Rorty, Religion, and Metaphysics (American Philosophy Series) 1498560385, 9781498560382

Citation preview

Rorty, Religion, and Metaphysics

American Philosophy Series Series Editor: John J. Kaag, University of Massachusetts Lowell Advisory Board: Charlene Haddock Siegfried, Joe Margolis, Marilyn Fischer, Scott Pratt, Douglas Anderson, Erin McKenna, and Mark Johnson The American Philosophy Series at Lexington Books features cutting-edge scholarship in the burgeoning field of American philosophy. Some of the volumes in this series are historically oriented and seek to reframe the American canon’s primary figures: James, Peirce, Dewey, and DuBois, among others. But the intellectual history done in this series also aims to reclaim and discover figures (particularly women and minorities) who worked on the outskirts of the American philosophical tradition. Other volumes in this series address contemporary issues—cultural, political, psychological, educational—using the resources of classical American pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. Still others engage in the most current conceptual debates in philosophy, explaining how American philosophy can still make meaningful interventions in contemporary epistemology, metaphysics, and ethical theory.

Recent titles in the series: Rorty, Religion, and Metaphysics, by John Owens Ontology after Philosophical Psychology: The Continuity of Consciousness in William James’s Philosophy of Mind, by Michela Bella The Pragmatism and Prejudice of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., edited by Seth Vannatta Richard Rorty and the Problem of Postmodern Experience: A Reconstruction, by Tobias Timm Peirce and Religion: Knowledge, Transformation, and the Reality of God, by Roger A. Ward William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life, edited by Jacob L. Goodson Epistemic Issues in Pragmatic Perspective, by Nicholas Rescher Loving Immigrants in America: An Experiential Philosophy of Personal Interaction, by Daniel G. Campos The Religious Dimension of Experience: Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy, by David W. Rodick Aesthetic Transcendentalism in Emerson, Peirce, and Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting, by Nicholas L. Guardiano

Rorty, Religion, and Metaphysics John Owens

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is Available ISBN 978-1-4985-6038-2 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-6039-9 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Religion, Metaphysics, and Pragmatism PART I: PHILOSOPHY

1 13

1 The Attack on Realism

15

2 The Attack on Aristotelianism

45

3 Pragmatism 59 PART II: RELIGION

91

4 Pragmatist Religious Belief

93

5 Pragmatism and the Theologians PART III: ETHICS

117 139

6 Pragmatist Social Ethics

141

7 The Question of Recognition

163

Conclusion 191 Bibliography 211 Index 217 About the Author

221

v

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to all who helped with the development and preparation of this work. Special appreciation is due to the faculty and administration of Good Shepherd College, Auckland, for their support and assistance, to Al DiIanni for his early encouragement, to Andy Murray for his advice and comments, and to Margaret Whibley for her invaluable attention to details of style and expression.

vii

Introduction Religion, Metaphysics, and Pragmatism

A PHILOSOPHER WITH A SINGLE IDEA Readers of Richard Rorty quickly discover that he is a philosopher with a single idea, so that however widely he ranges in theme and material, he always returns to his one dominant interest.1 It says a lot for his skills of articulation and presentation that this single-mindedness is a virtue, and that even when we know how it will turn out, the story still grips us, and has an uncanny power to surprise, so that we are often taken aback as he redescribes topics and figures we thought we knew. In a word, he wants us to lose the age-old fascination with something large and holy that stands over against us and demands our respect. It does not matter whether it is called God, or Reality, or Truth, or Goodness, or whether it falls under the category of religion or metaphysics. For Rorty, all these terms are concerned with more or less the same thing, reflecting the human need for something that challenges or beckons from beyond the human, and which requires allegiance, drawing us into an attitude of reverence. Rorty thinks we will be better off if we simply leave all this behind. He holds that a world that has abandoned religion and metaphysics, at least as they have been traditionally understood, will be a better world. In fact, he wants us to move on so completely that we do not even discuss such issues any more.2 We will have reached a place where we have simply forgotten the large religious and metaphysical questions that once so preoccupied the human race. They will have vanished from mainstream discourse in the way that interests based on antiquated scientific concepts such as “ether” or “humors” have been relegated to distant history. Rorty also offers suggestions for the kind of life that could follow the defeat of the religious-metaphysical quest. These divide into proposals for the group-life of a society, and proposals for the way in which the most 1

2

Introduction

creative members of the society might develop their private projects. At the level of group-life, Rorty proposes a political liberalism of a standard sort, a society based on commonly accepted liberal democratic ideals. He believes that in certain respects, such a society has already been achieved so that at the political level, the West may have had the last revolution it needs.3 Rorty is at times an acute political observer.4 He generally favors the ideals of the old left and writes amusingly about their degeneration at the hands of radical academics.5 But such discussions are probably not his primary interest. Tellingly, he records a sense of guilt as a child that he did not feel much natural attraction for books aimed at making the world better, such as the report of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow trials, or Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, books that were required reading in the Rorty household.6 He also offers proposals for the kind of individual life that should succeed the demise of the religious-metaphysical quest. These resonate with powerful forces already at work in Western culture: the lure of self-creation, a heady sense of imposing direction on a reality that offers no original hint about how it should be seen or handled. Rorty develops here an “aesthetic” ideal of life that has been foreshadowed by other nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, especially Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Dewey, although its ultimate sources are with European Romanticism.7 Rorty has a Hegelian fascination with the kind of change that involves the transformation of a whole world along with its beliefs and institutions, including the sorts of objects that it comes to know.8 He thinks that Europe became aware of the possibility of such transformation around the time of the French Revolution. We see the theme reflected in the profile of the artist in contemporary Western society, an essentially Romantic figure intent on forging new vocabularies, and catching “the gigantic shadows that futurity casts upon the present,” as Rorty says of Shelley.9 Rorty’s descriptions of the private projects that succeed religion and metaphysics are focused on general ideals of “overcoming.” He offers vivid examples of thinkers and artists who remade the vocabulary in which they worked, imaginatively overcoming what went before. Scientists like Newton fit into this list, as well as poets like Shelley, and religious figures like St. Paul. In their very different ways, they expand our vocabularies, and take us into worlds that lie beyond our current imagining. It seems to me that the continuing fascination of Rorty’s work centers not on the detail of group or individual life that might follow a pragmatist understanding, but rather on the original clash with which he begins, between the religious-metaphysical worldview and its pragmatist successor. While he wants to promote a world that is postreligious and postmetaphysical—in that it has simply forgotten about such issues and has substituted projects of self-creation in place of the older desire to correspond to something beyond

Introduction

3

us—the interest of his writing lies not so much in the new life which it promotes, but in the original struggle between the two fundamental possibilities. This means that in spite of his best intentions, the religious-metaphysical quest achieves a significant profile in his work as a still powerful antagonist. The narrative with which he is concerned is one of the most dramatic the philosophical world has seen. Nietzsche thinks of the transition away from religion and metaphysics as involving a lonely journey that requires intense personal suffering. Rorty has no time for such dramatics and is deliberately matter of fact in his approach. He does not like philosophical narratives that speak as if the future of civilization hangs upon a single philosophical thread, and is critical of Heidegger for at times promoting this sort of tone.10 Nor does he approve of Alasdair MacIntyre’s view that we are forced either to Aristotle or to Nietzsche, as though there is a single large philosophical choice the current age has to negotiate, which puts all other choices in the shade. He finds MacIntyre’s claim “too dramatic and too simple,”11 and fears that such descriptions will unfairly trump the smaller concerns of humanity. His inclinations are pragmatic, favoring piecemeal attempts to advance on particular fronts, while promoting a gradual loss of interest in the religious or metaphysical world that is to be left behind.12 Yet Rorty’s very skill as a writer and his instinctive flair for a good story, work against all this. John D. Caputo refers to “his complete mastery of the idiom of American English,”13 and remarks on the irony whereby sheer literary skill keeps old-fashioned philosophical discussion alive, for all that Rorty’s stated intention is to kill our interest in such discussion.14 It is even possible to recognize for the first time in Rorty’s writing, what it was that the religious-metaphysical tradition glimpsed, and wanted to grasp and defend. In other words, in reading Rorty, we become aware as never before of what is at stake in this debate, and pace Rorty, how much is at stake. CHRISTIANITY AND ITS SHADOWS Among the religious-metaphysical views that constitute Rorty’s opposition, Christianity holds a privileged position. This is hardly surprising, given that Christianity is the default religious tradition of the culture that Rorty wants to transform. There are, however, theological and philosophical reasons why Christianity should serve as the chief antagonist. It offers a very strong narrative of connection between earthly and heavenly things, holding not only that earthly things were originally made through a divine creative word and that the divinity offered a subsequent revelation to the world but also that the divine itself became incarnate in human history. In many influential forms of Christianity, this movement of incarnation is continued in the sacramental

4

Introduction

activity of churches. Christian traditions therefore bring worshippers into a space where they are confronted at every turn by realities that address them from beyond. Things of heaven are constantly to be discerned among earthly things, so that temporal life includes a relation to an order that reaches down from above, imposing a powerful sense of reverence and obedience. Life’s contingencies are never simply contingent, in that the human gets its ultimate meaning from a center of significance that is situated beyond the human. Rorty holds that Western secular philosophical traditions carry on this Christian sense of contact with the divine. Using a characteristically broad brush, he suggests that Hegel’s World-Spirit, Heidegger’s “Being,” and Nietzsche’s “Superman” all share in “the duality attributed to Christ: very man, but, in his ineffable aspect, very God.”15 They promote the possibility of a privileged encounter that promises more than just temporal advantage, bringing the kind of upward lift traditionally associated with religion, and even perhaps offering a religious kind of security, based on an alliance with the only thing that really matters, making “the epigone feel like an incarnation of Omnipotence.”16 Most readers would agree that Hegel belongs in this list, though they might protest the inclusion of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Whatever the status of the detail, Rorty sees Christianity as a kind of exemplar that has continued a clandestine life among its philosophical successors in that these also promote an eventual identity between the human and the divine, and therefore find themselves on the wrong side of Rorty’s dividing-line. In seeing metaphysics in this way as a continuation of moves that are ultimately religious, Rorty develops familiar themes from a broader Nietzschean tradition of thought.17 Nietzsche holds that traditional Western concepts of truth and goodness find their roots in religious attitudes so that they stand or fall with the religious cause, being “shadows” of religious belief.18 Nietzsche is fiercely scornful of later Enlightenment figures like David Friedrich Strauss, or George Eliot, who think that after the demise of God, it is business as usual with large concepts of truth and goodness.19 The famous announcement of the death of God by the madman in The Gay Science includes the observation that the thinkers of the time do not realize the extent of the loss that has been incurred, especially the loss of traditional notions of morality.20 The effects of the demise of religion are therefore seen to extend far beyond specific religious interests. Large parts of the secular philosophical enterprise are also exposed as branches of the religious tree, living from the continuing force of religious intuitions. Where post-Enlightenment philosophy tended to distinguish metaphysicians from theologians, Rorty groups them together as historical variants of the same instinct of allegiance to a reality beyond the human. This means that views that were once sharply distinguished are now thrown together. Anyone who posits an ultimate framework that necessarily subsists beneath the everyday flux of the world is at heart a “theologian

Introduction

5

or metaphysician.”21 The emancipation that the West needs is therefore not only from religion but also from concepts that for all their professed secularity, trail an aura of holiness. In an essay on Rorty, John McDowell refers to Dewey’s project of freeing us from a religious outlook, which requires that we humble ourselves before a “nonhuman authority,” and goes on to point out that such emancipation is not complete until we are also free of the philosophical equivalents of religious concepts: “We need a secular emancipation as well.”22 In a Spinoza lecture delivered in 1997, Rorty does not hold back: “We hope to do to Nature, Reason, and Truth, what the eighteenth century did to God.”23 Rorty’s position therefore takes us beyond traditional theological divisions, for example, the division between those that endorse a directly philosophical base, in the way that the Catholic tradition has promoted Aristotle, and those like Karl Barth, who abjure any such worldly support, basing their theological views purely on the address of a revelation from beyond. Both of these qualify as “metaphysical” in Rorty’s sense, in that both look to something beyond the human that imposes itself with authority, and solicits a response of radical obedience. Even Kant finds himself described as a metaphysician, given that he sets out to identify a “permanent neutral framework for inquiry and thus for all of culture,” which does not change, regardless of the changes in empirical states which might come to fill it.24 Similarly, Rorty’s discussions of contemporary critics of the religious-metaphysical tradition, for example, Heidegger or Habermas, are often aimed at exposing remnants of metaphysical thinking in their positions, and suggesting revisions that might turn them into thoroughgoing pragmatists. Heidegger is criticized for “nostalgia”; Habermas for retaining elements of an idealized metaphysics.25 In cornering remnants of the metaphysical tradition like this, Rorty sees himself as driving home the consequences of a resolute nominalism, which he adopts as a kind of practical stratagem to move us away from trying to correspond to an authority beyond the world. Instead, we are to concentrate our hopes on development and exploration of new and better worlds. As a result, religious and metaphysical thinkers who once regarded themselves as antagonists, find themselves grouped together in Rorty’s world as implicit allies. The new significant divide now lies between those who want to live without recourse to non-human authorities—the pragmatists—and their religious-metaphysical opposition. Everyone is to be forced to one side or the other. Rorty is often criticized for his denial of possible middle ground between metaphysics and pragmatism. Thomas McCarthy takes him to task for excluding the possibility of concepts of reason, truth and justice that retain some transcendent force, but are not metaphysical.26 Frank B. Farrell complains that “[i]t is as if a stable middle position cannot be achieved in his thinking.”27 Whatever is to be said of the outcome of these debates, such

6

Introduction

authors have read Rorty accurately, in that he wants to exclude the possibility of a middle ground between broadly pragmatist positions, and positions that still include remnants of ultimate obedience. This is not to deny that Rorty has also been interpreted in the opposite way, for example, as mediating between dogmatism and skepticism, so that his position has been aligned with that of Gadamer.28 Every thinker can, of course, be placed between positions that are more extreme, and can be regarded as finding some sort of middle ground. But Rorty is surely no Gadamer and would see Gadamer’s approach as remaining too close to metaphysics for comfort. PRAGMATIST RELIGION? Rorty thinks that the transition he wants to facilitate is well on its way, in that the Western world has already taken many of the steps that lead it away from residual religion and metaphysics toward a world where there is no large nonhuman object deserving of primitive respect. Final abandonment of the old tradition need not therefore take much work. We simply need confidence that it can be done, and an awareness of how to do it. Rorty emphasizes the significance of twentieth-century approaches to language and the world, for example, those pioneered by Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Heidegger admittedly wanted to retain a place for large-scale philosophical thinking, which kept alive a sense of fundamental mystery from which we and our language proceed. Rorty regards this as nostalgia, and wants to emphasize the historicist side of Heidegger, where we come to realize that there is no need to appeal beyond ourselves and our various uses of language, along with the worlds that our uses of language enable to appear. To make his view plausible, Rorty has to break the hold of residual realism, and show that we can proceed perfectly well without the metaphysical underpinnings that were once thought necessary to account for our knowledge. Rorty shows that for a metaphysical realism to succeed, it needs to posit not only the existence of worldly materials that can be formed into objects of knowledge, but also the existence of a kind of viewpoint out in the world, where the things of the world say something about themselves, and affirm a kind of self-identity. Such a view of the world fits well with a belief in creation, the conviction that things were made by someone who had something in mind. If the things of the world are like this, then they prescribe certain articulations as original and privileged, the ones that express the nature of things as they really are. Rorty holds that since this condition is never met, and nonhuman reality never speaks in this way, the older realisms have no chance of succeeding. He is particularly adept at using imaginative examples to show that reality never prescribes how we are to speak about it, but that

Introduction

7

it first takes on significance in light of purposes of ours. Whatever objects we uncover always reflect deeper choices of ours that have enabled them to appear as such. Rorty calls the new approach to life and the world that replaces religious and metaphysical traditions “pragmatist,” a word that carries a broad range of meaning, but which refers to approaches that are generally future-oriented and experimental, allying themselves with liberalism in placing a high value on freedom of choice. While pragmatism assumes the defeat of the old divinized world, with its “nonhuman forces to which human beings should be responsible,”29 it does not limit itself to this. To adopt a pragmatist approach is in Rorty’s view also to orient one’s life in a positive direction, aiming at a certain sort of future. He draws support for pragmatism as a broad lifeprogram particularly from his favorite pragmatist philosopher, Dewey, who believes that pragmatism connects naturally with liberal democratic ideals, placing a high value on public discussion and common decision-making. Rorty follows Dewey in sharply distinguishing such a society from one that tries to establish itself on religious or metaphysical bases, and which falls back on a contemplative grasp of the world that claims to uncover the way reality originally is, independently of ourselves and our projects. He believes that the progress of the pragmatist project is connected to the decline of the contemplative project.30 Where does this leave religion? Rorty suggests that religion can in fact be reinterpreted against pragmatist criteria so that like all human projects it comes down to a choice of a particular vocabulary to achieve certain human purposes. It is therefore to be assessed—as are all vocabularies—according to whether it benefits or burdens human lives. Rorty’s discussion has two parts, covering the place of religion in public life, and its place in private life. With regard to public life, Rorty has no trouble accepting that religion once played an important role in offering Western societies a certain kind of hope. He says, rather sweepingly, that at a particular stage of its history, the Christian story served the needs of the human race well, in that it opened possibilities of hope during difficult times.31 This applied even to the public functions of religion in various historical societies. He believes that these times are now past and that we do not need metaphysical or religious props any more. He recommends the kind of society that regards itself as its own authority and sees no need for appeals beyond itself. Rorty recognizes of course that within current Western societies some still hold that legislators should take account of the will of God in formulating common rules of life, believing that the very basis on which society was originally established demands acknowledgment of this sort. He recommends that we should view political appeals to the will of God as “disguised moves in the game of cultural politics.”32 A direct appeal to religion is not a straightforward recommendation that society take

8

Introduction

account of an additional significant object, in the way that it should perhaps take account of the interests of a powerful neighboring state. Such a call is rather to be seen as a proposal to adopt a whole new vocabulary, and to accept a fundamentally different way for the society to go about its civic business. While Rorty does not warm to projects of this sort and at times shows a strong antipathy towards them, he has presumably no philosophical objection, should a society freely decide on such steps. On the question of how the individual relates to religion, Rorty becomes more accommodating in his later writings. Here he draws from themes in William James, who for at least some of the time sees religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider to be the divine.”33 This line of thought allows religion to be accommodated within the bounds of a pragmatist framework. Certain contemporary theologians have recognized possibilities for a new understanding of religion here and have set about developing detailed models that operate within such boundaries. They point to the kinds of changes that religion and theology would have to embrace, if they are to fit a framework that could be seen as broadly pragmatist. Some of Rorty’s theological sympathizers propose radical transformations of religious views here, transformations that reflect their abandonment of large notions of truth or reality. I suspect that the price of such accommodation is the loss of most of what made religion interesting in the first place. In the present work, I want to retain a robust notion of religion, along with its traditional metaphysical underpinnings, so that religion is not altered out of recognition as it tries to come to grips with Rorty’s work. Leszek Kolakowski suggests such an understanding at the start of his little book on religion: “The questions I am going to examine will be discussed on the shallow assumption that what people mean in religious discourse is what they ostensibly mean.”34 If we assume that religious discourse generally means what it says, how does it perform in a confrontation with Rorty? It is my belief that Rorty offers a surprising amount of insight into the nature of his enemy, and that one can learn a lot about religion (and also metaphysics) by reading Rorty. He articulates negatively the shape that such approaches must take if they are to justify an appeal beyond the objects of everyday coping, to something that requires a response of respect and obedience. If the religious-metaphysical side cannot offer any direct response to the challenge, it seems condemned to occupy the place Rorty keeps open for it, becoming a private vocabulary that some have developed to cope with their solitude. It is my belief that the traditional religious-metaphysical viewpoint can offer arguments in its defence, which go back in the first place to how we interpret our relations to others, and the implications of such interpretations for more general views of life and the

Introduction

9

world. It would be too much in this day and age to expect that such large matters can ever be settled by argument. But this does not mean that a plausible case cannot be made. Rorty himself agrees that when it comes to the largest questions, this is the best we can do. Rorty’s position sets out the opposition between pragmatism and traditional religious belief in such a way as to raise the large and interesting question of whether a religious view that claims adherence to a revelation, can ever in fact be accommodated within a pragmatist framework. Whatever concessions he is prepared to offer religion, Rorty insists that the significance of things comes back ultimately to us and our purposes so that the final evaluation of religious commitment depends on its benefit for human subjects, looking to the degree to which it enhances or handicaps individual lives. While a pragmatist view can accommodate many traditional religious practices and beliefs, it seems somehow to miss the one thing necessary that first moved most believers and set up religious belief as an interesting topic in the first place. Religious commitment is often first experienced as the exact opposite of a pragmatist view in fact, namely as a belief that the ultimate meaning of things does not come back to us and our purposes, but is mysteriously situated beyond us, in something that solicits from us an original submission. It is hard to see that such an understanding can ever really fit into a pragmatist stance. Many religious traditions, including much mainstream Christian belief, would precisely maintain that a pragmatist approach puts things the wrong way round. If religion contributes anything distinctive, it is surely as an unconditional commitment of the sort which Rorty opposes. Once religion is seen in this way, there seems little hope of accommodation between pragmatism and religion unless one position or the other is eroded of much of its traditional content. Strikingly, Rorty himself sets out the project that the realist has to complete if there is to be any successful challenge to the pragmatist position. He has shown (to his own satisfaction at least) that if realism is to get off the ground, it needs to establish that reality says something about itself. He is, of course, aware that some might maintain that parts of reality do meet this condition, namely other humans. They deliver utterances on how we should speak about them, and seem therefore to come before us as “realities” in a strong sense, so that they are more than objects that appear within discourses of ours as we go about our various projects. Surely, other humans stand over these discourses, challenging the discourses to measure up to a standard fundamentally beyond them? Rorty discusses at length how such encounters are to be described. He insists that such experiences can be understood from within pragmatist parameters, so that the presence of another human subject with whom we converse does not present any fundamental challenge to the pragmatist view. There are indications of tensions in these discussions when they bear on ethical issues. His engagement with authors in the post-Levinas tradition

