half a decade later. After flirting with the idea of ‘edifying philosophy’ as an alternative in his 1979 book he would return, in the 1982 ‘Introduction’ to Consequences, to the idea of philosophy as literary and cultural critique. He would remain with that idea, more or less, until the end of his career. Rorty claims in the first sentence of his introduction that the point of the book is to explicate the consequences of pragmatist philosophy (p.  xiii). But consequences for whom? For philosophers? Or for non-philosophers? Rorty, in fact, was split between these two questions. Probably the best way of resolving the tension is to see Rorty as asking about the consequences of pragmatism for

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philosophy as judged by the rest of culture. Thus, consequences of pragmatism for philosophers according to culture at large. Pragmatists can (though need not) remain philosophers, but their pragmatism advises them to see the value of their philosophical practice in terms that are not professionalized so much as drawn from cultural criticism. The rhetorical strategy Rorty adopts in the essay for splitting the differences is to distinguish little-p philosophy from big-P Philosophy. Thus his thesis is that, ‘Pragmatists are saying that the best hope for philosophy is not to practice Philosophy’ (CP, p. xv). In other words, pragmatists can (though need not) continue to think of themselves as philosophers so long as they accept their standards for their work from something more capacious and ranging than a systematic and technical effort at professionalization. The shift toward positive philosophy is framed by Rorty as a move toward ‘a culture in which neither the priests nor the physicists nor the poets nor the Party were thought of as more “rational,” or more “scientific” or “deeper” than one another’ (CP, p.  xxxviii). Such a culture, he continues, ‘would contain nobody called “the Philosopher” who could explain why and how certain areas of culture enjoyed a special relation to reality’ (CP, p.  xxxix). There would be no need for figures who claim for themselves an unconditional authority, because everyone would recognize such claims as nothing more than dressedup authoritarianism on an intellectual par with earlier and more naked displays of theoretical aggression. Either we do not need to be bullied by the experts because with a little more training we too can see what they see or we will remain forever ignorant to their insight in which case the onus is on them to show how their expertise really rises above bullying. Such a culture has no place for authoritarian expertise because it has learned that it is better served by ‘all-purpose intellectuals who [are] ready to offer a view on pretty much anything, in the hope of making it hang together with everything else’ (CP, p. xxxix). Here Rorty finally begins to unpack the metaphor for philosophy that he would find most productive, namely the idea of the philosopher as the freewheeling intellectual who, following Hegel, aspires for nothing more, but also nothing less, than holding their own time in thought. On this view, philosophy is best seen as ‘much like what is sometimes called “culture criticism”—a term which has come to name the literary-historical-anthropological-political merry-goround’ (CP, p. xl). What are the qualities of the philosopher as cultural critic? As Rorty describes this figure, clearly writing the description for the new job he has just taken, ‘he feels free to comment on anything at all,’ ‘he is a name-dropper,’



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and ‘he is the person who tells you how all the ways of making things hang together hang together’ (CP, p. xl). Philosophical cultural criticism is not premised on the idea that cultural criticism is inherently philosophical. Rather, all it needs to get off the ground is the quite plausible idea that somebody trained in philosophy can make a wider contribution to his or her culture by way of leveraging their learning toward discourses (inclusive of style, language, audience, and subject matter) that are of wider significance than those circumscribed by professionalization. Navigating this tension between professionalism’s persistence and cultural criticism’s cachet will never be easy. But it may prove fruitful, and precisely because it is difficult. In any event, Rorty’s suggestion here is that it is bound to be more fruitful than keeping everything on the side of a professionalized Philosophy that claims to have both rigorous standards for expertise (it is, after all, a profession) and an ability to transcend the contingencies of history (it aims, after all, at the eternal objects of Philosophy). In offering views as to how otherwise disparate things hang together, the philosophical cultural critic ‘does not tell you about how all possible ways of making things hang together must hang together’ and so ‘he is doomed to become outdated’ (CP, p.  xl). Rorty is prepared to let philosophy, and thus himself, go the way of the cultural wind. If the seasons shift, and his philosophy perishes, then so be it. If the price of making ourselves relevant to the world in which we live is that we self-consciously assume the finitude imposed on the terms of that world, then this cost should be born so that we can stop promising to ourselves and one another that Philosophy will help us transcend all context into eternity. Are the gains worth the costs? There is no knock-down answer to this question. Your answer to this question will depend on what you want philosophy to do. That, precisely, is what is at issue. If the cost of cultural relevance is ephemerality, then the cost of transcendence on the other side is the enormous confidence that eternality is in our grip. To think about how we might answer this question, consider as an example recent work in the philosophy of race. This is, surely, one of the most active and important subfields in contemporary philosophy. It also, more to the point, deals with one of the most philosophically fecund areas of contemporary culture. The status of race is widely contested in our culture today. That we lack adequate concepts for these conflicts is obvious to many, and it is also why we need something like a philosophy, or rather philosophies, of race. Despite their clear importance for us today, however, philosophers of race are quite obviously

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destined for eventual irrelevance. Nobody believes that race will be a permanent category of human social organization, and certainly not a permanentlycentral socio-organizational category. Even if our descendants 20 generations downstream still think of themselves as racialized, it is not likely that they will think of their racialization as an important marker of social organization. That acknowledged, there is important work for us around here right now concerning the centrality of race for social organization and the oftentimes negative effects of that centrality. We need philosophical criticism of the concept of race and the way that concept is made (and allowed) to function in a diversity of contexts. What are the ethical implications of racial categorization? What are the ontological presumptions of such categorization? What are the historical conditions of possibility of such a mode of categorization? These are all questions to which philosophers can, and already are, contributing important reflections. These important reflections are destined for dusty archival deaths, because the very questions in virtue of which they are coherent are destined to become innocent arcana which future generations will be amused at with the same curious condescension with which we tend to treat certain theological disputations of centuries past. And yet the contributions of contemporary philosophers of race are not unimportant just because they are stamped with an indeterminate but certain expiry. These contributions are important just because the questions are important. To whom are the questions important? To us, of course. Nobody who succeeds at gaining even the smallest modicum of intellectual self-awareness in contemporary culture can fail to grasp the centrality of race to contemporary culture. Philosophy of race and other such ephemera matter, then, just because ephemera such as race matter a great deal within our current cultural paradigms. Even if we are prepared to accept philosophy as an ephemeral practice bound to the finitude of our context, we might still ask what forms such philosophy as cultural criticism might take. What, in other words, does philosophy as cultural critique look like? The best way to answer such a question is probably to look at what forms philosophy as cultural critique has taken. This, at least, is what Rorty did as he became increasingly comfortable with cultural-critical philosophy as a preferred alternative to edifying philosophy. As he did so, his survey of the best historical exemplars of this conception of philosophy increasingly gravitated around the work of his pragmatist hero John Dewey. Indeed already in 1977 he had written, ‘Dewey is just the philosopher one might want to reread if one were turning from Kant to Hegel, from a “metaphysics of experience” to a study of cultural development’ (CP, p. 76).



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“Introduction” to Vol. 8 of The Later Works of John Dewey (1986) One central aspect of Rorty’s increasing adoption of an idea of little-p philosophy as cultural criticism, in contrast to competing alternatives such as edifying philosophy, was the prominence of philosophical pragmatism in his intellectual outlook. If Dewey was one of the three principal heroes of Mirror and pragmatism just one of the names for the philosophical perspective adumbrated therein, then Consequences explicitly names pragmatism as Rorty’s view, and Dewey increasingly became his primary hero.10 By the time Rorty wrote his most important book, namely Contingency, he clearly saw himself as a Deweyan intellectual. The rising prominence of Dewey in Rorty’s self-narration of his intellectual inheritance was, I believe, coterminous with the increasing centrality of cultural criticism in Rorty’s self-description of his philosophical practice.11 This is just to say that pragmatist philosophy was central to Rorty’s development of the idea of philosophy as cultural politics. A key, but almost entirely neglected, essay for understanding this shift in Rorty’s metaphilosophical vocabulary is his Introduction to Volume 8 of The Later Works of John Dewey. One reason this piece is especially worth considering is because it clarifies Rorty’s attempt to articulate what he takes as valuable in Dewey’s philosophical writings. This clarification is valuable insofar as many contemporary Deweyan pragmatists have argued (quite mistakenly I think) that Rorty’s downbeat assessment of professionalized philosophy gains little warrant from Dewey’s pragmatist metaphilosophy.12 Rorty discerns a tension in Dewey’s own practice of philosophy between: the image of the philosopher as social activist, concerned to keep the spirit of reform alive by constant criticism of the adequacy of current practices and institutions, and the philosopher as politically neutral theoretician—a specialist in, and authority upon, such peculiarly philosophical topics as the rules of logic, the nature of science, or the nature of thought. (1986, p. x)

Rorty favors the first Deweyan image of philosopher as social critic. He finds the second image of philosopher as neutral theoretician to be largely an impediment to the first. For the latter kind of philosopher says things like, quoting Rorty parroting Dewey, ‘You should share my desire for social reform, for it is grounded upon my philosophical research, certified by that “scientific method” which I have identified as the best way of thinking’ (1986, p. xi). Rorty notes that

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Dewey did not find this latter image of the philosopher to be an obstacle to the former. But Rorty suggests that in his attempts to be ‘neutral’ (Rorty’s term) and ‘scientific’ (Dewey’s), the pragmatist faces the trouble of spelling out exactly how we are to attain scientific neutrality in a way that does not beg all the important questions that are up for grabs in the space of social reform. Rorty thinks this is an impossible task that takes philosophy straight back to its shopworn self-image of epistemological expertise. In Dewey’s case, Rorty suggests, the attempt to spell out ‘scientific method’ confronted an irresolvable ambiguity between method as ‘a well-defined procedure—a method in the sense of a set of directions for what to do next, something like a recipe’ and method as ‘a mere recommendation to be open-minded, undogmatic, critical, and experimental’ (1986, p. xiii). To the extent that Dewey shades toward method-as-procedure he risks falling back into the authoritarian rationalism that his pragmatist empiricism is meant to avert. But to the extent that Dewey shades toward method-as-experimentation he disabuses us of the idea that such ‘method’ is something that ‘epistemologists’ have special province over and unique ‘expertise’ about. Rorty himself clearly prefers the looser liberal conception of method, and wishes only that Dewey had too in a way that would have enabled him to fully adopt his philosophical self-image as a ‘social activist’ in preference to the sporadic self-image of a ‘politically-neutral specialist’ whose special brand of metaphysics guarantees a political payoff. Philosophers, Rorty thought, are not especially equipped to be neutral specialists at anything. We are not, for instance, more moral than the undergraduates to whom we teach moral philosophy. We are, pretty much by design of training, much worse at the sciences than the scientists whose practices of knowledge we claim specialties in. What we are especially wellequipped for, Rorty wants to propose instead, is a rigorous study of the possible moves on the philosophical chessboard combined with a capacity for gaining a synthetic vision of our cultural present. This does not make us useful specialists so much as it makes us potentially useful engaged practitioner-critics. It equips us to undertake a criticism of our own culture. I find Rorty perceptive to have discerned in Dewey a tension that inhabits the vast majority of his major writings. I think Rorty’s favored modality of philosophy as cultural critique is about as good a description as one can get of what Dewey is up to in some of his best contributions to social and political theory, many of which almost read as short little cultural-critical tracts for the times. But other of Dewey’s books, especially those massive tomes where he is working out technical matters in philosophical logic or a systematic



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metaphysics of experience, do not easily fit the mold in their technical style and philosophical abstraction. How do we adjudicate this tension in Dewey’s thought? Who, some have asked, is the real Dewey? Rorty might have mentioned on behalf of his favored interpretation of pragmatist philosophy that the majority of Dewey’s prolific output in his mature period was writings more in a cultural-critical vein, namely thousands upon thousands of pages of almost constant contribution to pressing social, political, and cultural topics of the day. He might also have mentioned that Dewey himself often made explicit brief on behalf of a conception of philosophy as connected criticism. The most famous example of this comes from Dewey’s 1917 essay ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy.’ Dewey there wrote, ‘Philosophy records itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men’ (MW 10, p.  42).13 There is, in other words, no distinctive set of problems that are specifically philosophical in nature. Philosophy, accordingly, ought to address itself to the most pressing problems of its culture. Dewey here and elsewhere explicitly and proudly claimed philosophy as a resource for the criticism of its own culture. Rorty’s point, then, could be read as saying that it is in such passages as these that we come into contact with the real Dewey. But his point is probably best put not in terms of finding out who the real Dewey was (a controversial matter that could probably never be settled) so much as in terms of figuring out for ourselves which Dewey we would do best to model ourselves after. If there is anything controversial that remains in Rorty’s more modest claim, then it is simply his insistence that we cannot easily be both kinds of Dewey at once. To try to do so is to take back with one hand what we give with the other. The contentious point, in other words, is just that Philosophy tends to get in the way of philosophy insofar as systematic specialization often pulls against the efficacy of cultural criticism.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) Over the course of the 1980s, Rorty began spending more and more of his time hanging around departments of literature. In hindsight, then, it is no surprise that Rorty increasingly referred to the kind of philosophy he wished to nudge toward as ‘literary criticism.’14 Yet at the time, this terminology was indeed surprising to many of his occasional readers including his colleagues in

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philosophy departments who had rather closely followed his earlier contributions to internecine disciplinary debates. In the 1989 volume that Rorty would later describe as ‘still my favorite among my own books’ (2010, p.  17), the pragmatist unabashedly modeled philosophy on literary criticism, which he describes, in a kind of direct affront to professionalized philosophers, as ‘the presiding intellectual discipline’ that deserves to occupy a position of ‘preeminence within the high culture of the democracies’ (CIS, pp. 83, 82). The idea of philosophy as literary criticism forwarded in Contingency was thus decidedly not an attempt to specify something like a Fach to which academic parishioners might aspire—an aspiration elegantly mocked at the outset of the century by William James in his humorous description of ‘the gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young PhD’s boring each other at seminaries’ (quoted in Rorty, PMN, p. 136).15 Rorty offered literary criticism as a model for philosophy not because it would serve professionalization, but rather because it is just about as expansive a term as one can get for what the humanistic intellectual might do. In a personal letter sent by Rorty to Jonathan Lear in November of 1981, as some of the ideas for Contingency were already brewing, he offers a formulation that nicely frames the idea: I don’t want to say that ‘where we’re going is literary criticism’ but rather that something like ‘culture criticism’—illustrated by Carlyle and Goethe and Arnold and Mill (in the parts of Mill which don’t get assigned in philosophy courses) [—] is an all-embracing genre within which it doesn’t pay to divide out the lit. crit. from the philosophy. If both literary criticism and philosophy get dissolved into this wider thing, that would be fine with me. (RRP, Box 30, Folder 2; bracket inserted)16

Rorty is here clearly not fully confident with the vocabulary he would come to settle on by the end of the decade. But terminology notwithstanding, the idea is what matters. What matters is the full breadth of the thing that Rorty is after. That he would call this ‘culture criticism’ at one point and ‘literary criticism’ at another matters little to the underlying vision of philosophy’s future. Both are gestures to something much more capacious than philosophy’s erstwhile grayplaster temperaments would have let themselves imagine. Contingency begins with a version of that contrast between two images of philosophy I have been tracking. Rorty focuses on ‘a split within philosophy’ between those ‘faithful to the Enlightenment [and] the cause of science’ and a Romantic strain in philosophy less impressed with the scientist who pretends to represent reality in itself and more in favor of ‘the political utopian and



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the innovative artist’ for whom the whole metaphor of truth as representations of a world that is discovered rather than developed is ‘pointless’ (CIS, pp. 3, 4). While the first part of Contingency focuses on negative criticisms of Enlightenment-style philosophy, the second part begins to roll out the more positive image of a Romantic-styled philosophy. In a chapter titled ‘Private Irony and Liberal Hope’ Rorty begins with a conception of philosophy as a ‘dialectical’ project, one that is modeled not around ‘argumentative procedure’ so much as around ‘literary skill’ (CIS, p. 78). Rorty’s exemplar for this is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which ‘helped turn [philosophy] into a literary genre’ by helping to ‘de-metaphysize philosophy’ (CIS, p. 79). With this Rorty executes his subtle but enormous kaleidoscopic shift. ‘A more up-to-date word for what I have been calling “dialectic”,’ Rorty simply says, ‘would be “literary criticism”’ (CIS, p. 79). Rorty immediately explains the idea in terms of its full-scale capaciousness: the term ‘literary criticism’ has been stretched further and further in the course of our century … [such that] instead of changing the term ‘literary criticism’ to something like ‘culture criticism,’ we have instead stretched the word ‘literature’ to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. (CIS, p. 81)

The term itself may be uncomfortable, Rorty confesses, but this has as much to do with the academic origins of our ill ease as with the term itself. Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. (CIS, p. 81)

The important point, again, concerns not literature or philosophy or science or art so much as a preoccupation that would come to seem increasingly central to Rorty. Rorty wrote about literature with as capacious a sensibility as is imaginable: ‘The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance—might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important’ (CIS, p. 82). We philosophers should become literary critics, Rorty seemed to be saying, because the object of our concern really ought to be measured in terms of the contribution to the wider moralities of

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our wider culture. Literary criticism, or cultural critique, brings into focus the important contributions that philosophy can make to the liberal moralities of the West. All the argumentative arcana and technical tedium of our journal articles, anthologies, and monographs will, Rorty suggests, ultimately be judged by whether or not they ‘facilitate moral reflection’ (CIS, p.  82). Rorty’s point, of course, is not that professional philosophical work cannot facilitate moral reflection. Rather his point is just to challenge philosophy to take this aspect of its brief much more seriously. We have tended to increasingly think of ourselves over the past few centuries as discharging a particular set of duties that involve forms of expertise and professionalization which have less and less to do with broader matters of cultural morality. This is to our discredit. But it is redeemable. We can do better. And indeed we might, if only we bother to try. Rorty was suggesting that we philosophers should feel free to treat what he called ‘literary criticism’ as the centermost province of our intellectual mission. This, Rorty was suggesting, is likely the best general job description we can give ourselves if we are at all serious about the pragmatist challenge to foundationalism, representationalism, dualism, and so on (in short, to the ‘Philosophy’ Fach). Many philosophers these days buy that negative critique. Yet they still balk at Rorty’s suggestion that philosophy should see itself as a kind of literature. But if all that Rorty meant by this is that philosophy should see itself as an all-purpose and free-wheeling attempt to facilitate moral reflection, then what’s the problem? Isn’t Rorty really just telling us to do what we all wish we really did do better than we tend to?

Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007) Most of Rorty’s many metaphilosophical musings after Contingency contain ample reference to a positive image of philosophy as literary and cultural critique. Less than half a decade after Contingency he urged, in a widely-read 1993 reply to Hilary Putnam, that we philosophers ought to ‘move everything over from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics, from claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about what we should try’ (TP, p. 57). Nearly two decades worth of writings, including publications both in highly-professionalized journals and more cultural-critical venues, return time and again to this core and crucial theme of philosophy as cultural politics. We can retrospectively recognize a kind of culmination of this theme in a brief two-page preface to the fourth and final volume of his Collected Papers



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published in 2007. Here, in one of his very last writings printed just months before he passed away, the indefatigable critic of foundationalist philosophy offered a final, and incisively concise, characterization of the positive role that he hoped philosophy might yet come to play. Many were surprised to find such a bold endorsement of philosophy from one of philosophy’s staunchest selfcritics.17 But, as I have argued, Rorty was always of two minds about philosophy. Weary of the obsolete pretensions of foundationalist philosophy he wholly embraced the imaginative engagements of literary philosophy. That Rorty was of two minds about philosophy is not a symptom of metaphilosophical deficiency on his part. Philosophy, after all, is just the sort of thing that we ought to be of two minds about. This has always been the case with would-be and may-be philosophers from Socrates to Hume to Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein (and now Rorty). Rorty’s focus in his 2007 preface is on philosophy’s possible relevance to ‘humanity’s ongoing conversation about what to do with itself ’ (PCP, p.  ix). Since we no longer hold any foundationalist pretensions of being able to either predict where this conversation will wind up, we should be content to see ourselves as contributors to the conversation about who we are. This way of putting things, of course, hearkens back to claims in Mirror to the effect that ‘edifying philosophy aims at continuing the conversation rather than at discovering truth,’ but without couching the concept of conversation in terms of an edifying philosophical hermeneutics-cum-existentialism (PMN, p. 373). Rorty was now explicitly thinking about ‘conversation’ in terms of an idea of cultural criticism: ‘The progress of this conversation has engendered new social practices, and changes in the vocabularies deployed in moral and political deliberation. To suggest further novelties is to intervene in cultural politics’ (PCP, p. ix). Rorty appeals to his pragmatist hero, who had long since come to the fore of his personal pantheon of heroes pushing aside Heidegger and Gadamer, to make his principal point: ‘Dewey hoped that philosophy professors would see such intervention as their principal assignment’ (PCP, p. ix). According to this brief for cultural-critical philosophy, our job as philosophers is to contribute to an ongoing conversation about who we are and may yet become. But what would this look like in practice? In response, consider two features of the positive conception of philosophy exhibited in Rorty’s final preface. First, it would seem to involve a more expansive notion of the problems that philosophy ought to take as its primary subject matter. Dewey had claimed, of course, that we should shift our attention from purely philosophical problems to more practical problems confronted by persons in the course of

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actual experience. Rorty notes in this preface that ‘The professionalization of philosophy, its transformation into an academic discipline, was a necessary evil’ (PCP, p. x). The best way to make good on philosophy is for we philosophers to involve ourselves as much as is possible in debates going on outside of philosophy: ‘not just natural science, but art, literature, religion, and politics as well’ (PCP, p. x). We should become wide-ranging inter-disciplinarians with a capacious concept of our charge as critics. Second, the practice of philosophy as cultural criticism would presumably also involve an assessment of rival philosophical disputes in terms of the difference they make to the cultural conversation in which they should be properly located. On this point, Rorty urges that ‘we look at relatively specialized and technical debates between contemporary philosophers in the light of our hopes for cultural change’ (PCP, p. x). Philosophical disputation, in other words, should not be seen as an affair to be autonomously judged by the disputants. We must come to practice and assess philosophy in terms of its relevance to and yield for the culture that is its context. So, for example, a dispute between Kantian and Deweyan moral theory ought to be resolved not just in terms of the force of the better argument with an eye toward the clarification of our moral concepts but also with an eye toward how we might take up each of these competing moral theories in the contemporary moral life and what results we might expect from their being thus operationalized.18 Rorty refers to this in terms of philosophy as an intervention into cultural politics. He might just as well have called it philosophical cultural critique. For that is a term that is suitable for many of us today.

Conclusion: Pragmatist philosophy as cultural critique Richard Rorty challenged philosophy—he did not conclude it. In the course of issuing his provocations and ironizations, Rorty had a great many positive things to say about philosophy, its function in contemporary culture, and its future potentialities. This may come as a surprise to critics who reject his work for its supposed insistence on the necessity of an imminent end of philosophy. As a final piece of evidence, consider an instructive metaphilosophical piece published in 1992 where Rorty addresses this criticism head-on: I am often accused of being an ‘end of philosophy’ thinker, and I should like to take this occasion to reemphasize (as I tried to do on the final page of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) that philosophy is just not the sort of thing that can



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have an end—it is too vague and amorphous a term to bear the weight of predicates like ‘beginning’ or ‘end.’ What does have a beginning, and may now be coming to an end, is three hundred years’ worth of attempts to bridge the gap which the Cartesian, representationalist picture of knowledge and inquiry led us to imagine existed. (LT [from the 1992 introduction], p. 374)19

It is more misleading than helpful to criticize Rorty’s erstwhile claims that make him sound as if he wanted philosophy to come to an end. It would be more instructive for us to consider instead Rorty’s idea that it is high time that philosophy gets its act together. Rorty challenged philosophy to better discharge its obligations to its culture, to its practitioners, and to its many other audiences. As it happens, a great many philosophers now practice philosophy in ways that suggest that we have begun to take this challenge quite seriously indeed. Philosophy over the past few decades has become much better situated vis-à-vis its culture. This is exemplified by much recent work in feminist philosophy, critical race philosophy, much work in philosophy and history of science and philosophy of technology, empirically-informed philosophy of mind, wide swaths of political philosophy, environmental philosophy, embodied philosophy, and countless strands of discipline-centering contributions in analytic, continental, and pragmatist philosophy. What we can witness in all of this work is, as Philip Kitcher puts it in an essay also drawing on Dewey, philosophy turning itself ‘inside out’ such that those concerns that were once core to the discipline are becoming increasingly peripheral in order to make room for pressing culturalcritical matters that everyone understands the value of philosophical reflection upon (Kitcher, 2011). It is not clear that Rorty himself had anything to do with this major turning in the work of philosophy. But neither is it clear that he had nothing to do with philosophy’s ongoing work in turning itself inside out. What is clear, though it has not yet been clearly seen by enough philosophers, is that Rorty offers a positive self-image for these reconstructed practitioners of philosophy who have been springing up in recent decades. Rorty nowhere systematically set out the terms of this new positive self-image for philosophical practice. But this is because such systematicity would not be in good keeping with the self-image he had in mind. Without backsliding into the authoritarianism that is corollary with systematicity we can, nevertheless, arrive at a positive self-image of philosophical cultural critique.