10

Introduction

sometimes gives the impression of a mechanical appeal to an all-purpose pragmatist response, rather than a proper engagement with the issues raised. Paradoxically, Rorty himself is capable of recognizing the magnitude of the problem raised by Levinas, for all that he obstinately resists any solution that appeals to a large authority beyond everyday human interests. The possibility needs to be considered that our relation to other people stands at the beginning of the traditional commitment to realism. Whether someone finds such a suggestion attractive or plausible depends of course on willingness or unwillingness to make other moves, in particular to oppose the classic modern tendency (shown, for example, in Leibniz’s doctrine of “monads”) to downplay the part that relationships to others play in constituting human identity. To recognize relationships as fundamental in this way seems to open lines of understanding that lead naturally to strong claims about reality and truth, and even to a theistic view of the world. I believe that the deepest divide between Rorty and his religious or metaphysical opponents comes down to ways in which such questions are addressed. I will look first at how Rorty establishes the pragmatist project and manages to defend it against traditional epistemological and metaphysical approaches, including the approach of Aristotle. I will then examine the prospects for religion within a pragmatist approach, and the reactions of prominent theologians to the thought of cooperating with Rorty. Finally, I will move to key ethical questions, particularly the matter of recognition between persons. Such is the protean character of Rorty’s mind, the extent of his curiosity, and the breadth of his interests, that almost without exception, everything needed for this is found in his own writings. NOTES 1. Rorty comes clean on this in a late essay: “I am a hedgehog who, despite showering my reader with allusions and dropping lots of names, has really only one idea.” Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” in Power, Critique, Judgment, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3–38, 4. 2. Rorty’s ironist hopes that “by the time she has finished using old words in new senses, not to mention introducing brand-new words, people will no longer ask questions phrased in the old words.” Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 78. 3. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63. 4. See, for example, his uncanny prediction made in 1997 of political events that unfolded in the United States in 2016. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 90. 5. He criticizes the post-Marxist left for deserting piecemeal reform, giving up the project of taking over the government, and settling for taking over, in Irving Howe’s phrase, “the English department.” Richard Rorty, “De Man and the Cultural

Introduction

11

Left,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129–39, 137. 6. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 3–20, 5. 7. Admittedly Rorty has objections to the use of this term, pointing out that it assumes a Kantian contrast between “aesthetic” on the one side, and “cognitive” and “moral” on the other. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” in The Future of Religion, eds. Richard Rorty, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 29–41, 31. 8. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 3. 9. Richard Rorty, “Grandeur, Profundity, and Finitude,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 73–88, 85. 10. Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66–82, 68. 11. Richard Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 143–63, 159 fn. 12. J. Thomas Howe sees a similar contrast between Nietzsche and Dawkins, in that Nietzsche’s atheism looks to a life that is troubled and dramatic, whereas Dawkins anticipates an “easy peace and comfortable wonder.” J. Thomas Howe, “Affirmations After God: Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins on Atheism,” Zygon 47, no. 1 (2012): 140–55, 140. 13. John D. Caputo, “Richard Rorty (1931–2007): In Memoriam,” Crosscurrents 57 (Fall 2007): 434–38, 436. 14. John D. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 11: “If Rorty really wanted philosophy to die off, if he were really serious about wanting people to change the subject because they could not stand it anymore, or simply to walk away from the discussion, then he has made a serious strategic mistake.” Caputo suggests Rorty should have remained an analytic philosopher and contributed even more articles to journals like Mind on the topic of meaning and reference. 15. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 102. 16. Ibid., 103. Richard Rorty, “Response to Farrell,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 189–95, 191. 17. Rorty’s favored philosopher Dewey was also aware of this. Cf. Allen Hance, “Pragmatism as Naturalized Hegelianism: Overcoming Transcendental Philosophy?” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 100–21, 103. 18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 108. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, “David Strauss, the Confessor and the Writer,” in Thoughts Out of Season, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (London: T. N. Foulis, 1909),

12

Introduction

1–97. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. Thomas Common (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 41. 20. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 108. 21. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv. 22. John McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 109–23, 109. 23. Richard Rorty, Truth, Politics and ‘Post-Modernism’ (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997), 35. 24. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 8. 25. Richard Rorty, “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 90–97, 94. Richard Rorty, “Universality and Truth,” in Rorty and His Critics ed. Robert Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 1–30, 2. 26. “We need rather to develop concepts of reason, truth, and justice that, while no longer pretending to a God’s-eye point of view, retain something of their transcendent, regulative, critical force.” Thomas McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism,” Critical Inquiry 16, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 355–70, 367. 27. Frank B. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 154–88, 174. 28. Steve Bouma-Prediger, “Rorty and Gadamer,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 313–24, 320. 29. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 45. 30. Richard Rorty, “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 175–96. 31. Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 3–21, 15. 32. Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and God,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–26, 8. 33. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Collins, 1974), 50. 34. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion, cited by Nancy K. Frankenberry, “Religion as a ‘Mobile Army of Metaphors,’” in Radical Interpretation in Religion, ed. Nancy K. Frankenberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 171–87, 174.

Part I

PHILOSOPHY

Chapter 1

The Attack on Realism

TRUTH AND THE WORLD Rorty’s first task is to break the hold of the everyday intuitions that give the world authority, so that it seems to impose a truth about itself, which we are forced simply to accept. These intuitions also impose an ideal of knowledge as an acceptance of something given from beyond. While Rorty wants to question such intuitions at a philosophical level, he does not want to deny the validity of our everyday talk. His attack begins where someone wants to privilege a statement by giving it a metaphysical grounding, implying that it is to be seen as going beyond just an epistemological instrument that we have developed in order to get ahead in some way. While his critique of metaphysical realism is always aimed at the same conclusion (Rorty has only ever one thing to say), it is articulated through a variety of arguments. The general aim is not to refute metaphysical positions, but to show that they are not needed. Rorty often uses arguments from twentieth-century philosophy, for example, the argument that the compulsion that the world seems to impose on us can be explained by fundamental metaphors that hold us in their grip, of which we remain unconscious. As noted earlier, he also wants to erode intermediate positions that try to occupy a middle ground between metaphysics on the one side, and pragmatism on the other. In the course of this critique, Rorty clarifies the sorts of conditions a metaphysical position needs to meet, if it is to hold its own against pragmatism. I will survey some of principal arguments that characterize this discussion. In a significant early essay, Rorty introduces a vivid example from the history of medicine that sets out the lines of the debate as it plays itself out in the late twentieth century. The example concerns the discovery of germs as causes of disease, as opposed to older theories of “humors,” and so on. 15

16

Chapter 1

A metaphysical realist approach holds that the medical breakthrough comes with a belated identification of the causal entity that has always been operative in producing the disease. Once the reality is exposed, it exercises its own authority, and cannot be gainsaid. A simple appeal to the facts shows us why Pasteur is right and Paracelsus wrong, in that Pasteur correctly names the significant entity, and Paracelsus does not. Germs are to be found in the world, but there are no “humors” in the world. Rorty points out, however, that Paracelsus’s vocabulary also includes perfectly effective ways of identifying humors as present in the world, so that the justifications of the older vocabulary exactly parallel the sorts of justifications Pasteur offers about germs. He suggests that the difference between the approaches does not touch basic questions of representation, but is rather focused on the relative success or failure of each vocabulary in advancing the human interest in combating disease. We should regard the difference not as a clash concerning facts, but rather as a clash of alternative vocabularies, different fundamental ways of seeing and managing the world. There is no qualitative divide, as if one approach reflects the world as it is and the other does not. The superiority of Pasteur over Paracelsus is a percentage affair, and in the end comes down to the fact that we get much further with Pasteur than we did with Paracelsus so that the decisive point concerns the utility of Pasteur for human purposes.1 Rorty sees his discussion not as attempting to mount a single decisive argument here, but as part of a larger strategy that chips away at our ingrained habits of thought until we eventually start to consider alternatives. He has the advantage that once the mere possibility of an alternative view is conceded, the realist side has more or less lost the battle. Strong metaphysical approaches maintain that there is no alternative to the claim of a metaphysical view to express how things are, so that the mere possibility of an alternative is already an argument against metaphysical realism. Admittedly, some accuse Rorty of having himself fallen into an alternative pragmatist metaphysics, when he argues in this way. Rorty can reply, however, that his arguments are not meant to establish a new metaphysical position, but simply to break the hold of the old metaphysical view by showing that it does not have the necessity it claims. The ideal is not so much that it be defeated, as that it be simply abandoned. On this point at least, his approach is similar to that of Wittgenstein, assembling reminders that jolt us out of a customary way of seeing, until we give up altogether on the urge to think metaphysically. The example highlights the need to distinguish between the status of a sentence within a vocabulary, and the status of the vocabulary itself, when addressing questions of truth. Rorty agrees that with regard to particular sentences, the world often gives the nod to one sentence rather than the other, in the way that metaphysical accounts claim that it does. In a game of chance, the world decides between “Red wins” and “Black wins,” so that when the

The Attack on Realism

17

red counter comes up, everyone agrees that this decides the game. But this assumes that we have already adopted a particular vocabulary, along with its implicit agreements regarding referential implications. It is clear that “Red wins” only because the event is already articulated by a language that sets out the significance of various outcomes, showing how one thing is to be connected to another, and prescribing the significance of a particular colored counter’s turning up at the right time. As Rorty will say when discussing the world of Robert Brandom, the “primacy of the social” stands behind what can appear as a straightforward directive from beyond. Rorty says that with the individual sentences of a language, like “Red wins,” we often leave it to the world to decide what we are to affirm.2 Yet if the world seems to have an authority here, it is only because we have decided to grant it such authority. Rorty insists that when we move to the level of a whole vocabulary, the world does not make the choice for us in this way. If we consider competing examples of whole vocabularies—for example, the moral vocabulary of St. Paul versus that of Freud, or the vocabulary of Newton versus that of Aristotle—we cannot make any sense of the notion that the world itself decides between them. As was seen with the argument that we cannot decide between Paracelsus and Pasteur by a simple appeal to the nonexistence of humors and the existence of germs, we cannot appeal to the existence of mass or gravity to decide between Aristotle and Newton. Rorty says, “[i]t is hard to think that that vocabulary is somehow already out there in the world, waiting for us to discover it.” The world does not speak “Newtonian.”3 This means that while correspondences can arise within a vocabulary, there is no original correspondence between the vocabulary itself and the world. The vocabulary is adopted in pragmatic choices of ours, and the world then appears in light of this vocabulary. The development follows familiar nominalist lines, in that the action of connecting disparate elements into meaningful wholes is seen as coming back to the human subject. The materials of the world impose themselves in a physical, causal way, but do not impose themselves “representationally,” in that they never tell us what concepts we should use to describe them. This goes against the medieval thesis of the “truth of things,” the view that our speech tries to recapture an original logos that is part of the thing itself.4 Things are no longer seen as bearers of an original identity, so that they tell us in some way how they are meant to be described. This also shows how Rorty conceives the nature of metaphysical views. Such views maintain that Newtonian concepts, say, get something right about the physical universe, so that the Newtonian vocabulary corresponds to the way it really is, while Ptolemaic concepts just capture aspects of a world “for us.” Rorty is impressed by Kuhn’s view that the world did not change to Newtonian concepts because of something the world itself delivered, such as the results of “telescopic observations.” Rather, a period of conceptual

18

Chapter 1

confusion and muddled change issued in a new set of controlling concepts and beliefs. The new vocabulary abandoned the notion that the earth is the center of the universe, and adopted a framework within which a single set of laws governed all of physics, opening up new possibilities of prediction and control.5 We do not so much come to concepts whose credentials the universe itself underwrites, as alight on a novel contingent vocabulary that enables a culture to get ahead in spectacular fashion on certain fronts. Once it enters the new vocabulary, the culture never looks back. One of Rorty’s most common ways of putting this position is to say that although there are things out in the world, there is no truth out there. He develops this articulation particularly in the first chapter of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. “Truth” requires a stated view about the world, which is expressed in a judgment or sentence. Here Rorty agrees with Frege, and disagrees with the parts of the philosophical tradition that thought the notion of truth could also be applied to forms, or things, or intuitions.6 He argues against any view that holds that truth can attach itself originally to parts of the world, and insists that it is found only within sentences. This also fits a distinction he makes between the sorts of relations the world imposes on us, which are strictly causal, and the relations that can arise within a language. “Truth” is found only in the latter sphere. Belief in a prior truth that exists out in the world effectively involves a conviction that there are “sentences,” “descriptions,” “a nonhuman language,” or “self-subsistent facts” in the world, or that of its own accord the world splits itself up “into sentenceshaped chunks called ‘facts.’”7 The metaphysical position is understood as affirming that alongside the things of the world, there are also views about them in the world that press in on us, and confront us radically from beyond the circle of our interests and beliefs. We are confronted not just by materials, but by a kind of word that the materials enunciate about themselves, and that we are pressed to acknowledge and repeat. Rorty holds that there is no truth of this sort to be found among worldly things. The only statements of which we are aware are human ones. The only address we experience comes, therefore, from other human beings, who might insist that we take seriously the way they regard themselves, and adopt their own preferred self-description.8 For Rorty, this is not a metaphysical imposition, but a political one. THE SILENCE OF THE WORLD Rorty holds that the view there is a truth in the world, existing beyond the truth of sentences and acting as a final arbiter for our beliefs, is ultimately a religious view, one that implicitly sees the world as a “creation.” As he puts it, “[t]he suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of

The Attack on Realism

19

an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.”9 In a statement made during a discussion about Western metaphysical culture, Rorty says that in such a culture, any entity that has a robust reality is thought to be an object of perfect knowledge, the object of the eye of God, so that “to be real, so to speak, was to be in God’s visual field.”10 To say that strong notions of truth assume a kind of logos in the world, to which speakers and thinkers are originally called to correspond, might seem exaggerated, or downright bizarre. Even defenders of realist positions sometimes baulk at what Rorty is suggesting, and try to fall back on something more moderate, perhaps a realism that does not take us back to pre-modern philosophy. Charles Taylor objects to the implication that correspondence theorists are committed to holding that the world has a point of view on itself, so that there is something like a vocabulary out in the world, and suggests that in implying this, Rorty is trying to reduce his opponents to “Raving Platonists.”11 Yet it can be argued that Rorty has accurately portrayed an important part of traditional realist belief about the nature of truth. A perceptive contemporary defender of Aquinas’s position on the doctrine of the truth of things has a formulation that is close to Rorty’s statement of the matter, seeing the concept of truth as requiring not only the existence of things in the world, but also a view of things that is somehow out in the world, and that connects the position to the notion of God. “If there were no such thing as God’s regard, there would be no truth beyond our subjective perspectives.”12 The twentieth-century Thomist, Josef Pieper, quotes favorably an opinion of Spinoza: “Whoever calls things “true” . . . takes them in such a way as if they spoke, although they are of course in fact speechless.”13 It is a sign of the breadth of the position that it counts both Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas among its adherents. In a famous statement discussing the hidden piety that lies behind science, Nietzsche says that “it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousandyear old faith, the Christian faith that was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.”14 Thomas Aquinas holds the thesis of the veritas rerum, the view that reality itself is “true” in a deep sense, in that it shows forth the way it ultimately is, reflecting the original vision of the creative eye of God. He suggests a straightforward parallel between the eye of an artisan determining the measure of an artifact like a table or chair, and the eye of God as the measure of a natural object. “[T]hings are themselves measured by the divine intellect, in which are all created things—just as all works of art find their origin in the intellect of an artist.”15 Human knowledge attempts to correspond to an original identity that has been inscribed in things. Aquinas further says that “the forms of things are the impressing of the divine knowledge in things,”16 a

20

Chapter 1

position that presumably relates to the New Testament doctrine that all things were created through the Word. As Rorty is aware, even early modernity associates the idea of truth with the notion of creation. Galileo thought that if mathematics functioned as a key to unlock the universe, it was for the reason that the universe was a kind of book that was written in the language of mathematics in the first place. A proper knowledge of the world would therefore aim at the word that lay behind it, from which outward phenomena would be seen as coming forth. Rorty expresses Galileo’s understanding with the metaphor of a key and a lock: “When Galileo said that the Book of Nature was written in the language of mathematics, he meant that his new reductionistic, mathematical vocabulary didn’t just happen to work, but that it worked because that was the way things really were. He meant that the vocabulary worked because it fitted the universe as a key fits a lock.”17 Admittedly, the metaphor of the key and the lock could be employed in service of a pragmatist understanding, signifying no more than that a vocabulary is effective in facilitating our dealings with the world. But Rorty recognizes that Galileo means more than this, holding that realism requires a further condition in the way that reality is seen, if it is to get off the ground; it needs to show that reality has a kind of aspiration, a preference for some descriptions over others. Rorty’s portrayals of the realist position often reflect this, in that the position sees nature itself as aspiring toward a certain description. Seventeenth-century philosophers draw the moral “that the new vocabulary was the one nature had always wanted to be described in.”18 Scientific enquiry after Newton aims at representations of reality “which are not merely ours but its own, as it looks to itself, as it would describe itself if it could.”19 The Cartesian attempt to eliminate everything from our minds that comes from us is intended to leave not bare materials in space and time but “the thoughts which are Nature’s Own.”20 Such statements reflect Rorty’s understanding that to go beyond pragmatism, and to insist that our best vocabularies also get the world “right” in some deep sense, is to say that nature or the world has something like an interested point of view, or at least, it has to be seen in this way. Nothing less than this will do, if the required epistemological constraint is to function. We are to be confronted not only by materials, which we can in principle describe however we like, but also by preferred descriptions, so that there is a kind of judgment in the world against which our descriptions are to be measured, and nature itself gives certain descriptions the nod. Something like this is required, if we are to distinguish in realist fashion between things as they appear as objects of disinterested theory, and things as they appear in light of our interests. As Rorty puts it: “The contrast between the pursuit of truth and the pursuit of expediency goes when the notion of truth as ‘agreement’ or ‘correspondence’ with something that has purposes of its own goes.”21

The Attack on Realism

21

Rorty sometimes explores this possibility in relation to the position of panpsychism, which sees an existing entity not only as being in the world in space and time, a possible object for knowers, but also as having its own perspective on other things. Given the marginal status of panpsychism in Western philosophical history, Rorty shows a surprising interest, perhaps because he recognizes that it was important for James and Dewey, part of the attempt at the end of the nineteenth century to find categories that could articulate a continuity between the human and the nonhuman world, and overcome the dualism of subject and object. Rorty notes that while pragmatism survived to enjoy a renaissance at the end of the twentieth century, there was no similar renaissance for panpsychism.22 He himself turns down the kind of panpsychist option explored by Dewey and Whitehead that looks to categories that allow a point of view into nature, so that as Warren G. Frisina expresses it, “to be anything at all is to be a perspective on that which already is.”23 For Whitehead, “being something” does not mean simply being present as an object within a field of vision. To be an entity is rather to have a sort of interest over against the world, a stance on the world that sees it in a certain way. Because Rorty holds that language is simply restricted to the human sphere, he remains unsympathetic toward positions that try to find something like language among the world’s non-linguistic entities, and dismisses such views as mere “metaphor.” “To attribute beliefs and desires to nonusers of language (such as dogs, infants, and thermostats) is, for us pragmatists, to speak metaphorically.”24 Frisina sees a discontinuity here between Rorty and some of the philosophers who influence him. While all agree that everything goes on against a background of “coping,” Rorty insists on absolute discontinuity between language and what precedes it. “[Dewey and Whitehead] see continuity among all of the ways we struggle to cope with the world where Rorty creates a divide between linguistic and nonlinguistic copings.”25 Tom Sorrell glosses Rorty’s position as holding that a realist sees worldly entities as if they are persons. Coming to the truth about the world is like coming to the truth about what another person is thinking or feeling, and therefore attempting to correspond to another person’s mental states. Sorrell thinks that this exaggerates what a realist in fact needs to hold. He proposes weaker kinds of realism, which avoid strong metaphysical points of view, yet still manage to maintain that certain representations of the world are privileged, or can at least be described as “specially accurate.” He commends the views of Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel here. Williams describes objectivity as an inclusive higher-level representation. For Nagel it is a limit concept that gets beyond the individual perspectives of particular representations, and eventually approximates to a view from nowhere. Sorrell develops a full answer to Rorty along these lines, arguing that it is possible to defend a realist view without falling into premodern metaphysical realism.26 It is clear

22

Chapter 1

how Rorty would answer views like those of Williams and Nagel. He would see them as fitting quite comfortably into a broad pragmatist account of how we organize our representations in order to cope with the world, and would strongly deny that they need be regarded as anything more than this. So he would resist the final move of authors like Williams and Nagel, in the way that he will resist the conclusion of Charles Taylor that modern astronomical vocabularies and statements are more than just “useful.” Rorty would add nothing to the point that such vocabularies help us cope. We should give up larger ambitions about getting reality right, and settle for a pragmatist account, accepting that anything further is wasted effort. Rorty thinks it clear that the attempt to find privileged descriptions in the world is hopeless. We cannot believe in God any more, and we should therefore get rid of notions of truth that depend on God. Correspondence notions of truth have no useful part to play in the workings of a liberal society, whose processes are designed precisely to bypass a committed framework of this sort. While there are objects in space and time, there are no languages out there, and therefore no preferences as to which descriptions should be chosen. He emphasizes the anthropomorphism of views that ascribe propositional attitudes to nonlinguistic entities, seeing these as attempts to ascribe a kind of intention to things that have none. He says flatly that “the world does not speak,”27 echoing Foucault on the intuitions that underpin knowledge in the contemporary age: “We should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face.”28 CAUSAL RELATIONS AND RELATIONS OF JUSTIFICATION Rorty has a further important articulation of these matters, in terms of a sharp distinction between causal relations and relations of justification. He agrees that the world acts on us causally in the usual ways, allowing me, for example, to walk through the door, but not through the wall. The causal action of the world can also form beliefs in the mind, as Hume noticed, in that sheer repetition has an effect on us, so that we cannot help but anticipate that an experience of a particular sort will be followed regularly by one of another sort. But as seen earlier, while Rorty is happy to accept talk of causal relations between the world and ourselves, he denies “representational” relations, where the world imposes a description of itself, giving us reasons to describe it in one way rather than another, so that some of our descriptions become privileged over others, because they are thought to be endorsed by reality itself. To impose a privileged description, reality would have to make a sort of claim on us, arousing in us the sort of feeling which John McDowell

The Attack on Realism

23

describes as “answerability to the world,” a feeling that can be aroused only by the presence of another person.29 Rorty’s belief is that the things of the world give no ultimate direction about how they are to be described. This denial that the world imposes privileged descriptions helps discredit any appeal to perception as grounding a metaphysics. Perception can play such a role only if it presents the world as having a significance of its own, which we merely register through the action of the senses. Rorty sees the privileging of perception as going back to Plato. The Platonic achievement draws two disparate epistemological moments into an apparent unity so that they appear to be aspects of a single move. The first moment appeals to a defined practice of argument, utilizing the moves and countermoves that constitute responsible argumentative discourse within a particular community at a particular time. We could imagine, for example, a dispute within a community about the detail of certain magical or religious beliefs and practices, as they relate to a particular local event. The power of such argument rests on the form of life to which it belongs, which has been adopted by a community as part of its way of managing a particular environment. This first moment incurs a threat of relativism, in that everything seems to go back just to local ways of understanding the world. By contrast, the second moment looks to the possibility of vision, the sight of an object that speaks for itself, once it is glimpsed, so that the mind is overwhelmed, and has no choice but to submit. Plato implies that the first moment leads naturally toward the second. A privileged object (e.g., the vision of the Good) looms as the goal of a discourse that consists of a set of moves and countermoves from within an argumentative tradition. The vision that comes with the second moment enables the first to escape the threat of relativism. The second moment delivers reality as it is, so that at the end we contemplate a compelling object that has us in its thrall, and to which we feel ourselves beholden. The union of the two moments leads to the eventual dogmatism of Plato, the natural impatience with further discussion and debate that characterizes one who claims to have had a vision of reality. Rorty comments that Plato wants to “substitute theoria for phronesis.”30 Rorty therefore believes that Plato’s ideal of knowledge tries to combine two approaches that have no necessary connection. The dialectical approach, made up of a series of moves and countermoves within a certain historical form of life, for example, the to-and-fro of Platonic dialogue, leads us toward a moment of a different sort, where reality speaks for itself. Here the mind has no choice but to submit, given that the object displays “the ahistorical and nonhuman nature of reality itself.”31 While we are led to this moment by a temporal process situated within a particular history, the vision with which we finish transcends the process that led toward it. Rorty believes that this attempt to unite an argumentative economy and a compelling object is