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Rorty’s achievement should be understood in terms of challenging a highlyprofessionalized tradition of philosophical experts to transform themselves into a breed of more capacious intellectuals who eagerly and confidently push themselves toward a more engaged practice of philosophy as cultural politics. Rorty was not alone amongst late-twentieth-century philosophers pursuing such reflexive provocations.20 That Rorty was not a singular gadfly, but rather just one particularly prominent entrant midst a whole magazine of entreaties, should give us greater confidence in hoping yet for better cultural-critical philosophies in the near future.21

Notes 1 The depth of Rorty’s debt to Hume seems to me underappreciated by most of his commentators. Certainly it is underexplored in the existing scholarship. For an important exception, drawing attention to the sort of metaphilosophical analogies between Rorty and Hume I here seek to exploit, see a discussion by Michael Williams (2003). Whereas Williams looks to make the connection in order to point out a problematic ambiguity in Rorty’s metaphilosophy, I seek to use the connection as the basis for highlighting a productive tension in Rorty’s conception(s) of philosophy. 2 Alan Malachowski, long a sympathetic expositor, notes that Rorty wanted, ‘to change our conception of what philosophy is, what it involves, the ways in which it ought to be practiced and the topics that it should deal with’ (2002, p. 3). Christopher Voparil explicates at length a positive conception of ‘politics and vision’ in Rorty’s work (2006). Eduardo Mendieta describes Rorty as having helped us see that, ‘Philosophy can help transform the world only if it first transforms itself, and it transforms itself by ceasing to be deluded about its royal mission’ (2006, p. xvii). Michael Bacon describes Rorty’s pragmatist anti-representationalism in terms that aim to make sense of ‘the glory’ of this philosophy idea in terms of ‘its relevance for social questions’ (2009, p. xii). David Rondel similarly claims of Rorty’s ‘evangelical metaphilosophy’ that ‘it recommends that philosophers should seek to remake their own discipline in exactly the open-ended fashion that the ironist seeks to remake herself—with hope, open-mindedness, and a refusal to accept that any such remaking represents the final word’ (2011a, p. 165). I am also happy to report that many of the contributors to the present volume have argued that we can find a positive conception of philosophy in Rorty. What I offer here thus might be described as a kind of synthesizing framework in which some of the views well represented in this collection can be situated. A short sample from authors



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herein includes Bjørn Ramberg (‘A fundamental aspect of Rorty’s contribution to philosophy in the spirit of pragmatism consists in drawing up, and attempting to implement, proposals for how we may, using language, do various things differently from the way we have been doing them up to now’ [this volume, p.53]), Richard Shusterman (‘a life of bold and wide-ranging philosophical inquiry’ [this volume, p. 107]), and Esa Saarinen (‘That the philosopher could, and should help, is the very essence of Rorty’s point’ [this volume, p. 146]). Robert Brandom, in an earlier essay, writes, ‘Rorty sees philosophy as having an absolutely crucial cultural role to play in the current situation—a role far more significant than that envisaged by most analytic philosophers’ (2000a, p. x). 3 See Wojciech Małecki (2009) on Rorty for a related distinction drawn up in terms of ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ philosophy. 4 I thus fail to see why so many contemporary philosophers who are critical of our entrenched parochialization take Rorty’s elegant criticisms of the same as an affront to their own efforts. I suspect that the lingering differences between Rorty and most other contemporary post-foundationalist philosophers can be boiled down to this: Rorty was less sanguine than most of us are about the hopes of converting our discipline to one that operates with a post-foundationalist and post-professionalized self-image. While many of us think that philosophy is capable of nudging itself in a post-foundational direction, Rorty rarely made much noise about any hopes he had for such a prospect, preferring instead to talk in terms of intellectual culture going post-philosophical. This is because Rorty thought that we post-foundationalists would find more allies in literature, history, and anthropology departments than we would in our own departments. I am not sure if Rorty’s predictions will be born out or not. But I would insist that his lack of optimism on this score should not be taken for a lack of meliorism—Rorty tirelessly wrote and read on behalf of his favored image of philosophical practice and in so doing offers us a model for what we might yet become. 5 It may be useful to situate my argument vis-à-vis two recent essays from a symposium on the subject of cultural politics in Rorty’s metaphilosophy. Both essays offer nuanced readings of the place, and time, of cultural criticism in Rorty’s conception of philosophy. David Hiley, with whom I pretty much agree, writes that, ‘Rorty gave various names at different times to the activity that might help once we abandon [systematic philosophy],’ going on to name ‘edification,’ ‘pragmatism,’ ‘post-modernist bourgeois liberalism,’ and ‘liberal irony’ (2011, p. 47). My minor tweak is just to suggest that ‘cultural criticism’ is the best description that Rorty finally settled on, after having expressed some doubts about (nearly) all of the others. In contrast to my agreement with Hiley, I pretty much disagree with Christopher Voparil (usually one of my favorite Rorty commentators) when he writes that ‘Rorty has gone from inviting but being rather noncommittal about

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philosophy getting involved in cultural politics in the 1970s, to believing in the 1980s and 1990s that novelists, poets, and journalists alone can do the work, to thinking in his final collection [of 2007] that the intervention of philosophers is absolutely necessary’ (2011a, p. 115). My argument below is that Rorty was from the beginning (as early as 1958) working toward an illumination of philosophy’s positive role. Where Voparil holds that ‘At this early stage [the 1970s], Rorty is noncommittal about a positive role for philosophy in this broad practice of culture criticism’ (p. 117), I hold that Rorty’s early writings rather evince a lack of commitment about how to best conceptualize philosophy’s positive role. More importantly, I see an increasing clarity over time in Rorty’s work concerning how to conceptualize positive philosophy. It is mostly on this point that I am in disagreement with Voparil, who claims that ‘by the late 1980s Rorty’s developing position pretty clearly writes off philosophy’ (p. 117) only to begin ‘a revision’ of that stance beginning around the time of his ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ Tanner Lectures given in 1991 (published as Rorty [1993a]). My view is that Rorty developed increasingly clearer ways of distinguishing two forms of philosophy, such that the only thing Rorty ever seriously ‘wrote off ’ was highly-professionalized philosophy. 6 I first came across this piece when working as an archival assistant for sociologist Neil Gross who was at the time preparing his intellectual biography-cum-sociology of Rorty (cf. Gross [2008]). I left Stanford one Spring day, thanks to Gross and to Rorty, with two copies of this early essay, one dating from Rorty’s time at Wellesley in the late 1950s and another dating from Rorty’s first years at Princeton in the early 1960s. I mention the story of these multiple drafts for two reasons. First, Rorty evidently took this metaphilosophical piece seriously enough to work on it over the span of more than a few years, during which he was to produce some highlyregarded philosophical work of his own. Second, Rorty’s correspondence reveals that he took the piece seriously enough to send it off for publication, though he failed to find a suitable venue. Gross subsequently helped arrange to have the piece published in Princeton University Press’s re-edition of PMN. 7 Note that the shortened version of this essay included in Rorty’s PCP collection of papers excerpts the crucial quoted line. 8 See Rorty (CIS, p. 189) on the remaining normative force of self-conscious post-foundationalism, an idea that I develop in detail vis-à-vis Rorty in Koopman (2011). 9 Rorty later wrote that ‘my invocation of Gadamerian hermeneutics was feeble and unproductive’ (2010, p. 13), but contrast Raymond Geuss’s (2008, p. 86) recollection of Gadamer’s importance for Rorty at the time. 10 As Rorty put it in a 1991 introduction to a collection of papers, Dewey is ‘the figure who, in the decade since I wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, has, in my imagination, gradually eclipsed Wittgenstein and Heidegger’ (ORT, p. 16).



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11 For similar arguments see recent work by Rondel (2011b, p. 57) and Voparil (this volume, p. 107). 12 These arguments on behalf of Dewey against Rorty need to be read as situated in a much wider terrain of debate over Rorty’s credentials as a Deweyan pragmatist. See, for instance, criticisms from contemporary classical pragmatists such as James Gouinlock (1995), Susan Haack (1995), and Ralph Sleeper (1985), as well as Dewey scholars such as Larry Hickman (2007) and intellectual historians of pragmatism such as Robert Westbrook (2005). For two recent and important re-evaluations of Rorty from within the center of contemporary classical pragmatist philosophy see Vincent Colapietro (2011) and Michael Eldridge (2009). For more recent responses to the disputes amongst the previous generations of pragmatists see Mark Sanders (2009), David Rondel (2011b), Chris Voparil (2012 [this volume, p. 107]), and in a broader sense my own prior efforts at offering terms for a rapprochement between what I have referred to as debates between ‘paleopragmatists’ and ‘neopragmatists’ in Koopman (2007, 2009). Another carp I have not emphasized before but which I may as well go ahead and air now is that it is not clear to me how there is anything quite Jamesian or Deweyan about insisting that Rorty is not entitled to make what use of James or Dewey he needs to in order to fashion himself into the kind of situated cultural critical philosopher that James and Dewey were before him. Rorty, I should think, ought to be free to leverage the spirit of pragmatist methods and orientations against the letter of any particular pragmatist theory with which he disagrees on pragmatic grounds. In borrowing the spirit of a self-image, and not always the letter of a doctrine, from the classical pragmatists, Rorty renewed that spirit so that pragmatist philosophical thought might continue to contribute to a wider public discourse in the manner of what I am calling cultural criticism. 13 Dewey went on to famously adumbrate this metaphilosophical pragmatism in issuing the following provocative challenge to his philosophical contemporaries: ‘philosophy in America will be lost between chewing a historic cud long since reduced to woody fibre, or an apologetics for lost causes (lost to natural science), or a scholastic, schematic formalism, unless it can somehow bring to consciousness America’s own needs and its own implicit principle of successful action’ (MW 10, p. 47). 14 See Rorty (CP, pp. 66, 139) for two early (from 1976 and 1981 respectively) uses of the term that rose into prominence in Rorty’s writings across the 1980s. 15 James to George Santayana, May 2, 1905, from James 1920, p. 228, and quoted in Rorty, PMN, p. 136. 16 The letter is from Rorty to Jonathan Lear, dated Nov. 17, 1981, and can be accessed at the UC Irvine collection of the Richard Rorty Papers, Box 30, Folder 2. 17 See the opening paragraphs of the discussions by Shusterman (this volume, p. 165) and Voparil (2011a, p. 115), and my response above in note 5.

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18 I am here glossing the argument given in Rorty’s 2004 essay ‘Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy’ included in the PCP collection. 19 Almost a decade later Rorty would write, Would [the end of authoritarian epistemology] be the end of philosophy? Certainly not. There would still be the need to reconcile the old and the new—to reshape old metaphors and vocabularies so as to accommodate them to new insights. That is why philosophy will last as long as cultural change does. But philosophy may eventually cease to be thought of as a super-science, or as supplying a foundation for science, or as a substitute for religion, or as supplying weapons to be used to defend either religion or science against their cultured despisers. Philosophy would be a matter of conciliating the human present with the human past. (2000c, p. 218) 20 Two other thinkers of stature who immediately spring to mind are Bernard Williams (thinking of defected high church analytic philosophers who finally forswore analytic boasts about scientific rigor) and Michel Foucault (thinking of paradigmatic continental philosophers who rejected the pretences of phenomenological rigor). My claim is that all three of these thinkers were striving to make room for a positive image of philosophy as cultural critique, an image that serves up particularly useful self-conceptions for those many strands of cultural critical philosophy referenced in the previous paragraph. For readings of the work of these other two philosophers along these lines see my interpretations in Koopman (2010) on Williams and Koopman (2013) on Foucault. 21 For insightful comments on earlier versions of this material I would like to thank Christopher Voparil, David Rondel, Alan Reynolds, Alexis Dianda, Elena Clare Cuffari, and members of an audience (especially Vincent Colapietro) at a Society for Advancement of American Philosophy panel on the work of Richard Rorty.

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Pragmatist Philosophy and Enlarging Human Freedom Rorty’s Deweyan Pragmatism Christopher J. Voparil My perspective in this chapter goes against the grain of received views about Rorty’s relation to Dewey. I argue that the basic motivation behind Rorty’s thinking and writing is a fundamentally Deweyan one: promoting ethical, social, and political change by reconceiving our understanding of philosophy and its role in the culture. More specifically, I suggest that the idea of ‘philosophy as cultural politics’ that emerges in Rorty’s final collection of essays can be read as a culmination of an effort begun in the mid-1970s to rejuvenate the ‘celebrations of American democracy, naturalism, and social reconstruction’ he associated with the ‘heroic period of Deweyan pragmatism’ between the wars (CP, pp. 64, 61), albeit with a few key revisions. Not only do I see these two thinkers as having more in common than most commentators, I locate their particular points of divergence differently. As a result, ways in which Rorty may be seen as assuming the mantle of Deweyan pragmatist philosophy that have not sufficiently been recognized come into view. The focus of this chapter is what Matthew Festenstein has called ‘the political meaning of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy’ (2001, p.  203). I read both Rorty and Dewey as committed to a conception of philosophy as an instrument of social change embodied in what Rorty called, borrowing a phrase from Sidney Hook, the project of ‘enlarging human freedom’ (CP, p. 69). The differences arise when Rorty objects to particular elements in Dewey’s work, like the project of constructive metaphysics in Experience and Nature, that he believes get in the way of reconstructing philosophy as an instrument of social change. Stated most starkly, Rorty’s approach can be summed up by his notion of ‘putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit’ (ORT, p.  178).1 He

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is content to retain only those philosophical categories and assumptions that in his view foster social and political change or ‘moral progress.’ Yet for Rorty, philosophy has no particular monopoly on this project of enlarging human freedom and no special contribution to make to the Deweyan work of, as he put it in Reconstruction in Philosophy, ‘clarify[ing] men’s ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day’ (MW 12, p. 94).2 For Rorty, this project need not ‘center around anything more than anything else: neither poetry, nor social institutions, nor mysticism, nor depth psychology, nor novels, nor philosophy, nor physical science’ (CP, p. 70). Whether Dewey would assent to such views is, of course, an important issue, though perhaps separable from the question of whether these would be salutary developments for pragmatism or American culture and democracy as a whole. In any case, for his part Rorty took these views to be a function of Dewey’s insights, in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, about the ‘cultural matrix’ within which all inquiry takes place (LW 12, p.  28ff.).3 My claim is that the idea of philosophy as cultural politics and the injunction that philosophers make intervening in cultural politics their primary assignment is not only an explicit turn—or return—to Dewey, but a culmination of Rorty’s thought. This foregrounding of shared cultural-political dimensions is in keeping with a new wave of interpretations of the Rorty-Dewey relationship.4 In what follows I offer a reading that suggests how their accounts can be seen to cohere, based on the distinction between normal and abnormal discourse. Ultimately, I argue that bringing Rorty’s and Dewey’s insights together yields the fullest conception of pragmatic philosophical discourse in the context of democratic change and collective self-reform. After situating Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics within the broader trajectory of his work, I attempt to justify the label ‘Deweyan pragmatism’ referenced in the subtitle. I then highlight Rorty’s contributions to the project of reconstructing pragmatist philosophy. My hope is to shift the debate from polemical readings to discussion of which dimensions of each thinker’s projects are most useful for the project of enlarging human freedom.

From putting politics first to philosophy as cultural politics To fully grasp the significance of Rorty’s claims about ‘putting politics first and tailoring a philosophy to suit’ and ‘the priority of democracy to philosophy’ it is helpful to situate them against the larger cultural backdrop of his project. Rorty’s work of the 1970s, culminating in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, can be



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understood as an attempt to initiate a project of philosophical and cultural reconstruction aimed at getting us to move beyond ‘the entire cultural tradition which made truth … a central virtue’ (CP, p.  35).5 As he later put, it comes down to ‘a question of efficiency’—‘how best to bring about the utopia sketched by the Enlightenment’ (TP, p.  172). His critique of traditional philosophy in its rationalist and foundationalist registers is a matter of ‘causal efficacy’ with regard to political and moral ends, rather than ‘epistemic status’ (TP, p. 172). Viewing issues in moral and political terms, rather than epistemological or metaphilosophical ones, he holds, ‘makes clearer what is at stake’ (ORT, p. 28). As he explains in Mirror, he identified with thinkers, like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey, who in his view sought ‘to help their readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide “grounding” for the intuitions and customs of the present’ (p. 12). This method of evaluating philosophers based on the ‘politics’ that follow from their perspectives is what leads Rorty to prefer Dewey over Heidegger, precisely for the former’s efforts to turn philosophy toward rather than detach it from ‘the problems of men’ (CP, pp. 52–3).6 Understood in this light, the idea of philosophy as cultural politics that emerges in Rorty’s final collection of essays is less of a departure than it initially seems. His call in the preface to Philosophy as Cultural Politics for philosophers to ‘intervene in cultural politics’ and see this as ‘their principal assignment’ is of a piece with his call in essays of the mid-1970s for philosophers to become more involved in the cause of enlarging human freedom (p. x). Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics can be seen as a culmination of his effort to revive the ‘celebrations of American democracy, naturalism, and social reconstruction’ he associated with the ‘heroic period of Deweyan pragmatism’ (CP, pp. 64, 61). During these ‘great days of Deweyan philosophy and social science’ between the wars, philosophy became a call to reconstruct the American social order via the application of intelligence to social and moral problems. Philosophy took on a distinctly cultural role in the nation’s life, providing ‘moral leadership’ and engaging ‘new problems arising from the social sciences and the arts’ (CP, pp.  63, 61). In the story Rorty tells, the metamorphosis of logical empiricism into analytic philosophy during the post-war period displaces this socially-concerned conception, replacing it with an understanding of philosophy as a rigorous, technical discipline modeled on the more narrowly professionalized mathematical and natural sciences that strived for ‘cooperation in joint inquiry and the production of agreed-upon results’ (CP, p. 64).

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Two fundamental characteristics distinguish this new conception of philosophy and its basic raison d’être from its Deweyan predecessor: a withdrawal from the culture and a disinterest in moral and social questions. The underlying social concern that animated Deweyan philosophy was abandoned, and philosophy lost contact with both the social sciences on one side and the arts on the other.7 My claim here is twofold: not only does the conception of philosophy as cultural politics mark Rorty’s attempt to recover these dimensions of the Deweyan pragmatic project; the dual aims of engaging the culture and generating interest in moral and social or political issues supply the fundamental driving energies of his thought.8 In ‘Dewey’s Metaphysics,’ which dates to 1975, Rorty expresses his interest in what he refers to as Dewey’s idea of ‘philosophy as the criticism of culture’ and affirms Dewey’s notion of philosophy as ‘an instrument of social change’ (CP, pp. 73–4).9 At this early stage, Rorty’s conclusion about the role of philosophy in this broad practice of culture criticism straddles the fence: ‘professionalized philosophy may or may not join transcendentalist culture, but it should not try to beat it’ (CP, p. 69). However, as we have seen, in this same essay Rorty also calls attention to the ‘moral leadership’ philosophy provided in the ‘heroic period of Deweyan pragmatism’ between the two World Wars (CP, p. 61). He closes with a quote from Sidney Hook, the philosopher on whose knees he was bounced as a child, who calls pragmatism ‘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). Rorty’s point is that professional philosophers are ‘not doing as much for this cause as they would like’ (CP, p. 70). What complicates the interpretation of Rorty’s project that I am offering here is the fact that despite this early call for philosophers to do more for the project of human freedom, by the late 1980s Rorty’s developing position pretty clearly writes off philosophy, putting the burden of advancing the cause of ‘equality and freedom’ on novels and other forms of narrative. At least this is the way it seems. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he links his liberal utopia with ‘a general turn against theory and toward narrative,’ based on the idea that ‘the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress’ (p.  xvi). In ‘Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,’ he sketches a story about the West in which ‘the novel, and particularly the novel of moral protest, rather than the philosophical treatise’ is ‘the genre most closely associated with the struggle for freedom and equality’ (EHO, pp. 66–8). Similarly, in ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,’ he evinces his well-known stance that democracy



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does not need ‘philosophical backup’ (ORT, p. 178) and suggests we see moral progress as ‘a history of making rather than finding, of poetic achievement by “radically situated” individuals and communities, rather than as the gradual unveiling, through the use of “reason”, of “principles” or “rights” or “values”’ (ORT, pp. 182, 189). In the 1990s, Rorty turns to more specific political issues and concrete groups, taking up pragmatism’s implications for feminism, human rights, globalization, and justice, among others.10 A key dimension of this work is expanding the boundaries of the conversation beyond the West. Because they are less oriented toward providing ‘one right answer,’ these narrative traditions offer a more fruitful basis for East-West dialogue and ‘finding something distinctive in the West which the East can use, and conversely’ (EHO, pp. 68, 82). In ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty,’ Rorty affirms the non-West’s skepticism toward Western claims and advocates dropping the universalist and rationalist rhetoric of philosophy to ‘permit the West to approach the non-West in the role of someone with an instructive story to tell, rather than in the role of someone purporting to be making better use of a universal human capacity’ (PCP, p. 55). In his view, this approach offers the best chance of achieving a ‘global moral community’ built upon ‘a community of trust’ (PCP, p. 55). While Rorty did not yet employ the vocabulary of cultural politics, these stances are consistent with what he later calls cultural politics, which aims to subvert the idea inherent in Enlightenment rationalism that ‘persistent argument will lead all inquirers to the same set of beliefs’ (PCP, p. 92). Cultural politics can be understood as a catch-all phrase for conversation or inquiry that takes place in the absence of agreed-upon criteria to govern argument. The issue of how to generate ‘fruitful conversation’ between ostensibly opposed philosophical traditions without neutral criteria to appeal to is a preoccupation of Rorty’s from his earliest published work, as we will discuss below (see Rorty, 1962; and LT, pp. 1–39). In his later writings, he simply transfers this idea from the philosophical to the political realm. The foregrounding of social and political implications is, in part, what gives rise to Rorty’s selective interpretation of Dewey. He uses these same two priorities—attention to the cultural context of philosophy and its level of engagement with social and political questions—as a critical lens through which to analyze Dewey’s project of developing a ‘metaphysics of experience’ in Experience and Nature. The basic problem Rorty sees is the contradiction between a naturalistic metaphysics that claims to identify the generic traits of experience and Dewey’s insistence on the necessity of attending to the cultural matrix in which inquiry occurs. Specifically, Rorty’s worry is that Dewey’s metaphysical project assumes

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‘there must be a standpoint from which experience can be seen in terms of some “generic traits”’ (CP, p. 80). On Rorty’s view, Dewey never escaped the notion that ‘what he himself said about experience described what experience looked like’—that is, that the virtue of his method was that it is more empirical than that of his opponents (CP, p. 81). Rorty’s claim is that a metaphysics of experience that finds its ‘generic traits’ is not necessary to provide a philosophical basis for the criticism of culture.11 On his reading, Dewey set out to accomplish two things with his turn to a naturalistic metaphysics: to undermine traditional philosophical dualisms by providing a more empirical alternative to realist and idealist metaphysics; and to ‘open up new avenues for cultural development,’ as Rorty puts it, through a conception of philosophy as criticism of culture (CP, p. 85). For Rorty, the project of attaining a more naturalistic description of the generic traits of experience simply is not necessary for the latter aim.12 While clearly drawn to the notion of ‘philosophy-as-criticism-of-culture’ he finds in Dewey, Rorty proceeds to sever this idea of criticism of culture from the metaphysical and epistemological strands Dewey saw as necessary for this work (CP, p. 75).13 As Rorty explains in ‘Dewey’s Metaphysics,’ Dewey set out to show the harm which traditional philosophical dualisms were doing to our culture, and he thought that to do this job he needed a metaphysics—a description of the generic traits of existences that would solve (or dissolve) the traditional problems of philosophy, as well as open up new avenues for cultural development. I think that he was successful in this latter, larger, aim; he is one of the few philosophers of our century whose imagination was expansive enough to envisage a culture shaped along lines different from those we have developed in the West during the last three hundred years. (CP, p. 85)

For his part, Rorty is fairly convinced that opening up avenues of cultural development, or what Dewey calls the ‘expansion and emancipation of values’ or ‘the liberation and expansion of the meanings of which experience is capable,’ does not require a naturalistic metaphysics (LW 1, pp. 305, 307). The catch here is that Dewey’s understanding of philosophy as ‘a criticism of criticisms’ whose ‘distinctive position’ resides in its ‘generality’ seems to require a naturalistic metaphysics concerned with identifying generic traits to perform its fundamental task (LW 1, p.  298). Only by detecting and defining these traits can philosophy provide the ‘ground-map of the province of criticism’ that establishes the ‘base lines to be employed in more intricate triangulations’ that characterize the application of intelligence. Where philosophical discourse



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is distinct from literary discourse is precisely in its responsibility to ‘appraise values’ and ‘render goods more coherent, more secure and more significant in appreciation’ through its instruments of ‘the conclusions of science about matter-of-fact efficiencies of nature’ (LW 1, pp. 309, 305). As Thomas Alexander puts it, ‘Thus, for Dewey’s critical, value-oriented philosophy to work at all, the quest for generic traits is imperative’ (1980, p. 32).