24

Chapter 1

reflected in contemporary philosophical positions that still appeal to ultimate epistemological grounds, such as “sense-data or surface irritations or clear and distinct ideas.”32 Quine’s naturalized epistemology, Dennett’s evolutionary epistemology, Kripke’s essences or natural necessities, and Sellars’ insistence on “picturing,” all qualify as sharing some of the aims of the Platonic tradition, even while they differ from it in other important ways.33 They all attempt to subject our epistemological processes to a final compulsion that bears in on them from outside the processes themselves. The “compulsion” referred to is not the same as occurs in causal relations, though there seems to be an analogy between the two, in that knowledge itself is to be converted into “something as ineluctable as being shoved about,”34 as Rorty puts it. He uses the notion of “sublimation” to describe the relation between representational compulsion and causal compulsion, saying that “[p]utatively rational ananke is, so to speak just a sublimated form of brute bia.”35 Rorty’s strategy is to show that the world never imposes rational compulsion in this way, and that we cannot convincingly unite the two sides. The strategy recalls Sartre’s arguments against moral compulsion or necessity as showing a kind of bad faith, as if those who appeal to such things cannot face the fact that the compulsion they experience does not come from the world, but goes back in the end to their own ingrained habits, which they freely maintain. Rorty refers to Sartre’s remark that metaphysical thinking is driven by a desire to believe that something touching the order of explanation, that is, a “description,” is imposed on us in the same way that stones impinge on our feet.36 Religion and metaphysics begin with such an urge to be rationally overwhelmed so that ultimate decisions on what we are to think or do are taken out of our hands. In speaking of the philosophical notion of “grounding” that runs from Plato to Kant, he says: “[t]hat notion involves finding constraints, demonstrating necessities, finding immutable principles to which to subordinate oneself.”37 He sees the attraction of such constraints as lying in their absolution from responsibility, the promise of a life that can be treated as a calculus, where we can simply read off the answers we need through application of a pre-existing schema. If rationality consists in “being constrained by rule,” it becomes possible for the morally wise person to resolve life-dilemmas “by consulting his memory of the Idea of the Good, or by looking up the relevant article of the moral law.”38 Rorty is obviously painting with a broad brush, and his interpretation of Plato has been contested by John McDowell, who strongly denies that Plato is simply appealing to “a reality larger than mere human beings, as if it could fill gaps in the arguments.”39 The overall point seems well made, however, that part of the attraction of a vision that can secure our knowledge is that it counteracts the Angst that goes with the suspicion that our knowledge lacks any foundation beyond ourselves. Rorty’s final position is that only causal necessity obtains between

The Attack on Realism

25

the world and human speakers, and that this has no direct connection with relations of justification, where we give reasons for our beliefs and raise them to the level of knowledge. Rorty thinks we are misled here by examples whose descriptions are so natural and obvious that we take them to be imposed by the world itself. One of these is the Copernican view of the heavens. The Western world is long committed to this view, and it would be unthinkable that it return to an Aristotelian model. This can lead to the belief that the world has finally shown itself as it is. Rorty thinks, of course, that we should regard the Copernican view as a pragmatic agreement that a society adopts at a particular time for purposes of coping. He takes the further example of the Pythagorean theorem and points out that our certainty regarding the theorem can be interpreted simply as a confidence that others will continue to use the complex web of conventions that is Pythagorean geometry, and will generally agree with its conclusions. The practice does not have to be brought back to “the relation of reason to triangularity,” as if the proof brought us to a point where reason was simply overwhelmed by an intelligible triangular object.40 For a time in the world’s history, the concept of “planetary influences” was part of the working vocabulary, but it ceased to be useful, and was eventually dropped from scientific discourse. Similarly, there was a time when the possibilities of the modern notion of an “atom” became apparent, and the concept became a valued part of the working vocabulary.41 So we should not think of the difference in success between one concept and another as having anything much to do with the notion of accurate representation. It is not that atoms are really out there, in a way that planetary influences are not. Purveyors of each of these descriptions could offer their own criteria for deciding when the objects in question are present, and could therefore claim representational compulsion in their turn. Instead of seeing such disputes as cases of comparing our schemes and judgments with a reality that is beyond them, we should rather see ourselves as moving from one whole vocabulary, along with the objects that appear in its light, to another whole vocabulary. The appeal to a privileged object to justify one of our ways of talking, and to disqualify others, seriously misreads the situation. This is shown by the fact that such an appeal adds nothing significant to an account that rests simply on the pragmatic function of different vocabularies. If we adopt the latter account, we find there is nothing that an appeal to a privileged object could further contribute. The difference between a view that settles for ways of talking, and a view that appeals to a compelling perception, is “a difference which makes no difference,” as Rorty sometimes puts it.42 Rorty often sees the choice he makes here as a preference for Hegel over Kant.43 We give up the preoccupation with securing the right categories and concepts for approaching a world that stands over against us as

26

Chapter 1

a whole, and settle instead for seeing history as a succession of changing sets of categories and concepts, along with the objects that appear in their light. Rorty differs of course from Hegel in seeing categories and concepts as mere historical products without any necessary relation to one another. He has no interest in a final summation that might issue in absolute knowledge. DEBATES WITH CHARLES TAYLOR For the metaphysical viewpoint to gain traction, it needs therefore to convince its hearers that the entities of the world impose not only a causal order on us, but also representational necessities, views about how they are to be understood. Rorty tests his position in a number of notable discussions that he holds with contemporaries. Most of these address the status of the most basic entities of the world, its mineral bodies. For the post-Newtonian imagination, this seems to take the debate to bedrock, in that mineral bodies seem simply “there” in a fundamental way, with other entities being built up out of them. Any suggestion that they are somehow a product of language, as if they might somehow come into existence when we first talk about them, looks absurd, at least to everyday commonsense.44 But this is not Rorty’s position. He has no problem affirming the existence of things that were there long before humans were on the scene. Once we develop an astronomical language that includes talk of stars, planets, and satellites, and enquires into the nature of such things, it becomes clear that most of them existed long before the appearance of humans. Rorty’s question concerns rather the status of the talk in which such things are originally discussed. Should we understand it in a pragmatist way, ultimately as a means of articulating the things of the world so as to achieve a desirable life that includes a good measure of prediction and control? Or should we think of our talk as uncovering the way the things of the world really are, regardless of purposes of ours so that we should try to approach the “right” way of talking about such things, a way that is somehow sanctioned by the things themselves? All agree that the sun existed long before we did, and that it exercises causal influence on us. The question is whether it also imposes a description on us, so that we get something right when we separate out the sun and give it a name as a heavenly body that is distinct from the planets. Rorty wants to argue that descriptions, reasons, or justifications arise only within a language, and that the world never tells us that we should choose one of these rather than another. One of the most interesting exchanges on these topics comes in a debate between Rorty and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor on the question of the status of the language of Newtonian physics, and its relation to the

The Attack on Realism

27

Aristotelian physics that preceded it. Both Rorty and Taylor agree with the commonsense judgment that Newtonian physics is far superior. Taylor makes no attempt to argue (in the manner of Goethe, say) that Aristotelian physics has different ends in view, and operates according to a different ideal of enquiry than does Newtonian physics. The question bears rather on the status of the new Newtonian vocabulary, and whether it can claim a fundamental privilege over other physical vocabularies that have so far appeared, beyond the obvious fact that it enables us better to predict and control the future. Does the world itself somehow have criteria of selection that give the nod to Newton, telling us that Newtonian concepts better articulate the real world, and allow us finally to come to judgments that correspond to the reality of things? Taylor wants to argue that heliocentrism is superior to geocentrism not only pragmatically, in that it enables us to do more, but in the sense that it grasps the reality of the universe in a way that geocentrism does not. It therefore approaches the truth more closely than do any of its rivals. Taylor agrees (with a reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time) that we come to the realities we know only after they have been articulated by language. This language itself operates on top of a prior practical grasp of the things of the world, the forms of life that underlie our talk. This means that before we come to develop theories about the world, we are already “at grips with a world of independent things.”45 Before I attempt a theoretical view of what a hammer is, it exists as an independent part of my world, assigned its place by what Taylor calls a “framework understanding,” which arises from a certain way of being in the world.46 This “framework understanding” is not itself a representation of our position in the world, but is the implicit understanding embedded in the background practices, from which our attempts at representation get their meaning. So it is not as if my linguistic practice decides what I am to make of the hammer. Rather the hammer’s significance is a kind of fact, even before I think about it. Taylor wants to oppose what he sees as relativistic tendencies in Rorty’s approach, that the world is put together through the associations and dissociations of language, without any acknowledgment of a pre-existing significant reality to which the language should correspond. In the end, reality gives the nod to particular vocabularies over others. “Some schemes can be ranked . . . because they permit us to grasp . . . features of reality, including causal features, which we recognise as being independent of us. This is the nub of what I want to call realism. It involves ranking (some) schemes, and ranking them in terms of their ability to cope with, allow us to know, describe, come to understand reality.”47 Taylor further insists that the Copernican position is privileged, because it “is part of a scheme which allows us to describe reality better.” He holds that it is only after we have made the right moves, and introduced the right concepts, that we “get a handle” on the way things work in our universe. An Aristotelian astronomy that

28

Chapter 1

includes the sun and Mars in the same category, is going to be “incapable of dealing” with important matters about the workings of our galaxy.48 The terms in which Taylor puts his case seem unfortunate. He wants to describe features of reality that are simply independent of us, and which therefore transcend interests or activities of ours. Some of the words he uses, like “know,” “describe,” or “understand,” accurately articulate such a project. Yet alongside these expressions he uses others that emphasize that a Newtonian vocabulary enables us to “cope” or “deal” with the world better than does an Aristotelian vocabulary. This plays into Rorty’s hands, in that such statements lend themselves to a straightforward pragmatist interpretation that sees our epistemological moves as part of our coping with the things of the world. Newtonian concepts are described as closer to reality than Aristotelian concepts only because if we rely on the latter, we find ourselves incapable of “dealing” with the universe. Rorty sees no point in going beyond such an understanding and is pressed even to see what someone could be referring to, who wants to promote a realism beyond pragmatism. He can make no sense of a criterion of “more adequate representation,” which privileges certain vocabularies for reasons that have nothing to do with pragmatic effectiveness. We should settle for the point that the vocabularies of Newton and others work better than their rivals, and resist the temptation to add that they do this “because they represent reality more adequately.”49 In relation to Taylor’s claim that the Copernican system better describes astronomical realities, he says that “[w]e cannot make any sense of the claim that ‘the solar system stayed there, waiting for Kepler.’”50 Rorty elaborates on this reply to Taylor in a way that perhaps brings us to the heart of the dispute. He says that there should be no more talk of “inorganic objects hoping desperately that somebody will finally find language in which to pick them out, wistfully waiting for somebody to locate the joints that divide them from their neighbours.”51 As noted earlier, Rorty here identifies what it is that enables something to function as an object of “correspondence.” The object itself must have something like a hope or preference, a kind of original commitment to one vocabulary rather than another. If, along with the planets, I were to discover the beginnings of a vocabulary in the heavens, where planets were describing themselves in some way, such a vocabulary would present a fundamental challenge to my own descriptions. The situation would be not unlike the one that arises in human affairs, where a particular group sets out to have its own description of itself accepted, and pushes such a description against the one that society at large tries to impose, claiming that the group is not really recognized or even noticed, until the description is accepted. While a society is not forced to accept the vocabulary that such a group proposes, it nonetheless experiences it as posing a challenge to which it is required to respond.

The Attack on Realism

29

In articulating this position, Rorty assumes or affirms various twentieth century philosophical results concerning the part played by our languages in allowing the things of the world to appear as meaningful objects. Vocabularies open up or close off possibilities of understanding through the connections they affirm or exclude. An Aristotelian vocabulary groups the sun and moon with the rest of the sky’s wanderers, and distinguishes all of these from the earth. By contrast, for a language that speaks of “planets” in the modern sense, the earth belongs among the planets, and all of these are distinguished from the sun and moon. Robert Brandom says that “identical with” is always short for “identical with in the following respect” and the respect is contributed by the vocabulary that is brought to bear, so that things themselves do not make decisions about their identity, as if they stated what they are to be seen “as,” and what company they are to keep.52 With his reductio argument about inorganic objects that want to be understood in a certain way, Rorty suggests that if an entity is to challenge the point that connections arise only in light of a vocabulary of ours, it needs to display ends and interests of its own. The planets have to show that they somehow want to take up a family relation to the earth, rather than to the stars. The discussion manifests vividly what is needed if an entity is to be something in such a way that a correspondence notion of truth can apply. It is not enough that it just include materials, even materials that are structured in a certain way. Structure might go back simply to the use of a vocabulary with its rules of association and dissociation. If we are to get beyond this, we need something like a hope or an aspiration that we can locate out in the world. DEBATES WITH JOHN SEARLE Like the early Heidegger, Rorty picks up the common twentieth-century emphasis on the connection between the world we encounter and the primitive human activity that opens up this world in a particular direction. Rorty believes that once the implications of this relation are taken into account, the difference between pragmatic questions and theoretical questions starts to disappear, at least at the philosophical level. At other levels, we can, of course, still imagine discussions that are properly theoretical. But these belong within a larger framework whose original description is pragmatic. For example, our everyday behavior and discourse open up mountains as mountains; we then start to talk about what has been opened up, and our discourse grows into the theoretical science of geology. But when we ask about the original status of the objects of the science, the answer must take account of the practical interests that first allowed them to appear.

30

Chapter 1

Mountains loom large in the philosophical discussion of such matters. John Searle argues for his own particular form of realism against Rorty by appealing to the reality of mountains, insisting that Mount Everest, and many of its features “would have remained totally unaffected if no one had ever represented them in any fashion.”53 To this, Rorty replies: “What people like Kuhn, Derrida, and I believe is that it is pointless to ask whether there really are mountains or whether it is merely convenient for us to talk about mountains.”54 Thomas Nagel regards this reply as offering a reductio ad absurdum of Rorty’s position, and quotes the sentence with an assurance he is “not making this up,” as if Rorty were denying the existence of the Rockies, or the Cascades.55 Yet Rorty could maintain that mountains offer in fact a strong example of his basic point. He does not want to disagree with any of the usual statements we make about mountains, including the everyday reply to a question as to whether there are mountains on the western side of the United States. The point is rather that there is a background of human practices and articulations that is presupposed if we are to recognize mountains as mountains at all, and if reality imposes causal effects on us here, it does not impose descriptions of them in the same way. Alan Malachowski presents a defence of Rorty’s position against Searle, trying to show that if a mass of materials is to count as being a “mountain,” we need to take potential observers into account, who group the materials into an intelligible object. He imagines a cosmic collision that destroys all of earth’s resources except the lump of material that humans currently call “Mount Everest” so that what was once the highest mountain on earth is reduced to a small blip on the electron microscopes of distant alien observers, who are the only intelligent life-forms left in the universe. Malachowski asks if the materials in question would still count as Mount Everest, and even if they would be described as “a lump of rock.” While he agrees that Searle might try to answer both of these questions in the affirmative, he claims that “our imaginative grip on just what would have been sitting there in its ‘representation-free state’ is stretched to breaking point,” implying that the concept of a mountain starts to dissolve if it is cut off from the background identification practices that are normally assumed.56 Identification of something as a mountain proceeds from a vocabulary that embodies a set of interests and practices (e.g., a practice of mountain-climbing). As Rorty might say, the mountain itself does not insist on a particular description of itself, in that it does not name or conceptualize itself. Our activities of naming or conceptualizing do not access something that already has a view on itself, as if there is already in existence an implicit word that captures the thing to which they should correspond. The particles that make up a mountain do not have an interest in being considered together under a single description, giving a nod to one account rather than another.

The Attack on Realism

31

Rorty sees this as an argument against natural kinds, the view that the world itself divides itself up in a particular way, so that some of our descriptions count as fundamentally corresponding, while others do not. “[N]ature has no preferred way of being represented.”57 There is no reason to think that some of the joints of the things we know belong to the world itself, and are fundamentally independent of activities of ours. He makes this point against scientifically minded cosmologists who might think that while the larger objects of the world are formed into unified objects by human conceptual activity, the elementary particles of the universe are simply there, and constitute the original natural building blocks from which the rest is built up. Rorty insists that elementary particles “are not the very joints at which things as they are in themselves divide.”58 More generally, “[n]o sense can be made . . . of the claim that some . . . descriptions pick out ‘natural kinds’—that they cut nature at the joints.”59 This articulates the now-familiar condition that must be met if we are to see something beyond us as exercising epistemological authority over us, that it needs somehow to confront us with a preference of its own. This is required if the divisions of the world are to show themselves as the joints of the world itself, and not just as the divisions that appear in light of human conceptual interests. The same goes for attempts to distinguish properties of the world that are seen as belonging to the world itself, from properties that it acquires only through a relation to human observers and their languages. Here Rorty argues against Searle’s distinction between features of the world that are “intrinsic” and those that are “observer relative.”60 Searle proposes physical concepts like “mass,” “molecule,” and “gravitational attraction” as examples of features that fall into the first class. He compares them with observer-relative features, such as the referent of “nice day for a picnic,” which picks out features whose constitution depends on their relation to language-users. In this way, Searle claims that certain properties are philosophically privileged, and that some of our language use can claim to correspond to the way things actually are. By contrast, Rorty argues that both expressions are dependent on the interests of those who are using the expressions, so that even Searle’s “intrinsic” features depend on a context of significance that goes back to the human world. He encourages us to give up the quest for a viewpoint on things that is free of background interests. Rather he tries to show that whatever properties we consider, there are always human background interests at work that uphold their significance. “A pragmatist must also insist . . . that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it.”61 This does not of course mean that Rorty wants to say that the “intrinsic” features of things are really “observer relative” in Searle’s sense. This would be to fall into an alternative metaphysics. The hope is rather that we will undergo a kind of

32

Chapter 1

conversion, and lose interest in the question so that its hold over us is broken. The distinction between “intrinsic” and “observer relative” features is fine as a pragmatic distinction made within a wider context of human interests, but it does not offer anything that is philosophically significant. DEBATES WITH HILARY PUTNAM Some of Rorty’s critics, who share his dislike of metaphysics, want nonetheless to safeguard basic realist intuitions, and therefore refuse to follow Rorty into his particular version of pragmatism. Hilary Putnam holds a position of this sort. On the one side, he agrees that the things of the world are accessible to us only inasmuch as they appear within one of our descriptions. We look at the world from within the perspective of a language, and have no independent check of how it really is, away from our language, so that we cannot view our language “from sideways on,” as if we could compare language and world.62 But Putnam is concerned by familiar relativistic implications of Rorty’s views, the possible consequence that language and thought never get outside themselves, bringing the danger that the truth of statements is reduced to a successful application of current norms of enquiry, and therefore degraded to mere consensus. He thinks that our relation to the world is more robust than this, and wants to allow for an acknowledgement that we manage (perhaps gradually) to access a world outside ourselves, insisting that our awareness of this possibility makes a difference to us. Putnam is particularly concerned to safeguard the intuition that science gradually uncovers the way the world is. He agrees that there is no single privileged description of the entities of the world, and concurs with Rorty that our descriptions go back to ways of talking into which we enter for pragmatic purposes. He also agrees that there is no need for recourse to a metaphysical isomorphism here, some sort of fact in the world that has the same logical form as our sentences, as if we appeal to “a kind of ghostly double of the grammarian’s sentence.”63 But Putnam still wants to say (over Rorty’s objections) that there is a way in which the things of the world “make” sentences true, so that the truth of a sentence depends on the state of the world in a stronger sense than Rorty wants to allow.64 In Representation and Reality, Putnam focuses on the example of an erroneous identification of a particular metal as gold. He imagines a former age that did not distinguish real gold from a similar alloy that showed most of the same properties as gold. For all that, the alloy had a different atomic structure. People later came to an improved knowledge of chemistry and realized that they had thrown two different things together. If reality were taken simply as a correlate of linguistic structures, it might seem as if both a new concept and a new corresponding reality emerge at this point. A concept that included

The Attack on Realism

33

both gold and the alloy has given way to a new concept that distinguishes gold from the alloy, and therefore enables gold to appear as gold for the first time. Because he is disturbed by the seemingly idealistic consequences of this possibility, Putnam argues that the earlier age could have been referring to the same thing in fact as the later age, when it spoke of “gold,” even if the exact reference only became clear later. Even if it was confusing gold with something else, this does not mean that it was not referring to “gold.” This is confirmed by the fact that had the earlier speakers known of the atomic evidence available to the later age, they would have agreed that they were really referring to the same thing the later age knew as “gold.” So in spite of confusing gold with the alloy, they could have been referring to gold. Those who identified the molecular structure of gold by distinguishing it from the alloy for the first time did not therefore bring a new object of reference into existence. Rather, new discoveries specified more closely the thing that was always being referred to. This approach allows Putnam to develop the notion of reality as a limit to which science approximates to a greater or lesser degree. He can therefore support a type of realism that falls short of defending a full-scale metaphysics that sees objects as simply existing in a certain way, establishing an original standard to which our talk should correspond. There is a significant reply on Rorty’s behalf from Paul D. Forster, who shows that Putnam’s argument looks less convincing if we change the examples that are in play. Putnam’s example refers to the area of science, where there is overall agreement on how to proceed and an acceptance of what counts as confirmation of a position. Because of this, it is easy to conclude that earlier ages were really seeking the kind of thing that underlies the present consensus, and that they were really on the trail of gold as we understand it, even though they had not properly isolated the phenomenon they were seeking. Putnam’s position allows for a distinction between “truth” and mere “justification,” in that the earlier researches might have fulfilled the best criteria available at the time, but might still have been in error. If the examples are changed—Forster takes as an example the rules of chess—the matter is no longer obvious. If an earlier age plays a primitive version of the game of chess, one that does not include the “castling” rule, and then alters its understanding of the game so as to introduce castling, this may well be accepted as an improvement to the game. It would be odd, however, if we went on to claim that such a move had finally uncovered the “real” game of chess, and that the previous rules and practices of the game covered only an approximation of the real game. To see earlier talk of “gold” as an imperfect attempt to get hold of what everyone now understands by the term, can seem similarly odd.65 Forster’s example is intended to break down the notion of a final goal of enquiry, something that is definitively “there,” which we can approach progressively. The example leads us rather toward a description where we