Rorty’s contribution to the project of enlarging human freedom What we seem to have here are two conceptions of what it means to do cultural criticism: one that turns to a method and community of inquirers exemplified in science and one that embraces forms of narrative knowledge, each with a differently circumscribed role for philosophy. The view I will advance is that Rorty’s understanding of the project of enlarging human freedom, and the philosophical assumptions that inform it, are more directly oriented toward social change or growth than Dewey’s, in the sense that attending to the limits of our conceptions of rationality and community—i.e., to those whom we exclude—and working to expand those conceptions, is a more explicit aim of Rorty’s. Rather than approaching this contrast polemically, I want to suggest that the two accounts complement each other: the difference between Dewey’s and Rorty’s views can be seen as the difference between what we might call normal and abnormal politics.14 I will outline several ways in which I see Rorty’s perspective complementing and expanding Dewey’s and identify the key philosophical contributions of Rorty’s account. In general terms, these insights result from placing Dewey’s ideas in a more explicitly political, as opposed to scientific, context.15 In the final section I will sketch how these philosophical insights offer the basis for a reconstruction of a Deweyan conception of philosophy as an instrument of social change to make it more responsive to marginalized and excluded groups. The first contribution I want to highlight emanates from Rorty’s attention to contexts where we lack antecedently agreed upon criteria to settle disputes. From his first publications of the early 1960s, Rorty was preoccupied with the problem in the history of philosophy of ‘dialectical impasses between competing schools’ (1962, p. 322). Not unlike William James, he was acutely aware of ‘the spectacle of philosophers quarreling endlessly over the same issues,’ unable to

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persuade each other of the rightness of their respective views (LT, p. 1). Rorty attributes this state of affairs to the absence of two crucial things: a presuppositionless starting point not dependent itself upon a substantive philosophical thesis, and a criterion for success in solving a philosophical problem that admits of rational agreement (LT, p. 4). He also perceives how fundamentally elusive these two things are in the context of philosophical inquiry: 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 that will guarantee its own success (thus in effect, changing the rules [of the game]). (1961a, p. 299)

So, he concludes, ‘each system can and does create its own private metaphilosophical criteria, designed to authenticate itself and disallow its competitors’ (1961b, p. 110).16 These insights lead Rorty to a keen appreciation of the limits of rational philosophical inquiry and argumentation. Absent privileged contexts and accepted criteria, all we can do is redescribe things and compare one redescription to another. In other words, if ‘every philosophy will contrive to present a selfjustificatory account of the criteria for choice between philosophies,’ then philosophy and its purported truths cannot settle moral or political conflicts (1961b, p. 111). Under these conditions of abnormal discourse, where we lack shared criteria to which to appeal to settle disputes because it is precisely these criteria themselves that are up for grabs, the kind of argument that proceeds inferentially from shared premises within a fixed logical space simply has no purchase.17 Like so much of his thinking, Rorty’s approach emanates from his deep sense that we are in a post-Enlightenment cultural and historical moment where the philosophical paradigms and vocabularies of the past are no longer useful; ‘we have different purposes, which will be better served by employing a different vocabulary’ (PSH, p.  xxii). These background assumptions help us understand why Rorty’s basic stance is that ‘our efforts at persuasion must take the form of gradual inculcation of new ways of speaking, rather than of straightforward argument within old ways of speaking’ (PSH, p.  xix). That is, Rorty seeks to demonstrate the limits of a view of rational inquiry as ‘a matter of putting everything into a single, widely available, familiar context—translating everything into the vocabulary provided by a set of sentences which any rational inquirer would agree to be truth-value candidates’ (ORT, p. 95). The views we hope to persuade people to accept cannot be stated in familiar terms, which



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is what often prompts accusations of irrationality. Yet if rationality consists in respecting existing distinctions and vocabularies, Rorty writes, ‘then no doubt we [pragmatists] are, indeed, irrationalists’ (PSH, p.  xix). ‘But of course we go on to add,’ he continues, ‘that being an irrationalist in that sense is not to be incapable of argument … We simply refuse to talk in a certain way’ (PSH, p. xix). By contrast, the conception of ‘free social inquiry’ wedded to ‘full and moving communication’ that Dewey offers as a means to constitute a community united by a shared public interest, with its appeal to rational acceptability by the standards of the existing community, seems to require a measure of agreement commensurate with what we might call normal discourse (LW 2, p. 350). For Dewey, ‘The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy’—a consciousness predicated upon ‘conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it’ (LW 2, p. 328). Yet Dewey needs to account for the criteria by which ‘good’ consequences are to be distinguished. As a result, he comes close to arguing that desirable consequences are such simply by virtue of their being a product of intelligent inquiry—that intelligence itself becomes the criterion. Dewey’s discussion in The Public and its Problems is shot through with the opposition between that which is ‘blind,’ ‘unreasoned,’ ‘unreflective,’ ‘impulsive,’ and ‘at the mercy of accident,’ on the one hand, and that which is the product of ‘reason,’ ‘perceiving in a thorough and discriminating way,’ and ‘employing intelligent method and conscious criterion,’ on the other (LW 2, pp. 240, 247–8, 256). Developing ‘a critical sense and methods of discriminating judgment’ will enable us to avoid ‘floating, volatile, and accidently snatched up opinions’ (LW 2, pp. 336–7). The problem of rational disagreement among ‘competent inquirers’ seems solved by the method of intelligent inquiry itself.18 Rorty’s insights around the unavailability of antecedently shared criteria point toward a central disagreement over the role of what Dewey calls ‘the authority of intelligence’ as a criterion for adjudicating rational disagreement (LW 1, p. 305).19 The second contribution of Rorty’s account is his understanding of logical space in the context of argument and moral deliberation. The prominent place Rorty accords imaginative and linguistic novelty is a function of his appreciation of the role of non-logical changes in belief for expanding this space. The problem with argument as a way of spurring belief change is that it gets its traction through appeals to antecedently shared criteria by ‘working according to the rules of some familiar language-game, some familiar way of describing the current situation’ (EHO, p. 189). Because of this necessary recourse to the

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familiar, for Rorty arguments ‘often just get in the way of attempts to create an unfamiliar vocabulary, a new lingua franca for trying to transform what they see around them’ (EHO, p. 181). To his manner of thinking, argumentation is beneficial for ‘operating within a logical space in which all possible descriptions of everything [are] already at hand’ (ORT, p. 95). These appeals to familiar vocabularies and existing logical spaces become problematic when Rorty turns to more explicitly political issues in his essays of the 1990s. In distinguishing his own stance from that of Jürgen Habermas, Rorty notes that ‘the notion of “argumentative procedures” is 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 unfamiliar, which might work’ (EHO, p.  190). In the context of feminism, Rorty calls our attention to the problem of a claim about injustice that takes the form of ‘a voice saying something never heard before’ (TP, p.  202). In such cases, ‘appeal to rational acceptability by the standards of the existing community’ is insufficient because it is precisely these standards and the boundaries of this community that are being challenged (TP, p. 214). This approach is what leads Rorty to the view that moral progress often involves expanding this logical space of moral deliberation; and that this logical space can only be expanded by ‘non-logical’ means—novel metaphors, redescriptions, and creative misuses of language.20 Rorty criticizes ‘universalist’ approaches that assume ‘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’ (TP, p. 203). Because logical means of argumentation and persuasion rely on appeals to antecedently shared criteria to function, they are incapable of expanding the frame itself. For this reason, forms like prophecy, which Rorty describes as ‘all that nonviolent political movements can fall back on when argument fails,’ come to the fore (TP, p. 207).21 Rorty’s embrace of literature, narratives, and stories should be understood in terms of the historic value of these forms for marginalized groups.22 The value of Rorty’s perspective here may reside in its ability to mediate two conflicting tendencies in Dewey. It should be noted that Dewey too understood the value of what Rorty calls ‘non-logical’ means. While not developed, even in The Public and Its Problems Dewey notes that ‘The freeing of the artist in literary presentation … is as much a precondition of the desirable creation of adequate opinion on public matters as the freeing of social inquiry,’ though his concern here seems to be with the art of presentation more than imaginative novelty per se (LW 2, p.  349). Earlier in the work he observes that while innovations are



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welcomed in the arena of technology and ‘mechanical appliances,’ ‘new ideas of a non-technical and non-technological nature’ are viewed with trepidation because of their potential to disturb social behavior. For his part, Dewey avers that ‘A new idea is an unsettling of received beliefs; otherwise, it would not be a new idea’ and states that ‘To form itself, a public has to break existing political forms’ (LW 2, pp. 272, 255).23 But these are not linked to the process of constituting a public itself. Of course in Art as Experience, where Dewey pays more direct attention to the non-logical power of the moral imagination, one gets a vivid account of ‘the liberating and uniting power of art’ and the role of ‘imaginative vision addressed to imaginative experience (not judgment) of possibilities that contrast with actual conditions’ (LW 10, pp. 349–52). How to bring this affirmation of the moral imagination together with the means and methods offered in The Public and Its Problems to prevent conditions where ‘the human imagination might run wild’ is by no means obvious (LW 2, p. 238). The third contribution is Rorty’s framing of communities in moral or ethical, rather than epistemic, terms.24 As he put it, ‘I should like the sentiments of pity and tolerance to take the place of belief-systems (or of what Habermas calls “the commitment to rationality”) in bonding liberal societies together’ (1987, p. 578, n. 24). Rorty has described this project as following Hume rather than Kant—that is, it looks not to rational agency and moral obligation but to what Annette Baier has called ‘a progress of sentiments’ (TP, p.  181). Rather than moral knowledge—‘claims to knowledge about the nature of human beings’ and the idea that ‘a whole community might come to know that most of its most salient intuitions about the right thing to do were wrong’—this account foregrounds felt attachments of sympathy and a shared moral identity as the primary means for making societies more moral and just (TP, pp. 171–2). Based on these assumptions, we get Rorty’s by now familiar account of moral progress, as he puts it in ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty,’ as ‘the expansion of the circle of beings who count as “us”’ (PCP, p. 45, n. 3). The important shift here, which is evident as early as Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, is that knowledge is taken to involve ‘a shift in a person’s relations with others,’ rather than making our representations more accurate (PMN, p.  187). Raising the question of whether ‘all members of an epistemic community are members of a moral community,’ ultimately leads Rorty to recognize the extent that even our conceptions of rational agency are, in part, a function of our understanding of ‘membership in our moral community’ and ‘what it is to count as a moral agent’ to someone in this community (PMN, p.  191, n. 23; TP, p.  177). As a result, both whom we regard as ‘conversation

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partners’ (and whom we do not), and how we understand our judgments about what is rational (and what is not), are informed by these prior assessments of who counts as a conversation partner or moral agent. Although I cannot develop this claim here, this move away from knowledge claims to our relations with others shares much with Dewey’s critique of liberal individualism, as well as the relational social ethic of Jane Addams.25 It gives Rorty a basis for attending to the way in which community is constituted through exclusion and what he calls the ‘borderline cases’—individuals or groups that we may exclude from membership in our moral community (TP, p. 168). For Rorty, to be part of a society is to be taken as a possible conversational partner by those who shape that society’s self-image. Indeed, expanding the range of people we regard as ‘possible conversation partners’ emerged in the 1980s as an enduring priority of his work (ORT, p. 203).26 Initially, his attention to those whose views fell outside the bounds of this intersubjective agreement focused on examples of intellectual disagreement. ‘Enemies of liberal democracy, like Nietzsche or Loyola,’ he tells us, are deemed ‘crazy’ or ‘mad,’ not because their views are false or incoherent or irrational, but because ‘the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously. This, in turn, is determined by our upbringing, our historical situation’ (ORT, pp. 187–8). As we have seen, in the 1990s Rorty turned more explicitly to marginalized and excluded social groups, suggesting that moral progress is ‘a history of making rather than finding, of poetic achievement by “radically situated” individuals and communities, rather than as the gradual unveiling, through the use of “reason”, of “principles” or “rights” or “values”’ (ORT, p. 189). A hallmark of Rorty’s later thought is his attention to the irrational as essential for intellectual progress and for the self-criticism of cultures. ‘The “irrational” intrusions of beliefs which “make no sense” (i.e., cannot be justified by exhibiting their coherence with the rest of what we believe),’ Rorty holds, ‘are just those events which intellectual historians look back upon as “conceptual revolutions”’ (EHO, pp.  14–15).27 On a Quinean view, Rorty tells us, ‘rational behavior is just adaptive behavior of a sort which roughly parallels the behavior, in similar circumstances, of the other members of some relevant community. Irrationality, in both physics and ethics, is a matter of behavior that leads one to abandon, or be stripped of, membership in some such community’ (ORT, p. 199). The value of Rorty’s account is that it prompts us to attend to those who are excluded from the conversation for the simple fact that we do not regard them as viable conversation partners, often because we deem them ‘crazy,



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stupid, base, or sinful’ (ORT, p. 203). As Rorty explains, ‘They are crazy because the limits of sanity are set by what we can take seriously’ (ORT, pp. 187–8).

Toward a reconstructed pragmatist philosophy Rorty’s response to the unavailability of antecedently shared criteria is to make any attempt to establish criteria a matter of ‘cultural politics.’ As we established above, the notion of ‘cultural politics’ is his shorthand for issues that cannot be decided by appeal to agreed-upon criteria. ‘Neither appeals to “experience” nor appeals to “reason,”’ he argues, are of much help in choosing between alternative theories or social practices since these appeals to criteria are themselves moves in the game of cultural politics rather than outside it (PCP, p. 26). What complicates this matter is that Rorty attributes his thinking here, which he called ‘pragmatism as anti-authoritarianism,’ to Dewey: ‘As Dewey saw it, whole-hearted pursuit of the democratic ideal requires us to set aside any authority save that of a consensus of our fellow humans’ (2006, p. 257).28 If we are willing to entertain Rorty’s claim that ‘All attempts to name an authority which is superior to that of society are disguised moves in the game of cultural politics’ (PCP, p. 8)—that is ‘what they must be,’ he tells us, since ‘it is the only game in town’—then we might take up the question of how the authority of intelligence may operate in relation to those who have been excluded from the process of inquiry.29 The issue here is not that Dewey posits a form of transcendental, non-democratic authority, but that it may function as such for particular marginalized groups who find themselves outside the social practice of intellectual inquiry.30 Rorty’s recognition of the political forces at work in our attempts to define criteria and define what is common offers resources that pragmatists have yet to fully take up, especially when it comes to acknowledging the effects of power and positionality on democratic discourse and social inquiry.31 An example of what I have in mind here is the problem discussed by Lorraine Code of a marginalized individual whose ‘epistemic deprivation and disempowerment’ manifests itself in a ‘lack of an interpretive community’ (1992, pp.  8, 11). Rorty’s attention to those we may exclude from the community of inquirers by not regarding them as conversation partners in the first place offers a nuanced diagnosis of this problem, and his turn to a relational perspective whose priority is generating ‘moral development in the individual, and moral progress in the

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human species as a whole’ via ‘re-marking human selves so as to enlarge the variety of the relationships which constitute those selves,’ points toward a social and political project that engages the ‘affective, situational’ dimensions Code identifies as important.32 Rorty’s foregrounding of ‘sentimental education,’ whose primary aim is the cultivation of sympathetic and imaginative identification with others and an expansion of ‘the sheer quantity of relationships which can go to constitute a human self,’ can be seen as building upon Dewey’s own call for ‘readjusting social relationships’ (PSH, p.  81; LW 2, p.  355).33 Here Rorty distinguishes his stance from Dewey’s, noting that ‘an increase in intelligence’ will not suffice in this context. Rorty understood that ‘People can be very intelligent, in this sense, without having wide sympathies’ (PSH, p. 81).34 By contrast, for Dewey ‘something truly social and not merely associative’ is achievable via the ‘perception of the consequences of a joint activity’ that ‘creates a common interest’ (LW 2, p. 353). While Dewey certainly recognized a role for affect and the ‘qualitative,’ in The Public and Its Problems he seems too concerned with the manipulation of ‘emotional habitudes’ by ‘exploiters of sentiment and opinion’ and the danger of acting ‘from crudely intelligized emotion and from habit rather than from rational consideration,’ to make this the means for expanding moral communities (LW 2, pp. 341, 334). Finally, we might see Rorty’s embrace of literature and narrative as an extension of Dewey’s recognition of the role of ‘Poetry, the drama, the novel’ in communication: ‘Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not the outward happening in itself which is new, but kindling by it of emotion, perception, and appreciation’ (LW 2, p. 350). The ‘detailed descriptions’ of the daily lives, including the suffering, of others that Rorty values in novels like those of Harriet Beecher Stowe or Charles Dickens are often little more than a means to get to know people we would otherwise not have the opportunity to meet. Perhaps these instances can be seen as an extension of the call for ‘shared and communicated experience’ that Dewey makes near the end of The Public and Its Problems (LW 2, p. 370). To return to the distinction between normal and abnormal discourse, we might see this difference in terms of Dewey’s focus on ‘the reconstruction of face-to-face communities’ under ‘normal’ conditions versus Rorty’s concern with expanding our communities and felt identifications to include distant and different others in ways that move us beyond current assumptions and practices. If, for Dewey, philosophy as an instrument of social reform is promoted by generalizing ‘the experimental side of natural science into a logical method



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which is applicable to the interpretation and treatment of social phenomena’ (LW 8, p. 11), then the upshot of putting Rorty and Dewey’s ideas into more fruitful conversation may simply involve attending more directly to the potential limitations of this approach and thinking through ways to move beyond them. In ‘Creative Democracy,’ Dewey reiterates the necessity for democracy of ‘generating the science which is the sole dependable authority for the direction of further experience and which releases emotions, needs and desires so as to call into being the things that have not existed in the past’ (LW 14, p. 229). He also called democracy the only ‘form of moral and social faith’ that does not ‘rest upon the idea that experience must be subjected at some point or other to some form of external control; to some “authority” alleged to exist outside the processes of experience’ (LW 14, p. 229). While Rorty agreed with the second claim and the latter part of the first, his attention to how non-scientific and non-theoretical genres, like the novel, and forms of narrative knowledge have been pivotal to the struggle for democracy and social justice in the context of racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual exclusion, should give us pause about the claim that science is the ‘sole dependable authority’ for the liberation of the meanings of which experience is capable. Indeed, the ways in which narrative and storytelling have been empowering for marginalized writers and have enabled the formation of communities should inform our conceptions of democratic collective self-reform and attempts to define philosophy’s role in them.35 We know that Dewey too was attuned to the ways in which ‘poetry is a criticism of life’ and how ‘imaginative vision addressed to imaginative experience … of possibilities that contrast with actual conditions’ can promote social and political change by challenging the ‘consecrations of the status quo’ that protect the established order (LW 10, pp. 349–50). Dewey recognized that ‘different hues of philosophic thought are bound to result’ from distinct social groups with different social and historical experiences. He argues: But when women, who are not mere students of other persons’ philosophy set out to write it, we cannot conceive that it will be the same in viewpoint or tenor as that composed from the standpoint of the different masculine experience of things. (MW 11, p. 45)

At the same time, Dewey’s insistence that all ‘inquiry has a common structure or pattern’ tends to work against his salutary recognition of the plurality of experience (LW 12, p.  105).36 It is here that Rorty’s criticism of Dewey’s

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naturalistic metaphysics for assuming ‘there must be a standpoint from which experience can be seen in terms of some “generic traits”’ becomes relevant (CP, p. 80). Despite Dewey’s deep commitments to fallibilism, experimentalism, and the cultural context in which inquiry proceeds, his naturalistic metaphysics and method of intelligence seem to involve a neutral standpoint outside the fray of democratic pluralism that characterizes Rortyan cultural politics. If perspectival interpretation always mediates our transactions with the world, as it seems to for Dewey in his notion of selective interest,37 the extent to which intelligence can be understood as providing a criterion outside this perspectivism for distinguishing warranted from unwarranted conclusions of inquiry is unclear. Rorty’s view recognizes the establishment of this criterion itself as a move in the game of cultural politics, which opens the door to considerations of power and positionality, and brings the moral dimensions of how we constitute a community of inquirers, including those who may be excluded, into view. The value of Rorty’s contribution to the reconstruction of pragmatist philosophy resides in his attentiveness to the potential for philosophy in its role of gathering up the threads of new knowledge and perspectives into a central tendency to exclude, overlook, and distort the range of meaning inherent in the diverse social experiences of different individuals and groups. Rorty’s insistence that ‘cultural politics’ should have ‘the last word’ so that ‘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’ (PCP, pp. 14, 30) is an important part of the project of realizing Dewey’s vision of the task of democracy: ‘the creation of a freer and more human experience in which all share to which all contribute’ (LW 14, p. 230). By situating these issues squarely within the arena of cultural politics, understood as a realm of pluralistic contestation ungoverned by antecedently shared criteria—his own claims included—Rorty is cashing out Dewey’s own insights about the culturally-situated context of inquiry. The contributions that result are an important resource for advancing the role of pragmatist philosophy in the cause of enlarging human freedom that pragmatists of all stripes would do well to take up.

Notes 1 For a full defense of this claim, see Voparil (2006) and (2011b). 2 For Rorty, this function is ‘that of high culture in general, rather than of philosophy in particular.’ Non-philosophical examples he cites include, ‘Freudian accounts of



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inner moral conflicts, ethnographic descriptions of alternative forms of social life, experimentalism in literature and the arts’ (TP, p. 306). 3 See for example, Rorty, CP, pp. 76–7; and TP, pp. 305–6. 4 See for example, Koopman (2009); Rondel (2011b); and Voparil (forthcoming). 5 See McDowell (2000) for a compelling account of this as ‘a Deweyan narrative of Western culture’s coming to maturity.’ For a more in-depth discussion of this cultural backdrop, see Voparil and Bernstein (2010), pp. 19–52. 6 See also the introduction to PMN, where Rorty further distinguishes Dewey from the other two heroes of that book, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, for situating his reading of the philosophical tradition ‘within a social perspective’ and writing his critiques of that tradition ‘out of a vision of a new kind of society’ (PMN, pp. 12–13). Later, in AOC, Rorty cites the priority given to social justice in the work of Dewey (and Whitman) as the overriding factor in their ongoing relevance—see AOC, pp. 18, 36, 51, 101. 7 Rorty’s preoccupation with scientism kept him from contributing much on the side of the social sciences. On this point see work by Shusterman, for instance, Chapter Ten of this volume and Shusterman (2011). 8 In PSH, especially Section II, ‘Hope in Place of Knowledge: A Version of Pragmatism,’ Rorty begins to outline this positive role for philosophy, returning again to Dewey’s idea of ‘making philosophy an instrument of change’ (p. 29) and to the function of philosophy as ‘mediat[ing] between old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks, with new ways of speaking, developed in response to new demands’ (p. 66). As he puts it here, we should ‘see philosophy as an aid to creating ourselves’ (p. 69) and pragmatism as ‘an attempt to alter our self-image’ (p. 72). However, he does not view this as ‘cultural politics’ per se. At this time he still insists on a distinction between ‘real leftist politics’ and ‘cultural politics’ (TP, p. 231) with the latter being his shorthand for what he took to be the overtheorized, pessimistic, ‘academic’ politics of the postmodern Left that he would criticize in AOC. It is not until the last few years of his life that he drops the pejorative use of ‘cultural politics.’ For more on this reading, see Voparil (2010). 9 The following year in ‘Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture’ Rorty sketches this idea of ‘culture criticism’ in greater depth, calling attention to the ‘kind of writing’ that emerges in the nineteenth century with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, which he describes as ‘neither the evaluation of the relative merits of literary productions, nor intellectual history, nor moral philosophy, nor epistemology, nor social prophecy, but all of these things mingled together into a new genre’ (CP, p. 66). 10 The most conspicuous early example is Rorty’s brief 1983 piece ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’ (ORT, pp. 197–202). For Rorty’s essays of the 1990s, see, for example, ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ and ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,’ both in TP; ‘Globalization, the Politics of Identity, and Social Hope,’ in PSH; and ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty,’ in PCP.

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11 For a defense of the assumption that Rorty rejects, see Alexander (1980). For a comprehensive account of the scholarly literature on the Dewey-Rorty relationship, see Voparil (forthcoming). 12 Rorty also believes a naturalistic metaphysics is unnecessary for realizing the former aim as well. In other words, Dewey could have challenged the same philosophical dualisms by taking a ‘Hegelian’ route, rather than a ‘Lockean’ one, that simply ‘point[ed] out that the dualism is imposed by a tradition for particular cultural reasons,’ instead of trying to describe the phenomenon in a nondualistic way. See CP, pp. 80–3, and passim. 13 For an account that focuses on this issue, see Boisvert (1989). 14 Here I am following Rorty’s own appropriation in PMN of Kuhn’s categories, as well as Nancy Fraser’s (2008) recent work on this topic. Whether under conditions characterized by diversity and pluralism politics are ever ‘normal’ in this sense is not clear. 15 Here I am taking a cue from Marion Smiley who, despite identifying several unresolved tensions, argues that Dewey’s account does indeed contain the resources for a more robustly pluralistic public if placed in a political, as opposed to a scientific, context (1990, p. 378). In Smiley’s view, Dewey is moving in this direction anyway to the extent that he tends to ‘introduce aspects of public opinion and democratic process into scientific inquiry itself ’ (p. 372). What is striking about Smiley’s attempt to reconstruct Dewey’s understanding of a public is that it anticipates the issues Rorty foregrounds in his own account: attending to the boundaries by which we constitute communities, including the project of expanding our circle of moral concern, and cultivating sympathetic identification with others. See op. cit., esp. pp. 375–9. Ironically, at the time Smiley considered this effort to be a direct counter to Rorty’s more limited embrace of ‘ethnocentrism’; Rorty’s essays of the 1990s, where he takes up these issues themselves, which are collected in TP, had yet to appear. 16 Rorty’s early attraction to pragmatism, particularly Peirce and Dewey, was for the way they seemed to embrace rather than despair of philosophers’ ability to change the rules, understanding that, in Rorty’s words, ‘to keep communication going is to win the game’ (1961a, pp. 301–2). For more on Rorty’s early work, see Voparil and Bernstein (2010), pp. 11–19. 17 For Rorty’s useful distinction between ‘paradigms of inference’ and ‘paradigms of imagination,’ see ORT, pp. 94–5. 18 In passages like this Dewey seems to gloss over the problem: ‘There may well be honest divergence as to policies to be pursued, even when plans spring from the knowledge of the same facts. But generally public policy cannot be generated unless it be informed by knowledge, and this knowledge does not exist except when there is systematic, thorough, and well-equipped search and record’ (LW 2, p. 346).



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19 For more on this point, see Voparil (forthcoming). 20 Rorty understands ‘creative misuses’ of language as ‘causes to change one’s belief, even if not reasons to change them’ and asserts, ‘most moral and intellectual progress is achieved by non-“logical” changes in belief ’ (TP, p. 213, n. 23). 21 For a thoughtful and original interpretation of Dewey as offering a conception of prophecy, see Glaude (2011). Glaude argues that the prophetic, for Dewey, can be understood as ‘a dimension of critical intelligence.’ As compelling as Glaude’s reading is, it is hard to see how it can be reconciled with the Dewey of Experience and Nature and The Public and Its Problems, where Dewey on more than one occasion asserts that what is needed is not ‘prophecy’ but ‘analysis.’ See LW 2, pp. 351, 358–9. In making room for prophecy within a conception of critical intelligence, Glaude does not take up the issue of criteria. 22 See, for example, Clayton (1990) and Fluck (2003). See also, Voparil (2011a). 23 Interestingly, if we consider Rorty’s much-maligned case for a public-private split, Dewey goes on to say that ‘the production of new ideas is peculiarly a private performance. About the most we can ask of the state, judging from states which have so far existed, is that it put up with their production by private individuals without undue meddling … the state provides those conditions of security which are necessary if private persons are to engage effectually in discovery and invention’ (LW 2, p. 272). 24 Rorty’s discussion of this topic in PMN is especially illuminating—see pp. 182–192. His nominal concern is the views of Wilfrid Sellars, whom Rorty credits for at least raising ‘the question of whether all members of an epistemic community are members of an ethical community’ (p. 191, n. 23). 25 See, for example, Sarvasy (2010). 26 See, for example, ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ and ‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,’ in ORT, and the essays in Part 2 of TP. See also ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty’ in PCP. 27 See also PMN, pp. 182–92 and 389–94 for discussion of the logical space of reasons and its limits. 28 Rorty also attributed the idea of philosophy as cultural politics itself to Dewey—see, for example, PCP, p. 169. 29 Dewey makes it clear that philosophy has ‘no private score of knowledge or of methods for attaining truth’ and no special access to the good or true. All it can claim is ‘the authority of intelligence’ (LW 1, p. 305). 30 Recall here that one of the dimensions of the role Dewey accords experts in the process of inquiry is ‘having the ability to judge the bearing of the knowledge supplied by others upon common concerns’ (LW 2, p. 365–6). 31 For a more in-depth critical interpretation of these resources, see Voparil (2011a). 32 For Rorty’s most sustained treatment of these issues, see ‘Feminism and Pragmatism,’ in TP.

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33 Rorty too refers to this as ‘a process of adjustment’ (PSH, p. 81). 34 The sense of intelligence Rorty has in mind is ‘increasing one’s skill at inventing courses of action which simultaneously satisfy conflicting demands’ (PSH, p. 81). 35 See, for example, Clayton (1990) and Fluck (2003). 36 On this point see Stuhr (2003), ch. 6. 37 On this point, see Seigfried (2004), pp. 60–1.

8

The Transformation of Citizenship Rorty’s Concept of Cosmopolitan Patriotism Saskia Sassen Rorty is a philosopher who makes space for transversal engagements with his work. Where some would see an interloper from another professional field, Rorty might see a perspective, a kind of knowledge arising from a conceptual location other than his.1 I write here in that transversal spirit. And what I write about concerns a similarly transversal encounter: the articulation between that which is fully formalized and the condition of incompleteness. The incompleteness that concerns me here is of a specific sort. It does not pertain to what is left out knowingly, and perhaps necessarily, in the process of formalizing, and which can become highly visible through this excluding. Rather the kind of incompleteness that concerns me is integral to the condition of being formalized. Because it is part of that condition this incompleteness is rendered invisible by the fact itself of full formalization. We might say that it is not Weber’s concept of the iron cage, also a kind of incompleteness, but one that makes visible what is excluded by creating closure around that which is included. Here I examine these questions through the institution of citizenship, which, I will argue, is marked by incompleteness and is meant to be such. It is also an institution that helps me bridge between the philosopher and the intellectual in Rorty. Citizenship’s longevity is considerable. It has outlasted an enormous diversity of historical epochs and historical spaces, as well as types of regimes within each epoch and space. This capacity to outlast change holds even if we specify that sub-category usually referred to as modern citizenship. From a distance, or in an abstract sense, the core of citizenship has remained basically unchanged: through it all, the citizen has been and continues to be the most developed and formalized rights-bearing type of subject we have historically produced.