34

Chapter 1

progress historically through a series of changes, and the later changes are seen as improvements over what went before (in Rorty’s circular sense of “improvement,” where those who play later versions of the game do not want to go back to earlier versions). The “game” metaphor is often used to bring out the point that the worlds we inhabit are internally related to contingent linguistic practices, and cannot therefore be regarded as having any privileged status. While games are meaningful activities that absorb the attention and energy of whole communities, they do not allow justification from outside themselves, as if a particular form of a game better measures up to an external criterion than do other forms, and therefore gets something right. The “game” metaphor is particularly effective in breaking the hold of other metaphors that have us in their grip, showing us that we are not in fact subject to representational necessities in the way that we had thought. There are several discussions where Rorty uses the notion of a game for this purpose, seeing for example the observations that belong to a scientific test as similar to moves in a game. With his customary flair for the extreme, he suggests that we regard the process by which a litmus test discredits an experiment as not too different from moves in a Mayan ball game, in which one of the teams automatically loses and is executed if the moon is eclipsed during play.66 This might not be the most helpful example for showing the contingency of rules, given the difficulty of imagining how exactly the Mayan ball game would be experienced by its participants. But the basic point seems clear: that a theoretical enquiry relies in the first place on a set of social practices that are held together by the common goals of a society, so that there is no firm boundary between theoretical activities and practical ones. As already mentioned, Rorty agrees with Robert Brandom here on the place of “the social” in constituting our talk and its corresponding world, so that any authority that seems to bear in on us from outside is brought back to ourselves and our practices. We can view all of our activities in this way, including religious practices and the practices of theoretical science. In discussing the work of Jeffrey Stout, Rorty sums up Brandom’s position as the claim that all authority goes back to social norms. “Sacred books and the results of scientific experiments, both derive their revocable authority from social agreement, just as our legislators derive their revocable authority from the electorate.”67 In contrast to Putnam, who believes that concepts of gold gradually uncover something that is originally present as a kind of ideal limit, suggesting a criterion imposed by reality itself, Rorty insists that a process of identification goes back to rules of human practice. For example, we make a sort of decision that molecular structure will be decisive for determining the identity of a mineral. While everyone in fact accepts this as a criterion of identity in mineral matters, its status as a criterion depends on an underlying agreement

The Attack on Realism

35

in human practices. We have other ways of talking, for example, “functional” ways, which assume a different notion of identity, and do not look to molecular structure, but rather to the “outputs” which a thing can deliver after various inputs, to determine its identity. What counts as a “coffee-machine” is not determined by identity of structure. The “game” metaphor therefore forces us back to the common agreement that sits under the practice. Rorty sees the scientific offence of believing something without adequate evidence not so much as a failure to correspond adequately to some external object, as an infringement of the rules of the scientific game. We have gone against the contract implicit in the playing of the game, being guilty of “the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules.”68 It may seem that this goes too far, and that the litmus test and the Mayan game do not share any significant similarities, given that we seem to have no choice in the case of the litmus test, whereas we always have a choice regarding the significance of moves in a game. Whether we like it or not, the litmus produces a certain color when brought in contact with a certain level of acidity, whereas the connection of the moon with the failure of one of the teams seems simply arbitrary. Rorty would reply that he is not disputing the causal action of the acid on the litmus, but rather the fact that this somehow determines the way we must describe it. We take the color of the litmus as a sign that the liquid has a certain structure, and live in a world where the structure defines the identity of the liquid as an acid. If we defined the acid in a functional way as “one of the things that turns things red,” we would have a different set of identities and objects. Rorty insists that nothing ever forces us to attach a particular description to a specific object or happening in the world except our own linguistic commitments. There is no natural correspondence to which the world directs us. Rorty puts it bluntly in reference to the work of Donald Davidson: “Correspondence can tie any word to any sort of thing.”69 In the examples of the litmus test and the Mayan game, people have adopted ways of talking in light of which certain facts appear, and the facts can then settle questions that arise from within the way of talking. The familiar conclusion follows that it makes no sense to say that nature can be “corresponded to better or worse, save in the simple sense that we can have more or fewer true beliefs,”70 which is in the end to say that more or fewer of our beliefs are functional and fruitful. FURTHER CONTROVERSIES Rorty thinks that attempts to invoke an ideal limit as a way of handling the notion of “reality” smuggle the eye of God into philosophical discourse. The

36

Chapter 1

point can be seen in Putnam’s discussion of “rationality,” which is regarded in much the same way as “gold,” as an ideal limit that our practices approach. There is “a true conception of rationality,” which we approach more or less closely as our methods develop historically, and which is in principle open to our uncovering it as it is. Putnam does not want to say that we have actually finally uncovered such a notion of reason, or that it is easy to come to such a thing. But the concept functions as a “Grenzbegriff, a limit-concept of the ideal truth.”71 We should therefore try to get beyond descriptions that see our intellectual history simply as a series of changes where a particular epoch looks back on its predecessors and judges them according to its own standards. For Putnam the historical journey is rather to be seen as a progressive uncovering of something that was implicitly present at an earlier stage, functioning as a secret motivation within the historical progress, until it came to the point where what it had been seeking was uncovered. Our historical efforts were always directed toward a stable ultimate goal, and sometimes made progress toward uncovering it. Rorty holds that a kind of jump takes place within an argument of this sort. For most of the discussion, the historical progress is described as something that appears within successive historical vantage points, each with its criteria of judgment, as well as its peculiar view on its predecessors. But the thought of an ultimate goal, even of one that functions as a Grenzbegriff, suddenly introduces a viewpoint that is of an entirely different sort from anything that can appear within a historical process like this. In fact, it lies beyond anything accessible to a finite point of view. As Rorty puts it, in appealing to a limit concept, we give up anticipating what future ages might think of us, and suddenly ask what God would think of us, looking down at us with an absolute standard in view, and able to see whether we are starting to get it right or not. “[W]hat is such a posit supposed to do, except to say that from God’s point of view the human race is heading in the right direction?”72 Putnam does not of course describe the position as referring to the eye of God, but rather to a historical ideal, holding that we have to invoke the possibility of “epistemically ideal conditions,” if we are to make sense of truth.73 Rorty sees any talk of an “ideal limit” as invoking a final authority, one that reassures us that our best projections get beyond the status of mere projections of ours. In anticipating a definitive and final point of view that judges all the others, we are making surreptitious use of a theological concept. Rorty makes similar points in discussion with Jürgen Habermas, who also appeals to an ideal state of affairs to ground a more robust notion of truth than Rorty wants to allow. Habermas is struck (as is Rorty) by the way that the notion of truth seems to go beyond that of mere justification in terms of the best procedures available at a particular time, to something like a claim to “unconditional validity.” Yet neither Habermas nor Rorty thinks that this

The Attack on Realism

37

can be grounded in a metaphysical correspondence to reality. They agree that the old understanding of truth as correspondence needs to be translated into correspondence with a human community and its procedures of justification, so that it focuses on the question of whether a statement can win acceptance from an actual human community. In Rorty’s view, Habermas translates the unconditional element in truth into an affirmation that what is put forward as “true” implicitly affirms that it could be justified to “all audiences, actual and possible.”74 But this appeal to all “possible” audiences shows in fact that the claim reaches beyond our present situation with its anticipation of how the argument would play for existing audiences, to a sense of justification that gets beyond history altogether. Rorty thinks that such an appeal is not only overblown but also unnecessary. A proper pragmatist understanding can dispense altogether with the notion of “unconditional validity” which Habermas is trying to maintain. Rorty thinks that it is enough to settle for being able to justify ourselves to the audience we consider relevant and simply to move on. We gain nothing by trying to include consideration of challenges that may be as yet unimaginable. To claim any more than a pragmatic minimum seems to be making an unjustified empirical prediction about an infinite number of future possible cases, as if we were in a position to estimate how an argument stood to eternity. In his mature writings, Rorty is sensitive to the nuances of “truth” (more than some commentators realize), and does not want to revise the meaning the word has acquired in everyday discourse, including the meaning that a claim to truth somehow goes beyond mere justification by our best current procedures. But he thinks that our everyday intuitions about the concept can be safeguarded by a cautionary view that focuses on the possibility that better evidence or better hypotheses might in the future overturn our best current convictions. The everyday distinction between truth and justification serves to remind us of this. We should resolutely refuse any hint of something that stands over against us, and in principle threatens our best insights and procedures, to which we are obliged to correspond, though we will never definitively attain it. Rather, we should maintain a low-level awareness of fallibility, and not decide too quickly that we have got something right. As Rorty says, “to speak of truth as being unconditional is just one more way of expressing our sense of contrite fallibility.”75 Rorty has a similar exchange with Robert Brandom, a philosopher whom he much admires, and whose positions he normally regards as friendly to the kind of pragmatism he himself favors. In an article that appears in the collection Rorty and His Critics, Brandom rehearses Rorty’s arguments against the myth of the given. He sees the separation of the realm of the justificatory from that of the causal as reflecting the familiar point that things take on significance only in light of practices of ours. If an entity in the world challenges us

38

Chapter 1

to correspond to it in some way, it is always because our communal practices have given it a role where it can make such a challenge. As Brandom says, “only in the context of a set of social practices . . . can anything have authority, induce responsibility, or in general have a normative significance for us.”76 Justifications always go back to something of ours, practices that connect particular claims or beliefs with others. The only sort of “action” mere things can perform is causal and not justificatory, imposing causal effects but not descriptions or obligations. The causal effects might include beliefs, but they do not justify the beliefs they cause (we do not establish the validity of a claim by a causal statement such as “I can’t stop myself thinking it”). Rorty draws the conclusion that before there were humans not only were there no truths and no truth claims (because there was no one to make them), but there were also no facts. Brandom is unhappy with this last point and thinks that something has gone wrong with the argument if it leads to such a conclusion. Surely, the facts of a past situation were already there and were in a position to make some of our later statements true, even before we or our statements existed? This holds even if we accept that we only ever know the entities of the world “under a description,” as Rorty and Brandom agree. In his reply, Rorty insists that any notion of facts that exist before there are humans and languages, in such a way that they make later statements true or false, is at odds with the belief that things are only ever known under a description. He resorts to his common tactic against the spell imposed by scientific practice, namely an appeal to the rules of a game. The rules and conventions of baseball require that a regulation baseball be covered in horsehide. Does this mean that the facts of baseball were somehow there in the fabric of the universe, long before the game of baseball was thought of or played? In a certain sense, if we want, we can answer this question in the affirmative, in that the materials were implicitly present, and were always liable to be picked out by a later community of speakers as having been already there. It could then be meaningfully affirmed that the game was somehow originally present as a possibility. But this is not to say that the possibility “does” anything, or “demands” recognition, in the sense of making a sentence true. It is not as if a possible game of baseball clamors for our attention and asks that we describe it in a certain way. Rorty views Brandom’s attempt to see the facts of the world as “making” later statements true, as an attempt to give this sort of role to an abstract possibility. The need to isolate a fact that makes sentences true suggests that reality has joints, “which are Nature’s Own,” and which obtain independently of the human interests that lead to the formation of vocabularies, and which then make demands on vocabularies.77 Rorty distinguishes between relations of “representation,” which make the familiar claim that beliefs articulate “nonbeliefs,” that is, parts of the universe as it originally is, and mere relations of “aboutness,” which claim simply

The Attack on Realism

39

that someone is talking about this or that, without implying anything further. Riemann’s discourse takes up a relation of “aboutness” to Riemannian space, Meinong’s discourse to round squares, and Shakespeare’s discourse to the character Hamlet. If we conceive these relations as relations of representation, then all sorts of problems arise about the status of the objects described. If on the other hand they are seen as relations of “aboutness,” there is no reason to ask anything more of the objects they describe than that the objects play a part in our discourse, “directing attention to the beliefs that are relevant to the justification of other beliefs.”78 AN ALTERNATIVE METAPHYSICS? Rorty has the problem that arguments against those who want to defend an attenuated realism seem to imply an alternative theoretical account of how it all works, so that Rorty has fallen into metaphysics in spite of himself. Critics sometimes accuse him of continuing the metaphysical project, and not simply walking away from it as he claims. Putnam concedes that part of Rorty’s critique of the history of philosophy—the part that concludes that because metaphysics has failed so many times in the past, it is unlikely it will succeed in the future—can be pressed without itself incurring any entanglement in metaphysics. But Putnam also believes that Rorty’s attack relies on positive philosophical results that assume an alternative metaphysical view, and affirm substantive metaphysical positions. The attack looks to “results concerning, for example, the possibility of representation—which have recently been attained in philosophy of language and mind (although his rhetoric officially disavows the possibility of such philosophical ‘results’).”79 One could add the broadly Kantian thesis that there are no uninterpreted data to the list, a point that is crystallized in the image of William James that Rorty often repeats that “the trace of the human serpent is over all.”80 As noted above, others ask whether Rorty assumes some sort of linguistic idealism, the view that in some sense, things do not really exist until there are languages to describe them. On the one side, Rorty can reply that he has every right to use commonly accepted philosophical arguments in order to show that particular philosophical roads lead to a dead-end, and are not worth taking. These arguments would have the limited goal of defeating traditional metaphysical views. Many of Rorty’s arguments are aimed at breaking the sense of necessity that often accompanies metaphysical argument, showing that we do not have to think in the way that metaphysicians claim we do. We have already remarked on the rhetorical advantage of the critic here, who simply needs raise the possibility of an alternative position in order to show the insufficiencies of metaphysical views. But can Rorty really get away with his overall disclaimer of positive

40

Chapter 1

philosophical positions so that he can credibly claim to avoid subscribing to any metaphysical theses at all? One historical possibility that Rorty can invoke is Pyrrhonian scepticism, where equal arguments are brought for and against a position, not with a view to the eventual victory of one side over the other, but rather to a loss of interest in the question under discussion. In the end, the disputants give up, perhaps because they believe there is no progress to be made, and simply walk away.81 Rorty’s own account sometimes suggests this kind of approach. To break the hold of the metaphysical picture, he uses straightforward philosophical arguments aimed at showing that it cannot properly establish itself, and lacks the necessity it claims, or that it is entangled in difficulties that it cannot settle. In this he tries to help readers to break imaginatively from the pictures that hold them captive, encouraging them to try out alternatives, and by this very fact to realize that there are alternatives, and that the original sense of necessity was an illusion. To come through this is perhaps already to adopt the loose experimental attitude of pragmatism that he ultimately recommends, where we regard our styles of thinking as attempts to cope with the world in new and interesting ways. We are led to a point where we see the significance of things as coming back simply to the practices of a community, and we make a kind of decision for the sort of life that sustains such a view. As Caputo says, we find that we have quit metaphysics in the way some people quit smoking.82 NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 160–75, 163. 2. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 3. Ibid., 5–6. 4. Thomas Aquinas, Truth, vol. 1 of 3, trans. Robert W. Mulligan (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952), 11. 5. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6. 6. John McCumber claims that even for Frege, it was just a pragmatic decision to define truth in this way. “Reconnecting Rorty: The Situation of Discourse in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,” Diacritics 20 (1990): 2–19, 4. 7. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 8. Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202–27, 223. 9. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 10. “The spectatorial account of knowledge took for granted that there was a way things are—that they had properties that might or might not match the various predicates we humans used to formulate assertions about them. That metaphysical

The Attack on Realism

41

view and theism were made for one another, because it was assumed that anybody who could see the whole of things—could see how everything relates to everything else—would never be misled into using non-referring predicates, and thus could not mistake appearance for reality. Reality could thus be defined as the object of perfect knowledge—to be real, so to speak, was to be in God’s visual field.” Jason Springs, ed., Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 2 (June 2010): 413–48, 421. 11. Richard Rorty, “Charles Taylor on Truth,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84–97, 85. The reference to Taylor is to Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 257–75, 258. 12. Robert Spaemann, “Rationality and Faith in God,” Communio 32 (Winter 2005): 618–36, 632. 13. Josef Pieper, “Wahrheit der Dinge—ein verschollener Begriff,” in Werke in acht Bänden, ed. Berthold Wald, Bd 8.1 Miszellen, Register und Gesamtbibliographie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2005), 381–95, 382 (my translation). 14. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 201, fn. 344. 15. Aquinas, Truth, vol. 1, 11. 16. Ibid., 58. 17. Richard Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” in Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 191–210, 191–92. 18. Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” 193. 19. Ibid., 194. 20. Ibid. 21. Richard Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 290– 306, 301. 22. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 291. 23. Warren G. Frisina, “Minds, Bodies, Experience, Nature: Is Panpsychism Really Dead?” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 163–86, 171. 24. Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xvi–xxxii, xxiv. Cf. “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 105–19, 113: “On the antiempiricist view . . . there is no difference between the thermostat, the dog, and the pre-linguistic infant except the differing degrees of complexity of their reactions to environmental stimuli.” 25. Warren G. Frisina, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Towards a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 159. 26. Tom Sorrell, “The World from Its Own Point of View,” in Reading Rorty, ed. Alan Malachowski (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 11–25, 12.

42

Chapter 1

27. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6. 28. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 229. Quoted in Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” 205. 29. McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 109–23, 110. 30. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 164. 31. Ibid., 165. 32. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth,” in Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 126–50, 149. 33. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 2nd printing with corrections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 299. 34. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 375–76. 35. Ibid., 157. 36. Ibid., 375. 37. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 168–69. 38. Ibid., 164. 39. McDowell, “Towards Rehabilitating Objectivity,” 109–23, 113. 40. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 157. 41. Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–17, 5. 42. Richard Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Enquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19–42, 19. 43. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 302. 44. A discussion that reportedly took place between Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and A. J. Ayer, about a proposition put forward by Ayer that “there was a sun before men existed” expresses this point of view nicely. Georges Bataille, “Un-knowing and Its Consequences,” October 36 (1986): 80–85, 80. Cited by Nick Trakakis, The End of Philosophy of Religion (New York: Continuum, 2008), 31. Ayer sees no reason to doubt the proposition. The others think the matter more complicated. 45. Rorty, “Charles Taylor on Truth,” 86. The reference to Taylor is to Charles Taylor, “Rorty in the Epistemological Tradition,” in Reading Rorty, 270. 46. By contrast, Rorty denies that our dealings with the world comprise a framework “that makes picturing possible.” He does not regard the human practical relation to the world as any more primordial than any other. “Charles Taylor on Truth,” 95–96. 47. Charles Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” in Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism, ed. James Tully (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 213–57, 220. 48. Taylor, “Reply and Re-articulation,” 220. 49. Rorty, “Charles Taylor On Truth,” 86. 50. Ibid., 89. The italicized phrases are quoted from Taylor. 51. Rorty, “Charles Taylor on Truth,” 91. 52. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and God,” 3–26, 15.

The Attack on Realism

43

53. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995), 153. See Alan Malachowski, Richard Rorty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 155. Malachowski misstates the title of this work as The Social Construction of Reality. 54. Richard Rorty, “John Searle on Realism and Relativism,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 63–83, 72. 55. Malachowski, Richard Rorty, 153. See Thomas Nagel, The Last Word (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29. 56. See Malachowski, Richard Rorty, 156. 57. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 300. 58. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 3–21, 10. 59. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” xxvi. 60. John Searle, Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 211. Cited by Rorty, “John Searle on Realism and Relativism,” 73. 61. Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–6, 4. 62. “I agree with Rorty that we have no access to ‘unconceptualized reality’.” Hilary Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” in Richard Rorty, Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought, vol. I, ed. Alan Malachowski (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 217–32, 219. 63. The remark is from R. G. Collingwood. Cf. Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” 222. 64. Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” 223. 65. Paul D. Forster, “What Is at Stake between Putnam and Rorty?” in Richard Rorty, Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought, vol. I, ed. Alan Malachowski (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 233–50, 238. 66. Richard Rorty, “Texts and Lumps,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 78–92, 80. 67. Rorty, “Pragmatism and Democracy,” 419. 68. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 6. 69. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 300. 70. Ibid. 71. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 216. Cf. Forster, “What Is at Stake between Putnam and Rorty?” 238. 72. Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–34, 27. 73. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, 55. 74. Richard Rorty, “Response to Jürgen Habermas,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 56–64, 56. 75. Rorty, “Response to Jürgen Habermas,” 57.

44

Chapter 1

76. Robert B. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 156–82, 161. 77. Richard Rorty, “Response to Brandom,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 183–90, 185. 78. Richard Rorty, “Inquiry as Recontextualization: An Anti-dualist Account of Interpretation,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–110, 97. 79. Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” 218. 80. For example, Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” 3–20, 15. 81. Cf. David R. Hiley, “Edification and the End of Philosophy,” in David Hiley, Philosophy In Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme, ed. David Hiley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 143–73. 82. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, 88.