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But it is precisely in this distance and in this level of abstraction that the thought of Rorty is a welcome questioning presence. Questioning this objectifying distance and extreme abstraction allows me to posit that incompleteness may be a core and necessary feature of what is highly formalized. In the particular case of citizenship, incompleteness becomes the capacity to interact with the large and small transformations that constitute historical processes. In this conception of incompleteness lies, then, an opening to engage Rorty’s call for a philosophy that has a historical consciousness of itself and captures its own time in thought. In the case of citizenship, this incompleteness also contains an opening to engage Rorty the public intellectual on the question of his national yet cosmopolitan patriotism. The invisibility of this specific kind of incompleteness has diverse methodological sources. Among them is the common practice of examining the fully formalized from the inside—a practice more common than one might expect that can be described as explaining the X in terms of Xa, Xb, … and excluding the non-Xa, non-Xb … Another source is the equally common practice of examining the fully formalized from the outside at what might be considered an objective/objectifying distance, and hence again excluding the non-X. Reading Rorty makes me think that he would accept neither as the way to gain knowledge. He would want an interaction between the formalized condition and what that formalization itself renders invisible; it is also what concerns me here. Focusing on incompleteness as part of the tissue of what is formalized is, then, in my reading, one way of gaining knowledge that resonates with Rorty’s critique of both metaphysics and the self-objectifying of scientific knowledge. His critique opens up a space for what I am here referring to as transversal knowledge practices. I am interested in the tensions between the formalized and the incomplete. Incompleteness enables a formal institution to incorporate change, including change that is potentially lethal to that institution. Formal institutions generally cannot avoid the unsettlements of daily life, and more generally, the conflicts that mark an epoch. Some formalized institutions are sufficiently abstract to escape with only minor chinks in their armor. But this is not the case with institutions that encase critical and contested components of daily life or of an epoch: these institutions can be brought down, no matter how powerful their formalization and their supporters. The divinity of the sovereign and slavery are two grand cases of the fall of formalized institutions.



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Highly formalized yet incomplete For the purpose of these types of questions, let me characterize citizenship as an incompletely theorized contract between the state and the citizen, and, further, that it is meant to be incomplete, given the historically conditioned meaning of the institution of citizenship. This incompleteness makes it possible for a highly formalized institution to accommodate change—more precisely, to accommodate the possibility of responding to change without sacrificing its formal status. This, in turn, brings to the fore the work of making, whether it is making in response to changed conditions, to new subjectivities, or to new instrumentalities. I locate my inquiry at this point of incompleteness so as to open up the discussion of politics. The distinction between the universalizing of knowledge and Rorty’s emphasis on recognizing a diversity of perspectives (arising from the particularity of location) is critical to my understanding of questions of rights and the rights-bearing subject. The rights articulated through the subject of the citizen are easily universalized. Yet they are of a particular type and cannot easily be generalized to other types of subjects. Modern citizenship, I will argue, is strong precisely because of the complexity and multiple tensions built into the formal institution of citizenship, and both these features arise precisely out of the particularities of how citizenship is enacted across space and time. The universality of the aspirations contained in modern citizenship would not have been enough to ensure the longevity and grounding of this institution. This type of contextualizing of what is often universalized brings to the fore the particularity, rather than the universality, of the national citizen as a rights-bearing subject.2 I organize the conceptualizing of these various issues through the proposition that insofar as citizenship is at least partly and variably shaped by the conditions within which it is embedded, today the institution is undergoing changes that are not quite captured in its formal features (i.e. Xa, Xb, …). And importantly, the fact that we cannot capture these in the formal features of the institution is not necessarily due to their not yet having been formalized. Indeed, I argue that some may never become fully formalized, and thus become part of that active incompleteness (non-Xa, non-Xb, …) that I see as a key feature of the institution (and of any other fully formalized institution with a long historical life). Some of the change that is not formalized might be viewed by ‘normal’ (in Rorty’s sense)3 political science as pre-political given the prevalent meanings for the category of the political. I argue that this is a mistake and that it is better seen as the political (das Politische), as distinct from politics (die Politik).

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I find much in Rorty’s writing that brings content to my engagement with the specific type of incompleteness that I examine here through the lens of citizenship. Rorty has developed one of the most devastating critiques of the presumptions of both philosophy and science. His core objection is to philosophy’s presumption to a Platonic immutability of truth. He finds this Platonic immutability of truth also in the ‘objectivity’ of science, with the new genetics a source of particularly disturbing consequences in his view.4 As a consequence, Rorty rejects philosophy’s claim ‘that there are philosophical truths to be discovered and demonstrated by argument’ (LT, p.  36). For Rorty, this claim leads to categories and distinctions that evict the active making and interacting that feed into the shaping of diverse perspectives, a capacity he finds critical to human life and unique to humans.5 It is worth quoting this passage at length in that it captures key aspects of Rorty’s thought on how we get to know which I have found most useful. Another possibility is that methodological nominalism would be retained, but that the demand for clear-cut criteria of agreement about the truth of philosophical theses would be dropped. Philosophers could then turn toward creating Ideal Languages, but the criterion for being ‘Ideal’ would no longer be the dissolution of philosophical problems, but rather the creation of new, interesting and fruitful ways of thinking about things in general. This would amount to a return to the great tradition of philosophy as system-building—the only difference being that the systems built would no longer be considered descriptions of the nature of things or of human consciousness, but rather proposals about how to talk. By such a move, the ‘creative’ and ‘constructive’ function of philosophy could be retained. Philosophers would be, as they have traditionally been supposed to be, men who gave one Weltanschauung—in Sellars’ phrase, a way of ‘understanding how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’ (LT, p. 34 [emphasis added]) … [R]epudiate the notion that there are philosophical truths to be discovered and demonstrated by argument. Waismann says that ‘To seek, in philosophy, for rigorous proofs is to seek for the shadow of one’s own voice,’ and Wittgenstein that ‘If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree with them.’ … Waisman and Wittgenstein share the view that philosophy, apart from its critical and dialectical function, can be at most proposal, never discovery. (LT, p. 36)



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The relation between the universalizing of citizenship and the particularities of the institution as a condition for its survival can be seen more easily in its history than in the more explorative analysis I make in this chapter. Elsewhere (Sassen, 2008a, chs. 2, 3, 6) I examined the active making of diverse types of rights-bearing subjects. The making of a citizen-subject in medieval times issued out of the active making of urban law by the town burghers. England and the United States in the 1800s saw the shaping of a fully–enabled, propertyowning citizen (epitomized by the industrial bourgeoisie) and a disadvantaged citizen (the factory worker), an inequality formalized in the law. The 1900s saw the partial remaking of this disadvantaged citizen through civil and workplace struggles claiming the right to have rights: disadvantaged subjects fought for and gained formal rights. These are just a few instances of recent Western history. Struggles for making a rights-bearing subject have happened across the centuries and across the world, with vast variations of form and content. And also the modern twentieth-century citizen arising out of the nation state is being remade in bits and pieces, even though formally it may evince permanence. My focus here is on how this highly formalized institution confronts today’s changes in the larger social context, in the law, in political subjectivities, and in discursive practices. Key in my analysis is that these are all made, they are not merely givens. There is a variable degree of ordering and patterning in such responses to change. In this regard, Rorty has at times expressed strong and unambiguous preferences for what might organize the historical process. What he finds most important about a democratic constitution is that it enables the poor and weak, as he says in answering a question about ‘the relationship between the progress of democracy, on the one hand, and the reduction of cruelty, on the other’: What’s important about a representative democratic government is that it gives the poor and weak a tool they can use against the rich and powerful, especially against the unconscious cruelty of the institutions that the powerful have imposed upon the weak. A democracy is an institution distinguished not only by its form of government, but also by the presence of institutions such as free press, free universities, and an independent judiciary. These institutions help the nation come to grasp the existence of previously unrecognized forms of cruelty and suffering: the cruelty of whites against blacks, for example, or the suffering of gays. In a fully democratic society, unnecessary suffering would not exist. (TCF, pp. 81–2)

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It is, in my reading, such specific issues that are critical to the survival of the institution and the ‘proposal’ that it was and continues to be—a proposal for abolishing institutions that exploit and for promoting a tolerance that is permanently threatened. At the same time, I argue that the impossibility of the full execution of this proposal feeds the continuity of the institution. And this impossibility also develops its muscles to keep it alive as a ‘proposal.’ My thesis is that its incompleteness is the source of its formal strength. Reading the history of citizenship as fed by its incompleteness goes against standard accounts. The mainstream account can be seen as an instance of Rorty’s observation that most disciplines have a ‘whiggish’ account of their evolution in that they emphasize a gradual maturation of the discipline. Analytic philosophy invites its own distinctive engagement with contingency. A ‘subject’—astrology, physics, classical philosophy, furniture design— may undergo revolutions, but it gets its self-image from its present state, and its history is necessarily written ‘Whiggishly’ as an account of its gradual maturation … But I hope that I have shown how we can see the issues with which philosophers are presently concerned, and with which they Whiggishly see philosophy as having always (perhaps unwittingly) been concerned, as results of historical accident, as turns the conversation has taken. (PMN, p. 391) 6 We are not suggesting that philosophy is best done in the form of historical commentary, much less that it should cease to be ‘analytic’. But we do suggest that analytic philosophers will be missing a desirable form of self-consciousness as long as they ignore the attempts of intellectual historians to inculcate a sense of historical contingency. (Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, 1984, p. 13)

Finally, there is an aspirational project that runs through the struggles for citizenship or for a more encompassing citizenship. Aspiration here is to be distinguished from the notion of ‘proposal’ discussed above. Thus Rorty keeps celebrating the so-called American ‘Old Left’ (‘all those Americans, who between 1900 and 1964 struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong’ and proposes that we instead use the term ‘reformist Left’ [AOC, p. 43]). He mourns the absence of this reformist urge in both the intellectual and political work of today’s cultural left—his entire book is a call for this reformist agenda.7 Rorty’s position on the importance of such an aspirational dimension brings to the fore the particularity of his pragmatism and his insistence in recognizing the capacity for making in humankind. Here



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follows the answer he gave when asked by Chronis Polychroniou, ‘You have used extensively the term social hope in your works in the context of keeping alive alternative scenarios that will culminate in an egalitarian, classless society. What are those alternative scenarios that you think are viable today?’ There is a scenario which seemed plausible at the end of the Second World War, in which the rich democracies would unite in a world federation which would gradually bring democracy and prosperity to the rest of the world. That scenario now sounds much less plausible. But it is the only one I can envisage that might actually have good results. There is no reason except selfishness and greed why, for example, the rest of Latin America could not imitate the example of Costa Rica, or the rest of India could not imitate the example of Kerala. If public opinion in the rich democracies could be persuaded to see such developments as a way of assuring peace in the world, maybe social hope could be revived. (TCF, pp. 100–1)

In this, Rorty somehow signals the presence of a larger order or a larger power. This larger presence may well have the quality of the elephant in the room that no one acknowledges. In the case of modern citizenship, this larger order is the national state. A key feature in the evolving of the institution has been the will of the state to make national major institutions that might well have followed a different trajectory, and to some extent did for most of recorded Western history. Political membership as a national category is today an inherited condition, one experienced as a given rather than as a process of making a national rights-bearing subject. This produces a blind spot in much of the current discussion about change in the institution. The only conceivable change is construed in terms of something that is not national: postnational and transnational being the most common versions. I argue that much change can happen within the parameters of citizenship as a national institution. And it is thus that its incompleteness matters, and that it becomes legible. If it were complete, a core condition of change would be its full superceding. Although political membership across time and space has taken many other forms, today it has been collapsed into a national form and is generally understood to be inextricably articulated within the national state, with Himmelfarb, one of the strongest articulators of this view. As a public intellectual, Rorty was outspoken in his convictions about national democracies; in Achieving Our Country he posits an American patriotism on the substance of American democracy’s principles. This is for Rorty a patriotism that does not exclude the weight, the presence of a global diversity of cultural perspectives and voices.

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Disassembling the national, and its implications … Here I want to bring in a particular angle of my work on the transforming of citizenship that engages Rorty’s notion of a cosmopolitan patriotism, a notion that has received much criticism and is, I think, easily misunderstood. The notion of a cosmopolitan national subject (which one might think of as a variant of cosmopolitan patriotism) intersects with a specific shift I find in the current period, one that has not been recognized by citizenship scholars. It is the focus of this section. Much of the globalization literature argues or implies that the global and the national are mutually exclusive and in some sort of zero sum relationship—what one gains, the other loses. My interpretation goes against much of the globalization literature. In my research and interpretation I find and theorize that the national, including the national state, is one of the strategic institutional locations for the global. That is to say, some of the larger contextual changes that may carry specific consequences for citizenship in our current global era include changes in the national. Thus citizenship, even if situated in institutional settings that are ‘national,’ is a possibly changed institution if the meaning of the national itself has changed, as I argue at length elsewhere (Sassen, 2008a). In brief, my argument is that the changes brought about by globalizing dynamics in the territorial and institutional organization of state authority are also transforming citizenship, and they do so from inside the institution.8 I interpret these types of changes as a partial and often incipient denationalizing of citizenship to distinguish it from postnational and transnational trends, which are also taking place. With denationalization I seek to capture something that remains connected to the ‘national’ as constructed historically, and is indeed profoundly imbricated with it, but is so on historically new terms of engagement. Incipient and partial are two qualifiers I usually attach to my use of denationalization. In my research I find processes whereby global logics get partly constituted inside the nation state and the state apparatus itself, producing an incipient denationalizing of what historically was constructed as national.9 This way of conceiving of matters opens up possibilities for repositioning Rorty’s national patriotism, and for articulating such a patriotism with cosmopolitanism.10 The following passage captures well what Rorty was after with that notion. Nobody has yet suggested a viable leftist alternative to the civic religion of which Whitman and Dewey were prophets. That civic religion centered around



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taking advantage of traditional pride in American citizenship by substituting social justice for individual freedom as our country’s principal goal. We were supposed to love our country because it showed promise of being kinder and more generous than other countries. As the blacks and the gays, among others, were well aware, this was a counsel of perfection rather than description of fact. But you cannot urge national political renewal on a basis of descriptions of fact. You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. (AOC, p. 101)

The engagement between the national and the global cannot be reduced to the victimhood of national states at the hands of globalization, as is so often argued. The national is still the realm where complexity, formalization, and institutionalization have all reached their highest level of development, though they rarely reach the most enlightened forms of which we might conceive. Territory, law, economy, security, authority, and membership all have largely been constructed as national in most of the world, albeit rarely with the degree of autonomy posited in national law and international treaties. For today’s globalizing dynamics to have the transformative capacities they evince entails far deeper imbrications with the national constitution of territory, authority, and rights than the prevailing analysis of globalization recognizes or allows us to recognize. These instantiations of the global, in good part structured inside the national, do not need to run through the supranational or international treaty system. Nor do they need to run through the new types of global domains that have emerged since the 1980s, such as electronic financial markets or global civil society. These transformations include particular and specific components of a broad range of entities, such as the work of national legislatures and judiciaries, the worldwide operations of national firms and markets, political projects of non-state actors, translocal processes that connect poor households across borders, diasporic networks, and changes in the relationship between citizens and the state. They reorient particular components of institutions and specific practices—both public and private—toward global logics and away from historically shaped national logics (including in the latter international operations, which are to be differentiated from current global ones). Thus the epochal transformation we call globalization is taking place inside the national to a far larger extent than is usually recognized. It is here that the most complex meanings of the global are being constituted, and the national is

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also often one of the key enablers and enactors of the emergent global scale. A good part of globalization consists of an enormous variety of micro-processes that begin to denationalize what had been constructed as national—whether policies, capital, political subjectivities, urban spaces, temporal frames, or any other of a variety of dynamics and domains. Sometimes these processes of denationalization allow, enable, or push the construction of new types of global scalings of dynamics and institutions; other times they continue to inhabit the realm of what is still largely national. The human rights regime illustrates how a non-national regime gets filtered into a national state apparatus without overriding the formal distinctiveness of the national state and an international regime. This specific type of process is what I conceptualize as denationalization—partial, specialized, and not necessarily self-evident. Harold Koh (1997) has perhaps given us one of the sharpest formulations of this process in his examination of how human rights norms get filtered through the national system, gradually take on stabilized meanings, and eventually become federalized, that is to say, part of national law. Developments within the European Union (EU) make some of these processes particularly legible given the extent of cross-border institutionalization. The complex shift in the locus of the individual as a result of the ascendance of the judiciary in the Europeanization of rights can be seen as moving matters beyond the common interpretation of tensions between the EU level and its national member states. Jacobson and Ruffer (2006) argue that the struggle between, on the one hand, the European Court and national judiciaries, and, on the other, national executives and legislatures, is a struggle between an increasingly individual-centered form of the political and the state’s republican national project. This growing role of the judiciary is predicated in good part on the increasing density of the law, which promotes individual rights and prerogatives.11 The judiciary mediates and adjudicates this web of law, at national and regional levels, for both domestic and international law. In this shift toward the judiciary the authors see the rise of a form of agency that is individual centered. Further, Jacobson and Ruffer find much significance in the transfer of the coordination of immigration policy from the third pillar in the EU to the first pillar: Legal provisions emanating from the third pillar are not part of community law; they are norms regulated by public international law. In contrast, legal instruments emanating from the first pillar become part of European Community law and are binding on each member state. (Jacobson et al, 2006, p. 29)



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Similarly, the now formal commitment of the EU to human rights under the Amsterdam Treaty may enhance the European Court of Justice’s authority in such matters over member states. I would argue that these EU realignments contain a partial overriding of the familiar binary between the national and the universal. The EU case discussed above entails an endogenizing of the non-national (the universal) inside the national, without eliminating the national state. And it is court cases around immigrants and asylum seekers that have been critical in constituting that judicial development. This type of instance does not quite fit Benhabib’s assertion that ‘Under these conditions, territoriality has become an anachronistic delimitation of material functional and cultural identities’ nor her qualifier ‘yet even given the collapse of traditional concepts of sovereignty, monopoly over territory is exercised through immigration and citizenship policies’ (2004, p. 5). But it does support her larger vision of a federated cosmopolitics, the possibility of novel ways of constructing membership that do not require the elimination of the nation state.

Toward denationalized citizenship? One critical dimension here is that the transformation of citizenship takes place even when citizenship remains centered on the national state, that is, even if it does not necessarily become postnational or transnational. I argue that it is important to capture these transformations that are easily obscured by the fact that the institution remains national.12 I see the potential for capturing two— not necessarily mutually exclusive—possible trajectories for the institution of citizenship in the differences between these dynamics. These trajectories are embedded in some of the major conditions marking the contemporary era; that we can identify two possible trajectories contests easy determinisms about the impact of globalization, and they signal the potential for change in the institution of citizenship. Their difference is a question of scope and institutional embeddedness. The understanding in the scholarship is that postnational citizenship is located partly outside the confines of the national. In considering denationalization, the focus moves on to the transformation of the national, including the national in its condition as foundational for citizenship. Thus it could be argued that postnationalism and denationalization represent two different trajectories. Both are viable, and they do not exclude each other. One has to do with the

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transformation of the national, specifically under the impact of globalization and several other dynamics, and will tend to instantiate inside the national. The other has to do with new forms that we have not even considered and might emerge from the changed conditions in the world located outside the national rather than from the earlier institutional framework of the national. If important features of the territorial and institutional organization of the political power and authority of the state have changed, then we must consider that key features of the institution of citizenship—its formal rights, its practices, its subjective dimension—have also been transformed even when it remains centered on the national state. This territorial and institutional transformation of state power and authority has allowed operational, conceptual, and rhetorical openings for nation-based subjects other than the national state to emerge as legitimate actors in international/global arenas that used to be confined to the state. The national remains a referent in my work on citizenship. But clearly it is a referent of a specific sort: it is, after all, its change that becomes the key theoretical feature through which it enters my specification of changes in the institution of citizenship. Thus, while I argue that this transformation in nation-based citizenship is not only due to the emergence of non-national sites for legitimate claim making, critical to my argument is that the meaning of the territorial itself has changed.13 And this change goes beyond the by now familiar fact that digital space enables articulations between national territorial and global spaces that deborder national encasements for a variety of activities from economics to citizenship practices.14 For instance, the human rights regime, while international, deals with citizens inside a state. It thereby destabilizes older notions of exclusive state sovereignty articulated in international law, which posit that matters internal to a country are to be determined solely by the state. The human rights regime does, in principle, subject states to scrutiny when it comes to treatment of individuals within its territory. But this goes beyond the enforcement function, and includes less recognized elements. One aspect is the already mentioned work by Harold Koh (1997) showing how human rights norms get incorporated into national law through an at times slow but effective process he calls ‘transnational legal process.’ Further, two major changes at the turn of the millennium are the growing weight of the human rights regime on states under the rule of law and the growing use of human rights instruments in national courts both for interpretation and adjudication. This is an instance of denationalization insofar as the mechanisms are internal to the national state—national courts and legislatures—while the



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instruments invoke an authority that transcends the national state and the interstate system. The long-term persuasive powers of human rights are a significant factor in this context. Elsewhere I have examined a series of reassemblings of specific bits of territory, authority, and rights, once encased in nation states and now redeployed onto other scalings, both sub-national and global.15 I think these assemblages, often specialized and obscure, represent new forms of territoriality, assembled out of ‘national’ and ‘global’ elements, each with distinct spatio-temporal features. To capture such mixed assemblages I have developed the category of analytic borderlands. Let me illustrate with one type of emergent territoriality that is neither fully national nor fully global. An instance of such a type of territoriality is getting constituted through the development of new jurisdictional geographies.16 The last few years have seen a kind of legal action that involves multiple geographic sites across the globe and, important for my argument, can today be launched from national courts, using national enabling legislation. They do not have to go through international courts. They produce a transnational geography for national lawsuits. A good example is the lawsuit launched by the Washington-based Center for Constitutional Rights against nine U.S. and foreign multinational corporations for abuses of workers’ rights in their offshore industrial operations (Stevens, 2001). Thus, in addition to new types of courts and legal instruments, today we see components of the rule of law (national courts and national legal instrument) that once served to build the strength of the national state contributing to the formation of transnational jurisdictions— transnational in that they are not formal inter-state treaties or arrangements. Nationality itself is transformed in this type of proliferation of territorialities beyond the classical understanding of the concept as rooted in the exclusive authority of the nation state over its territory. Nationality can no longer be easily deployed as a singular condition.17 Some of the main dynamics at work today are destabilizing its singular meaning, for example, the granting of dual nationality and the incorporation of international human rights norms in national law referred to earlier; this is also happening in non-formalized ways, for example, granting undocumented immigrants in the United States the ‘right’ to mortgages so they can buy homes. At the same time, denationalizing processes can feed nationalizing dynamics in separate though at times connected domains—for example, the denationalizing of certain components of our economy and the renationalizing in some components of our immigration policy. When this happens, the tendency has been to focus on the renationalizing. Immigration,

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particularly, has invited such interpretations, obfuscating some of the distinctions developed here. It seems to me that this destabilizing of the meaning of the national, both as in nationality and as in national territoriality, qualifies rather than fully supports the postnational/transnational argument. One key element in that argument is the common proposition that territoriality is anachronistic in a globalizing world. I consider this an incorrect formulation. Rather, I would argue that they reposition national state territoriality insofar as other types of territoriality are now emerging that partly inhabit a geopolitical space once exclusive to national states and the interstate system.18 This also weakens the notion of a contradiction between the ‘growing normative incongruities between universal human rights and assertions of territorial control by nation-states’ (Benhabib, 2004, p. 6). A concluding thought is then whether such a repositioning of national territoriality also transforms the meaning of ‘national’ in Rorty’s ‘national patriotism.’ He is not here to contest this possibility I posit. But I see in this angle of Rorty’s work an implied thesis that the national has been transformed, though it is not at all clear that he would accept my elaboration, even if he accepted the argument I made in Losing Control? This possibility does allow me to conceive of a national cosmopolitan patriotism. While patriotism is not a term I am comfortable with, I can see (in my own analytics) the possibility of such a cosmopolitan national disposition/sentiment.

Notes 1 I first met Richard Rorty in Palo Alto (California) while I was at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. The first time that he and his wife came to dinner at our house, it didn’t take long for all of us to engage in a lively discussion about politics and patriotism. My husband, Richard Sennett, had been one of those debating his patriotism piece on the New York Times op-ed page. At some point in the evening he said to me that in a lecture he had, and I quote him, ‘shamelessly’ used some of my work from Losing Control? without citing it and that he would like to do so again. It was a funny moment, frank and unexpected. And I think now I understand why this material was useful to him. As to why his resistance to quote, reading Chapter Twelve in this volume by Shusterman makes me wonder if it was to remain consistent in his dislike for the social sciences.