Chapter 2

The Attack on Aristotelianism

ARISTOTELIAN METAPHYSICS Rorty is fond of saying that reality has no joints of its own, and that it acquires joints only when viewed in light of a particular descriptive language. His usual name for the opposite philosophical approach is “Platonism”—belief in the set of distinctions that constitute the traditional metaphysical order— called by Dewey “a brood and nest of dualisms.”1 These distinctions constitute the assumed background to the Platonic problem of finding out how reality really is, as opposed to how it appears to us. Plato himself expresses a belief in “joints” when he describes philosophical discourse as having the aim of “dividing things again by classes, where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of a bad carver.”2 Aristotle is the ancient author who best works out the detail of such a view. His teleological understanding, which holds that the very existence of an animal is an aspiration toward specific achievements, implies that the parts of animals are “joints” put in place by nature, and that our languages have the task, as Plato says, of articulating them as they are. In Aristotelian understanding, a grazing animal is enlivened by an aspiration toward a particular sort of life, and its very existence is necessarily connected to the aspiration toward this life. The joints of its legs are to be understood in relation to the life-goals, in that they enable the animal to move around and feed, and therefore to realize the sort of life that is its deepest identity. One could think of an animal confronting a Cartesian researcher who is determined to restrict its reality to the way it is articulated through a mechanistic vocabulary. An Aristotelian would ask, does not the animal, in such a case, issue a kind of appeal so that even the researcher can suddenly feel that the mechanistic vocabulary is being challenged, and the animal is insisting 45

46

Chapter 2

that its reality is not exhausted by the way it appears within the Cartesian vocabulary? R. L. Stevenson toys with the thought that his donkey Modestine, who carries his sleeping-sack, can be considered “an appurtenance of my mattress, or self-acting bedstead of four castors.”3 But Stevenson is joking, and knows that his donkey has a reality that goes beyond her functional place in a scheme projected by himself. In fact, so strong is her implicit view on things (including a view about Stevenson), that she not only makes it impossible for him to realize his description of her as an appurtenance, but it is almost as if she objects to being regarded in this way. Stevenson seems called to take account of her not just as a set of materials that make up an object that appears in his view, but also as something that has a view of its own, a kind of insistence on how she should be called. In this, the observer’s eye meets something that is already articulated for itself, which raises objections if it is considered simply as a set of materials to be arranged in light of a viewpoint that is external to it. In her own way, the donkey is capable of insisting on this. She offers a view about what she is, issuing an appeal to the observer as to how she is to be described. This shows how Aristotelianism attempts to meet the condition for realism, that an entity is not just regarded as a set of materials, but that it also projects a primitive view about what these materials constitute. One of Aristotle’s main insights is to see that the very existence of the donkey goes back to this sort of fundamental aspiration, so that her very deepest reality comes down to a striving for a certain sort of life (a striving to “complete its form” as an Aristotelian would put it). To be a live donkey is to be identified with the active pursuit of certain ends. While Stevenson can impose further ends on the donkey, for example, that of carrying baggage through the Cévennes, he imposes these on top of a set of innate pursuits that operate at a more fundamental level, and constitute the first identity of the animal. In fact, Stevenson exploits these—the desire for food and drink, the need to escape the pain of the goad—in order to use Modestine for his own purposes. While Stevenson’s pursuits are imposed on the donkey from outside, the basic aspirations of the donkey itself are not imposed like this. In Aristotelian terms, they are not imposed on an already-existing identity, but rather establish the identity in the first place, so that if she departs from these, she ceases to exist at all. As Aristotle says, for living things, the act of living and striving is their very existing.4 So the fundamental identity of the animal is constituted by drives that underpin any further relations that might come on top of these. As Rorty expresses the Aristotelian view, the identity of the animal is to be the “embodiment of either a telos or a logos,” something with built-in purposes.5 This gives an original significance to the parts of the animal, in that they become the means by which it realizes what it is. Whatever else happens to the animal, as when the unfortunate Modestine becomes Stevenson’s pack-carrier, this comes on top of an original significance built

The Attack on Aristotelianism

47

into the animal itself, as a sort of accident that comes to a more fundamental essence. Rorty is, of course, aware of the fundamental divisions that Aristotle manages to put into play, and which for Aristotle are constitutive of reality itself. “A substance that exemplifies an Aristotelian natural kind divides into a central essence—one that provides a built-in purpose—and a set of peripheral accidents.”6 For Aristotle, all living things are busy with built-in purposes for as long as they exist, and their activity in realizing these purposes constitutes their original existence. Other properties or situations alight on this from outside. In an early article, which displays an excellent knowledge of Aristotle, Rorty rehearses some of the traditional discussions about this original identity of animals. His critique focuses on the status of matter in the Aristotelian perspective. He points out that for Aristotelianism, where reality always involves a kind of movement toward form, materials have an uncertain status. They can be regarded as real only in as much as they are taken up into an aspiration toward form, the transition described by Aristotle as movement from potency to actuality.7 While Aristotle sees an animal as making a kind of affirmation about its ultimate identity, this is not true of matter as such. The identity of matter is at best derivative, and comes from its association with form. Rorty sees this as a fundamental weakness in the Aristotelian view. If the reality of an animal consists in an activity of aspiration, the materials that are involved in the aspiration have no existence of their own. Their reality is defined by what they are aimed toward, so that when considered in themselves, they are reduced to an aspiration or movement toward an achievement that has not yet appeared “actually.” Rorty believes that this shows the fundamental implausibility of an overall Aristotelian ontology. Anything that belongs to the area of materials or potency, developmental stages of things, parts of things, and even heaps of things, are all regarded as merely “potential” so that they do not have full reality. Aristotelian knowledge is understood as knowledge of form, and the various stages of development of an animal have a reality only inasmuch as they are understood as stages toward the form of the whole. As Rorty points out, “this means that nine-tenths of the world is unknowable, including all the processes of coming-to-be of natural things.”8 He would agree that Aristotle means merely that they are unknowable in themselves. But his objection carries weight in a world that has greatly increased its knowledge of the underpinnings of the end-directed entities of the world, so that it sees them as elements in themselves, from which the rest of the world is simply built up, rather as artifacts are built up out of inert parts. Aristotle would avoid these difficulties if he simply granted reality to the material developmental stages, and admitted that what he calls a “potentiality” is also a “something-or-other” that happens to be able to serve as the material for a future development. But to admit this would start to collapse

48

Chapter 2

the strong qualitative distinctions needed to support the unified notion of “substance” as the identity of the thing. The adult donkey or giraffe would be reduced to a number of stages in a process of seamless historical development, something like Whitehead’s notion of an “enduring object.”9 And once the area of material “potential” is chopped up into quasi-entities like this, as Rorty says, “one would be well on the road to . . . a law-event framework of scientific explanation as opposed to a thing-nature framework.”10 The concept of species would start to look like an arbitrary privileging of a particular stage in a historical continuity, the very thing that Aristotle is trying to avoid. So as Rorty says, Aristotle “preferred to save the program by condemning nine-tenths of the world to the realm of the potential, the accidental, and the unintelligible.”11 Rorty goes on to observe that the Aristotelian system got away with this until the rise of the new science, when Descartes found the notion of potentiality more or less unintelligible.12 Rorty therefore suggests that if we go on using the notion of “potency,” it should be to refer simply to the possibility of an elemental matter that serves as material for further development, something that is a possibility for every existing entity. This excludes any implication of metaphysical depth from the notion, denying that there is anything that exists only in an attenuated metaphysical sense, as does Aristotelian matter. Rorty has little patience with the elevation of potentiality to a fundamental ontological category, as though some of the things in the world (parts, heaps, and developmental stages) somehow exist less than do full substances. Once Rorty’s adjustment is allowed, the distinctions that enabled Aristotle to see an animal as having its own center of significance, so that it projects an identity of its own on to the world, fall away. The Aristotelian view that natural kinds have “joints” of their own, which are part of an original privileged self-interpretation that could serve as a fundamental norm for knowledge, is no longer sustainable. “THINGS MADE” AND “THINGS FOUND” As we will see, the decisive point in this confrontation concerns the possibility envisaged by Aristotle that an animal in some way challenges my point of view. When a Cartesian researcher determinedly views an animal simply as a collection of material parts,13 everyone accepts that the animal can object to what the researcher proposes to do to it (e.g., vivisection). But the decisive question bears on something deeper: whether the animal can in some way challenge the vocabulary that the researcher is using. Does it in some way tell us that it simply is in a certain way, and that it should be described and named in a way that corresponds to how it actually is? Some things are obviously

The Attack on Aristotelianism

49

not like this, such as the artifacts that people construct and use in the everyday. It is up to us to determine what is a cup and what isn’t. Are the natural things of the world importantly different from this, so that they do indicate in some way the kind of vocabulary that should be used if we are to describe them accurately? Another of Rorty’s discussions of Aristotle begins here, with the question of whether there is a deep difference between what Rorty calls “things made” and “things found.” “Things found” are the purported original entities of the world, which Aristotle characterizes as “natural kinds.” They are given to us in a way that is more or less untouched by interests of ours, as having an original intelligibility of their own. They are therefore able to become objects of contemplative interest. Aristotelianism assumes a qualitative difference between these and what Rorty calls “things made.” These (e.g., bank accounts) are products of our practical activity, and come into existence as a further significance is imposed on the natural properties of the original constituents that make them up. A beast of burden does not as such belong among the original natural elements of the world, but comes into existence only as a further significance is imposed by an external interest, such as the interest of Stevenson in crossing the Cévennes. While a donkey is something “found,” a pack animal is something “made.” Rorty wants to get rid of this distinction, with its overtones of an original order that exists without reference to our needs and interests, and which is simply “there,” so that the first task of the human is to form an accurate idea of it. He sets out to show that in fact, our needs and interests play into all theoretical enquiries, for example, zoological enquiries into the nature of animals. Far from animals coming before us with a self-understanding that is normative for our knowledge, they first become knowable at all only through activities of ours, and in the light of languages that we have developed. Rorty’s view is worked out in a popular essay that appears in Philosophy and Social Hope. In opposition to the Aristotelian view, he argues that we can make no sense of the view that entities in the world press original descriptions on us. He makes the familiar point that something can only appear as an entity with meaningful contours from within our descriptions. In a manner reminiscent of Heidegger’s discussions in Being and Time, Rorty describes the activities by which we first open up the world in particular directions. Entities like giraffes appear as such within the activities of a language community, against a background of human interests, and we have to assume such a background if we are to apply the connections and disconnections required to pick out part of the world as a giraffe.14 For example, the animal appears as a meaningful object for a meat-eater with an interest in satisfying hunger. The interests of hunters, and their determination to realize them, cause them to distinguish “[t]he line between a giraffe and the surrounding air.”15 If we imagine human-like subjects that have different interests, they

50

Chapter 2

might develop a description of the world that is quite different. Rorty offers some suggestions: a language-using ant, an amoeba, a space-voyager who observes us from afar. The language-using ant lacks interests that lead it to distinguish the part of the visual field occupied by the giraffe from the part occupied by the surrounding air. The ant might have a language of a different sort and would talk about different objects. All this is meant to jog us toward the familiar pragmatist view, where we realize that the basic identifications that underlie even our most theoretical activities presuppose human interests to hold them together. We go nowhere if we try to go further than this, and think we can uncover the “reality” of a thing, which is supposed to hold us somehow in thrall, as if it had a pure significance of its own, imposing itself on us as an object of pure theory. Rather, we talk in different ways for different purposes, and the object appears differently, depending on our talk. Rorty takes this fundamentally Kantian position in a pragmatist direction. The fact that we separate out a piece of the world and call it a “giraffe” has no philosophical privilege over any of the other linguistic possibilities that confront us at every turn. As he says, “it is not clear that any of the millions of ways of describing the piece of space-time occupied by what we call a giraffe is any closer to the way things are in themselves than any of the others.”16 It is pointless to ask in Aristotelian fashion whether the giraffe is really “a collection of atoms,” or a substance composed of body and soul, or even “a collection of actual and possible sensations in human sense organs.” There is no general answer to such questions, because an abstract question, existing away from the interests that create particular contexts of use, has no clear sense. From within a context of enquiry, we can privilege some answers over others. But this privileging goes back to everyday pragmatic reasons and not to metaphysical ones. During surgery, it makes no sense to ask a surgeon who is about to remove a part that is diseased, whether a human being really has discrete “parts,” or is perhaps better described as a unified living whole. The context in which the surgeon operates, with its goals and typical practices, has already determined what counts as the best way of looking at things. Even if surgeons were moved to amend their anatomical language, thinking they should never “objectify” patients, everything would presumably just rearrange itself until it arrived at alternative expressions of the same distinctions as before, given that the interests and practices remain the same. The pragmatist argument dissolves the sharp distinction between descriptions of things that try to represent them as they are, and descriptions that show what we can do with them. This applies to the case of animals just as much as to cases of minerals. Rorty does not, of course, want to deny any of the familiar distinctions we make between different classes of objects. We can still draw an everyday contrast between things made by us and things that we discover already existing in the world. But this does not point to any large philosophical difference.

The Attack on Aristotelianism

51

“Things made” are things whose existence goes back to our own activity and intentions, like bank accounts. By contrast, there is a sense in which the existence of “things found” has nothing to do with us. Animals were in existence long before humans or human languages existed. Rorty can even agree that they would have existed if there had been no human languages, though this can, of course, be said only from within a human language. He allows that “if there had been no human beings there would still have been giraffes, whereas there would have been no bank accounts.”17 But these differences are not of a metaphysical order, as though giraffes prescribe to us the original way in which they are to be described, whereas bank accounts arise within our descriptions, being ultimately products of our activity. Both need to appear against a background of human interests if they are to appear as meaningful objects at all. The difference just goes back to the fact that some linguistic objects are seen as having existed before the vocabulary in which they are articulated, whereas others require the vocabulary, if they are to exist. This account of the difference assumes that at a deeper level, both objects appear within languages, and are understood against a background of human interests and practices. In an article sympathetic to Rorty, Nancy Frankenberry offers a useful summary of this argument, focusing again on an example of landscape. The world at all its levels appears within our descriptions, along with the lifeinterests that stand behind such descriptions. This means there is no privileged single way that the world originally is, to which our other descriptions could be referred. The reflection therefore leads us away from metaphysics, and toward pragmatism. What the phrase “natural object” designates is, in part, dependent on human beings and our practice. Even things regarded as “natural kinds,” such as “oceans” or “mountains,” lack any essence or intrinsic nature independent of various interests in dealing with them. The “nature” of wilderness, for example, can be identified and described differently by a geologist or a hiker. The former is interested in sedimentations in the soil, the latter in the soles’ journey. Both offer descriptions and neither describes a natural kind that is the Way It Is apart from human descriptions. For there is no one Way It Is on the part of nature, reality, wilderness, or any other natural kind one might construct. This is because there is no single privileged way in which things may exist or fail to exist.18

THE CONTEMPLATIVE IDEAL Rorty believes that two opposed worlds open up, according to whether one follows the Aristotelian paradigm, or whether one adopts his form of pragmatism. The Aristotelian view begins in contemplative wonder, which

52

Chapter 2

Rorty describes as “wonder at finding oneself in a world larger, stronger, nobler than oneself.”19 From within such a world, certain ideals commend themselves intuitively, especially those of conformity to higher things. The alternative view begins with the familiar twentieth-century thought that the world always appears within a particular vocabulary. The choice of vocabulary is not itself dictated by the world, echoing Rorty’s point that the world does not tell us how to speak. The second view may come to favor a different set of ideals, particularly the ideal of creative “overcoming” found in Nietzsche. Rorty regards the first view as ultimately theist. To hold that we find ourselves in a world where things have an intrinsic nature, is also to hold something like a religious doctrine of creation. “[O]nly if we have some such picture in mind, some picture of the universe as either itself a person or as created by a person can we make sense of the idea that the world has an ‘intrinsic nature.’”20 This belief can be held with different degrees of explicitness. Aristotle denies the possibility of creation, but strongly believes that things have an intrinsic nature. Medieval thinkers expressed the same belief with the doctrine of the veritas rerum, the “truth of things,” linking it with an explicit doctrine of creation. Because it is created through the word, the world does not just contain entities, but also a truth about them, indicating how they must be conceived if they are to be understood rightly. The creation doctrine sees entities as a kind of product, the work of someone with something in mind. For Rorty, the implication also runs the other way. To hold that an entity has an intrinsic nature is to hold that there is a kind of natural truth about it, which implies something like a doctrine of creation. Presumably a belief in an intrinsic nature needs something like this in principle, if it is not eventually to fall back into some sort of pragmatist position. Rorty sums up this line of thought: “The suggestion that truth, as well as the world, is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language of his own.”21 Along with Nietzsche, he thinks that premodern Western ontologies imply a theological doctrine of this sort, as do the secular variants of the original doctrine, which have developed under their influence. This also explains the contemplative dimension of the older ontology, where entities are regarded as showing forth the goodness of the created order. The creation offers an “edifying spectacle” that shows how entities live up to a normative plan and are therefore worth contemplating. Rorty believes that the modern shift away from Aristotelian natural kinds results in a loss of this contemplative dimension. As he says of the world after Copernicus and Newton, “it became hard to imagine what it would be like to look down upon the Creation and find it good.”22 Rorty believes that the Aristotelian worldview, with its privileging of natural kinds, has been eroded by stages since the beginning of modernity.

The Attack on Aristotelianism

53

Descartes enables the shift to an ontology of particles and laws. This means that most of the entities of the world are no longer seen as having a center of their own, as if they show something like a self-understanding that could constitute an original identity, an implicit profile that they automatically project into the world.23 Yet Descartes makes an exception for the human mind, which he keeps apart from the centerless material continuum, so that it maintains its function of grounding an ultimate human identity. Rorty thinks that Freud completes the defeat of Aristotelianism in that he shows how even the mind can be included under the new ontology. Instead of being seen as something of a different order from the material world, it can be regarded as a kind of machine, which is discussable in naturalistic terms. Rorty regards this as an opportunity, in that it opens the way for a different sense of life, and a new sense of freedom and independence. We can come to see ourselves more or less as original materials, which can be used or developed for diverse futures, and which have no intrinsic preference for any particular future. “[I]f we are machines, then it is up to us to invent a use for ourselves.”24 He sees a Freudian narrative as assisting a sense of Romantic freedom, where nothing constrains us from beyond ourselves, and the future is free for imaginative ventures. Rorty describes this shift to mechanical accounts of human nature as congenial to an “atheist’s” point of view, because it gets rid of the last vestiges of absolute constraint that come with a sense of creation, and the imposed obligations it brings. “The nice thing about purely mechanical accounts of nature, from an atheist’s point of view, is that they tell us that there are no purposes to be served save our own, and that we serve no purposes except those we dream up as we go along.”25 This could again look like a lapse into an alternative metaphysics, in that it seems to promote a new picture in place of the old, as expressing the way the world really is. Yet Rorty could reply that his concern is negative, and aims simply to break the hold of the Aristotelian view, with its instinct of subordination, and to awaken a sense of the many vocabularies we can use for our various purposes. The way will then be open for new inventions. The loss of the Aristotelian challenge is therefore seen as an important precondition for a human-centered, pragmatist view of the world. MACINTYRE’S ARISTOTELIANISM At the end of his discussion of Freud bringing the Aristotelian era to a close, Rorty examines Alasdair MacIntyre’s views on this historical development, particularly as set out in After Virtue.26 MacIntyre agrees with Rorty on the contrasting possibilities that face the contemporary world, between an Aristotelian virtue-based view of the human being and the mechanical view made

54

Chapter 2

possible by Newton, Darwin, and Freud. He also agrees that the mechanical view of the world frees up new possibilities of human creativity, opening the way for a description of human life based on the will. For MacIntyre, however, this is a reason for rejecting the Freudian view. He holds that a world whose moral stances are grounded simply in the human will, incurs serious problems that cannot be satisfactorily resolved. He does not think we can simply return to Aristotle’s original description of the goals of human nature, and is in fact happy to jettison much of the Aristotelian metaphysical picture, what he calls the “metaphysical biology” (described by Rorty as “the nonsense in Aristotle”).27 He nevertheless wants to retain an attenuated version of the Aristotelian view that the human being is aimed at ends that are not simply determined by the will, so that it relates to “living well” in the same way as a harpist relates to “playing the harp well.” This means getting beyond a view of the self as a featureless choosing agent that exists prior to all roles that it might take on, whose relation to the detail of its life goes back simply to the choices it makes. MacIntyre wants to see the individual identified as a “citizen, soldier, philosopher, servant of God.”28 Such descriptions include a normative standard for judging the individuals they describe. To identify people as “soldiers” is already to include a sense of what they should be, in that the end-directed quality of the description implies criteria for fulfilling it well or badly. It should be possible for society to begin a new moral reflection by working through the consequences of such a shift. There is even a hope of rediscovering a common sense of purpose, based on agreement about the kinds of virtues that are needed to fulfil common social roles well. MacIntyre realizes, of course, that contemporary society largely retains an understanding of the individual as a featureless choosing agent, where “choice” is the key category in determining what counts as a satisfactory human life. Professions like those of the “manager” or the “therapist,” which so characterize the contemporary Western world, specialize in helping people who do not necessarily share much in common, to live together while preserving their various chosen identities. MacIntyre adds a further figure to the list, that of the “rich aesthete.” These are people who develop an identity which pursues higher things, but where the significance of such things tends to be reduced to the significance they have for them, adding types of experience or pleasure which are seen as enhancements of a chosen lifestyle. Higher things are conflated with hobby-interests, whose value ultimately comes down to the fact that a certain sort of chosen life regards them as valuable, and chooses them. In MacIntyre’s view, there is no hope for a world which tries to conceive the human in this way. He thinks we need to return to an Aristotelian functional concept of the human being, with its original commitment to ends that are not simply a function of the will, if these impasses are to be overcome. MacIntyre therefore sets out to

The Attack on Aristotelianism

55

reinstate various Aristotelian concepts in order to render more coherent the Aristotelian residue of our moral vocabulary (words like “reason,” “human nature,” or “natural rights”). Rorty is no supporter of the featureless moral self which has been promoted since Kant. His reason for rejecting it is not, however, the same as MacIntyre’s, namely that it reduces the human to a narrow center of power. It is rather that it trails remnants of a metaphysical view, and therefore limits the potential richness of concepts that a pragmatist view could promote for conceiving the human. Naturally, Rorty does not want to follow MacIntyre in endorsing remnants of Aristotelian teleology, even in an attenuated narrative form. He thinks that MacIntyre’s project remains halfhearted in wanting to retain such Aristotelian residues anyway. According to Rorty, we should “make the discourse coherent by discarding the last vestiges of those (Aristotelian) ways of thinking.”29 If we talk about roles, with the inherent norms they bring, we should emphasize that they themselves are objects of choice and experimentation. Everyone should get the chance to experiment. Rorty says he would be quite happy with a culture dominated by aesthetes, managers, and therapists, so long as the society can be arranged on lines that give as many citizens as possible the chance to become rich aesthetes.30 Interestingly, Rorty claims that this position, which assumes the possibility of a mechanistic philosophy that repudiates the deepest aspirations of Aristotelianism, is not far removed from MacIntyre’s position anyway. He sees MacIntyre as having pared away so much of the original Aristotelian view that not much remains except the name.31 Not only does MacIntyre drop Aristotle’s metaphysical biology; he does not even make use of any general notion of a “function” of a human being (i.e., a natural end that is attached to human nature itself) in developing his account of how people should consider human identity. A strong appeal to an Aristotelian functional approach of this sort would yield a life-pattern that would be basically the same through all cultures, so that each narrative would include the same themes. But as Rorty notes, MacIntyre does not require any such thing. He contents himself with the simple requirement that there be some narrative, seeing identity as going back to the ability to tell a coherent story, without the prior constraints that Aristotle regarded as essential background for all human stories. MacIntyre does not really advance beyond this general demand for a consistent narrative. While he himself happens to prefer the Aristotelian narrative, there seems no reason why it should be privileged above others. Rorty is therefore happy to affirm a culture whose citizens spend their time trying out various roles, including those of the aesthete, manager and therapist, holding that even if such a culture is not perfect, it is well ahead of a culture dominated by the figures of the warrior or the priest.32

56

Chapter 2

ARISTOTELIAN REALISM AND PRAGMATISM Aristotle and Rorty therefore agree on the nature of the main condition for realism, which is that the world does not consist only of materials, but that it also turns a kind of face to us, showing an implicit self-understanding. This allows the realist view to shun some frames of reference while affirming others. The entities of the world can in principle challenge the frame of reference that an external knower tries to impose. An animal can challenge the Cartesian frame of reference that sees animals as machines, so that it is a struggle to maintain the Cartesian stance. The glance of the animal somehow imposes the animal’s interests, and we feel ourselves driven to conclude that there is more to the animal than its existence as a set of materials formed into an object by our glance. The animal insists that it is a certain sort of thing, in the way articulated by the Aristotelian doctrine of natural kinds. The teleological striving of living creatures, which for Aristotle constitutes their very existence, is regarded by the Aristotelian tradition as bestowing a face on a natural entity, an implicit statement of identity, which is turned toward the world. Rorty certainly does not want to affirm the Cartesian view that animals are “really” machines, as an alternative to an Aristotelian view. But he insists that the moral compulsion we might feel to acknowledge a living animal does not go back to any imposition of the interests of an entity as it is in itself. This is shown by the fact that we do not have to think of parts of the nonhuman world as gathering themselves over against us with a unity of interest in this way. Kant, whose intuitions stand behind this line of thought, observes that I am never forced to acknowledge a teleological reality in an external object, at least not in the way that I am compelled to register its height or color. Teleology is a “regulative,” and not a “constitutive” concept, a kind of heuristic device by which we regard certain bodies as if they had an inner directedness.33 The things do not force the teleological concept on us. Rather, the concept enables us to deal with living things more effectively, given that there are areas where the vocabulary of physics does not suffice. It is possible to see the beginnings of a pragmatist turn here, in that the use of the concept goes back to an attempt to cope with the world, rather than simply to correspond to it. It does not follow that Rorty’s position lacks ethical guidelines when it comes to treatment of animals. While it is possible simply to regard an animal in the way that Cartesian philosophy proposes, and we sometimes do this (e.g., for veterinary purposes) Rorty’s main preoccupation is to avoid any suggestion that particular ways of seeing the animal finally get it right, or express the way it ultimately is. There are many ways of talking about animals, including the Cartesian one, and most of these have their uses. It all depends on what

The Attack on Aristotelianism

57

we are attempting to do. The dissatisfaction that people feel with Cartesian descriptions in certain situations, comes down to a sense that a way of talking which is useful for some purposes, is being used for inappropriate purposes. In certain situations, a vocabulary of friendship might be more suitable and useful for our dealings with animals. In Rorty’s view, the challenge to a particular vocabulary does not come from a reality that is beyond it, to which it needs to correspond in some way, but comes rather from the possibility of other ways of talking. Perhaps the speaker could approach the entities of the world in quite a different way from the ways that are currently favored. If we try out the vocabulary of friendship, we might discover different aspects of animals, possibilities of companionship, and everyday comfort. But we must not think that their “reality” has somehow compelled us here. We have rather discovered a way of expanding our lives, entering into areas of sympathy we experience as enriching. The remnants of an Aristotelian approach that holds to a world of meaningful entities challenging us to correspond to them, are therefore incorporated into a view that is ultimately pragmatist. We no longer see ourselves as challenged from beyond to correspond to an original reality. The only challenge comes from other ways of being human that bear in on us as unthought possibilities that might further enhance our lives. NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, “Preface,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), xii–xv, xii. 2. Phaedrus 265e, Plato I: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, The Loeb Classical Library, Vol. 36 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 535. 3. R. L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1925), 43. 4. Aristotle, On The Soul, Bk. III, 7, 415b13, The Complete Works Of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 641–92, 685. 5. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” vol. 3, 290–306, 301. 6. Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” 143–63, 143. 7. Richard Rorty, “Genus as Matter: A Reading of Metaphysics Z-H,” in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos, eds. E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos and R. M. Rorty (Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1973), 393–420, 394. 8. Rorty, “Genus as Matter,” 414. 9. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 34. 10. Rorty, “Genus as Matter,” 415.