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2 This resonates with Rorty’s use of the concept of conversation, in its full meaning (con-versere). If we see knowing not as having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are on the way to seeing conversation as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood. Our focus shifts from the relation between human beings and the objects of their inquiry to the relation between alternative standards of justification, and from there to the actual changes in those standards which make up intellectual history. (PMN, pp. 389–90) 3 Here I am reminded of the following passage: ‘In normal physics, normal philosophy, normal moralizing or preaching, one hopes for the normal thrill of just the right piece fitting into just the right slot, with a shuddering resonance which makes verbal commentary superfluous and inappropriate’ (CP, p. 106). 4 I find much of Rorty’s critique of the objectifying of human beings arising out of genetic science politically important. See here, for instance, the work of Troy Duster on this matter, engaging the question of the genetics of race. 5 This does not, however, mean that Rorty values experience. Thus, for instance: ‘Cutting out the intermediary—experience—between the causal impact of the environment and our linguistic response to the environment is an idea whose time has come’ (Rorty, 2000d, p. 209). 6 He also brings this critique to bear on philosophy. We would argue that, in Britain and America, the historiography of philosophy has recently been less self-conscious than it ought to have been. In particular, the influences of analytic philosophy have recently been less self-conscious than it ought to have been. In particular, the influence of analytic philosophy has worked against self-consciousness of the desired sort. Analytic philosophers have seen no need to situate themselves within Gadamer’s ‘conversation which we are’ because they take themselves to be the first to have understood what philosophy is, what questions are the genuinely philosophical ones. (Rorty, Schneewind, and Skinner, 1984, p. 12). 7 Rorty could have included the rather internationalist context/underpinnings of much of this community in the interwar period, especially as it related to the early progressive/reformist politics. The latter connected to socialist, international labor politics, human rights, civil rights, and free speech. There was a distinctly American (pragmatic) but very globally minded cosmopolitanism at play in that history (see, for instance, John Witt’s Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American

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Law [Chapter 3] which examines the history of an American nationalism that can be seen as cosmopolitan, with its specific democratic/legal mechanisms and relationship to an internationalist, aspirational, and leftist political project). 8 From the perspective of nation-based citizenship theory, some of these transformations might be interpreted as a decline or devaluation of citizenship. I think this is not necessarily so: it could also be the opposite depending on the character of that denationalizing. 9 For an elaboration of this argument see my ‘A Response to Seyla Benhabib’ (2007). 10 See note 8 above. 11 For example, to mention just one of the more recalcitrant EU members, in 2000 Britain incorporated the bulk of the European Convention on Human Rights into domestic law. The British Parliament adopted the Human Rights Act of 1998 in November 1998; it became effective in Britain in October 2000. 12 Elsewhere I examine formal and informal changes in the rights of citizens, in citizens’ practices, and in the subjective dimensions of the institution; by including non-formalized ‘rights,’ practices, and subjectivities the analysis can grasp instabilities and possibilities for further change. 13 See Sassen (2008a, ch. 5) and Sassen (1996, ch. 1). 14 See, e.g. Karavas and Teubner’s (2003) argument about a right of access to digital space as part of a larger project about decentered constitutionalism. 15 I consider territory, authority, and rights to be complex institutionalizations constituted through specific processes and arising out of struggles and competing interests. They are not simply attributes. They are interdependent, even as they maintain their specificity. See Sassen (2008a). 16 This represents but one of the three very diverse types of such novel territorialities I identify (Sassen, 2008a, ch. 8). Further, another type of reassembling is evident in the sharpening alignment inside the state apparatus among the different branches of government in liberal democracies (Sassen, 2008a, chs. 4 and 5). Very briefly, there is the fact that with deregulation and privatization, legislatures are hollowed out and the executive branch of government gains new powers; further the executive branch increasingly gets aligned with global institutions (e.g. when a country becomes an IMF program country, the IMF will only deal with the executive branch), while legislatures become increasingly ‘domestic.’ 17 See Knop (2000) and Rubenstein and Adler (2000). There are two broad categories of cases when it comes to nationality: standing cases and human rights cases. Standing cases require international arbitration because they involve a conflict between two states over the nationality of an individual. What a state does to its own national is not subject to international law, but what it does to a national of another state can be if the state to whom the individual belongs takes issue on behalf of the citizen. 18 See Sassen (2008a), Part III.

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Kindness to Babies and Other Radical Ideas Rorty’s Anti-Cynical Philosophy Esa Saarinen At such a time when the history of the philosophical thought of our times is one day written, the name Richard Rorty will loom large. In philosophy departments throughout the world, this towering thinker is unfortunately too infrequently read with the respect and enthusiasm that he deserves. Amongst those in the academic discipline of philosophy, in fact, Rorty is often stripped of his own intellectual selfdescription and charged with not being a true or real philosopher. In the introduction to a volume titled The Future for Philosophy, Brian Leiter exemplifies the prevailing tone: If real philosophy, then, as portrayed in the essays in this volume, is less familiar to readers and scholars outside the field, the explanation is, in part, that a handful of philosophers who have, in recent years, reached a wide audience outside the discipline have generally done a poor job representing the actual state of affairs. Richard Rorty is both the best-known and worst offender on this score—his depictions of philosophy are widely regarded by philosophers as shameless fabrications. (2004, p. 18)

Leiter adds, simply if not provocatively, ‘most philosophers have stopped reading him’ (p. 18). Is Rorty really not a real philosopher? Certainly, it is undeniable that, in a move shocking to academic theorizing, Rorty infamously suggested that philosophy has centered too much of its efforts around securing a firm ‘foundation’ for theories, ‘truth,’ and ‘knowledge.’ Instead of spending all our time on these empty promises, he argued, we should look more directly at action and practices that build toward a better, that is a more free and egalitarian, future. In a pithy but provocative formulation: ‘Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself ’ (see TCF).

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The trouble with ‘truth’ is a trouble with representations and the philosopher’s preoccupation with self-imposed problems. As Rorty puts it, ‘philosophers have given their subject a bad name by seeing difficulties nobody else sees’ (CIS, p. 12). Instead of dwelling on ‘unprofitable topics’ like ‘the nature of truth,’ Rorty argues for a more engaged and action-intensive role for philosophy (CIS, p. 8). We have to agree with Marx that our job is to help make the future different from the past. We have to shift from the kind of role that philosophers have shared with priests and sages to a social role that has more in common with the engineer or the lawyer. (Rorty, 1995, p. 197)

But as long as philosophy engages itself only with analytical issues of its own making it will not face, head on, life’s crucial pragmatic questions and moral quandaries. Philosophers have represented reality in various intellectually intriguing ways, but the point is to change it. I consider myself a pragmatist philosopher, although I have not written on pragmatism nor have I studied systematically its recent debates. But when reading Rorty, I realize that the key point of pragmatism is not to come up with a theory of pragmatism, but to direct our attention to conduct. Herein, I would like to add, lies its radicalism. With or without philosophy, people will address their lives’ themes from the point of how to live the life, struggling through complexities as they encounter them, with an eye to what seems like the big picture. The way I read Rorty, he calls attention to the instantly recognizable if professionally bypassed fact that there is potential for philosophy here, namely for philosophy that takes such challenges seriously. That the philosopher could, and should, help is the very essence of Rorty’s point.

In lieu of an argument Rorty’s pragmatism is a call for the better. His is a philosophy of a better life as a practical art. Let us assume for the sake of argument that Rorty’s discussions of ‘edifying philosophy’ in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature will come to be regarded as weak and uninformed scholarship. Granted that contentious criticism, the fact still remains that Rorty in that groundbreaking book sets out a vision that people presently find, and in the future are likely to find, inspiring and elevating.



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The life and times of visions are different from those of arguments. Visions can be enlightening, inspiring, upsetting, agonizing, eye-opening, personally relevant, and indeed life-transforming. The history of philosophy is rich in visions that have enhanced ‘the conversation of mankind.’1 How significant, in retrospect, are the arguments for those visions, as opposed to the visions themselves? How significant are the debates surrounding them? The fact is that apart from a few privileged scholars, hardly anyone cares.2 Visions inspire, elevate, transform lives, trigger renewal, and create magical uplift, because people cry out for meaning. But there is a cost. The visions do not reduce to the discourse of ‘truth,’ and thus fall short of being of interest to practices devoted to the discourse of ‘truth.’ That is the state of affairs, Rorty argues in so many words, in academic philosophy. As a result, it oftentimes fails to achieve visionary impact. How could anyone be so flat-footed as to deny the significance of visions, and the need to work with visions in an effort to renew one’s own? How could any responsible and intellectually-acute human being be so disillusioned as to overlook this task, much less feel proud of it? Socrates taught us that one should not declare certainty regarding everything one feels certain about. Wisdom is, Rorty rightly insists, adopting the stance of one who ‘worries that the process of socialization which turned her into a human being by giving her a language may have given her the wrong language, and so turned her into the wrong kind of human being’ (CIS, p. 75). I submit that this is the categorical imperative of Rorty’s thinking: focus on life as a pragmatic art directed to betterment, to moral and social progress, in a mode that is self-critical of its discourses and modes of action. Is this conviction not quintessentially sustainable, morally uplifting common sense that most parents would want their children to demonstrate? I think it is. Not knowing the practices of professional philosophy or the discourses, metanarratives, and institutional arrangements that justify them, a concerned citizen might take it for granted that philosophers as professional thinkers ought to be contributing to the ‘conversation of mankind’ by making use of the intellectually imaginative, holistic grand visions of their honored discipline. Few can imagine how professional philosophers have somehow managed to end up isolating themselves and not contributing. In the 2,000 pages of Christopher Alexander’s eloquent and richly documented The Nature of Order, one finds chapters like ‘The Phenomenon of Life,’ ‘The Impact of Living Structure on Human Life,’ ‘Living Processes,’ ‘Deep Feeling,’ ‘Our Belonging to the World,’ ‘Positive Space in Structure and Materials,’

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and ‘Making Wholeness Heals the Maker.’ Clearly a visionary and bold mind, the learned architecture professor is engaged in serious thinking, and in stimulating the thinking of others. He is adding a voice to the conversation of mankind. In what sense is Alexander’s work not ‘philosophy’? Only in the sense in which philosophy is understood as specialized academic philosophy carried out by its legitimized semi-scientific methodologies. In his uplifting essay ‘The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature’ (published as an appendix to Achieving Our Country), Rorty notes the dramatic change that can take place in the university in ‘the sort of talents that get you tenure’ (AOC, p.  128). ‘A discipline’—Rorty explicitly discusses sociology, philosophy, and literature—‘can quite quickly start attracting a new sort of person, while becoming inhospitable to the kind of person it used to welcome’ (AOC, p. 128). A characteristic feature of Rorty’s Mirror is its focus on the classic philosophers of the past (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dewey) as enriched by a select few from the more contemporary scene (Davidson, Sellars, Quine, Putnam, Apel, Hacking, Ryle, Gadamer). Like Alexander, Rorty engages in visionary, serious, and cross-cultural thinking, in a way that future generations will appreciate because of the fact that this kind of philosophy characterized by genuine thinking will always be in demand.

Apologies for apology Suppose we take the view that the vision Plato describes in Apologia is still relevant. This vision calls out to human virtues such as integrity, courage, and wisdom. It is a vision according to which ‘the unexamined life is not worth living for men’ (Apologia, 38a), a vision according to which the challenge for a human being is ‘not to care for any of his belongings before caring that he himself should be as good and as wise as possible’ (Apologia, 36c). As a matter of fact, Apologia sets out a vision that has inspired people throughout the ages. For the profession of academic philosophy, however, the piece is a bit of an embarrassment. Its arguments are weak, and no real theories are presented. The point is that visionary philosophy, of the kind that Rorty represents, is simply dismissed by academic philosophers because they envision another task for philosophy. Rorty is disregarded, just like the Socrates of the Apologia. Surely this is an absurd state of affairs. It is absurd because even a superficial



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reading of the greatest works of Western philosophy, starting with a few pages of Plato’s Apologia, indisputably shows that the project of philosophy has always been to contribute to our lives in the name of something better. The point is to bring about a change in actual life, as opposed to a change in a particular representation or model of that life, or in the arguments offered in favor of a particular theory for life. Whatever the role of representations, descriptions, arguments, justifications, and the like are supposed to be, they are to be secondary only. The key point is living a life, continuously under scrutiny, an examined life, a better and flourishing-aiming life. Accomplishing this calls for life-and-self-examining thought, and this calls for philosophy. The social side of the absurdity is an outrage. The outrage of the good Athenians was not stirred by the views of Socrates on this or that, but by his practice that aimed to challenge the way people actually lived. Has the Socratic call disappeared from philosophy within universities? Apart from Rorty and a few other exceptions, the answer unfortunately must be tendered in the affirmative.3 The Socratic call has been overridden by the bandwagon of radically narrowed-down, alienated practices that restrict the philosopher and make him or her irrelevant. But for Rorty, life deserves more.

Sense of life In a striking section in the first volume of his The Nature of Order, Alexander shows pairs of photographs of fences by a road, of two downtown streets, of lobbies in two office buildings, of two parking lots at the University of California, and asks, ‘which makes you feel more alive within yourself?’ (2002a, p. 68). Most people point to the same pictures. Noticing this, Alexander suggests that we seem to ‘recognize the subtle distinction’ between ‘differing degrees of life’ (2002a, p.  64). Alexander then goes on to suggest that the distinction is something ‘empirically real, even for cases where not much distinction seems to exist’ (2002a, p.  71). Using persuasive strategies that are likely to strike as unacceptable many argumentatively conscious and methodologically pure academic philosophers, Alexander works his way to presenting a highly elaborate and enriching discourse on ‘the phenomenon of life.’ Alexander’s thinking might seem prima facie to be strongly opposite to Rorty’s. For one thing, Alexander seems openly essentialistic. And where

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Rorty despises visual metaphors—‘we must get the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether’ (PMN, p. 371)—Alexander’s The Nature of Order not only embraces visual metaphors in its discourse, but presents visual images on virtually each page of the nearly 2,000 pages of its four volumes. On a deeper level, however, Alexander demonstrates and exemplifies what Rorty calls for. He wants to enhance the conversation of mankind, he is creating a discourse of hope. The fundamental camaraderie and side-by-side-ness of these two towering figures is evident in a shared commitment that seldom gains academic focus despite its gravity and significance—anti-cynicism. Working from different discourses and argumentative backgrounds, thus adopting different strategies and vocabularies, Alexander and Rorty fundamentally reject the cool and detached cynicism that is dominant in much of current modes of academic thinking.4 Alexander’s crusade is in terms of materially built environments influenced by architects; Rorty’s crusade is in terms of the conceptual environments of philosophers. Their shared vision is to open the eyes of the current and future professionals of their fields, as well as the eyes of people at large, to the vital possibilities hitherto bypassed and dismissed, in the dimension of life as the chief category of the constructed environment (Alexander) and in the dimension of practice as the chief category of the conceptual environment (Rorty). In their respective efforts to attack the sacred cow of cynicism, Alexander and Rorty engage in a detailed analysis of how something so obvious as life itself (Alexander) and practice and hope (Rorty) could have been bypassed. For both thinkers, the essentials of life are at stake. Their greatness is in their courage to stand up and speak in plain language for life itself as the ultimate adventure of our making and of our responsibility.

Philosophy of life as the first philosophy According to the Socratic conception of philosophy, philosophy is a practice conducted among people in all walks of life. The practice concerns life as perceived as something to be examined and as something that calls for improvement. The first philosophy, therefore, is philosophy of life, and that in terms of actual conduct as opposed to mere reflection. Rorty’s vision of what he calls edifying philosophy, described vividly towards the end of Mirror, has not energized most professional philosophers to adopt



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new communicative strategies and methodological techniques in their actual practices. A professional philosopher might be willing to debate a particular articulation of, say, Gadamer’s view of Bildung. But that is different from being mesmerized by what Gadamer meant when he spoke of Bildung. The opposition Rorty faced among colleagues was not due to the fact that he had gotten some part of his analysis of, say, Sellars, Quine, or Davidson wrong. A lot of people have written about Sellars, Quine, and Davidson, getting something wrong on some count, and yet have not been despised for it. In fact, most people that have written about them not only have continued their careers after doing so, but have found their status more legitimized because of their papers on Sellars, Quine, or Davidson. So why the emotional reaction against Rorty? Why the dismissal of Rorty from among the ‘serious’ academic philosophers? It is not what Rorty says or claims or argues that triggers the reaction, but what he implies, as a modern Socrates, about the ways of life of his fellow Athenians. Rorty implies that what his fellow philosophers are doing with their lives is not good or virtuous enough. It is not what they would be doing if they chose to examine their ways of life. Their ways amount to cynicism, Rorty implies. And he does not allow himself to be impressed by the intellectual brilliance of their tricks. The path chosen is itself the problem. This is a discomforting view for many. The business of philosophy is to mind its own business. Adopting such a detached view of ‘philosophy as an autonomous quasi-science,’ a philosopher can step aside and concentrate upon his theories, while his former teacher is harassed out of his job, and while neighbours are disappearing (PCP, p. x). You can continue your research, as indeed Heidegger did, without whispering a word about it even afterward, perhaps because by your count what happened was only an ephemeral factual event, accidental and passing, and your job as a philosopher is to carry out your reflections distanced from contingent worldly factualities. Or suppose you engage as a philosopher with perhaps the biggest collective challenge of the twenty-first century, climate change, by analyzing your fellowphilosophers’ views of this or that conceptual aspect of climate change. Chances are excellent that whatever you end up contributing in that expert cultural philosophical debate is not going to have any effect on the actual problem of climate change. Philosophers can create never-ending debates about anything and everything imaginable. But how significant is that debate in terms of actual practice, in terms of life itself? Rorty’s blunt and quite possibly correct view of most epistemologically- and ontologically-focused philosophical controversies is that these debates are too often (though not always) a dead end.

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Radicalism of babies One of the most lasting aspects of Rorty’s legacy is his style of writing and speaking—that is, the explosive power of his thinking. I say ‘thinking’ as opposed to ‘theorizing’ or ‘philosophizing’ in order to emphasize that something more is at stake than mere academic quarrels. And I say ‘explosive power’ as opposed to ‘strength of analysis’ or ‘brilliance of the argument’ because I believe that Rorty’s thinking has emotional energy (in the sense of Collins, 2004) of the kind we should embrace. One of Rorty’s most peculiar lightning bolts of thought is his reference to kindness to babies in connection with his discussion of Sellars in Mirror.5 This reference to babies should not be viewed as anything but extraordinary. It brings out Rorty’s anti-cynical philosophy in a tone that is illuminating and exemplary—it gives us a way of thinking according to which kindness to babies is a relevant criterion for philosophy. Few people in actual practice challenge kindness to babies as a viable category. Most people respect it and live by it.6 Most people agree that a world where kindness to babies is prevalent is a better place than one where it is not. Rorty unselfconsciously uses kindness to babies to demonstrate the lifeenhancing application of philosophical thinking in action. This is something which conventional wisdom in academic philosophy signally fails to do. How could anything matter more than kindness to babies? One possibility is to hold representations to be more significant, more worthy of attention, than what they stand for. Instead of hugging a baby, say, you end up contemplating the concept of ‘a baby’ or ‘a hug.’ You might think that as a prerequisite to being kind to babies, we will need to get clear on the concept of ‘kindness’ and ‘babies,’ perhaps even of ‘interaction’ or ‘bodily encounter’ or the problem of ‘other minds’—an effort that is likely to take some time. Is such an outcome not somewhat perverse? Yet this is what philosophy departments everywhere de facto generate. Kindness to babies is just not high on the list of what is considered relevant. But how can it be that some of the finest minds of all time can bypass babies? How can it be that the best and the brightest can overlook tenderness? Rorty has an answer. The answer points to the metaphysical and epistemological biases of Western thinking, all the way from Plato through Descartes and Kant right up to the present. I deem cynical any philosophy and any way of thinking that does not assign first priority to kindness to babies. It reduces the miracle of life, it languishes



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life’s flourishing. Yet the logic is clear. As life is reduced to thinking, and thinking to thinking of representations, kindness to babies becomes secondary. With brilliant intuition and an uplifting tone, Rorty departs sharply from the mainstream of academic philosophy. The move is natural given his commitment to pragmatism. Indeed, I submit kindness to babies as an excellent metaphor for what Rorty’s pragmatically-minded philosophy is all about. Babies are the future, and kindness to babies is to care about the apotheosis of that future. Furthermore, kindness to babies is a participatory metaphor of the kind Rorty quite rightly insists that we find and cultivate as part of ‘panrelationism,’7 the view of ‘everything as relational through and through’ (PSH, p. 72). Philosophy, thus perceived, sees it vital to engage in activities and practices outside its own realm, adopting interactionist strategies as opposed to isolationist ones. ‘Growth itself,’ Rorty quotes from his favourite philosopher, John Dewey, ‘is the only moral end’ (PSH, p. 28). As philosophers, we should serve the goal of growth. More so than arguments or conceptual clarifications, we should focus on kindness to babies.

Rorty’s anti-ismism For a philosopher reading Rorty, it is tempting to try to figure out his position, to identify the relevant labels. For instance, one might be tempted to follow his own example and opt for negative descriptions, and thus describe Rorty as anti-Platonist, anti-metaphysician, anti-foundationalist (PSH, p.  xvi), or antiCartesian, anti-dualist, anti-representationalist, anti-essentialist (EHO, p.  2), or anti-universalist, anti-divinist, anti-privilegist (PCP, pp. 75–6).8 Yet there is something misleading about such descriptions. For I would say that Rorty is not an -ism kind of guy in the first place. As a visionary and culturally-enriching thinker, his point is not to advocate for a particular theoretical position. Rorty’s call is for a philosophy with a cause. Instead of describing life, or debating such descriptions, he wants to nurture life, improve it, and make it emerge in more hopeful forms than currently is the case. Let us define the Philosopher’s Index of Self-Indulgence as the sum you get, per page, from adding up the following: a) the number of times a word appears with the ending ‘-ism’; b) the number of times some word begins with a capital letter although it should be written with a lowercase letter;

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c) the number of words contained in an example that would be found boring by your medical doctor daughter, architect son, engineer brother, and retired aunt; d) the number of references to ‘argument,’ ‘distinction,’ ‘theory,’ or ‘position.’ Using this criterion, we can observe that works such as Plato’s Faidon, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, Epictetos’s Notebook, Montaigne’s Essays, Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty, de Tocqueville’s America, all of Nietzsche’s writings, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, many of Heidegger’s writings, such as ‘The Question Concerning Technology,’ as well as Wittgenstein’s writings (including also the Tractatus), not to mention Sir Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, or Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, are low in the Philosopher’s Index of Self-Indulgence. The same is true even of much of Kant, whose heavy terminology does not per se drive up the index. Foucault is low. Sartre is relatively low, even in Being and Nothingness. In much of his writing (and contrary to James or Dewey, who are low throughout their writing), Rorty is higher than he might want to be, I submit. This is because much of his writing aims at revealing the myths, assumptions, tacit doctrines of Western philosophy as part of his meta-level narrative that he hopes will open the eyes of his fellow academic philosophers. He writes in the discourse of positions because he wants to convince people whose discourse embraces this framework due to the contingency of their language. At the verge of adopting ism-ism, he appears ism-ismical himself, but in my opinion this is not the heart of the matter for him. Rorty cares primarily about what happens. Far from dismissing the university, his dream is for a practice and a living out of philosophy from within that grand institution that is able to influence culture in a way that currently does not happen.9 Rorty, it seems to me, is a thinker whose vision of philosophy involves work, energy, and effort outside of debating the -isms. The point concerns the practice of philosophy and the conduct of thinking, the way professional thinkers use their creative endowment from the point of view of mankind and the future of the world. Like his pragmatist hero Dewey, Rorty wants to awaken philosophy from its self-indulgences and bring it to the realm of the relevant. Concepts are good, but not good enough. As Habermas puts it in a warmlytuned and illuminating address, ‘Richard Rorty had in mind nothing less than to foster a culture that liberated itself from what he saw as the conceptual obsessions of Greek philosophy—and a fetishism of science that sprouted from the furrows of that metaphysics’ (Habermas, this volume, p. 00).



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In the footsteps of the greatest While Rorty does not seem to acknowledge Socrates as a pragmatist in his sense, I think Rorty follows in the footsteps of the greatest. Rorty’s call is essentially for what could be called the original Socratic ideal. That ideal calls for interventions. The call is to care, and to take action. ‘Dewey hoped that philosophy professors would see such intervention as their principal assignment’ (PCP, p. ix). Philosophy should conceive of itself as a cultural force and seek to contribute in the service of hope. To that effect, philosophy should give up its self-centered practices and step back into the marketplace of Athens to participate in the actual lives of actual people. But notice that this call for relevance is in no way an invitation to some kind of neo-simplicism (to coin a phrase). The point of philosophy is to join forces with historical processes of piecemeal building of a more fair, more just, richer, and happier society and human life. This is going to be anything but a simple matter. The call here is for sensitivity, for operational brilliance, and for ‘communicative reason’ (as indeed Rorty emphasises in PCP, see especially p. 77). It is a call to what Raimo P. Hämäläinen and I have called systems intelligence—intelligence in the interactive and feedback-rich environments in which we live our lives and conduct our affairs.10 Philosophy will be relevant only if it finds communicative practices that work.

Mothers without borders In the finding of communicative strategies that work, mothers are masters. In their interaction with babies, I propose, mothers are prime candidates of Rortyan growth-oriented pragmatism. Just like Rorty argues, the mother and the infant break from the ‘the Cartesian theatre’ where the human being is reduced to an ‘entity whose relations with the rest of the universe are representational rather than causal’ (PSH, p. xxiii). Mother and infant are the original examples of Rortyan anti-representationalism and anti-dualism. Indeed, autonomy won’t work for a mother or for the infant. As infant research makes clear, the growth of the infant is a systems phenomenon, involving agency that is interactive, co-regulated, and bi-directional from the very beginning (Beebe and Lachmann, 2002; Hobson, 2002; Fogel, 1993). Far from being Cartesian isolated selves, mother and infant form a dyad where dualistic logic has lost its

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grip. The radicalism of babies in Rorty becomes a call for acknowledging the crucial nature of the mother-infant dyad as the original form of life and one not accountable in terms of philosophy as a mirror of nature. ‘Plato and Aristotle were wrong in thinking that humankind’s most distinctive and praiseworthy capacity is to know things as they really are,’ Rorty writes in the preface to PSH (p. xiii). ‘My candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people’ (PSH, p. xiii). What demonstrates that distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity more vitally than the infant-mother dyad? Furthermore, the mother-infant dyad illuminates strikingly Rortyan pragmatism in its ‘thinking of everything as relational through and through’ (PSH, p. 72). The structural parallels carry over to language. As a remarkable demonstration of Rortyan vision in action, the mother engages with the infant with motherese, partly created on the fly and with sensitivity to the specifics of this particular baby. The point is not to represent things, but to make things happen. She engages in what infant researches call ‘preverbal dialogue’ with the infant (Jaffe et al., 2001), creating a context for a ‘recognition process,’ a ‘fitting together’ (Sander, 2000), a ‘moving along’ (Stern, 2004). In a demonstration of the astonishing human endowment for mutuality, what emerges is the ‘co-construction of interactive patterns and self-regulatory ranges’ (Beebe and Lachmann, 2002, p. 23). The ‘bi-directional coordination’ of the mother and the infant starts to emerge (Cohn and Tronick, 1988). What comes out takes place in rich patterns and rhythms of interaction in which the infant, far from being a mere Cartesian object for a Cartesian subject mother, is very much an active partner in the process of ‘co-creativity’ (Fogel, 1993). Kindness to babies, as an actual practice, and the agency of babies as embraced by such kindness, implies the adoption of communicative strategies and interaction styles that are designed to foster the emergence of growth by taking into account the specific capabilities of the baby. The mother and the infant enter into a ‘co-creational process,’ forming a ‘dyadic system,’ allowing for ‘dyadic expansion of consciousness’ (Tronick et al., 1998) whereby ‘a state emerges that is more inclusive than what either system alone could generate’ (Beebe, 2008). What emerges from that systemic whole is more than either party could have achieved on their own because both partners bring their unique contribution to what is essentially a cooperative enterprise. I submit that these aspects of the mother-infant dyad forcefully illustrate Rorty’s call for hopeful and pragmatic philosophy of working together for the purpose of growth. The mother-infant dyad provides a striking example of a Rortyan ‘non-representationalist account



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of language’ in the service of ‘a working program of action, a prophecy of the future’ (PCP, p. ix). The implication for philosophy is to look to mothers and infants for guidance.