58

Chapter 2

11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 416. 13. Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris deny that Descartes sees animals simply as machines, insisting that Descartes’ discussion is limited to the view that animals can be seen in this way. Gordon Baker and Katherine J. Morris, Descartes’ Dualism (London: Routledge, 1996). 14. Rorty does not like use of the word “constituted” in contexts like this, as it carries overtones of a genetic process, as if we could get behind the naming of things. See “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” 105–19, 115ff. 15. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” xvi–xxxii, xxvi. 16. Ibid., xxvi. 17. Ibid. 18. Nancy Frankenberry, “On Empty Compliments and Deceptive Detours: A Neopragmatist Response to Theodore W. Nunez,” Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1999): 129–36, 134. 19. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 29. 20. Ibid., 21. 21. Ibid., 5. 22. Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” 144. 23. Ibid., 143. 24. Ibid., 144. 25. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 300–301. Rorty later regrets his use of the word “atheist.” 26. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). 27. Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” 159. 28. Ibid., 144. 29. Ibid., 159. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 161. 32. Ibid. 33. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, Part II, “Critique of Teleological Judgement,” First Division, 375, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), 24.

Chapter 3

Pragmatism

THE PRAGMATIST BACKGROUND Especially in his later writings, Rorty regards himself as a “pragmatist,” and many of his positions have their counterparts in the classical pragmatist tradition. While the founding pragmatist figures often disagree among themselves, they all reject the contemplative ideal of knowledge, the sort of ideal that characterizes premodern philosophy, and which also survives in Descartes and Locke. A contemplative view sees the knower as an observer who tries to register a full-fledged object that is already present and complete in the world. It is as if entities wait to be observed, and the knower has a kind of moral duty to record them as they are, without alteration. In a way that recalls Rorty’s later reflections on this ideal, William James remarks on its strangeness, implying as it does that nonhuman reality imposes epistemological obligations. “The notion of a reality calling on us to ‘agree’ with it, and that for no reasons, but simply because its claim is ‘unconditional’ or ‘transcendent’ is one that I can make neither head nor tail of.”1 Pragmatists hold the contrasting view that knowledge is an active pursuit, where the knower is engaged in a wider practical task of coming to grips with the world, while immersed in a journey of enquiry whose focus shifts as it progresses. Barry Allen notes the impact of the modern experimental tradition on early pragmatists, the influence of thinkers he calls “the experimentalists of knowledge—Galileo, Bacon, Boyle, Hooke, Newton.”2 These emphasize the active side of knowledge, the way in which the knower continually tries out different instruments in an attempt to handle what the world throws up, keeping an eye on what works, while discarding modes of thought that prove unproductive. The pursuit of knowledge is therefore a historical process, where knowers select the aspects to which they want to attend, forming instruments for coming to grips 59

60

Chapter 3

with a situation, and testing them in practice as the project develops, and as new meanings and challenges emerge. This practical problem-solving side of theoretical enquiry stands behind the significance of the categories and concepts it develops and uses, so that they are quickly exposed as meaningless if they lose touch with it. Dewey sees the pragmatist approach as disqualifying much of traditional metaphysics because of this, given that metaphysics tries to give an account of things that is valid for all contexts of enquiry. “But knowledge that is ubiquitous, all-inclusive and all-monopolizing, ceases to have meaning in losing all context.”3 A famous early paper of Peirce defines the very meaningfulness of concepts in terms of their practical implications for enquiry. “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our concept to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.”4 At this early stage, Peirce specifies “sensible perception” and “sensible effects” as constituting the relevant effects, so that the principle in its early formulation resembles logical empiricism or verificationism, and like these later developments, threatens to dissolve the known object into our experience of it. Peirce discusses the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, suggesting that the doctrine has no meaning, because the concept of transubstantiation promotes a concept that is not allowed any practical implications. Our sensible experience of bread and wine remains unchanged, whether the doctrine holds or not. James, who has a broader notion of “effects,” points out, however, that the notion of transubstantiation has practical implications and effects for a believer, for whom it makes “a tremendous difference.”5 Concepts and categories, the means by which a knower connects and disconnects the flow of experience, are seen as artifacts or instruments that are gradually discovered by the productive skill of knowers. James sees common-sense categories as discoveries of “prehistoric geniuses.”6 The associations and dissociations that lead to notions of genus and species are inventions of this sort, useful for handling the knowledge process. “Kinds, and sameness of kind—what colossally useful denkmittel for finding our way among the many!”7 This historical approach, where thinkers invent ways and means for handling the data of experience in creative ways, blurs the distinction between Kantian categories (minus their transcendental justification) and Kantian ideas, in that James regards all of these as so many historical instruments. He describes spiritualism and materialism as “prophecies” of the world’s future, while free-will, the Absolute, God, Spirit, and Design, are all part of a “theory of promise” regarding the outcome of the world process.8 Of its nature, the activity of knowledge aims at a goal, one that practice either confirms or refutes. James’s overall position here expresses the basic pragmatist distaste for an ideal of knowledge that sets out to make mere copies

Pragmatism

61

of what is already the case. Instead, truth is the goal of an activity that gets us ahead in grappling with the problems of life. In this sense, it serves an instrumental purpose. James says that any idea that leads us usefully from one part of our experience to another, simplifying and alleviating our general tasks, is true “instrumentally.”9 In a way that anticipates Rorty’s discussion of the reality of the giraffe, James emphasizes the influence of language on the objects we know. “What shall we call a thing, anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.”10 The pragmatist understanding of enquiry suggests an original unified experience, out of which the notions of “nature” and “the knowing self” could be subsequently abstracted. Dewey develops this direction, calling the original unity simply “experience,” something that “recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both in an unanalysed totality.”11 The notion assumes a kind of holism, which moves away from the atomistic units of experience proposed by Hume, which have no natural connections, and which need to be joined from outside themselves. Dewey’s objects of experience already have an inner connection. Conceptual knowledge is a product of the conflicts and tensions in the original experience (what Dewey calls its “dubious and conflicting tendencies”). It shows a close continuity with the experience with which it deals, and can be seen as part of an overall process of adjustment. The reflexive element of knowledge does not simply come to the data from outside, but is itself a result of the natural dynamism of addressing conflicts and tensions. While agreeing with the general lines of the pragmatist approach described so far, Rorty has strong reservations about reworking concepts—like experience—so as to give them a significance that is fundamentally metaphysical.12 Dewey holds that the pragmatist approach, with its dislike of dogma, its experimental bent, and its forward-thinking flexibility, coincides more or less with the method of experimental science, which he calls “empirical” or “denotative.”13 A pragmatist investigation does not so much aim at a set of proven conclusions that will stand the test of time, but rather at a record of investigation, that others can test and reproduce in their turn, to see whether it brings them to the same result.14 Dewey is alert to the inherently cooperative nature of this project. “The adoption of empirical, or denotative, method would thus procure for philosophic reflection something of that cooperative tendency toward consensus which marks inquiry in the natural sciences.”15 Rorty approves of the general forward-looking tone of all this, and is aware, as is Dewey, of how well it fits with democratic ideals.16 Rorty disagrees with the attempt to tie pragmatism to scientific method. He admits that Dewey “never stopped talking” about scientific method, but submits that “he never had anything very useful to say about it.”17 At other times Rorty interprets

62

Chapter 3

Dewey as close to his own view that distinctions between science and other disciplines should be “rubbed out” in favor of a general problem-solving approach that would blur distinctions between traditional disciplines.18 The sweeping quality of this judgment has been disputed by interpreters of Dewey.19 The notion of truth is one of the most contested aspects of pragmatist philosophy. As usual, pragmatists hold different views, and often disagree with one another. Peirce retains a robust sense of answerability to the world, along with a respect for scientific method. He develops a notion of “truth” based on an idea of convergence. We should see a theory as true only when its application to a problem results in a convergence of results among different enquirers. Peirce offers the example of research into the velocity of light, mentioning a number of different studies involving the transits of Venus, the oppositions of Mars, the eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites, etc. While initial results might be in tension with one another, once methods and processes improve, there will be a convergence. As Peirce says in an early paper, “the results will move steadily together toward a destined center.” We are “fated” to believe such results once we investigate the matter sufficiently.20 Since different experiments might produce initial results that are in tension with one another, the problem looms of how we determine when the convergence has been achieved. Peirce says that application of the method to the problem must “in the long run” produce the convergence, if the theory is to be taken as true. The detailed implications of these reflections are not immediately clear and have been the subject of controversy. In many respects, Peirce is reasonably traditional in his views. For example, he accepts the possibility of “buried secrets,” truths that might never see the light of day, although he holds that on any particular question, investigation could yield an answer about them “if it were carried far enough.”21 With William James, there is a sense that pragmatist maxims are applied more directly to our beliefs, a position that is encapsulated in his famous definition of truth as “the expedient in the way of our thinking.”22 In a historical sense, the formula is unfortunate, in that it could be taken as favoring wishful thinking, as if to imply that the truth comes down to whatever is useful for a community to believe. In fact, James does not mean to exclude traditional intellectual interests. He writes to D. S. Miller in 1907 concerning the pragmatist F. C. S. Schiller: “All that Schiller and I contend for is that there is no ‘truth’ without some interest, and that non-intellectual interests . . . play a part as well as intellectual ones.”23 The criteria of “usefulness” are to be understood broadly. In his defense of James, Hilary Putnam points to detailed criteria of usefulness for prediction, overall coherence, and simplicity.24 James further qualifies the statement as implying that the truth is “expedient in the long run and on the whole,” since short-term expediency might not withstand

Pragmatism

63

the challenge of further experience. He emphasizes the way in which experience itself causes us to make corrections to our working formulas.25 For all that, his formulations sometimes leave to be desired. He accepts that he gave “some excuse” for the charge of seeming to have made the truth of religious beliefs consist in their “feeling good.”26 James’s position gives rise to longrunning controversies about the relation between truth and its confirmation. Pragmatists are wary of a sense of truth that remains independent of ways of confirming it, so that the correspondence of a belief to reality seems to come down to an “occult” quality.27 As with Peirce, James tends to identify truth with the end of an enquiry, seeing “absolute” truth as a limit where different truths converge.28 This raises the obvious question of the status of such a limit, as well as the question of determining when the limit has been reached. Even a brief survey suffices to show how many of Rorty’s preoccupations and positions are already present in the history of pragmatism. He endorses the idea of an imaginative journey, where the enquirers form and reform the instruments of enquiry during the journey of discovery, and where ideals of knowledge are strongly tied to actual human practices. As we will see, he has reservations about some traditional pragmatist views. The scientific and experimental ambitions of some pragmatists, and their preoccupation with method, leave him cold. He is also opposed to any notion of an original epistemological norm, for example, “experience,” that could offer a check on free-flowing discussion and keep an enquiry in touch with a set of original parameters that are simply given. He further opposes an idealized notion of truth, of the sort that is found originally in Peirce, but which finds a resonance in the work of all three of the pragmatist founders. In general, he is enthusiastic about pragmatism’s freeing of philosophy from old constraints. He is less happy with pragmatism’s attachment to what he sees as remnants of metaphysical positions; for example, an overall sense of responsibility to a world to which science offers privileged access. For this reason, Rorty is seen as belonging to a new phase of pragmatism, sometimes called “neopragmatism.”29 He is often credited with a general revival of interest in pragmatism, after it fell victim to more empiricist preoccupations in the mid twentieth century. But he is also seen as a dangerous intruder who will give the pragmatist enterprise a bad name. A BROAD NOTION OF PRAGMATISM Rorty offers no sharp definition of the nature of pragmatism, and he often uses the word very broadly, to refer to a certain life attitude, and a particular tone of enquiry, rather than to a detailed set of principles or beliefs. At very least, he sees his pragmatism as repudiating religious and metaphysical authorities,

64

Chapter 3

which might set absolute boundaries to areas of enquiry. Sometimes he seems to imply that this is all that pragmatism is. In a 1996 essay, he refers to the pragmatist project as concerned simply with clearing metaphysics out of the way: “Usually, we [pragmatists] define ourselves in negative terms. We call ourselves ‘anti-Platonists’ or ‘antimetaphysicians’ or ‘antifoundationalists.’”30 He even associates the word “atheist” with this approach, admitting to a tendency to call himself an atheist, while adding, “[b]ut that term (“atheist”) is not much more than an abbreviation for suspicion of what Heidegger called ‘the onto-theological tradition.’”31 Here, pragmatism is identified with repudiation of the familiar metaphysical enemy. Rorty thinks that antimetaphysical and antifoundationalist projects are steadily gaining ground, and represent the latest stage in a process of emancipation which has been going on for a good two centuries. There is evidence that people are losing the need and the taste for deep descriptions of ultimate realities, along with their accompanying prescriptions for how life should be lived. There is “an increased ability to brush aside the suspicion that we are under the authority of something not ourselves.”32 Rorty thinks that this development should be embraced as a good thing. His pragmatism is also, however, a positive program that sets out to shape an alternative approach to life. Rorty’s view of how exactly this relates to the anti-metaphysical stance is not obvious. As Wittgensteinians point out, the repudiation of metaphysics does not entail a commitment to any alternative philosophical view. The detail of the positive program is expressed in different ways in Rorty’s work. At times, it can seem as if everything has simply become a use-object. He often describes our knowledge with help of toolmetaphors, as opposed to traditional metaphors based on “sight.” Sometimes this seems to imply the crudest instrumental approach, as if pragmatism were simply a way for us to get what we want. Yet he also uses descriptions that suggest a broader understanding, showing the traditional pragmatist commitment to an experimental and future-oriented approach to the world, and to democratic practices. Our courses of action are to be handed over to a process of discussion and decision that recalls the “open” style of Socrates rather than the doctrinal approach of Plato. Rorty also describes pragmatism as a form of “holism,” where traditional philosophical divisions are overcome, and theoretical and practical concerns are fused as part of a large and interconnected process of coping.33 This echoes the pragmatist insistence that we are first of all active in the world, and that things gain significance in light of activities of ours. All of these accounts assume a human-centeredness, in that differences between positions are seen as significant in as much as they make a difference for us. In Rorty’s early writings, pragmatism tends to exclude any form of religion, given that religion is seen as irretrievably connected with the kind of absolute authority that is to be overcome. In his later writings, he allows

Pragmatism

65

a qualified place for religion within a pragmatist scheme, suggesting lines of accommodation that have been taken up by contemporary theological thinkers. The question lingers through all of these discussions whether Rorty falls into an alternative pragmatist metaphysics, in that he seems to adopt his own final account of how we come to know the world and interact with it. I will now examine the main features and implications of Rorty’s various accounts of pragmatism as a positive philosophical program. THE NOTION OF “COPING” Obviously, Rorty wants to promote a view that brings the meaning of things back to humans and their purposes. At its crudest, this tends to the position that things are judged simply according to their usefulness. With this, Rorty’s pragmatism moves in the direction of “instrumentalism,” the view that cognitive practices and objects are mere means to independent ends. Attribution of this view can make pragmatism sound disreputable, as if it is happy to license any approach that “works.” As noted earlier, classical pragmatism was heavily criticized for this sort of thing, as happened, for example, with William James’s description of “truth.” At times Rorty seems to exemplify the worst of an instrumental approach. He suggests we drop metaphors of vision, and adopt metaphors that see knowledge as a set of tools which helps us cope with the world. He expresses the hope that ocular metaphors will one day seem as quaint as “the animist vocabulary of pre-classical times.”34 We will come to describe education simply as “acquiring habits of action for coping with reality.”35 Robert Brandom calls this approach “instrumental pragmatism.”36 At its most obtuse, it reduces beliefs to means for the pursuit of happiness. In a discussion of Gadamer, Rorty refers favorably to a cognitive attitude that has little interest in examining the things of the world as they are in themselves, and whose interest is instead centered “in what we can get out of nature and history for our own uses.”37 He recommends that we judge ethical beliefs according to whether “they are the best habits of action for gratifying our desires.”38 And he favors James’ suggestion “that we carry utilitarianism over from morals into epistemology.”39 If this is Rorty’s fundamental philosophical approach, it does not seem promising for an accommodation with religion, or with anything much else. Rorty is, however, prone to exaggeration in some writings, and these extreme statements are qualified by more moderate expressions of the program. For one thing, instrumentalism is disreputable only so long as it allows crude practical interests to interfere with a traditional theoretical notion of truth. It can look better when situated in a context that repudiates the

66

Chapter 3

traditional notion altogether and sets out to blur the boundaries between the theoretical and the practical. Rorty wants to do this, promoting a typically pragmatist, experimental approach to the world. His general line follows that of William James. We are to see the sciences as closer to “crafts” than we thought.40 Rather than focusing on a search for stable philosophical knowledge that goes back to unchanging principles, we should see ourselves as crafting a future, drawn by the promise of something better than the world we have known. Rorty describes pragmatism as a “hopeful, melioristic, experimental frame of mind” that is willing to experiment to find better ways of proceeding, and substitutes “hope” for philosophical knowledge.41 It should even be possible for such an approach to recover many older philosophical distinctions, while recasting them in such a way as to lose any suggestion of timeless principles or foundations. For example, distinctions between appearance and reality, conditioned and unconditioned, relative and absolute, prudence and morality could be seen from a pragmatist viewpoint as coming down to so many versions of the distinction between older views that have been abandoned, and current views that have replaced them.42 At the moment when we feel the pull of a new historical turn, but have not yet completed it, it seems that we are about to get something right that we had long had wrong, so that we move from appearances to reality, or from something that was “conditioned” to a deeper level of reality that is “unconditioned.” Here the pragmatist proposes a fundamentally different way of describing the transition, seeing it as the adoption of a better set of practices, which we do not want to give up, once we have adopted them. The experimental emphasis of pragmatism sees theoretical activities as “problem-solving” or “coping,” which tends to bring theoretical and practical areas into a single spectrum. Rorty associates this position with what he calls “holism,” in that everything we do can be seen as a form of problem solving. “We would thus fulfill the mission of the syncretic and holistic side of pragmatism—the side that tries to see human beings doing much the same sort of problem-solving across the whole spectrum of their activities (already doing it and so not needing to be urged to start doing it).”43 Activities that were formerly distinguished from one another (Rorty mentions the examples of “physics” and “poetry”) can be seen as facets of “a single continuous, seamless activity.” “Problem-solving” covers the whole spectrum, including both physics and poetry, so that advances in each of these are to be seen as successful solutions of practical problems. To describe all human activities as “coping” or “problem-solving” in this way imposes a particular logic on the way the human situation is seen. Historical advances are viewed technologically, as successful human attempts to resolve difficulties, removing anomalies so as to get ahead. As regards some advances in physics and poetry, the pragmatist description seems

Pragmatism

67

straightforward and convincing. Anomalies in Newtonian physics are overcome by the development of an Einsteinian approach, and Romantic poetry can be seen (perhaps) as overcoming the artificial restrictions of late classicism. When it comes to religion, however, it is less obvious that the approach is appropriate. Once advances in religion (the doctrines of creation, incarnation, redemption) are regarded as part of a program of “problem-solving,” religion is reduced to a human creation that is to be assessed according to straightforward pragmatic criteria. At very least, this seems to compromise the self-understanding of the kind of religious belief that sees itself as going back to a revelation. There is therefore a fundamental question as to whether a pragmatist approach can ever really accommodate strong-minded religious belief. For one thing, if religious things are seen simply as means for achieving human purposes, they can conceivably be replaced by more effective means. While the word “religion” has a variety of meanings, it surely often comes down to the view that the ultimate significance of things does not simply come back to ourselves and our interests, but is centered mysteriously beyond us. This is Rorty’s precise objection to traditional religion, that it is defined by the familiar interest in an authority that bears in on human things from beyond. An understanding of religion that sees its ultimate significance as realizing different human interests and projects, seems, at very least, to go against the usual meaning of the word. RORTY’S MODIFIED PRAGMATISM There are two important ways in which Rorty’s initial pragmatist position is qualified, which can render it more friendly to religious interests. The first is his broad notion of “advantage” when describing what counts as success in coping with the world. Rorty is far from holding that things are justified only in as much as they bring a selfish gain for an agent, as if everything were directed toward the satisfaction of pre-existing drives. He realizes that friendship, generosity, and commitment to justice are important parts of most human lives, and accepts that they all require a sort of self-transcendence or sacrifice. Desirable human lives are therefore characterized by a wide variety of goods. He has sympathy with J. S. Mill’s efforts to incorporate sensitivity for “higher things” into a pragmatist utilitarian framework, seeing “poetry” as covering the sorts of higher functions once fulfilled by religion and philosophy (a move not entirely reassuring to religious believers).44 Coping successfully with life’s demands can implicate us in surprising forms of selflessness, where we recover many of the seemingly disinterested human goods that were once affirmed by religious or metaphysical approaches. There are