Broadband philosophy It is striking that just like priests of the Holy Order in years past, so the school philosopher believes there is a privileged discourse into which he or she has been baptized as a member of academia. Philosophy, of the kind Rorty criticizes, believes it can create, rule, and govern its own discourse by its own criteria. Communicability does not count. Consider the following justification for current school philosophy by Leiter: It is true, to be sure, that philosophy is now a ‘profession’—just like psychology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and mathematics—and it is also true that the discipline is often technical and unintelligible to the lay person. But only a complete ignorance of the history of philosophy could lead anyone to think that this supports a special complaint about contemporary philosophy. (2004, p. 19)

And Timothy Williamson: Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention spans. (2004, pp. 126–7)

Leiter and Williamson do not seem to prioritize the communicability of philosophy to non-philosophers very highly. Yet communicability, service, connectivity, intersubjectivity, interface brilliance, attunement, mutual recognition, co-creativity, and other similar notions do not imply lack of depth or automatic triviality. Beethoven continues to reach people irrespective of their background, as does music by the Beatles. Likewise does the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao by Frank Gehry, Shakespeare and the Three Tenors, Umberto Eco, and Michaly Csikszentmihalyi. St. Mark’s Square in Venice mesmerises people generation after generation in a way that is ‘readily accessible—virtually on contact and with little effort’ (to use the apt phrase from Noel Carroll from his A Philosophy

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of Mass Art [1998]). Total holistic art experiences such as the Wagnerian opera is a relatively recent innovation, just like open air concerts by opera singers to mass audiences are something that required ingenuity in order to be created. The largest encyclopaedia in the world is readily accessible, distributed free of charge, and is prepared by people without an authorization from any university. The point is, cultural constructs can update and renew themselves, even radically. In particular, they can create for themselves the quality of addressing new types of people and can even find ways of touching ‘audiences with widely differing backgrounds’ (Carroll, 1998). Why should philosophy want to give up such a possibility before the game has even started? The fact that something is difficult and points beyond the status quo does not mean the dream is not worth the effort. On the contrary, we should think that if it is easy, it may not be worth the effort, but when the goal is nearly impossible, it is just about right. Rorty’s vision calls out for such a dream for philosophy. Why should some dark historic forces, operative since about 1950, doom philosophy to drift in a sea of meaninglessness forever?

Media philosophy Finnish style In the early 1980s I become a media celebrity to some extent. Being a young philosophy PhD, excited about analytic philosophy but also punk rock, and due to a book I co-authored together with a critic friend of mine as well as some other ‘media interventions’ (as I called them), the title ‘philosopher’ made a breakthrough in my country (as opposed to ‘professor,’ ‘PhD,’ or ‘teacher’). I think one can say that I helped to popularize philosophy and to make ‘philosophy’ a household name in Finland. Alas, the process did not take place within the ontology of philosophical theories or through the purely conceptual realm. It happened through my personality and the mass media. Many of my colleagues were outraged. One reason may have been that they could not see how my media activities related to debatable philosophical positions. Because I was not out there in public as a representative of a philosophical theory, my philosophy colleagues concluded that the fuss was just an ego trip and so much superficial noise of no significance. What these thinkers did not appreciate is the point that I think Rorty wants to hammer home, to the effect that there can be philosophically significant practices that are not reducible to philosophical positions. Sociologically, culturally, and ideologically, this amounts to a radical move. Suppose your



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creative professional life revolves around theoretical positions. Suppose you are a devoted positionist, as most professional philosophers are. Your view is that a philosopher’s worth is judged by the value of her philosophical positions as articulated in philosophical discourse. For a positionist, it does not make much sense to speak about the creativity, innovativeness, and contributions of a philosopher outside the realm of philosophically conceptualized positions. He or she is not in a service business but in a production business. Yet I think Rorty’s call is for service business on the basis of a-positionism. Ultimately positions do not count, as intellectual constructs, as much as service does. This is a core aspect of what I have been calling Rorty’s anti-cynical metaphilosophy. I venture to assume that Rorty would have welcomed my media philosophy as a positive extension of action-oriented philosophy. Media philosophy is an effort of a philosopher to contribute to an ongoing discussion through media, in media, with the instruments of the media.11 I submit it provides a natural platform for a philosopher that wants to engage in Kantian ‘public use of reason.’

Philosophy for managers In the early 1990s I started to give broad-scoped lectures in businesses and organizations, partly with the name recognition I had generated in the 1980s through my media interventions. These were the years when Nokia was emerging as a serious challenger to such established giants as Motorola and Ericsson. Soon Nokia took the number one position in mobile phones globally and after that became 50 percent bigger than the number two company. As these industrial breakthroughs were unfolding, unprecedented in Finnish history, I continued extensive discussions with the senior management of the company— almost all of whom were Finns—on life’s broad themes, as well as conducting lectures in various parts of the organization year after year. These lectures had such titles as ‘Magnificent Life’ or ‘Passion and Trust.’ One of the differences between lecturing as a professor at a university and lecturing as a philosopher at a high-tech company is that if your lecturing is perceived as boring, irrelevant, and not related to people’s life concerns, in the first case you can continue business as usual, whereas in the latter you cannot. If your stuff does not have practical value, if it does not serve the people, if it does not live for those people, it does not have philosophical value, for them.

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I believe it is valuable to contribute to people’s efforts in the dimension of their self-leadership and in their urge to examine their lives. It is valuable to help people conceptualize the critical systems of their lives—to enrich their perspectives as they reach out to attain a conception of the bigger picture and the frame of things. I think it is valuable to serve as a dialogic partner to people as they make their way through the complex environments of their lives, even when they are emerging from and yet remain hidden behind a veil of uncertainty. In fact, I think these are among the key tasks of a philosopher in the current time, as they were in the time of Socrates. Most professional philosophers see their task otherwise, but I wonder if that is a result of careful consideration and a conscious choice, rather than a necessity dictated by (academic, economic, and institutional) practices the philosopher has not questioned. At the current time, the practice of Philosophy for Managers does not loom large in business schools around the world. Hundreds of professional philosophers, however, could be contributing to the ongoing discussion and practices by their skilful, engaging, inspiring, and interactive forms of pedagogy and thinking, to what will become managerial reality through the actions of the participants of the seminars, lectures, and mentoring sessions on Philosophy for Managers.12 Viewing philosophical lecturing as a life-enhancing practice for the benefit of organizations, managers, and people at large, my own experience, spanning over 20 years, points to the crucial relevance of conceiving the lecture not in information- and content-centered terms, but as a thought-concert. One might think about the philosopher-speaker as the soloist, but I prefer to envision him or her as a conductor. The philosopher-speaker serves as the conductor for the thought-concert where the participants each play their thought-instruments.13 This shift from information-centered metaphors to musical and performative ones highlights relational and moment-to-moment aspects of the philosophical lecture, and points attention to what Daniel Stern (2004) calls ‘the present moment.’ The philosophical lecture is conducted more like a performance at a theater than as a content-delivering university lecture. It amounts to something like a musical performance created together by the orchestra of thinkers, and will require special sensitivities from the philosopher-conductor regarding the participants in order to be successful.



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Lincoln at Gettysburg In his fine introduction to a book of interviews with Rorty, Eduardo Mendieta quotes ‘the words that remade America,’ the words of Abraham Lincoln delivered at the cemetery of Gettysburg in 1863, and states that ‘Rorty’s America is Lincoln’s America’ (TCF, p.  xxx). That America is ‘dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,’ as Lincoln put it by a reference to the Declaration of Independence in a speech that barely lasted two minutes and left transfixed the 7,000 people present. As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin puts it, ‘Lincoln had translated the story of his country and the meaning of the war into words and ideas accessible to every American’ (2005, p. 587). That kind of use of the intellect—communicative and structure-giving, forward-building and inspiring—is exactly what Rorty is after. His instincts are for the common man and woman, for ordinary life and its improvement, and above all for the future—his focus is not upon debate, criticism, or upon founding a new school in philosophy. He is after a vision for a better future, and advocates philosophy—thinking in general14— to that cause. ‘When I attribute inspirational value to works of literature, I mean that these works make people think there is more to life than they ever imagined’ (AOC, p. 133). This is Rorty the positive utopian, Rorty the admirer of engineers (who construct better tomorrows in concrete terms), Rorty the admirer of poets (who push the limits of language and extend the imagination,15 providing romantic inspiration) and Rorty the admirer of novelists (who maintain ‘taste for narrative, detail, diversity, and accident’ [EHO, p. 73])—and Rorty the admirer of philosophers who use their thinking for causes that are just, uplifting, and socially constructive.16

Notes 1 The last section of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is entitled ‘Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind.’ It takes inspiration from Michael Oakeshott’s essay ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’ to which Rorty explicitly refers. For a rich discussion of what such a conversation might involve, see Rorty’s CIS, arguably the most extensive book-length elaboration of Rorty’s views. 2 This is not to disclaim the significance of arguments for the purposes of the good life. See Nussbaum (2007) for an excellent discussion of the ways in which philosophical arguments can foster moral progress.

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3 Among the uplifting exceptions (in English-speaking academic philosophy): Alain de Botton, Stanley Cavell, Thomas Nagel, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Charles Taylor, Mark C. Taylor, and Cornel West. It is exciting that some leading academic philosophers like Harry Frankfurt (2005) and Colin McGinn (2005, 2007, 2008) have moved on to write on broader themes like bullshit, film, ‘mindfucking,’ and Shakespeare. Outside philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, the Socratic call is particularly forceful in Zygmunt Bauman, Jerome Bruner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Anthony Giddens, Carol Gilligan, Ellen Langer, Amartya Sen, Martin Seligman, and Peter Senge. The vitality of the French philosophical approach is admirable, with its characteristically seamless integration of philosophy with literature and public life from Sartre through Foucault and Derrida to the flamboyance of Bernard-Henri Lévy. Among the German philosopher-writers, the towering figure for me is Jürgen Habermas who combines theoretical insight with a tremendous sense for the human and the just. The deep humanism of Simon BaronCohen, Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and Daniel Stern moves me deeply and they represent to me Socratic academics of the highest order along with the Norwegian great Arne Naess, the founder of deep ecology. 4 Alexander is not out there to defend ‘essentialism’ any more than Shakespeare or Beethoven. To be sure, the character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello is a personification of Evil, and so is Don Pizzaro in Beethoven’s Fidelio. ‘Ode to Joy’ and Beethoven’s ‘Ninth’ celebrate brotherhood in a way that few can forget. The masters are conducting a ‘conversation of mankind’—and have adopted essentialism as a discursive strategy without committing to the philosophical position of ‘essentialism.’ Given Rorty’s commitment to pluralism there is nothing to contradict Rorty’s perspectives here. See the chapter ‘The Contingency of Language’ in CIS. Alexander is very much ‘a strong poet’ in the sense that Rorty discusses: someone like Galileo, Yeats, or Hegel (a “poet” in my wide sense of the term—the sense of “one who makes things new”) is typically unable to make clear exactly what it is that he wants to do before developing the language in which he succeeds in doing it. His new vocabulary makes possible, for the first time, a formulation of its own purpose. (CIS, pp. 12–13) 5 When concluding his analysis of Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given, Rorty makes it a point to emphasize that the conclusions reached are ‘compatible with kindness to babies and animals and thus with the common moral consciousness’ (PMN, p. 192). 6 See, however, the important work of Alice Miller (1983, 2005) on the forms of aggression against the dignity and integrity of children.



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7 Rorty discusses approvingly Annette Baier’s views on morality in ‘Ethics without Principles’ in PSH. ‘Baier and Dewey agree that the central flaw in much traditional moral philosophy has been the myth of the self as nonrelational, as capable of existing independently of any concern for others’ (PSH, p. 77). Instead we should ‘see everything as constituted by its relations to everything else’ (PSH, p. 77). The point I am trying to make about kindness to babies as a revolutionary metaphor in Rorty is echoed when he writes: ‘To see the point Baier wants us to appreciate, consider the question: Do I have a moral obligation to my mother? My wife? My children? “Morality” and “obligation” here seem inapposite.’ (PSH, p. 78) 8 He is anti-Aristotelian, that is, he rejects the convention-nature distinction. He is also anti-Thomist, that is, he rejects the natural law-human law distinction. He is also anti-Kantian, that is, he rejects the noumena-phenomena, analytic-synthetic, a priori-a posteriori distinctions. He is also anti-Cartesian, that is, he rejects the mind-matter, innate-acquired distinctions. He is anti-Hegelian, that is, he rejects the notion that there is a logic of history … He is also anti-Marxist, that is, he rejects the idea that all history is the history of class struggle … All of this can be translated into anti-essentialism, antirealism, antimentalism, antisubjectivism, anticognitivism, anti-historical materialism—in short anti-metaphysics and antifoundationalism. (Mendieta, 2006, pp. xiv–xv) 9 On Rorty’s faith in universities, see in particular AOC. 10 See Hämäläinen and Saarinen (2004, 2006, 2007, 2008). 11 For a discussion of some of the cultural and philosophical aspects involved, see Taylor and Saarinen (1994), Sandbothe (2005), Sandbothe and Nagi (2005), and Műnker, Roesler, and Sandbothe (2003). 12 For a discussion of some of the key issues involved, see my ‘Philosophy for Managers.’ 13 For a discussion of some of the issues involved, see Saarinen and Slotte (2003). 14 In an important interview Rorty remarks: Dewey in America, Habermas in Germany, Kolakowski in Poland: these are intellectuals who are important for the life of their countries. They happen to be philosophy professors, but if they had been historians or sociologists, they would have done about the same thing. Being a philosopher as opposed to an historian or a literary critic is not all that essential; it’s being an intellectual that matters. (TCF, p. 56)

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15 In his powerful and uplifting John Dewey Lecture at the University of Chicago Law School, Rorty discusses the ultimate significance of moral progress and quotes Shelley’s Defence of Poetry: ‘Reason is to Imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance’ (Rorty, 2007b, p. 923). Rorty continues, ‘Only the imagination can break through the crust of convention’ (Rorty 2007b, p. 923). 16 I am grateful for Raimo Hämäläinen, Ernie LePore, Petri Lievonen, Ian Marson, and Mike Sandbothe for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

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Pragmatism and Cultural Politics Variations on a Rortyan Theme Richard Shusterman In this chapter I wish to reconsider my critical differences from Rorty while exploring the title-giving theme of his final book, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, whose arguments I have never discussed. Because many philosophers and literary theorists have read my philosophy of culture as essentially Rortyan, it seems useful to reformulate what differentiates our styles of pragmatism, including his vehement critique of my project of somaesthetics. Moreover, though Rorty modestly disclaims that his last book displays real novelty, it suggests an evolution in his thought that I hope would have brought our positions closer together, had not his death cut short our conversation.1 I attempt here to continue that conversation in a sadly diminished form through the help of the inspiring texts and dialogical memories that he left me. Rorty showed me how to pursue the basic orientations of Deweyan pragmatism without eschewing the crisper, more linear style of argument characteristic of the ordinary-language analytic philosophy in which I was trained in Jerusalem and Oxford. I also followed Rorty in highlighting the aesthetic dimension of Deweyan pragmatism and emphasizing genealogical and cultural critique rather than trying to articulate a systematic pragmatist metaphysics as some other contemporary pragmatists have been keen to do. Though advocating Dewey and the aesthetic, Rorty devotes almost no discussion to Dewey’s aesthetic masterpiece, Art as Experience, probably because its key concept of experience is an anathema to him. Nonetheless, by championing both Dewey and the aesthetic, Rorty led me to undertake a more serious and sympathetic rereading of Art as Experience, which my analytically trained eyes had initially rejected as a thick blob of rebarbative mush. And through its rich resources I tried to reconstruct a pragmatist aesthetic theory that, while Deweyan in spirit, is more suitable to

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our contemporary arts and postmodern times; for example, in being more appreciative than Dewey was to the aesthetic value of rupture, incompleteness, and discordant difference without, of course, gainsaying the wonderful values of harmony and unity of consummation to which Dewey’s aesthetic was wholeheartedly, and I think one-sidedly, committed. Although Rorty repudiated Dewey’s use of the notion of experience, I defended it as an astute and essential strategy in his very effective attack on the compartmentalized, elitist isolation of fine art and his corresponding attempt to bring art and aesthetics more fully into the practices of democratic living. I was in fact critical of Dewey’s idea that aesthetic experience could provide an adequate definition of art in standard philosophical terms, arguing (after Wittgenstein) that such definitions were inevitably inadequate or so general and vague as to be culturally useless. But I nonetheless insisted that Dewey’s reorienting emphasis on aesthetic experience was worthwhile, since it usefully directed us toward appreciating what is especially valuable in art and in life and thus could promote their flourishing. Moreover, I tried to extend Dewey’s experiential strategy and democratic impulse toward a revaluation of the popular arts and the distinctively embodied styles of the art of living that are so central to contemporary culture.2 Though Rorty has shown no sympathy for these aesthetic projects, I would like to suggest that his final work on philosophy as cultural politics should bring him closer to accepting them. But before going further into the issues of aesthetics and cultural politics, I should begin by articulating important differences on other philosophical topics. Let me group them into the two general areas into which Germans traditionally divide the philosophical field: theoretical philosophy (epistemology and metaphysics) and practical philosophy (ethics and political theory).

Interpretation, experience, and language Rorty regards all thought and understanding as essentially interpretation, a view that has its roots in Nietzsche but is shared by much more moderate, traditional thinkers such as Gadamer. Rorty embraces this ‘hermeneutic universalism’ for a number of reasons. First and foremost is his opposition to epistemological foundationalism. For this doctrine typically appeals to apodictically unmediated perceptions and understandings that can infallibly justify truth claims because they simply grasp things the way they are (or are experienced), with no linguistic or interpretive gloss that would render their evidence fallible



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or prejudiced. Interpretation, in contrast, is traditionally associated with fallible and contested claims to knowledge, and thus is congenial to pragmatism’s essential stance of open-minded fallibilism, the idea that any belief now held to be true could prove false and require correction in the future. Perspectival pluralism is another good pragmatist motive for arguing that everything we understand and talk about is interpretation. For the very notion of an interpretation implies that other interpretations are in principle possible (and may be even reasonable or somehow valid). Even if one of the interpretations seems right or best, its rightness does not entail that all the others are wrong. Works of art and literature are notoriously open to multiple interpretations (and they are wonderfully fascinating for that reason). But contracts, treaties, and religious texts are likewise open to interpretive ambiguity, though rival interpreters of the latter are far less tolerant of such plurality than they usually are in the arts. If Rorty’s aestheticism and pragmatist pluralism reinforce each other in highlighting interpretation as the basic mode of all cognition, so do the ideas that perception, understanding, and inquiry are always contextual and active and motivated in terms of purposes. Different contexts involve different aims of understanding and those aims shape what we interpret the objects of understanding to be, by selecting what realist parlance would call those aspects of the object (or situation) that are pertinent to our aims. Rather than regarding our objects as having fixed essences on which we base our interpretations of significance, interpretation instead goes ‘all the way down’ into the very constitution of our objects: ‘all inquiry is interpretation,’ Rorty claims, just as ‘all thought consists in recontextualization’ (ORT, p.  102). The notion of interpretation is thus stretched to such all-encompassing breadth that it loses the ‘contrastive and polemical force’ it has when opposed to more immediate understanding, which is traditionally taken to be foundational, objective, unbiased, and indifferent to perspectival context. But that is a worthy, since necessary, price to pay for freeing ourselves from foundationalism and essentialism (ORT, p. 102). Though embracing Rorty’s anti-essentialist, anti-foundationalist stance and his respect for the pervasive importance of interpretation in our experience, I think a useful distinction between understanding and interpretation can be made by decoupling understanding from its foundational associations (which, though familiar, are not at all essential for the concept’s meaning). Understanding, in my view, can itself be nonfoundationally construed as perspectival, fallible, partial, plural, selective, and goal directed. Moreover (and more importantly), it is typically deployed that way in ordinary language usage. In such usage it is also often functionally contrasted with interpretation in terms of being

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immediate, unreflective, or direct, whereas interpretations imply some reflective awareness of alternatives or problems. Understanding, though not foundational or apodictic, is thus functionally more basic or prior than interpretation; it is what interpretation relies or builds on, even if such basic understandings were at some point shaped by earlier interpretations, which relied on still earlier understandings. The most basic unreflective understandings that underlie and guide our interpretations are, moreover, nonetheless corrigible through interpretation. This functional distinction between understanding and interpretation, which is endorsed by ordinary usage, provides interpretation not only with a contrastclass that helps give interpretation a clearer meaning but also with a grounding background of material on which to work and through which to guide its activity. Moreover, by recognizing a form of understanding that is immediate, spontaneous (despite being culturally mediated), we can do justice to the important unreflective dimension of our cognitive life. Most of the time when we intelligently understand and react to situations through appropriate behavior we are not engaging in reflection, thinking, or interpretation; we respond through intelligent, unreflective habit without having to interpret or consciously decide what should be done. Interpretive thought instead suggests reflective construing or conscious deliberation about possible alternatives. The idea that all understanding is interpretation is usually linked to the idea that all understanding is linguistic. In this view, language always somehow pre-shapes or pre-selects what we perceive or consider, and thus already essentially interprets it for us. For Rorty, the very idea of any sort of understanding beneath interpretation implies the misguided epistemological ‘dream’ of foundationalism, ‘the philosopher’s attempt to acquire non-linguistic access to the really real’ that would provide absolute, infallible knowledge (Rorty, 2007a, p.  129). The distinction between understanding and interpretation should not, however, be simply conflated with the distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic comprehension. As I’ve often explained, they are different because there are linguistic understandings that are not interpretations. In most normal, everyday situations, we understand unproblematic linguistic statements (oral or written) immediately and unreflectively without interpreting them. When someone at my hotel answers my question about what time breakfast is served by saying ‘7–10,’ I don’t need to interpret this linguistic response; I understand it immediately. Interpretation is needed only when there is something puzzling or especially interesting in an utterance or text, so that we need or want to look further into its meaning.



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I do, however, go further in affirming that immediate understanding can also be nonlinguistic. Our behavior sometimes includes nondiscursive responses that are directed to nonlinguistic actions or situations that demonstrate without words (or conscious representations of them in one’s mind) that one has understood. The intentional gestures or movements of a dancer, lover, or ballplayer can be understood and appropriately responded to (by a partner, teammate, or audience) without ever being articulated into words (real or imagined). Such recognition of the nonlinguistic, however, does not make me a foundationalist in the epistemological or metaphysical sense that Rorty repudiates and fears as regressive. For the important nonlinguistic intelligence and understanding that we demonstrate in gesture, sports, and various arts of movement are not, in my account, invoked as being in touch with anything more ‘really real’ than language is. These nonlinguistic understandings are not metaphysically primordial, purely physical ‘feels’ that exist beyond the world of culture and thus inform us of the absolute nature of reality. Instead (like the rest of our experience), they are deeply shaped by culture and history, as are even the size and shape of our bodies (which obviously vary in terms of the diet and exercise we take). Rorty is therefore wrong to conclude that rejecting foundationalism entails rejecting the notion of nonlinguistic understanding. If Rorty’s rejection of the nonlinguistic is motivated by fears of foundationalism and essentialism, he himself advocates what could be described as an essentialist view of human nature as essentially linguistic.3 We are ‘nothing more than sentential attitudes—nothing more than the presence or absence of dispositions toward the use of sentences phrased in some historically-conditioned vocabulary’ (CIS, p. 27). ‘To create one’s mind is to create one’s own language,’ since it is only ‘words which … made us what we are’ (CIS, pp.  88, 117). Though language may provide the most pervasive matrix of our lives, there is an important nonpropositional, nondiscursive dimension of experience that, I will argue, is important for philosophy to recognize and that can be discerned and cultivated by more attention to somatic experience through the field I call somaesthetics. Yet discourse is a crucial tool in cultivating this attention, so somaesthetics involves both discursive and nondiscursive dimensions of somatic experience.4 Rorty, however, radically rejects the whole concept of experience as philosophically worse than useless, because he thinks it misleads us into the epistemological ‘myth of the given,’ the idea of experiences that are so immediately present that they could not be false and thus can serve as indisputable foundations in justifying knowledge claims.5 But philosophy, I believe, can

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effectively deploy the concept of experience without falling into the myth of the given, by using it in various ways that lie outside the framework of foundational justifications. For example, by emphasizing aesthetic experience in the philosophy of art, Dewey is not claiming (as Schopenhauer did) that art provides the path for reaching ‘the really real’ (of Platonic ideas). Rather, he is usefully reminding us that art is not primarily an affair of autonomous and highly valued objects but is more essentially a matter of how those objects function in and for experience, such enriching experience being art’s most important source of value. Talking about aesthetic experience rather than art likewise helps highlight that there are aesthetic dimensions beyond the official realm of art that are worth noticing and cultivating, just as it reminds us that the appreciation of art does not require the discursive complexity of a critical essay. Art can be relished in wordless wonder. Experience, moreover, can likewise be usefully deployed as a general term to designate the consequences and fruits of action and ideas in ways that may not be articulated (or even articulable) in language. In his polemics against the idea of experience as inevitably a form of foundational metaphysics, Rorty often sounds like he is rejecting metaphysics of any kind. Yet his repeated insistence that reality is thoroughly and essentially contingent might itself be construed as a metaphysical view, the familiar pragmatist metaphysics of an open, changing world of continued and contingent flux. Whether or not we take Rorty’s position as metaphysical, I think he exaggerates and thus confuses the basic pragmatist idea of contingency by giving it a more radical sense of idiosyncratic arbitrariness or random accident rather than simply the sense of not being logically or ontologically necessary. He argues, for example, that if there is no ahistorical essence of human nature or ‘permanent, ahistorical, context of human life’ which dictates what the self must be, then it is entirely a ‘random’ product, ‘a matter of chance, a mere contingency’ (CIS, pp. 26, 37). Thus even our ethical attitudes and sense of duty are merely the result of ‘a host of idiosyncratic, accidental episodes’ (EHO, p.  157). By failing to distinguish between contingencies that are merely capricious, random, or idiosyncratic and those that are so deeply pervasive and socially or functionally entrenched that they are practically indispensable (‘contingent necessities’ or ‘historicized essences’ so to speak), Rorty manifests a cavalier disregard with respect to stubbornly persistent realities that are often expressed in powerful social norms and reinforced by social institutions. He further displays a shocking (and very unDeweyan) contempt for the social sciences that empirically study those realities, norms, and institutions. Following his favorite literary critic, Harold Bloom, Rorty condemns such sciences as ‘dismal’ (AOC, p. 127).



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Ethics and politics Combining his global textualism and hermeneutics with his notion of contingency, Rorty makes an intriguing argument for treating philosophy as primarily a private pursuit for perfection.6 If our world and selves are contingent and linguistic, we can then reshape them to our tastes by virtuoso linguistic reinterpretation through new vocabularies. He therefore declares his allegiance to the path of inspirational, revisionary literary theory, illustrated by Bloom and Jacques Derrida, rather than looking at literature and other artistic practices through Foucault’s method of genealogical critique of cultural institutions. He completely ignores the aesthetic theory of critical social theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, who combines philosophical theory with empirical social research to advance a progressive social agenda very much in the spirit of engaged Deweyan pragmatism. Rather than looking to the social sciences for resources to diagnose problems and formulate and test remedies to solve them, Rorty one-sidedly insists on ‘the hope for a religion of literature’ to improve our world by giving us inspirational visions and teaching us to be kinder to others by helping us to imagine more clearly their needs, aims, and problems (AOC, p. 136). Despite such advocacy of the literary imagination over empirical social science as the way to cope with and improve our realities, Rorty’s political philosophy has repeatedly drawn a very sharp distinction between what he calls ‘real politics’ and what he denigrated as the ‘cultural politics’ practiced by many progressive literary scholars in the academy whose political activism he saw as principally engaged in feminist, gay, racial, and ethnic issues and other issues of what is often called identity politics. Much of this activity, he complained, was focused on dealing with these issues as expressed in academic life (from affirmative action, to courses on marginalized identities, to efforts to revise the literary and artistic canon to be more reflective of minority diversities). In ‘distinguishing cultural politics’ from real politics, Rorty defined ‘real’ not as ‘a metaphysical status’ but as ‘electoral politics’ or ‘real actions and events in the political sphere’ that are ‘likely to redress the balance of power between the rich and the poor’ (1991, pp. 448, 489). Elsewhere he explains that ‘emphasizing the difference between real and cultural politics [means] alleviating suffering and equalizing opportunities on the one hand and redirecting the uses of learning and leisure on the other’ (1992, p. 7). I instead have argued that there exist substantial continuities and useful overlaps between the arenas that Rorty divides as real and cultural politics. This is because of the political, social, and economic power of cultural imagery

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and production. Race, gender, and minority identities constitute cultural issues that go far beyond the academy and clearly connect with what Rorty calls real politics, not simply with respect to issues of discrimination in employment and in the judicial system, but also because race, gender, and ethnicity play an important role in electoral politics, as the 2008 presidential primaries and national election made strikingly evident. Similarly, cultural issues regarding the acceptability of homosexuality and same-sex partnerships clearly have moved from academic explorations on the campus to judicial and legislative activity and even to electoral referendums. It seems to me dangerously simplistic (though typically neoliberal) for Rorty to portray political suffering and injustice in narrowly economic terms of rich and poor. Identity politics has an unhappy history of mattering in the most painful ways. Wealthy German Jews could not buy an Aryan manumission to escape the horribly real politics of Nazi persecution. As I resist Rorty’s sharp distinction between cultural and real politics, so (like many others) I have criticized his claimed ‘firm distinction between the private and the public’ (CIS, p.  83). Though we can often, in particular cases, clearly distinguish between public matters and private ones, the distinction is more porous than Rorty suggests. We cannot limit public issues to those concerning the rules and procedures of the official public institutions that structure our democracy, while regarding the private as relating to purely personal visions of the good life or self-realization, a question of ‘what should I do with my aloneness’ (ORT, p.  13). Perhaps through his neglect of the social sciences, Rorty fails to appreciate how pervasively the public, social, and economic fields (through our shared public language, social norms, and advertised ideals of fulfillment) shape what he advocates as the individual’s original, private visions of self-perfection. His own ethical ideal of the liberal ironist in constant search for new vocabularies, I have argued, seems an obvious echo of the consumer’s quest for new commodities, and both are obviously shaped by the public framework that supports neoliberal capitalism. Likewise, Rorty’s definition of autonomy as original, distinctly individualist self-creation seems a clear echo of neoliberalist self-seeking and self-absorption. This philosophy perhaps aptly reflects Rorty’s Hegelian view of what philosophy must be, ‘its time held in thought’ (PCP, p. ix). But his standard of successful self-cultivation seems so ambitiously demanding and elitist that we must question whether many people could really live that way and whether we should morally expect (or even want) them to.7 When forced to concede that the so-called private self and the language it builds upon for self-creation are always already socially constituted and



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structured by a public field, Rorty responds by redefining ‘the private-public distinction I want [as] that between responsibilities to ourselves and responsibilities to others’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 155). But for most people (even in neoliberal society) these different responsibilities are too deeply intertwined to split them sharply. It is hard to envisage acceptable projects of self-realization that swing free of what we feel (and cherish) as our bonds to those significant others who are so crucial to making us who we are and what we want to be. Pragmatists like Dewey and Mead thus emphasized that an individual’s sense of self is essentially shaped by his relationship to others and his sense of how they view him. Rorty ignores this point in his advocacy of American neoliberalism and pursuit of original self-creation. His intriguing reconstruction of Deweyan thought in these directions has been wonderfully fruitful in reviving international interest in pragmatism but it also has raised a backlash of suspicion that sees pragmatism as a sinister ideological tool and cultural expression of American global domination.

Aesthetics and culture Because Rorty’s writings in the early 1990s were so sharply critical of the notion of cultural politics, I was surprised that his final collection of papers, Philosophy as Cultural Politics, embraces this notion as the core project he recommends for philosophy. Though Rorty claims that ‘readers of his previous books’ will find ‘no novel ideas or arguments’ in the new volume, his revaluation of cultural politics looks like a noteworthy development (PCP, p. ix). Even if this development is construed as more about a change in the meaning Rorty gives to the term “cultural politics” than a new attitude to the things he previously designated by that term, the transformation is still worth exploring. This new account of cultural politics especially intrigues me as offering a way through which I could bring Rorty to appreciate my central project of somaesthetics, which he previously quite vehemently dismissed. Such a reconciliation would be very encouraging, because, after Dewey, Rorty’s aesthetic interpretation of pragmatism has been the most formative influence on the pragmatist direction of my aesthetics. But before exploring his new conception of cultural politics to revisit the issue of somaesthetics, I should briefly note some other contested issues in the cultural field of aesthetics, beyond the difference already discussed about aesthetic experience.

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With respect to interpretation in the specifically literary (rather than the deeper, more general philosophical sense), I have argued that Rorty is too one-sided in embracing Harold Bloom’s advocacy of interpretation as ‘strong misreading.’ While Rorty asserts that the good critic ‘simply beats the text into a shape which will serve his own purpose,’ I argue that such a policy is destructive of the very alterity that makes reading a dialogical hermeneutic project from which we can learn something new (CP, p. 151).8 The aggressively domineering approach of strong misreading, moreover, hardly seems a helpful attitude for Rorty’s project of realizing the ‘inspirational value of great works of literature’ (AOC, p. 125). Instead we need a hermeneutics of greater balance and pluralism by appreciating the value of a more receptive stance in reading, where we let the text lead us rather than forcing it to mean what we want. The Bloomian masculinist strategy of bullying the text into fitting one’s purpose, Rorty argues, helps promote the critical and cultural demand for new interpretations. But if we practice interpretive yin as well as overassertive yang, by letting the text lead us to places where we never dreamt of going rather than imposing our will on its possible meanings, we are likely to find still more unexpected and richer novelties. In any case, interpretive novelty is not the only valuable form of literary understanding. More ordinary, traditional understandings of texts offer their own communicative, emotional, and edifying satisfactions, besides their crucial role as the necessary background or base for radically innovative interpretations.9 Rorty’s praise of literature sometimes strikes me as too narrowly focused on its use for generating new vocabularies to enhance moral reflection, while failing to give enough attention to the aesthetics of pleasure, beauty, and entertainment. Pleasure, I argue, must be emphasized along with literature’s functions of meliorism (cognitive, ethical, and social), and not simply because it is in fact productively related to them. Pleasure helped bring me to an aesthetic appreciation and philosophical analysis of popular art that Rorty thought were deeply misguided. He refrained from examining in what ways popular art might positively contribute to a culture’s aesthetics or an individual’s vocabulary and self-fashioning; he instead blasted it with a global, undifferentiated condemnation, denouncing it as ‘schlock’ that ‘is sexist, racist, and militarist’ in contrast to the wonderful ‘‘high culture’ that Trotsky shared with Dewey and Dubois’ (1991, p. 488). Here again, I argue that pragmatism should maintain a more productive pluralist position that celebrates high culture yet also recognizes the merits of many works of popular art, while nonetheless urging in meliorist fashion that popular art still



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leaves much room for improvement. Because works of popular art are understood by more people, they can be especially effective in sensitizing our society to moral and political injustice. Thus popular novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin can dwarf the likes of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady with respect to ethical and political impact. To defend popular art’s aesthetic legitimacy and explore its cultural contribution while engaging in constructive critique aimed at making it better, therefore, seems a useful direction for pragmatist cultural politics. This position of meliorism (between global condemnation and uncritical celebration) has always guided my writings on rap, country music, and other styles of popular culture.10

Cultural politics The same meliorist orientation shapes my project of somaesthetics. Briefly defined as the critical meliorative study of the experience and use of one’s body as a locus of sensory-aesthetic appreciation (aesthesis) and creative self-fashioning, somaesthetics is therefore also concerned with the critical examination of the values, forms of knowledge, and disciplines of practice that structure such somatic care or can improve it. Somaesthetics thus involves the critical study of society’s somatic values and practices, so as to redirect our body consciousness and practice away from oppressively narrow and injurious stereotypes of somatic success that pervade our advertising culture and instead to explore more rewarding visions of somatic value and fulfillment, and better methods for attaining them. Though Rorty sharply criticized my project of somaesthetics, I hope to show it constitutes precisely the kind of project that his final account of philosophy as cultural politics could embrace. Rorty describes his notion of politics as emerging from Hegel’s and Dewey’s historicist views ‘that philosophy is its time held in thought’ rather than an eternal, God’s-eye vision of the world and that the philosopher’s job should therefore be ‘to contribute to humanity’s ongoing conversation’ about how to improve our time and practices (PCP, p. ix). ‘The progress of this conversation has engendered new social practices, and changes in the vocabularies deployed in moral and political deliberation. To suggest further novelties is to intervene in cultural politics,’ Rorty concludes, affirming Dewey’s hope ‘that philosophy professors would see such intervention as their principal assignment’ and endorsing ‘the pragmatist maxim that what makes no difference to practice

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should make no difference to philosophy’ (PCP, p.  ix). And he cites Dewey’s radically visionary claim that ‘philosophy is not in any sense whatever a form of knowledge,’ but rather ‘a social hope reduced to a working program of action, a prophecy of the future’ (PCP, p. ix). Rorty’s citation perfectly captures Dewey’s vision, and we can bring other quotes from Dewey to reinforce it. Chiding his philosophical contemporaries in the academy for ‘lack of imagination in generating leading ideas’ (LW 3, p. 10), Dewey claims philosophy can prove its value only ‘with the formation of directive hypotheses,’ instead of with a ‘sweeping pretension to knowledge of universal Being’ (LW 4, p.  248). In proposing concrete means and ends, philosophy should be ‘thinking which is operative—which frames and defines ideas in terms of what may be done, and which uses the conclusions of science as instrumentalities’ (LW 4, p. 227). In earlier writings Rorty seems more skeptical about philosophy’s socio-political utility. Claiming he ‘cannot find much use for philosophy in formulating means to the ends which we social democrats share,’ Rorty affirms philosophy’s ‘main use’ as helping us think through our personal utopian visions by supplying vocabularies which we can appropriate, transform, and transcend in our quest for self-realization (1987, p.  569): so ‘philosophy has become more important for the pursuit of private perfection rather than any social task’ (CIS, p. 94). But if we affirm the continuity of the private and the public, then the individual’s use of new vocabularies for projects of enriched self-realization are always already shaped by the social environment and conversely feed back into enriching that environment’s resources. When philosophy is construed as cultural politics rather than the pursuit of absolute, eternal truth, then its history, says Rorty, ‘is best seen as a series of efforts to modify people’s sense of who they are, what matters to them,’ and this leads to new images or ideals of self and society (PCP, p. ix). ‘Interventions in cultural politics,’ Rorty continues, ‘have sometimes taken the form of proposals for new roles that men and women might play: the ascetic, the prophet, the dispassionate seeker after truth, the good citizen, the aesthete, the revolutionary’ (PCP, pp. ix–x). But cultural politics, he adds, has also taken different forms, such as ‘sketches of an ideal community—the perfected Greek polis, the Christian Church, the republic of letters, the cooperative commonwealth’ or ‘suggestions about how to reconcile seemingly incompatible outlooks—to resolve Greek rationalism and Christian faith, or between natural science and the common moral consciousness’ (PCP, p. x). What Rorty asserts as common and crucial to these and other forms of philosophical interventions in cultural



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politics is that they aim to make ‘a difference to the way human beings live,’ not just to address specialist ‘technical debates’ in the academic field (PCP, p. x). Philosophy as cultural politics, Rorty further insists, should have an interdisciplinary orientation, for by engaging with other fields that deal with our multidimensional lives, philosophy can augment its resources for productively affecting our lives. 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. The more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves. (PCP, p. x)

Note, however, how Rorty strikingly omits the social sciences in his list of disciplines. Why don’t they belong there; why shouldn’t the social sciences help philosophy ‘make a difference to the ways human beings live,’ especially since human life is so thoroughly shaped by its essentially social character? Rorty provides no arguments for rejecting the social sciences, apart from the fact that his aesthetic taste finds them grimmer and less imaginatively inspiring than literature. That, however, hardly seems reason enough, especially because natural science also has its dull and dismal dimensions, while classics of social science can be inspiringly and imaginatively insightful. Think of the works of Weber, Simmel, Mauss, and Bourdieu. In recommending interaction with other activities as essential to philosophy’s cultural politics, Rorty is not at all explicit about the nature or style of this interaction. How does philosophy engage with these activities? Does it intervene only on the theoretical level by proposing critiques of theories of natural science, art, religion, etc.? Or does philosophy more closely engage the actual concrete practice of these activities by detailed critical analysis of the particular forms they take and by proposing new methods to improve practice (say, new scientific or artistic methods, new methods for religious meditation or political engagement)? Could philosophy as cultural politics connect itself still more intimately with the various practices that give our lives meaning by providing in itself a philosophical form of those practices? For example, could philosophy as cultural politics intervene in literary practice by making itself a self-conscious form of literary composition—say, philosophy as literature in the essay style of Montaigne or Emerson, the fictional style of Sartre, Camus, Beauvoir, or Musil, the dramatic dialogical style of Plato, the poetic style of

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Lucretius or Dante, or finally in the form of literary criticism that Rorty at times has practiced with great skill? If philosophy aims to make a difference in our lives, then why not practice it as an art of living, as most ancient philosophers recommended and several modern greats (such as Wittgenstein, James, Dewey, and Foucault) have likewise affirmed? Here philosophy’s cultural politics could take the eminently pragmatic form of seeking to benefit life not merely by writing texts but by other forms of concrete praxis in the world, by more robustly embodied forms of action and cultivation, including somatic disciplines that can make a positive difference to the perception, performance, and attitudes of the practitioner and to her capacities to understand and productively engage with the people and environments that surround her. Rorty, however, seems unwilling to go this far. The evidence of his career shows that Rorty sees philosophy’s cultural politics as essentially confined to textual politics or writing, especially in composing ‘arguments about what words to use’ (PCP, p. 3). In the many conversations we shared over the years, I often urged him to do more. If he thought that analytic philosophy had essentially deconstructed itself and outlived its usefulness, while Deweyan pragmatism should be reclaimed as a more promising philosophical direction, then why, I asked, did he not try to use his symbolic power as America’s most important philosopher to try to engage in institution building that could help the pragmatic turn he initiated? He could have organized a corps of new pragmatist philosophers inspired by his work, perhaps creating an interdisciplinary center for pragmatism when he held an endowed chair at the University of Virginia, or initiating some new pragmatist journals or book series. Such acts of cultural politics that transcend mere philosophical writing to include institutional praxis could help reorient philosophy and make pragmatism more influential in the American and international philosophical scene. When his fame surged beyond academic philosophical circles and won him international cultural celebrity as America’s most excitingly original intellectual, I repeatedly pressed him about his neglect of more concrete praxis to redirect philosophy and cultural politics more generally in the pragmatist directions he advocated. After all, I argued, his famous European counterparts typically engaged in institution development and robust cultural-political praxis to promote the theoretical orientations or social changes they thought were needed, and Rorty’s great hero, John Dewey, was famous for his vigorous engagement in political activism and institution building (including his famous Laboratory School, various labor unions, the



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National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the New School for Social Research). Rorty replied that such institution building would be a time-wasting distraction from his research and writing; that attempts to build up a corps of pragmatist philosophers through organizational means would most likely attract the most mediocre of minds. I remember him saying that smart people will get the pragmatist message by reading his books (if they want to), and they will spread it by writing their own good books. These arguments, while certainly reasonable, never entirely convinced me. They struck me, however, as a compelling rationalization for what I suspect was Rorty’s strongest reason for eschewing such cultural-political praxis: His personality—much more shy, bookish, and individualistic than group oriented and socially suave—made a leading, active role in organizational, social, and public praxis too unappealing for him to embrace. I respect that personal choice, and am grateful to Rorty for all the great things he was in fact able to do for philosophy and culture.

Somaesthetics I am, however, unwilling to accept his rejection of somaesthetics. So let me conclude by first considering his critique and then showing how somaesthetics effectively serves the key functions that Rorty demands of philosophy as cultural politics. Despite his continued insistence that ‘all awareness is a linguistic affair,’ Rorty concedes to me that we can ‘revel in … [and] bring nondiscursive sensual joy.’11 However, he questions the idea of somaesthetics as a project or ‘programme’ that, by thinking through the body and working on it, could bring more of this nondiscursive joy and more understanding of how it is achieved, experienced, and deployed in our lives. More precisely, he challenges somaesthetics by assimilating it into traditional aesthetic theory of the Kantian variety that aims to isolate a pure aesthetic essence that defines all things aesthetic and differentiates them from everything else. Rorty doubts we ‘need “a somatic aesthetics,”’ because we do not ‘need an aesthetic theory, or an aesthetic programme, at all’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 156). And he immediately supplies the anti-essentialist reason for his skepticism: ‘I doubt there is much to be said about what unites painting, literature, music, sex, and birdwatching while distinguishing all these from science, morals, politics, philosophy and religion’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 156).

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I share Rorty’s resistance to the essentialism of traditional aesthetics, and I even criticize our hero Dewey for courting it too closely.12 But ‘scepticism about “aesthetics” as a field of inquiry’ in its traditional essentialist sense (which Rorty calls ‘another of Kant’s bad ideas’) has no relevance to the somaesthetic project, which could not be farther from an attempt to define and compartmentalize a pure aesthetic domain (Rorty, 2001, p. 156). Somaesthetics is instead a distinctively interdisciplinary enterprise, radiating out of the concept of soma—the living, feeling, sentient, purposive body that implies the essential union of body-mind. The somaesthetic program—of studying the ways we use our soma in perception, performance, and self-fashioning, the ways that physiology and society shape and constrain those uses, and the methods we have developed or can invent to enhance those uses and provide newer and better forms of somatic awareness and functioning—implies engaging with science, morals, politics, art, and religion as well as with history and other disciplines. In somaesthetics, the aim is not to provide essentialist philosophical definitions but to bring together and deploy the various things we know (or can learn) about embodied perception (aesthesis) and action and about socially entrenched body norms and practical somatic disciplines so that this knowledge can be used in actual embodied practice to enrich our lives and extend the frontiers of human experience as we now know and imagine it. Somaesthetics, as I conceive it, is a field of practice as well as theory, a field admittedly far too large for any one researcher to explore or master on his or her own, and too complex in structure for me to summarize here. Suffice it to say that the somaesthetic field includes three major branches. The first (analytic somaesthetics) involves philosophical, empirical, and critical study of the principles of somatic functioning in perception and of our culture’s body norms, practices, and values, along with the ideologies and institutions that shape them. The second (pragmatic somaesthetics) deals with the comparative study and critique of practical methods aimed at improving somatic awareness, performance, and care; while the third area (practical somaesthetics) involves the actual practice of body disciplines aimed at such improvements.13 If, in Rorty’s conception, philosophy as cultural politics seeks ‘to contribute to humanity’s ongoing conversation about what to do with itself,’ to make ‘efforts to modify people’s sense of who they are, what matters to them’ by initiating new practices or ‘changes in the vocabularies’ that we use to think about our selves and our society and ‘to reconcile seemingly incompatible outlooks’; if Rorty indeed recommends philosophy as ‘a social hope’ expressed in ‘a working program of action’ that makes a ‘difference to practice,’ then he should endorse



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somaesthetics as providing just such an intervention (PCP, p. ix). By critically examining our culture’s oppressively narrow ideals of good looks and somatic satisfaction, while exploring alternative notions of bodily beauty and sources of somatic pleasures, somaesthetics can surely help improve ‘people’s sense of who they are’ and ‘what matters to them,’ and can promote new ways of talking about our embodied selves that are more liberating and rewarding. Through its comparative critique and exploration of various somatic disciplines and how they can be productively introduced into the project of philosophy as an art of living, and still further through the actual practice of such disciplines in one’s life, somaesthetics not only offers suggestions for personal cultivation but also resources for ‘social hope’ and ‘a working program of action.’ Moreover, if a key goal of cultural politics is ‘to reconcile seemingly incompatible outlooks’ whose apparent conflict tortures both individual and society, then somaesthetics can help remedy the pervasive body/mind and materialist/spiritual schisms in our culture through its recognition and cultivation of the soma as integrating material, mental, and spiritual dimensions of human life. Heightened body awareness is usually thought to be a necessarily private, selfish affair. But in fact since the somatic self is always essentially situated in an environment, somatic awareness cannot really ever be of the self alone. To feel oneself always means feeling one’s environment in some way, at the very least sensing the surface we are sitting, standing, or lying on, feeling the air that envelops us, and the gravitational force that weighs on us. But the soma’s environment is generally social as well as physical. Thus, heightened somatic awareness can help sensitize us to social relations so that we can improve them. Consider, for example, the problems of racism and ethnic enmity. Such hostility does not stem from rational thought but from deep prejudices that are somatically marked in terms of vague uncomfortable feelings aroused by alien bodies, feelings that are experienced implicitly and thus engrained beneath the level of explicit consciousness. Such prejudices and feelings therefore resist correction by mere discursive arguments for tolerance, which can be accepted on the rational level without changing the visceral grip of the prejudice. We often deny we even have such prejudices because we do not realize that we feel them, and the first step to controlling them or eventually transforming them into more positive feelings is to develop better somatic awareness so that we can recognize such implicit feelings and bring them fully into consciousness in order to work on them. This cultivation of skills of enhanced awareness is a central task of somaesthetics.14 Likewise, as ancient Greek and Asian philosophers have repeatedly asserted, taking care of one’s own somatic efficacy is a necessary means for effectively

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taking care of others. Diogenes the Cynic was not alone in employing it to advocate rigorous body training as ‘that whereby, with constant exercise, perceptions are formed such as secure freedom of movement for virtuous deeds’ (Diogenes, 1991, p. 71).15 When air safety policy instructs parents to take care of their own oxygen supply before worrying about their children’s, it is not a lesson in selfishness but the basic insight that to care effectively for others requires a certain level of somatic care for the self. As Mencius urged from the Confucian standpoint, we cannot meet our duties to our parents or society unless we first take care to keep our bodies in effective health, for only through our bodies can we act to help others.16 Moreover, given Rorty’s own ardent arguments for affect as the true ground of morality and human solidarity, he should recognize that somaesthetics has significant ethical and social potential. Rorty repeatedly insists that our commitment to human rights and other central moral principles cannot be effectively justified by appeals to universal rationality but instead depend on common sentiments about how people should be treated. Noting that cultures who do not share our moral beliefs are perfectly able to perform all sorts of difficult rational tasks, Rorty argues that their immoral treatment of subordinate groups they oppress cannot be the product of irrationality but is rather because they do not feel that the creatures they oppress are ‘people like ourselves’ and merit ‘full personhood’ (PCP, p.  53). What makes us more moral than other animals, Rorty claims, is that ‘We can feel for each other to a much greater extent than they can,’ and we progress in morality (both as individuals and as societies) the more we can feel for more kinds of people (2001, p. 358). Moral progress is thus ‘a progress of sentiments’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 362). Thus, rather than focusing on the search for universal rational principles to ground our own moral beliefs and convince others of their absolute validity, we should ‘put foundationalism behind us’ and instead ‘concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education,’ so that we can empathize with more kinds of people, imaginatively feel ourselves ‘in the shoes of the despised and oppressed’ (Rorty, 2001, pp.  358, 360). ‘That sort of education sufficiently acquaints people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human. The goal of this manipulation of sentiment is to expand the reference’ class of those we treat as humans like ourselves, of ‘people like us’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 358), and moral persuasion is thus more essentially a matter of ‘rhetorical manipulation’ of feeling than ‘genuine validity-seeking argument’ (PCP, p. 53). Rorty celebrates literature as the best means of ‘manipulating sentiments,’ but feelings can be effectively manipulated



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through somatic as well as literary means. We can bring strangers (and even enemies) to feel more comfortable with each other by having them share the pleasures of eating and drinking together. As William James famously argues, we can also to some extent transform our own moods and feelings by taking on the postures and bodily behaviors of those feelings and moods we wish to feel. Furthermore, to imagine empathetically what it feels like to be oppressed or despised (or even simply insulted or offended) is an act of somatic consciousness that can be done more powerfully when we have a more developed somatic imagination, when our somatic sensibility and awareness has been cultivated to be more keenly perceptive and subtle. There is thus a deep connection between somaesthetics and the cultivation of sentiment that Rorty seeks as a means to moral progress, though he totally neglects it.17 Rorty is perhaps blind to the value of somaesthetics as a resource for ‘social hope’ because he tends to identify it (and perhaps all somatically oriented philosophy) with the views of the most famous body philosophers of the late twentieth century, who controversially emphasized the body’s use in radical, violent ‘limit-experiences’ and social transgression largely centered on sex and drugs. ‘Foucault’s, Bataille’s and Deleuze’s discussions of the body leave me cold,’ Rorty writes, in contesting somaesthetics’ claim that the body is a place where we can go beyond the limits of discursive reason (2001, p. 156). He completely ignores that I explicitly critique their somatic extremism for confusing the need to transcend the limits of discursive rationality with the need to engage in violently irrational, transgressively ‘rabid Dionysiac excess.’ ‘The conflation of these two senses, in thinkers like Bataille, Deleuze, and Foucault, comes only by coupling the idea of somatic aesthetics with the avant-garde ideology of radical transgression and shocking extremes,’ I objected, urging that somaesthetics instead gives more attention to the kind of nondiscursive experience and action that, though not ruled by ‘discursive rationality is not devoid of intelligent direction’ (1997, p. 128). Rorty continues, But even if they [Foucault, Bataille, and Deleuze] turned me on, I would still resist talk about where discursive reason meets its limits. I do not see a difference between ‘discursive reason’ and talking about things, and I cannot see that talking about things has either ‘limits’ or an ‘other’. (2001, p. 156)