68

Chapter 3

inevitable questions about whether pragmatist interest-based approaches can ever in the last analysis accommodate disinterested virtues. But while Rorty might not use the word “disinterested,” he certainly sets out to include virtues of this sort in the world he recommends. Admittedly, this raises the question of whether he has so broadened the meaning of “pragmatism” that it loses any real focus. Some wonder if Rorty expands the meaning of the word to a point where it becomes too vague to be serviceable for anything much.45 The second important qualification in the understanding of “pragmatism” focuses on the point that the adoption of new vocabularies can also lead us to change our goals. A life dedicated to remaking the self in this way becomes an important ideal for Rorty. The ideal owes a lot to the early nineteenthcentury ideal of Bildung, which sees education as a process of assimilation and “overcoming” that leads to an expansion of the self. For Rorty, this takes the form of breaking out of old vocabularies and trying out new ones. He has a late essay, “Pragmatism As Romantic Polytheism,”46 which vividly evokes such an approach to life and the world, seeing it exemplified in writers like Nietzsche or Proust. He wants us to build a culture where the exploration of alternative vocabularies has a fascination of its own, on top of the straightforward advances that changes of vocabulary might bring in terms of better achieving existing goals. Rorty’s ideal citizen, the “liberal ironist,” supports the basic structures of a liberal society where freedom of action and discussion is safeguarded, but is also committed to private explorations of novel vocabularies and the personal transformation they promise. Robert Brandom, a former student of Rorty’s who is sympathetic to many aspects of Rorty’s project, suggests that there are in fact two different kinds of pragmatism, based on the sorts of goals that are pursued. The first sees vocabularies as part of a coping strategy for pursuing ends that are already in place, especially the large project of mastering and controlling the human environment. As noted earlier, this approach is instrumental, in that it tends to see religious beliefs and practices as mere projects of ours. Brandom calls this sort of pragmatism “naturalist,” and connects it with the classical American pragmatist tradition. But as well as helping us achieve ends to which we are already committed, vocabularies can help us “frame and formulate new ends.”47 This is the interest that drives the second sort of pragmatism, which Brandom calls “historicist,” a pragmatism that is centered more on the development of new vocabularies. Here we discover and adopt new purposes, which we were not even capable of formulating before the new vocabulary was in place. Rorty strongly promotes this second sort of pragmatism, which seems more promising for an accommodation with religion. Brandom offers examples of programs and activities that beckon as possibilities only after a change in vocabulary of this sort has been accepted. He remarks that no nineteenth-century physicist could have had the program of

Pragmatism

69

“determining whether neutrinos have mass,” given that the requisite vocabulary for making sense of such a project was not yet in place.48 A whole history of development needs to be assumed before the question even appears as meaningful. This implies that the vocabulary is adopted without a clear idea of its detailed implications, although there is already an intimation that it represents the future, and is therefore worth trying. Rorty refers to the classic transition between Aristotelian and Newtonian physics as an example of this. The adoption of Newtonian physics led Western culture toward goals that could not have been clearly foreseen at the time. It is as if a culture stumbled on a new set of tools before having a clear idea of what they might be useful for. Those who took part in the Copernican revolution acquired a new sense of prediction-focused science almost by chance, as they emerged from “fifty years of inconclusive muddle.”49 Brandom has an interesting observation on this understanding of the workings of vocabularies. He sees it as resolving the post-Enlightenment political problem of why people should surrender their individual freedom of action in order to conform to communal norms. It is easy enough to make sense of such surrender as a tactical move, where individuals use others so as to achieve their own goals more effectively. But thinkers have been nonplussed by the willingness of people to go far beyond what can be justified by mere tactical interest. Brandom suggests that by giving ourselves over to new communal vocabularies, we are able to do things that we could not have done in any other way. Submitting to communal norms enables a person to acquire “freedom to do things one could not only not do before, but could not even want to do.”50 Someone whose only interest is to get ahead with realizing individual goals never discovers the pleasures of scientific research in itself. The new possibilities go beyond mere tactics, in that they refer to a situation where the benefits of the new vocabulary are not available until people give themselves over to the life of the community that has developed the vocabulary. By contrast, metaphysicians try to explain the development of new vocabularies as part of the long struggle to arrive at the truth. Rorty resists placing any such metaphysical gloss on the discussion, refusing the suggestion that the history of ideas is a progress from error to truth. Progress is much better expressed as the choice of a paradigm with a future against one which has exhausted its possibilities. It accepts that at the start of the new commitment we often cannot fully imagine the nature of the progress that is to come. Even the theoretical activities whereby we formulate and verify propositions should be described as “coping,”51 or “acquiring habits of action for coping with reality.”52 We start to fall into a new way of seeing, which promises things that were not achievable in the previous world. The overall aim is to open up possibilities of life that are “better” than those that obtained in a previous world. Rorty is aware of the problem of defining

70

Chapter 3

what counts as “better” or “worse” here. He points out that with regard to Brandom’s “historicist” pragmatism, criteria for judging the goods that the new paradigm enables to appear, themselves emerge only at the end of the process, and are brought into existence by the process itself. Rorty sometimes uses historical evolution as a model for this kind of hopeful advance into the future.53 A creature takes on a genetic mutation that alters the central focus from which its life and world are assessed, so that by the end of the process, different abilities and talents come to be valued from those that were valued at the start. Similarly, people take on a new vocabulary, along with new possibilities, as happened when Aristotle gave way to Copernicus. An “advance” can be measured only after it has happened, in a way that is fundamentally circular, given that the criteria of judgment have themselves moved on. The mammals look back at the dinosaurs and see themselves as “better,” though it is not possible to judge the advance by neutral criteria. Rorty gives a nod toward such terms as greater “variety,” “freedom,” or “growth,” but recognizes that these terms are little more than commendations from later species, which assume their own criteria of judgment. Rorty can fall back on the fact that in many cases, having tasted an “advance,” most people do not want to go back to the old. In this somewhat circular sense, a new paradigm can be seen as “better” than the old. But its superiority cannot be envisioned at the beginning, any more than the organisms which eventually became mammals could specify how they were on a path to something that was “better” than their current lives. Rorty is aware of the similarities between a pragmatist like Dewey and the philosopher Hegel in that both see the standards by which we judge the world as advancing with the rest of world history.54 In this way the pragmatist problem-solving Rorty recommends, leads its practitioners not just toward already existing goals but also toward goals that are novel, and which even signify whole new styles of life. This second kind of pragmatism seems to offer more for the theological imagination than the first, in that it includes a sense of our being led from beyond ourselves, embracing a future which we do not control or anticipate in any straightforward manner. In a sense, it even calls up attitudes of faith and trust, promoting a hopeful venture into the unknown. It could go as far as to include a moment of self-surrender, so that our lives could be said to exceed or “overcome” themselves, achieving the upward lift formerly associated with religious experience, while avoiding reliance on authorities beyond the human. Such attitudes need not of course have any particular connection with religion in the narrow sense, and could be seen as part of a distinctively secular mission aimed at nothing more than developing a better world and a better life. Yet progressive-minded theologians with a sympathy for the program often want to forge a closer connection with religion, pointing out that “religion” has often changed its nature, and suggesting that a pragmatist

Pragmatism

71

approach might represent the most recent transformation of a phenomenon that has always been protean in character. Pragmatism might therefore be the best religious hope for an age that is averse to absolute authorities. Ronald A. Kuipers offers a striking example of how far some theologians have traveled: It is only when religious talk necessitates supernaturalist ontological commitments that Rorty balks at religion. From my point of view however, and perhaps many religious people might disagree, all that is required for an edifying religious attitude is receptivity to that which transcends one’s acculturation. I do not know what it would mean to look outside of the boundaries of space-time for an entity called God.55

AN ALTERNATIVE METAPHYSICS? The pragmatist redescription of human activities as “coping” or “problemsolving” is open to the objection that Rorty is promoting an alternative metaphysical description, a new attempt to map out the boundaries of all possible human activities in advance, in that it claims to uncover what is always really going on beneath the surface of human history (it’s all “coping”). Various writers have taken up this line of criticism, holding that in spite of himself, Rorty has fallen back into metaphysics. Some accuse him of turning to a metaphysics of the subject, of the sort that inaugurated the Romantic era so that truths about the world are replaced by truths about a knowing and willing subject. Frank B. Farrell sees Rorty’s final position as echoing the metaphysics of the self developed by German idealism. In place of the authority of an external reality, to which we have a duty to correspond, there is the authority of a dialectically developing self, in terms of which everything else is to be assessed. Farrell finds “a version of Fichtean self-positing” in Rorty’s early writing, and quotes Rorty’s statement that there is in the end nothing inside us “except what we have put there ourselves.”56 He claims that an implicit metaphysics of this sort accounts for the jump between the negative criticisms Rorty makes of metaphysics, and the positive pragmatist program that he recommends in its stead. Noting that European scientific positivism is criticized because it still “preserved a god in its notion of science . . . a portion of culture where we touched something not ourselves,”57 Farrell accuses Rorty of jumping to the mirror image of this, and exalting the self instead of science, switching to the position that “I shall encounter only myself in everything I touch.”58 The metaphysical ambition of touching something that is not ourselves, therefore, collapses into its opposite, the view that we never touch anything that is not ourselves. Farrell also notes echoes of German idealism in the hope that all determination from outside us can be reduced to an ultimate

72

Chapter 3

self-determination. So he sees Rorty as having jumped from repudiation of traditional metaphysics to a Romantic view of the primacy of the subject.59 Rorty responds directly to Farrell’s critique, pointing out that the offending statements are all early expressions of his position, most of them taken from Consequences of Pragmatism (written twenty-three years before Rorty’s reply to Farrell). He accepts that Farrell is sometimes right in his criticism if the statements are taken at face value. But he holds that his mature position has moved on from this. His later writing carefully avoids any switch to a Romantic metaphysics of the subject, and tries to avoid any privileging of either subject or object, as if one of these were a key for interpreting the ultimate status of things. He wants a position “that does not take sides between subject and object.”60 For all his protestations, Rorty offers some evidence even in later writings that he has not quite freed himself from the transition criticized by Farrell, which moves from the loss of the old metaphysical program to the adoption of a new subject-centered metaphysics. He quotes approvingly Nietzsche’s view that “self-creation could take the place once occupied by obedience.”61 The very volume in which Farrell’s criticism appears contains a statement that we should substitute the question of “what meaning shall we give to our lives?” for the older question about the meaning of life, inviting a jump from the negative point that human history is not to be placed “within a still wider, metaphysical context,” to the positive view that the flow of human history itself offers the “ultimate context” of significance and evaluation.62 Rorty could also be accused of replacing a theological with a humanist metaphysics. He offers the following gloss on why he is inclined to call himself an atheist: “I want to use that history—that swelling, unfinished poem—as my ultimate context, rather than placing it within a still wider, metaphysical context. Because I think of God as primarily a name for that wider context, I am inclined to proclaim myself an atheist.”63 The suspicion that Rorty’s refusal of a metaphysical or religious position brings an automatic commitment to an alternative metaphysics is summed-up in his reply to an essay of Richard Bernstein, where he is commenting on the familiar view that we are under the authority of something that has a privileged description of us: “To escape this latter thought is to think of human beings, either individually or in groups, as self-creators.”64 Given such statements, it is no wonder that some suspect Rorty of a “deep linguistic idealism.”65 Other critics question the transition that Rorty seems to assume between the defeat of metaphysics, and the adoption of pragmatism, which seems to imply that we have an overview of the available options, so that we can tell what necessarily follows what. At times, Rorty describes this transition so as to imply that the latter follows naturally from the former, as if giving up the one means taking up the other. “Now I should like to describe in somewhat

Pragmatism

73

more detail how human inquiry looks from a pragmatist point of view—how it looks once one stops describing it as an attempt to correspond to the intrinsic nature of reality, and starts describing it as an attempt to serve transitory purposes and solve transitory problems.”66 The change is also described in terms of a natural shift between two specific vocabularies. “Critical terminology naturally shifts from metaphors of isomorphism, symbolism, and mapping to talk of utility, convenience, and likelihood of getting what we want.”67 How do we characterize this move from the denial of realism to Rorty’s kind of pragmatism? Rorty seems to hold to a loose historical transition, so that once metaphysical justifications are defeated, it is to be expected that a pragmatist vocabulary will fill the void. It is not clear why this should be. Some argue that the loss of the original metaphysical metaphors need not lead to any replacements at all, and that our practices do not need any replacement philosophical description if they are to survive. Given we have bade farewell to one philosophical vocabulary, there is no reason why we should install another. D. Z. Phillips mounts a powerful critique from a Wittgensteinian point of view along these lines, arguing that if the emancipatory move away from religion and metaphysics seems to lead automatically to a positive pragmatist program, this is because the emancipatory move has remained half-hearted and has not really been carried through. Wittgensteinians endorse Rorty’s criticisms of metaphysics and metaphysical religion happily enough. But for Wittgenstein, nothing further follows for our everyday practices, once the defeat of metaphysics is accomplished. Philosophy famously “leaves everything as it is” so that human practices, including religious practices, can continue in principle as they were.68 By contrast, Rorty seems to imply that to farewell religion and metaphysics forces us to an alternative program. Phillips picks out a phrase from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where Rorty says that we only ever know the world as it is “under optional descriptions.”69 Rorty seems to use this phrase as a justification for the pragmatist program, in that it leads us to drop the old metaphysical ideal of correspondence, in favor of a view of humans as “generators of new descriptions.”70 The exposure of our knowledge as lacking metaphysical grounds leads toward an alternative view of it as a kind of aesthetic choice. Because this is always made in face of possible alternatives, it never seems to impose itself with full seriousness, in the way that something like a religious decision usually imposes itself. A religious commitment seems seriously altered in fact, if it is reduced to a choice of this sort. A moment that was originally experienced as surrender to grace is downgraded to a decision to adopt a particular articulation of one’s solitary feelings and experiences. Luther’s famous statement that he cannot do otherwise in taking a stand for reformation starts to look like an exercise in self-deception, in that for the “aesthetic”

74

Chapter 3

view, experienced necessities never in fact have the last word, but always conceal a deeper choice. As we know from writers such as Sartre, they can even serve as a means by which the subject refuses to take responsibility for choices that could have been made differently. Certainly, for a believer who speaks from within a religious vocabulary, a choice for religion usually seems anything but “optional.” Coming to religious faith can even bear in on a believer against his or her will. To take an example not discussed by Phillips, C. S. Lewis describes himself as he is being drawn back to religious belief, as “perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England,” having experienced the process by which he returned to religious belief as if it was imposed on him almost against his will.71 Rorty could, of course, agree that this is how Lewis experiences this passage in his life. He would simply suggest that the experience is better described in other ways, which admit the optional character of the new religious description. Lewis’s own account of his conversion could then be corrected in light of a general insight into the optional nature of religion. It would be seen as a form of bad faith, an insistence that a chosen course of action is in fact imposed from beyond. Rorty’s critics point to the fact that the claim to know what will always be the real origin of the action (the agent’s free choice) is ultimately metaphysical. Phillips notes that Rorty claims to value “the conversations of the world” as the basic transaction of his ideal pragmatist society. But with a phrase like “optional descriptions,” he has effectively promoted an alternative pragmatist metaphysics that undercuts the actual conversations of the world. He implicitly claims to know in advance what people are always really doing, so that however they might describe themselves to themselves, Rorty knows better. A religious commitment is a decision that ultimately furthers interests of ours. So the move to pragmatism does not just leave us with the world we formerly inhabited, shorn of its metaphysical beliefs. It brings us into a new set of metaphysical beliefs. PRAGMATISM AS A RECOMMENDATION Does Rorty have a reply to this criticism? Obviously, he does not want to admit that his pragmatist viewpoint implies a new metaphysics. He insists that as an approach to life and the world, it is no better grounded than any other.72 He claims that the arguments that he mounts against the metaphysical point of view are aimed at undermining the point of view rhetorically, and not at instituting a better example of the same paradigm. Metaphysical believers are to be brought to a point where they simply give up, and consent to try out a life without metaphysics.

Pragmatism

75

In later expressions of his position, Rorty weakens the suggestion that pragmatism follows with any necessity from the defeat of metaphysics. More often, he describes the pragmatist position as a practical “recommendation” that we are encouraged to try out. Perhaps we discover that we have adopted most of it without knowing and are simply encouraged to name it for what it is. Rorty talks of it as “a fundamental choice which confronts the reflective mind.”73 Caputo remarks that such a choice is not made for the sorts of reasons that usually characterize philosophical choices. Rorty wants us to give up certain sorts of philosophy in the way that we “quit smoking or lay off fattening foods.”74 This image may not be the happiest, in that we usually have well-defined reasons for giving up smoking or unhealthy foods, and could see our choices here as practical implementations of theoretical positions. Caputo perhaps means that while it is based on reasons, the choice to quit smoking also means accepting the sort of life in which such reasons are compelling. Rorty describes his arguments as attempts to get us off the “seesaw.”75 He says that pragmatists set out “to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behavior which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it.”76 He offers an example when responding to critics who object to his use of Darwinian paradigms, and who suggest that this implies his endorsement of the metaphysical truth of the Darwinian account. Rorty replies that he is not saying that Darwin’s theory is “true” in some non-pragmatist sense, but that he is simply affirming that Darwin is worth trying out. “[I]n the spirit of Deweyan experimentation . . . it behoves us to give the self-image Darwin suggested to us a whirl, in the hope of having fewer philosophical problems on our hands.”77 This shows one of the more radical aspects of Rorty’s pragmatism, in that he does not want to establish his position by argument, something that might give it the status of a new metaphysical position. Rather he simply wants to render the pragmatist account plausible and attractive so that a reader is tempted to change allegiance, while accepting that there is no argumentative bridge from metaphysical to pragmatist views. Once the reader sees what is possible on the other side, Rorty is confident that he or she will not want to return. Rorty regards the work of Robert Brandom as a good recent articulation of the sort of position he wants to promote.78 The key point is that the agreement of a society always stands behind the necessities of theoretical positions in such a way as to determine what we regard as authoritative evidence, and so on. Rorty raises the question of the status of Brandom’s own conclusions here, which are obviously novel, and do not rely on any established consensus in the philosophical world. As we would expect, Rorty does not think that Brandom’s view expresses a “conceptual necessity,” as if it rested on a transcendental argument, or as if the very notion of an authority-statement requires a social foundation. If such an argument were valid, it would be

76

Chapter 3

possible to claim it as a straightforward theoretical conclusion, given that it follows from commitments the philosophical community already accepts. Nor is the argument an “empirical discovery,” as though Brandom has ascertained from case studies that society in fact always stands in the background of any authoritative statement. Rorty’s conclusion is that Brandom is “articulating a cultural-political stance by pointing to the social advantages of his account of authority.”79 This is to say that he is making a proposal that we come into a new world that we enter by trying to think of things in a different way. Rorty encourages his readers to take this step by suggesting it will be to their advantage, although the advantage will appear only from within the new point of view. It may not look like an advantage when judged against older aspirations. So Rorty tries to draw us into a new life-attitude, encouraging us to a decision that is not far removed from an act of faith, for all that it brings us into a very different space from the one recommended by traditional acts of faith. We find ourselves in a world whose fundamental perspective never exceeds that of humans and their interests. Rorty sees himself as already living in such a world, and he is confident that if others try it, they will not want to leave it again. Discussions of religion take place on this basis. This is to propose a very large change to our usual ways of seeing things. In fact, the size of the change means that it presents peculiar difficulties for discussion, as is shown when critics try to express straightforward objections to the pragmatist point of view. Farrell says for example, that pragmatists reduce religious language (as well as other descriptive language) to a sort of expressive fiction, in that they do not much care whether their statements are true in any traditional sense, so long as they pay their way.80 But pragmatists can always come back with the more fundamental point that they are trying to get rid of the distinction between representational and expressive language altogether. They want to abolish a view that sharply distinguishes a first-rate literal language that records things as they are, from a second-rate expressive language that articulates things that have a lower grade of reality. When challenged to answer directly whether there is really a God, or whether God is just a useful fiction people use to articulate their experience of life, pragmatists deny that one need be forced to one side or the other, as if everything has to come down either to pure theory or mere expressive practice. In this situation, the critic’s frustration easily becomes an accusation of dishonesty, the view that whatever pragmatists say, they are covering over the fact that their position is really just a version of anti-realism. J. Wesley Robbins puts the question from the viewpoint of a defender of Rorty’s program, making a criticism of traditional realists who think pragmatists are being evasive: “How does one make the charge of dishonesty about the representational status of Christian terminology stick to people who want us to understand language use generally in non-representational terms?”81

Pragmatism

77

Even if the pragmatist proposal has the status of a recommendation, it still needs to be argued why we should try out pragmatism rather than some other proposal. Given we have left metaphysical approaches behind and are relaxed about a new general description of what we are about, why should we give pragmatism a whirl, rather than something else? Is Rorty’s recommendation simply motivated by personal reasons toward his own preferences? Commentators are sometimes troubled by what seems an invitation to adopt pragmatism without any clear theoretical reason for doing so. In an article that draws a brief comment from Rorty, Mark Okrent asks about reasons for adopting a pragmatist approach and sees two possibilities: either to mount a pragmatist argument that points to cultural and social benefits, or to fall back on a transcendental argument that sets out necessary conditions for all of our talk, showing that whenever we describe something as “language,” we have already implicitly understood it in pragmatist fashion. “Either it is argued that there are pragmatic grounds on which to adopt pragmatism or pragmatism is defended on transcendental grounds as expressing certain necessary conditions on the use of the words ‘language,’ ‘truth,’ etc.”82 Okrent believes that pragmatist arguments for pragmatism have failed and that the only possibility is an appeal to some sort of transcendental argument.83 It is clear, however, that Rorty does not want to endorse anything like this. So the question remains as to why the defeat of metaphysics should be followed by a recommendation for a human-centered experimental alternative. Is it simply a choice Rorty proposes because he himself prefers it? He perhaps indicates something like this in his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” where he says that he gave up his early philosophical ideal of “holding reality and justice in a single vision” partly because such a vision was ultimately religious and he “couldn’t imagine becoming religious.”84 It is also clear that the historical situation of his philosophizing is important. He sees himself as promoting a successor version of the kind of approach that started with Nietzsche. Once we give up appeals beyond the human, it seems natural that interpretation should shift into a more human key. Historically, this seems indeed to have been the case, and Rorty refers to strongly “pragmatist” passages that are found in Nietzsche himself.85 So it could be conceded in Rorty’s favor that the conversion to a pragmatist approach is a historical consequence of the perceived defeat of metaphysical religion and metaphysics. Once a culture discovers that it no longer has to think in the old metaphysical ways, it can be attracted to an experimental stance, where the exploration of new possibilities becomes a significant lifeideal, enhancing perhaps the sense of autonomy that is so much part of a contemporary Western identity. So people are moved naturally toward pragmatism. This could be the case even with theological explorations, once they come to describe themselves in a historical and Heideggerian way, accepting