Such statements seem foreign to the pragmatist spirit of philosophy as a working program of action and to the classical pragmatist insight that there are

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important dimensions of human life beyond the limits of discursive rationality and that philosophy should attend to those dimensions. Hence William James and Dewey emphasize the nondiscursively affective and the somatic, recognizing the importance of intelligent embodied habit that cannot be reduced to a verbal formula of discursive reason. Even if we rightly acknowledge that discourse itself always involves some dimension of action (whether actions of writing or reading or speech acts), we should not deny the very useful commonsense distinction between mere words and real action, between talking about doing something and really doing it. Such a distinction between merely saying something and actually doing it is crucial to our entire network of ethical, artistic, commercial, athletic, and juridical practices. Playing a Beethoven sonata or running a four-minute mile goes beyond the limits of merely talking about those things. ‘Talking about things is one of the things we do,’ Rorty persists (2001, p. 156). ‘Experiencing moments of sensual joy is another,’ and there is absolutely no meaningful relationship between discourse and nondiscursive experience that warrants any theoretical attention or systematic intervention (Rorty, 2001, p. 156). ‘The two do not stand in any dialectical relationship, get in each others’ way, or need synthesis in a programme or theory’ (Rorty, 2001, p. 156). Would performing an embodied nonverbal action to generate an experience of sensual joy constitute, for Rorty, still another thing we do or would it be assimilated into the joyful experience it generates? It hardly matters, because, in any case, it is clear that many fields do essentially rely on significantly relating the discursive and nondiscursive. In music, for example, there seems to be a purposeful and effective linkage between discourse and nonverbal experience; for example, between interpretive critical discussions of a musical piece, comments on relevant aspects of musical and performance theory, and specific discursive performance instructions, on the one hand, and nondiscursive movements and experiences of nondiscursive musical joy experienced by the performers or audience. The same might be said about how wordless sexual pleasures rely not only on nonverbal actions but on helpful erotic discourse about what precise actions to perform and how or when to perform them as well as verbal expressions that contribute to the mood. (Of course, here, no more than in music, does skillful discourse entail skillful performance, which is another reason why the commonsense distinction between words and actions is often useful.) Somatic disciplines are essentially constituted through systematic programs, methods, and theories that relate discourse to the nondiscursive, and in various texts I have tried to



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show how somaesthetics combines the verbal and the nonverbal in the process of reforming habits and acquiring skills.18 Rorty’s refusal to acknowledge fruitfully significant relations between discursive understanding and nondiscursive enjoyment seems an unnecessarily rigid, unproductive dualism that is not only alien to pragmatism’s emphasis on the continuity of theory and practice but also at odds with its meliorist impulse to use discursive theory—as cultural politics—to intervene in actual practice to improve our lives. When Rorty claims ‘we can agree with Gadamer that “being that can be understood is language” while remaining aware that there is more to life than understanding,’ he denies the existence of nonlinguistic understanding (2001, pp.  156–7). But nonlinguistic understanding seems not only quite evident in nonverbal arts like music, painting, dance, and (if you will) erotic artistry, but also in a variety of everyday somatic interactions that rely on a host of implicit understandings most of which never reach the level of explicit thematized awareness. Moreover, by Rorty’s own principles of cultural politics, we cannot reject somaesthetics by a mere appeal to ontological claims like the alleged inexistence of nonlinguistic awareness or understanding. For according to Rorty’s ultimate view, as articulated in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, such politics should always trump or ‘replace ontology’ (PCP, p.  5). In other words, the essential question is not whether nondiscursive understanding and awareness exist or not, but whether it is useful or not to believe they exist because of the benefits that are generated by such beliefs (which include the benefits of the diverse practices and actions emerging from those beliefs). Somaesthetics articulates, explores, and seeks to develop those benefits. In contrast, by denying the existence of nondiscursive understanding and awareness, Rorty tries to block the path of inquiry by ridiculing as senseless fantasy the pursuit of disciplines that treat the nondiscursive aspects of life and offer helpful methods for improving how we experience them. Though we can surely find some mumbo jumbo and superstition within the enormously vast array of body disciplines that human history has produced, there are also many somatic disciplines whose methods have won substantial empirical confirmation through centuries of successful traditions of practice and through contemporary clinical studies.19 ‘Inventing others to reason and then purporting to provide a better discursive understanding of these nondiscursive others,’ Rorty concludes, ‘seems to me a beautiful example of kicking up dust and then complaining that we cannot see’ (2001, p.  157). To justify this critique of my project, he simply (without argument) assimilates somaesthetics into a long epistemological tradition, ‘a

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project that stretches from British empiricism through Bergson to existential phenomenology’ and that aims to put us in discursive touch with the really real, an immediate primordial pristine perception of reality upon which all other knowledge must somehow be constructed (Rorty, 2001, p.  157). Presumably he is again assuming that any philosophical concern with the body must have foundationalist epistemology as its agenda. In response to this final objection of Rorty’s, I should first say that somaesthetics did not invent something other than reason, it simply responded to problems and pleasures of life that discursive reason cannot adequately address on its own because those problematic and pleasurable things have an important nondiscursive dimension.20 Second, somaesthetics has nothing in common with the traditional foundationalist project that Rorty evokes. The goal is not to discursively describe (or even nonverbally capture) a putative originary vision of the world—elemental, pristine, and universally shared, the sort of primordial perception celebrated by Merleau-Ponty, which allegedly reveals the ‘things themselves’ as they ‘are first given to us’ in our most basic spontaneous level of perception, a primordial level that remains forever unchanging though obscured by conventional vision.21 As a nonfoundationalist pragmatist, I see little point in trying to capture such an elemental perception. This is not simply because it would seem too primitive (in its absolutely primordial essence) to be very useful or interesting, but also because I doubt whether there is such an underlying primordial perception that remains unchanging and universally shared. For even our most basic nondiscursive experiences are significantly shaped by the cultures and environments we inhabit and these are neither uniform nor unchanging. Already in the womb, we are shaped by culture. Besides, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, the central goal of somaesthetics is not a discursive theory that defines the true, originary essence of nondiscursive experience. Somaesthetics’ discursive aims are instead focused on articulating frameworks and improving methods that themselves serve as means for the improvement of such nondiscursive experience and for the multitude of discursive practices that structure the ways we regard and use our bodies and the ways that other people regard and treat them. Of course, a good bit of the discourse of somaesthetics must also be directed to the cultural politics of arguing against theorists like Rorty who refuse to admit that talking about the body and its nondiscursive experience is a useful thing to do. I’d like to believe that if Rorty reviewed my vision of somaesthetics in the light of his evolving views on philosophy as cultural politics, he would have been more sympathetic toward what the somaesthetic project could pragmatically offer to



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individuals and to society as a whole. On a couple of occasions when we met in the last few years of his life—well after he wrote his critical rebuke of my somaesthetic project but before he could read the manuscript of Body Consciousness, Rorty suggested that he might be growing more receptive to it, though it was a project very remote from his personal style and professional skills in practicing philosophy as cultural politics. His apparent change of attitude greatly pleased but did not much surprise me, since Rorty was exemplary not only in his kindness but in his openminded tolerance and curiosity to learn new things. His untimely death ended a life of bold and wide-ranging philosophical inquiry but left us with a legacy to pursue the conversations he shaped in ever more adventurous and experimental ways.22

Notes 1 See Rorty, PCP. Rorty was not able to read the completed manuscript of my book Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, which presented a more comprehensive account of my somaesthetic project than that on which he based his criticisms. For Rorty’s critique of what he calls my ‘somatic aesthetics,’ see Rorty (2001). 2 See Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, trans. as Kunst Leben (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1994), Vor der Interpretation (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1996); Practicing Philosophy, trans. as Philosophie als Lebenpraxis (Berlin: Akademie, 2001); Performing Live, trans. as Leibliche Erfahrung in Kunst und Lebensstil (Berlin: Akademie, 2005). 3 Rorty concedes this: There is a sense in which Shusterman is right that I hold ‘an essentialist view of human nature as essentially linguistic,’ where he continues that this essentialism isn’t so baneful because it is not intended as a ‘metaphysical suggestion’ that claims to ‘divide nature at the joints’ [something like the point I’ve made about understanding]. (Rorty, 2001, p. 155)

My opposition to Rorty’s linguistic essentialism (to be developed below) is not a mere critique of his textualist metaphysics but a pragmatic argument that we need to recognize that there is something valuable in life besides language so that we can cultivate that nonlinguistic realm in order to improve our lives. 4 See Richard Rorty, ‘Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation,’ in David Hiley, James Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 70–71.

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5 Rorty repeatedly argues that ‘Dewey should have dropped the term “experience”’ instead of making it central to his philosophy (TP, p. 297). See his ‘Dewey between Darwin and Hegel,’ in TP. 6 Rorty affirms that some forms of philosophy serve a more public function of critically examining procedures of justice and democracy but this function receives far less attention from him than that of developing visions of private perfection and self-creation, which he celebrates but cautions against importing into the public sphere as a program that all selves must realize. In Rorty’s account of the value of literature, there is a somewhat parallel pair of functions, where literature is praised for teaching us to be kind to others but seems to get more praise (or at least more attention) for providing vocabularies for self-enrichment and self-fashioning. See, especially, CIS, and my critical discussion in Shusterman (2000b), ch. 9; and Shusterman (1997), ch. 2. 7 For my more detailed discussion of these points, see Shusterman (2000b), pp. 255–7. 8 For my critique, see Shusterman (2000b), ch. 4. 9 For similar pluralist reasons, I resist Rorty’s one-sided identification of the aesthetic life with singular genius and originality—not because I have something against original genius but again only because this unwisely excludes other rewarding modes of aesthetic living that are less demanding and more accessible. See Shusterman (2000b), ch. 9; and Shusterman (1997), ch. 1. 10 See Shusterman (2000b), chs. 7–8; and Shusterman (2000a), chs. 3–4. 11 Rorty affirms the exclusively linguistic character of consciousness to the very end of his life, as this quote (from PCP, p. 12) makes clear. The concession is made in Rorty (2001), pp. 155–6. 12 See Shusterman (2000b); and Shusterman (2000a). 13 For a more detailed account of somaesthetics, see Shusterman (2008). 14 Here somaesthetic efforts could go further than the remedy of diagnosis and isolation by actually transforming the undesirable, ‘intolerant’ bodily feelings, see Shusterman (2008), ch. 4. 15 Diogenes the Cynic was not alone in employing it to advocate rigorous body training as ‘that whereby, with constant exercise, perceptions are formed such as secure freedom of movement for virtuous deeds’ (Diogenes, 1991, p. 71). For more discussion of ancient Greek and Asian philosophers on the essential value of one’s somatic care and training for the practice of virtue, see Shusterman (2008), ch. 1. 16 See Mencius (1969), pp. 138–9 (4A.20). 17 I draw these arguments from my review article, ‘Feeling Beyond the Text: Reflections on The Rorty Reader.’ See Shusterman (2011). 18 See for example, Shusterman (1997), ch. 6; and Shusterman (2008), chs. 2–6. 19 For some of this evidence, see Shusterman (2008), chs. 5–6.



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20 In the same way, James’ and Dewey’s talk about nondiscursive experience— nameless feelings, nonlinguistic qualities and nonverbal understandings, and nondiscursively coordinated interaction—was not about inventing something to idly spin their theoretical wheels about but was necessary for explaining and promoting their exploration of interventions to improve such nonlinguistic experience. 21 See Merleau-Ponty (1945), p. ix; and Merleau-Ponty (1953), p. 63. Note also how he describes his project: ‘all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status’ (1945, p. vii). 22 This chapter is an abbreviated version of an essay originally published as ‘Pragmatism and Cultural Politics: From Rortyan Textualism to Somaesthetics,’ New Literary History, 41, no. 1 (2010), 69–94; and then, abbreviated and with a different subtitle, in the German collection on Rorty by Suhrkamp on which this present volume is based (which explains the German references I cite). For the updated English version of this abbreviated essay, I have added a paragraph and a few references. For a fuller discussion of many of the issues raised in this chapter, see Shusterman (2012).

Bibliography Abbreviations for references to major works by Richard Rorty AOC  Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis CP  Press, 1982. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University CIS  Press, 1989. Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. New EHO  York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method, 2nd edition, ed. LT  Richard Rorty. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992 [1967]. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1. New ORT  York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. PSH  Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 30th anniversary edition. PMN  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009 [1979]. Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4. New York: PCP  Cambridge University Press, 2007. RRP Richard Rorty Papers, MS-C017, Special Collections and Archives, the UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California. Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews TCF  with Richard Rorty, ed. Eduardo Mendieta. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3. New York: Cambridge TP  University Press, 1998.

192 Bibliography

References to other works by Richard Rorty cited in the volume Rorty, Richard. (1958), ‘The Philosopher as Expert,’ published as an appendix to PMN. —(1961a), ‘Recent Metaphilosophy,’ Review of Metaphysics, 15, no. 2, 299–318. —(1961b), ‘The Limits of Reductionism,’ in Irwin C. Lieb (ed.), Experience, Existence, and the Good. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 100–16. —(1962), ‘Realism, Categories, and the “Linguistic Turn,”’ International Philosophical Quarterly, 2, no. 2, 307–22. —(1986), ‘Introduction’ to Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 8. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1969–1991. —(1987), ‘Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,’ Political Theory, 15, no. 4, 564–80. —(1991), ‘Intellectuals in Politics: Too Far In? Too Far Out?,’ Dissent, Fall, 384–490. —(1992), ‘The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism,’ Yale Review, 80 (April, 1992), 1–16. —(1993), ‘Feminism and Pragmatism,’ in Rorty, TP. —(1995), ‘Philosophy and the Future,’ in Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (ed.), Rorty and Pragmatism. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 197–206. —(1996a), ‘Emancipating Our Culture,’ in Jozef Niżnik and John T. Sanders (eds), Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski. Westport: Praeger Publishers, pp. 24–9. —(1996b), ‘Response to Kołakowski,’ in Jozef Niżnik and John T. Sanders (eds.), Debating the State of Philosophy: Habermas, Rorty, and Kołakowski. Westport: Praeger Publishers, pp. 58–66. —(1996c), ‘Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics,’ Ferrater Mora Lectures, University of Girona, Spain. —(2000a), ‘Universality and Truth,’ in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 1–30. —(2000b), ‘Reply to Brandom,’ in Brandom, Robert B. (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 183–90. —(2000c), ‘Reply to Michael Williams,’ in Brandom, Robert B. (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 213–19. —(2000d), ‘Afterword: Intellectual Historians and Pragmatism,’ in John Pettegrew (ed.), A Pragmatist’s Progress? Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. —(2001), ‘Response to Richard Shusterman,’ in Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (eds), Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, pp. 153–7. —(2004), ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,’ reprinted in Richard Bernstein and Christopher Voparil (eds), The Rorty Reader. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, pp. 473–88. —(2006), ‘Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism,’ in John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis (eds.), A Companion to Pragmatism. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 257–66.

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—(2007a), ‘The Fire of Life,’ Poetry, 191 (November), 129–31. —(2007b), ‘Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress,’ The University of Chicago Law Review, 74, 915–27. —(2010), ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ in Randall Auxier and Lewis Hahn (eds.), The Philosophy of Richard Rorty: The Library of Living Philosophers. Chicago: Open Court. Rorty, Richard, Schneewind, J.B., and Skinner, Quentin (eds). (1984), ‘Introduction’ to Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References to works by other authors cited in the volume Adorno, Theodor. (1982 [1956]), Against Epistmeology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, Willis Domingo (trans). Oxford: Blackwell. Alexander, Christopher. (2002a), The Nature of Order. Book One: The Phenomenon of Life. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure. —(2002b), The Nature of Order. Book Two: The Process of Creating Life. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure. —(2004), The Nature of Order. Book Four: The Luminous Ground. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure. —(2005), The Nature of Order. Book Three: A Vision of a Living World. Berkeley: The Center for Environmental Structure. Alexander, Thomas. (1980), ‘Richard Rorty and Dewey’s Metaphysics of Experience,’ Southwest Philosophical Studies, V, 24–35. Bacon, Michael. (2009), Richard Rorty: Pragmatism and Political Liberalism. Lanham: Lexington. Beck, Ulrich. (2006), Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. Beebe, Beatrice. (2008), ‘Preface: A Relational Systems Approach to Infant Research and Adult Treatment,’ in L. Carli and C. Rodini (eds), Le forme di intersoggettività. L’implicito e l’esplicito nelle relazioni interpersonali. Milan: R. Cortina. Beebe, Beatrice and Lachmann, Frank M. (2002), Infant Research and Adult Treatment: Co-constructing Interactions. London: Analytic Press. Benhabib, Seyla. (1986), Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. —(1990), ‘Epistemologies of Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean-François Lyotard,’ in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, pp. 107–30. —(1992), Situating the Self: Gender Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.

194 Bibliography —(2004), The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bernstein, Richard J. (2010), The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boisvert, Raymond D. (1989), ‘Rorty, Dewey, and Post-Modern Metaphysics,’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, 27, no. 2, 173–93. Braaten, Jane. (1995), ‘From Communicative Rationality to Communicative Thinking: A Basis for Feminist Theory and Practice,’ in Johanna Meehan (ed.), Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York: Routledge, pp. 139–62. Brandom, Robert B. (1994), Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —(2000), “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Malden: Blackwell. —(2009), Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —(2011), Perspectives on Pragmatism: Classical, Recent, and Contemporary. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. —(2000a), ‘Introduction’ to Robert B. Brandom (ed.), Rorty and His Critics. Malden: Blackwell. —(ed.). (2000b), Rorty and His Critics. Malden: Blackwell. Carroll, Noel. (1998), A Philosophy of Mass Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Clayton, Jay. (1990), ‘The Narrative Turn in Minority Fiction,’ American Literary History, 2, no. 3, 375–93. Code, Lorraine. (1992), ‘Who Cares? The Poverty of Objectivism for a Moral Epistemology,’ Annals of Scholarship, 9, Winter/Spring, 1–18. Cohn, J. and Tronick, E. (1988), “Mother-Infant Face-to-Face Interaction: Influence is Bi-Directional and Unrelated to Periodic Cycles in Either Partner’s Behavior,” Developmental Psychology, 24, 386–92. Colapietro, Vincent. (2011), ‘Richard Rorty as Peircean Pragmatist: An Ironic Portrait and Sincere Expression of Philosophical Friendship,’ Pragmatism Today, 2, no. 1 (Summer), 31–50 [online at http://pragmatismtoday.eu]. Collins, Randall. (2004), Intaraction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Davidson, Donald. (2001), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Note that all citations of works by John Dewey in this volume follow the standard scholarly format for referring to Dewey’s Complete Works (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991) as follows: ‘MW 12, p. 94’ refers to page 94 of volume 12 of the Middle Works, and ‘LW 2, p. 349’ refers to page 349 of volume 2 of the Later Works.

Dewey, John. (1917), ‘The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,’ in Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1969–91. —(1918), ‘Philosophy and Democracy’ in Dewey, Jo Ann Boydston (ed.), The Middle Works of John Dewey, Volume 11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1969–91.

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Index Aristotle 54, 148, 154, 156 Baier, Annette 17, 117, 163 Benhabib, Seyla 33, 41, 139, 142 Bernstein, Richard J. 36, 46 Bloom, Harold 162, 171, 174 Brandom, Robert 3, 4, 16, 17, 67–70, 103 Code, Lorraine 119–20 Colapietro, Vincent 105 Collins, Randall 152 Davidson, Donald 16, 17, 56, 76, 148, 151 Derrida, Jacques 17, 58, 76, 162, 171 Descartes, René 24, 29, 148, 152, 154 Dewey, John 4, 5, 9–11, 14–16, 24, 30, 40, 47, 76, 81, 84, 87–8, 89, 92, 93–5, 99–100, 101, 104, 105, 107–13, 115–18, 119–22, 123, 124, 125, 136, 148, 153, 154, 155, 163, 165–6, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175–6, 178, 180, 184, 187, 188 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 16, 81, 123, 177

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 10, 13, 14, 23, 24, 64, 81, 90, 92, 97, 124, 148, 162, 163, 172, 175 Heidegger, Martin 9–10, 11, 13–14, 55, 58, 59, 84, 87–8, 89, 99, 104, 109, 123, 148, 151, 154 Hickman, Larry 105 Hume, David 17, 75–6, 99, 102, 117 James, William 16, 47, 81, 88, 96, 105, 113, 154, 178, 183, 184, 188 Kant, Immanuel 4, 23, 31, 36, 44, 45, 46, 62, 76, 92, 100, 117, 148, 152, 154, 159, 163, 179, 180 Kitcher, Philip 101 Malachowski, Alan 102 Margolis, Joseph 78 Marx, Karl 146, 163 McDowell, John 16, 123 Mencius 182 Mendieta, Eduardo 102, 161, 163 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 186, 189

Foucault, Michel 17, 106, 154, 162, 171, 178, 183 Frankfurt, Harry 162 Fraser, Nancy 4, 34, 46 Freud, Sigmund 70, 122

Nietzsche, Friedrich 16, 23, 24, 49, 50, 59, 67, 69, 70, 118, 154, 166 Nussbaum, Martha 161, 162

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 50–1, 53–7, 60, 62, 87–8, 99, 104, 143, 148, 151, 166, 185 Geuss, Raymond 104 Glaude, Eddie S., Jr 125 Gouinlock, James 105 Gross, Neil 104

Peirce, Charles Sanders 47, 124 Plato 12–15, 59, 60, 132, 148–9, 152, 153, 154, 156, 170, 177 Putnam, Robert 4, 16, 31, 35–45, 46, 47, 98, 148

Haack, Susan 105 Habermas, Jürgen 3, 4, 7, 31–6, 41, 43–5, 46, 55, 69, 116, 117, 154, 162, 163

Oakeshott, Michael 161

Ramberg, Bjørn 4, 5, 103 Rawls, John 33 Rorty, Richard references to Rorty are throughout; see specific references to the following published works,

204 Index Achieving Our Country 6, 7, 18, 123, 134, 135, 136–7, 148, 161, 163, 171, 174 ‘Afterword: Intellectual Historians and Pragmatism’ 143 ‘Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics’ 30 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 5, 52–4, 57, 60–8, 82, 93, 95–8, 104, 110, 146, 147, 161, 162, 169–70, 172,176 ‘Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God’ 119, 122, 178, 185, 188 ‘Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin’ 122–3, 187 ‘Dewey’s Metaphysics’ 5, 81, 92, 110, 112, 122, 124 ‘Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress’ 164 ‘Emancipating Our Culture’ 31–2 ‘The End of Leninism, Havel, and Social Hope’ 123 ‘Ethics without Principles’ 120, 123, 126, 153, 156, 163 ‘Feminism and Pragmatism’ 104, 116, 123, 125 ‘The Fire of Life’ 168 ‘Freud and Moral Reflection’ 170 ‘Globalization, the Politics of Identity and Social Hope’ 123 ‘Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude’ 153, 155 ‘Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy’ 62–3 ‘Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens’ 110, 111, 161 ‘Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace’ 37–40, 42, 98 ‘Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality’ 109, 117–18, 123 ‘Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-Dualist Account of Interpretation’ 114, 116, 124, 167 ‘Intellectual Autobiography’ 86, 96, 104 ‘The Intellectuals at the End of Socialism’ 171 ‘Intellectuals in Politics: Too Far In? Too Far Out?’ 171, 174

‘Introduction’ [to The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 8] 93–5 ‘Introduction’ [to Philosophy in History] 134, 143 ‘Introduction’ [to TP] 72 ‘Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism’ [to ORT] 104, 172 ‘Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy’ [to CP] 90–1 ‘Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean Philosophy’ [to EHO] 153 ‘Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making’ [to PSH] 114–15, 153, 155–6 ‘John Searle on Realism and Relativism’ 43 ‘Justice as a Larger Loyalty’ 111, 117, 123, 182 ‘Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral Philosophy’ 106 ‘Keeping Philosophy Pure: An Essay on Wittgenstein’ 89, 109 ‘The Limits of Reductionism’ 114 The Linguistic Turn 9, 14, 101, 111, 113–14, 132 ‘Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism’ 105, 174 ‘On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz’ 118, 119 ‘On Heidegger’s Nazism’ 10 ‘On Philosophy and Politics’ [interview in TCF] 18, 135 ‘Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey’ 89, 109 ‘Persuasion Is a Good Thing’ [interview in TCF] 16, 17, 133 ‘The Philosopher as Expert’ 82–5 ‘Philosophy and the Future’ 12, 146 ‘Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida’ 143 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature 5, 6, 44, 10–11, 13, 23, 44, 49, 50–3, 56–61, 63, 67, 82–3, 85–8, 89, 93, 96, 99, 100, 104, 105, 108–9, 117, 123, 124, 125, 134, 143, 146, 148, 150, 152, 161, 162

Index ‘Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics’ 118 ‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre’ 86–7, 111 ‘Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism’ 118, 123 ‘Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism’ 119 ‘Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth’ 72 ‘Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism’ 122 ‘Preface’ [to PCP] 98–100, 151, 155, 157, 172–3, 175–7, 181 ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’ 107, 110–11, 118, 119 ‘Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture’ 89, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 123 ‘Realism, Categories, and the “Linguistic Turn”’ 111, 113 ‘Recent Metaphilosophy’ 114, 124 ‘Reply to Brandom’ 68–9 ‘Response to Kołakowski’ 43 ‘Response to Richard Shusterman’ 173, 179–80, 182–6, 187, 188 Richard Rorty Papers (UC Irvine Special Collections) 96 ‘Solidarity or Objectivity?’ 43, 46, 109 ‘There Is a Crisis Coming’ [interview in TCF] 15, 163

205 ‘Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein’ 176 ‘Truth without Correspondence to Reality’ 123, 153 ‘Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future’ 115–16 ‘Universality and Truth’ 43 ‘Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn’ 125 ‘A World without Substances or Essences’ 13, 123

Sellars, Wilfrid 125, 132, 148, 151, 152, 162 Shakespeare, William 157, 162 Shusterman, Richard 4, 6–7, 103, 142, 187, 188, 189 Sleeper, Ralph 105 Westbrook, Robert 105 Whitman, Walt 12, 16, 123, 136 Williams, Bernard 106 Williams, Michael 102 Williamson, Timothy 157 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3–4, 9–11, 13, 14, 24, 25, 27, 59, 84, 89, 99, 104, 109, 123, 132, 148, 154, 166, 178 Yeats, W. B. 25, 162 Young, Iris Marion 4, 33–4, 46