78

Chapter 3

the importance of original linguistic disclosure. They realize that there are always other possible ways of experiencing the world and that these other ways are cut off from us by our current ways of experiencing. In a discussion of Heidegger, Rorty remarks that Western history began when it occurred to the first ironist, for no particular reason, that “maybe we don’t have to talk the way we do.”86 It may, of course, be that this drive toward a pragmatist stance lasts only so long as the remnants of the religious-metaphysical worldview are still with us, presenting themselves as barriers to be overcome. It could also be that remnants of the religious or metaphysical view of the world will always endure in Western philosophical history, so that the experimental revolution Rorty recommends is part of a permanent struggle against metaphysical temptation. Yet Rorty himself does not seem to limit his view in this way. He wants to inaugurate a cultural style that marks a sharp break with the old religious or metaphysical world, and does not depend on it for its existence. In the end, he seems to be recommending an imaginative decision, perhaps an attempt to catch hold of a future that the decision itself helps to realize. Overall, this discussion reflects two different strands in Rorty’s approach that are in tension with one another. The first emphasizes openness to all human experiences, moods, and projects, encouraging exploration of novel points of view, and excluding only the kind of correspondence aspiration that belongs to metaphysics or religion. The second emphasizes, however, that the forms of life that people adopt can always be described as forms of coping or problem-solving, so that they take on something of the status of means to ends. In other words, it is recommended that we adopt this as a permanent pragmatist framework. Regardless of how our future history unfolds, the narratives with which we approach the world will always be understood as part of a human-centered project, the search for a better life. It makes little difference that this is presented simply as a recommendation. The recommendation seems to have a permanence that echoes a metaphysical view, even if it claims that it is not itself metaphysical. It is questionable whether Rorty’s pragmatism ever reconciles these two conflicting aspects. Depending on whether he focuses on the one or the other, his philosophy takes on different shapes. A PRAGMATIST VOCABULARY The turn to pragmatism therefore follows a practical decision to try out a novel approach to the world. Once Rorty breaks the hold of the metaphysical position that reality imposes a truth of its own, he invites us into a pragmatist understanding. The program is then filled out with a set of new metaphors that replace the metaphors of the older tradition. Such metaphors can even form

Pragmatism

79

the basis of something like a systematic philosophy, in the way that such a program is developed by Brandom. Rorty draws on the older pragmatist tradition for his metaphors, looking particularly to James and Dewey. One of the most fundamental has already been mentioned, that language should be seen as a sort of tool, rather than as a medium in which the truth of things comes to expression (a medium that depends on what Rorty describes as “mirror” imagery). A historical epoch dominated by “Greek ocular metaphors” will give way to one in which such metaphors look as quaint as preclassical animist vocabulary.87 As is usual with the working of metaphors, their success depends on their not being noticed. We simply find ourselves operating in the grip of the metaphor of knowledge as vision and lose ourselves in the objects that appear in its light, so that the process seems governed by its own necessity. In situations like this, the mere suggestion that there is an alternative is enough to expose the dominant metaphor and break its spell, suggesting that what we have accepted as necessary is merely one possibility among others. Rorty introduces the metaphor of vocabularies as tools in order to develop an alternative of this kind. The suggestion that we see our vocabularies in this way has important antecedents in the founding moments of American pragmatism. As noted earlier, William James sees the intellectual history of the West as a progression of categories embraced and discarded according to their usefulness. In an oddly telling remark (given that no one takes “ether” seriously any more), he asks whether the “new” scientific understanding of reality, “the corpuscular and etheric world,” is essentially more true than the scholastic substantial forms which preceded it.88 The categories of common sense “may after all be only a collection of extraordinarily successful hypotheses.”89 And different hypotheses are suited to different tasks. “Common sense is better for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third.” As to “whether either be truer absolutely, Heaven only knows.”90 One can reply, of course, that certain of our tools might “work” precisely by representing the objects with which they interact, so that to promote a metaphor of vocabularies as tools is not necessarily to deny that the tools might have a representational function. Putnam notes this when discussing the position of John McDowell, who holds to a view that there can be “representation without representations,” in other words, that while we should abjure the classic notion of philosophical representation, this does not deny that some of our language might work by trying to represent its objects accurately. So the metaphor of “tools” is not necessarily opposed to the idea that language represents the world in some way. Putnam recommends avoiding Bergson’s “unfortunate” idea that if language is a product of evolution, statements are regarded as tools “as opposed to correct representations.”91 This humbler notion of “representation” presumably would not trouble Rorty’s narrative. He could accept

80

Chapter 3

that some of our concepts might work in the way cameras do, so that their performance as tools comes down to accuracy of representation. But this has no significant consequences for the overall pragmatist position. One of the advantages the new metaphoric brings is to remove the threat of skepticism that hangs around Western philosophy since Descartes. Skepticism follows representationalism, in that we can never be sure that the world in itself does not ultimately contradict our representations of it. Naturally, we have no way of getting outside the representations to check them against the originals. Yet if representations can lose touch with reality in this way, working tools cannot. In Rorty’s view we should regard the word “atom” more or less as we regard a prehensile thumb: as a useful tool for coping with the environment. Once we do this, we do not need to say any more that the word works because it represents part of the environment, any more than we try to say this of the prehensile thumb.92 The utility of a fulcrum has nothing to do with it representing the weights lifted or objects manipulated.93 They are rather part of an interaction of the organism with its environment, which can be successful or unsuccessful, but which does not set out to represent anything. Reminders like this help break the spell of the metaphor of vision that supports the ideal of pure theory. Rorty illustrates the position with a number of examples, all of which parallel the contrast between Paracelsus and Pasteur. A realist might attempt to explain or justify Freudian approaches by appealing to the way the world really is, as if there really is an “ego,” or an “unconscious,” invisible agencies that command hidden psychic forces. For such a view, our language first becomes accurate when it wakes up to such things and sets out to identify and deal with them. For Rorty, this gets things the wrong way round. We should say rather that we have stumbled into a productive and fruitful vocabulary, which provides a set of conceptual instruments to help us get ahead. To say that Freud uncovers the truth about human nature is just to pay the Freudian vocabulary an empty compliment, congratulating it in a roundabout way on its success. The “unconscious” is better seen as a conceptual instrument of ours, which sometimes enables successful treatment of the neurotic. Any discussion of its status or nature follows this, and is a generalization from the original causal effectiveness of the concept. An attempt to explain the latter by the former moves in a vicious circle. Rorty often mentions the “dormitive power” argument, where Moliere’s doctor explains why opium puts people to sleep by appealing to its power to put people to sleep.94 Realism’s explanation of the effectiveness of an instrument through an appeal to a hidden nature is in fact at best a generalization of the original effectiveness.95 Rorty sees himself making the same point as Wittgenstein, that the “representational” part of a term is always embedded in a practical economy of linguistic moves that oversee the use of the term. The functioning of the word,

Pragmatism

81

including its reference, is bound up with these moves. The reference cannot therefore be used to explain them or to ground the economy of use. Given it has no explanatory value, the “representational” part can then drop out without remainder, as does Wittgenstein’s wheel that is not connected to the rest of the engine. Rorty mentions this example along with Wittgenstein’s illustration of the “beetle in the box,” which Rorty interprets as showing that the individual sense-datum which is supposedly in the mind of each perceiver, plays no part in the logic of discussion.96 Rorty then draws the general conclusion that at this level, “critical terminology naturally shifts from metaphors of isomorphism, symbolism, and mapping to talk of utility, convenience, and likelihood of getting what we want.”97 BRANDOM ON EXISTENCE With a pragmatist set of metaphors in place, Rorty can go on to develop relatively systematic treatments of traditional philosophical questions. One of the most striking is a discussion of the notion of existence, which Rorty draws from Robert Brandom. While there is disagreement between Brandom and Rorty on some topics, for example, the place of transcendental arguments, they are in basic agreement on how talk of existence should be interpreted from within a pragmatist context. Discussion focuses on the point that we seem forced to say certain things, as if an external authority were bearing in on our talk, and channeling it in particular directions. This authority is, of course, often interpreted in a metaphysical way, as if reality itself simply bears in on us and demands acknowledgment. Once we have glimpsed the way things are, we have no real choice, at least if we still want to be counted as sane. So we justify our commitments by appealing to “the intrinsic nature of reality, as it is in itself,” knowing that nobody wants to argue with that.98 Naturally, Rorty wants to dismiss this sort of explanation. Yet he accepts, like everyone else, that we seem to fall under the power of an authority that exercises a control over us and which therefore needs to be explained. Rorty supports a proposal of Brandom’s for describing the sources of this authority: that we see it as going back in the end to “matters of social practice, and not objective matters of fact.”99 He begins with the view common to many twentieth-century philosophers that our acting in the world, along with the talk that accompanies such action, opens up sets of logical possibilities and closes others. First-person talk about physical objects is an example, in that it projects a grid of spatiotemporal locations centered on the current position of the speaker, allowing such expressions as “over there” or “a long way from here.” The grid covers a set of spaces, each with its own description (e.g., a street-address), which may or may not be occupied by

82

Chapter 3

an object. This is the key to understanding statements about “existence.” As Rorty puts it: “To say that a physical object exists is to say that the object in question occupies one of those points—that it occupies an address specified with reference to the coordinates of that grid.”100 Brandom insists that the talk which projects the world of physical objects is just one of many possibilities, and that it carries no special privileges. He acknowledges that this goes against Kant, who assumes that the space-time grid is privileged, being the only source from which the mind can construct objects that claim existence in a common world. Kant’s grid, therefore, serves as a base for the realities mapped by other grids. His privileging of the space-time grid has important implications for talk about the existence of God. If our knowledge of existence is always tied to sense-intuitions in the way that Kant thinks, then the existence of a deity is beyond the range of our knowledge, given that God does not inhabit space-time, and therefore remains excluded from the only intuition that is possible. By contrast, Brandom thinks that all grids are in principle equal. They are straightforward products of different kinds of talk, which we develop as we enter into our various life-purposes. The Sherlock Holmes stories set up a grid that includes persons and things mentioned in the stories, along with all the possibilities that they entail. It is true to say, within this language, that Dr. Watson’s wife exists, but not true to say that Holmes’s wife exists. Brandom thinks that “numerals” and the philosophical concept of “mind” are further examples of objects that come into existence from projections of particular grids. Rorty proposes examples circulated by writers like David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, with their references to consciousness, “raw feels,” and the possibility of zombies. The future will bring grids that we have not yet thought of. The notion of a grid relates to Rorty’s concept of a “vocabulary,” a way of talking (perhaps limited to a particular area of our lives), in light of which we associate and dissociate parts of the world, so that objects appear to us with meaningful contours. The largest vocabularies of this sort are “final” vocabularies. The vocabulary of St. Paul and Freud are competing examples of final vocabularies.101 They form our vision, as if offering instructions on how to divide up what we see. The notion of a final vocabulary fits with the important ontological point that Rorty makes, that nature has no joints of its own, no natural lines of division that force themselves on a knower. Rorty remarks in the context of a discussion about morality that our sense of solidarity with others goes back to “which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient,” and he concludes that “such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary.”102 The Christian vocabulary, whose historical importance Rorty acknowledges for forming a distinctive Western sense of solidarity, teaches its practitioners to associate the poor with Christ so that the beggar is seen as “another Christ.” In other words, a vocabulary

Pragmatism

83

opens up logical spaces that can be filled by the particular entities that it allows to appear. Like Rorty, Brandom holds to the radical contingency of the linguistic mechanisms that produce grids, and like Rorty, he connects them to particular practical moves that we make in the world. The scheme therefore receives a pragmatic twist, which connects the meaning of the things in the world to purposes of ours. All discourses are in the end part of our getting on in the world, “coping” in the broadest sense. In some ways, this approach benefits religious language, allowing it to take its place alongside other discourses on an equal footing. When considered “philosophically,” the criteria of existence which religious language puts into play are as just as good as those of any other grid. They cannot be discredited by a hostile metaphysics like that of Kant, which holds to a unique necessary foundation of a sense-manifold to ground a claim of existence. As Rorty says, a set of religious scriptures and the Sherlock Holmes stories are on a par when it comes to opening up grids of logical spaces that enable us “to confirm or disconfirm the existence of objects.”103 So Brandom thinks that a grid enables a world of basic objects to appear for us, existing in relation to one another. Some of the objects are so basic that they help define the grid. The main characters of the Sherlock Holmes stories are like this, enjoying a normative status that secures the grid itself. For example, Holmes has to be a detective; the grid would change its identity if he were a brush-salesman. Presumably, he could live at 222B Baker Street, instead of 221B, without threat to his identity. Brandom calls the basic objects “canonical designators.” They serve as norms for deciding other questions, for example, whether Holmes has a wife. One could imagine a student asking about Holmes’s marital status and a teacher replying by referring to the canonical designators of the stories. Rorty insists on a distinction between questions that arise within spaces opened up by the grid, which can be settled by appeal to canonical designators, and questions about the status of the grid as a whole, which cannot be settled by this sort of appeal. If a culture has entrenched the list of Olympian deities as canonical designators, it can ask a straightforward question about whether Uranus and Aphrodite have a child. But we must not think that a question about whether there are “really gods and goddesses” is on the same level.104 This is much more a question about the original use of the grid as a whole. It does not ask about something that exists within a language-game, but rather about whether the whole languagegame that sets up the Olympian deities and their context is worth playing in the first place. Among other examples, Rorty mentions the logic of the game of chess.105 While he does not much develop the example, the parallel seems clear. We can ask whether the Ruy-Lopez defense is more solid than some other

84

Chapter 3

defense, and this is answered straightforwardly by reference to the canonical designators of the game of chess (that the king is the most important piece, that capture of the king is the ultimate aim and so on). We cannot ask in the same way whether the chess king has too much power, or whether the chess king might one day cease to exist, and the game go on without him. The closest we can get to such questions is to transform them into questions about the use of chess language as a whole; in other words, whether it is likely that the game will always be played, or is worth playing, or whether certain changes could be made to it without it becoming an entirely different game. As philosophers within the Wittgensteinian tradition have insisted, the meaning of “existence” with regard to chess pieces only becomes apparent from within the practice of the game of chess. If we ask about the existence of a chess king, the logic of the game itself shows what is meant by “exists” here. A question that tries to reach beyond this to a generalized question about “existence” (“but do chess kings really exist?”), which is asked regardless of any grid that provides a background context, is shown to be nonsense. Questions like “are there really numbers?” or “are there really physical objects?” are similarly nonsensical.106 The only reply is to point to the relevant languagepractice and its usefulness. To look at the matter in this way is to subscribe to what Rorty calls “the primacy of the social,” in that the languages in terms of which objects are articulated go back to a kind of common decision to adopt a particular vocabulary. The sense of necessity that we experience from time to time goes back, not to an impress of reality itself, but rather to the rules of a game that we have agreed to play, the application of social norms that have been established by a society. Even modus ponens codifies a social rule that if we say certain things, we are then obligated to say other things.107 This original acceptance of a way of talking by a language community is therefore the ultimate authority that stands behind everything else. The doctrine of the primacy of the social is, of course, opposed to commonsense or metaphysical positions that would see reality itself as dictating our first insights about how things are. In particular, it refuses any significant status to “perception” as grounding our knowledge. Rorty and Brandom deny that perception has normative status in the sense that it imposes an original view of the way things are. The action of the world is limited to causal impact, the blind impress of one thing upon another. As has been noted, this is strictly separated from the area of reasons and explanations, so that it has no normative force, and cannot, in Brandom’s words “bind us, oblige us, or entitle us to do something.”108 There is no self-description reality pushes on us that would serve as an independent norm for how things finally are, and that is independent of our relations to a wider community of speakers. The community has the last word regarding what counts as plausible or not. Rorty takes the example of a person who claims to have seen the risen Christ in the disc

Pragmatism

85

of the sun on Easter morning,109 and compares the reception of such a vision with other claims that are based on sincere observation reports—someone who claims to have seen a round square, or a unicorn, or to have discerned that God is female. He points out that decisions about the credibility of such reports do not come back to an epistemic authority that attaches directly to observation, like a belief in “a special relation between reality and human sense-organs.”110 Rather, the decision comes back to the range of possibilities allowed by language practices adopted by a particular community. The vision in the disc of the sun might be accepted without further ado from within the discourse of some communities. Probably none of the other examples offered would be even considered by contemporary Western communities, religious or otherwise. This illustrates how claims to existence are filtered through an application of social norms, so that they fall under the “primacy of the social.” For Rorty and Brandom, this argument is directed against what is also a principal target of Rorty’s mentor Wilfrid Sellars: the “myth of the given.” Brandom sums it up: “The world consists of things and their causal relations, and they can only cause and not justify a claim or a belief—cannot make it correct or incorrect.”111 Only with a vocabulary do we get meaningful links between things that enable reasons and justifications. This position points toward a pragmatist dissolution of traditional disciplinary boundaries. Discourses that might have been regarded as irreducibly different from one another because they were concerned with different objects—literary criticism and philosophy, for example— are now shown to be variants of a single unified impulse, controlled by a community’s means of “coping.” The change shifts the weight of agency back to those who are doing the coping, and limits the direct influence of the world to causal agency. As well as attacking the automatic authority of sense-perception, the position also calls in question the broad Platonic view of ideal norms as exercising a sort of authority. Rorty has a discussion of an example where two opposing sides come to court and both appeal to existing law to justify their case. This situation is so common that we can overlook its strangeness, in that the appeal makes sense only on the assumption that the very law that is meant to decide the case is ambiguous. This seems to follow from the fact that both sides insist that it supports their particular case. So the law itself does not resolve the issue in a straightforward manner.112 Resolution comes down rather to a decision of the court, which creatively affirms one of the positions over the other, and endorses it as reflecting the way current society wants to understand the law. This effectively determines what the law is to mean at a particular place and time. The example should cure us of any tendency to see the law as standing over human decision-makers as an automatic arbitrator. Instead the decision-makers extend the boundaries of their current world in a particular direction, and the new interpretation takes its place as part of this new world.

86

Chapter 3

Brandom thinks that these two sides, in applying a set of existing norms and extending their meaning, are ultimately identical. The most commonplace use of language in a new situation always involves an element of novelty or creativity.113 The commonsense intuition that reality is simply there, imposing a duty of conformity upon our knowledge, is therefore broken down into a scheme where there is no strict division between knowledge and world. We do not register how the world is by purely contemplative activity. Rather our knowledge proceeds from a unity of theory and practice that ultimately comes down to a society’s “getting on” or “coping.” In general, Brandom’s proposals for understanding the notion of existence push the discussion back to grids that societies adopt in order to advance their lives in some way. They deny positivist positions that begin with privileged data of experience and move us toward a view friendly to Rorty’s style of pragmatism, where all grids are in principle equal. They are to be judged simply on whether they “work,” bringing their users into forms of life they do not want to desert, once they attain them. This seems to offer a place for religious and theological discourse that was not available under the older positivist scheme. Again, the question must be raised of the status of such considerations within Rorty’s wider project. It could sound as if he is endorsing a particular metaphysical theory about the status of language and its relation to the world. Presumably, if he is to be consistent, Rorty needs to maintain that the doctrine of the primacy of the social is being proposed only as a useful way of summing up much of what he wants to recommend, in that it is a way of looking at the world that fits with a more general pragmatist viewpoint. Rorty can also appeal to Brandom’s arguments for the doctrine of the primacy of the social in a negative way, arguing against metaphysical views that see the brute reality of the world as contradicting the doctrine (insisting that the metaphysical possibility is in fact the only one). As we have seen, much of Rorty’s writing aims at showing that we are not forced into metaphysics in this way. His proposals for a “positive” understanding of pragmatism, and the life associated with it, then stand ready for those who are convinced. NOTES 1. William James, The Pragmatic Method, in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 311–472, 442. This work has appeared under various titles, including Pragmatism, and Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism. 2. Barry Allen, “Is It Pragmatism? Rorty and the American Tradition,” in A Pragmatist’s Progress, ed. John Pettegrew (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 135–50, 137.

Pragmatism

87

3. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 1, 1925, eds. Jo Ann Boydston, Patricia Baysinger, and Barbara Levine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981), 29. 4. Charles S. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings, ed. Edward C. Moore (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 137–57, 146. 5. James, The Pragmatic Method, 392. 6. Ibid., 424. 7. Ibid., 423. 8. Ibid., 403, 405. 9. Ibid., 382. 10. Ibid., 455. 11. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 18. 12. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” vol. 3, 290–306, 297. 13. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 16. 14. Ibid., 34. “It [empirical method] places before others a map of the road that has been travelled; they may accordingly, if they will, re-travel the road to inspect the landscape for themselves.” 15. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 389. 16. Richard Rorty, “Truth Without Correspondence to Reality,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 23–46, 24. See also “Education as Socialization and as Individualization,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 114–26, 119. 17. Richard Rorty, “Response to Gouinlock,” in Rorty & Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 91–99, 94. 18. Richard Rorty, “Overcoming the Tradition: Heidegger and Dewey,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 37–59, 51. 19. For example, Larry A. Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 60–62. 20. Peirce, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” 154–55. 21. Ibid., 155–56. 22. James, The Pragmatic Method, 438. 23. Quoted by Edward J. K. Gitre, “William James on Divine Intimacy: Psychical Research, Cosmological Realism and a Circumscribed Re-reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience,” History of the Human Sciences 19, no. 2 (2006): 1–21, 8. 24. Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism, An Open Question (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 10. 25. James, The Pragmatic Method, 438. 26. William James, The Meaning of Truth in William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 821–978, 824. 27. Putnam, Pragmatism, An Open Question, 10. 28. James, The Pragmatic Method, 438. 29. Cheryl Misak, “Introduction,” in New Pragmatists, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 1–6, 1. 30. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” xvi–xxxii, xvi. 31. Richard Rorty, “Response to Hartshorne,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 29–37, 36.

88

Chapter 3

32. Richard Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 68–71, 71. 33. Cf. Fn. 17 above. 34. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 11. 35. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism,” 1–17, 1. 36. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 156–82, 159. 37. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 359. 38. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” xxiv. 39. Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” 71. 40. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 160–75, 163. 41. Rorty, “Truth Without Correspondence to Reality,” 23–46, 24. 42. Ibid., 24. 43. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism Without Method,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63–77, 76. 44. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophical Papers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27–41, 28. 45. For example, Malachowski, ed., Richard Rorty, 6. 46. Rorty, “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” 27–41. 47. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism,” 156–83, 169. 48. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 169. 49. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6. 50. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 176. 51. Rorty, “Charles Taylor on Truth,” vol. 3, 84–97, 96. 52. Rorty, “Introduction: Antirepresentationalism, Ethnocentrism, and Liberalism,” 1. 53. Rorty, “Truth Without Correspondence To Reality,” 23–46, 26–27. 54. Rorty, “Dewey between Hegel and Darwin,” 302. 55. Ronald A. Kuipers, Solidarity and the Stranger (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 114. 56. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” 154–88, 179. Cf. Richard Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy,” in Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), xiii–xlvii, xlii. 57. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” 178. 58. Ibid., 179. 59. Ibid., 175. 60. Rorty, “Response to Farrell,” 189–95, 191. 61. Richard Rorty, “Afterword: Pragmatism, Pluralism and Postmodernism,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 262–75, 265. 62. Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” 71.

Pragmatism

89

63. Richard Rorty, “Response to Charles Hartshorne,” in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 29–36, 35–36. 64. Rorty, “Response to Richard Bernstein,” 71. 65. Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” 217–31, 222. Rorty discusses this charge in “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” 105–19, 108. Malachowski offers a strong defence of Rorty in “Imagination Over Truth: Rorty’s Contribution to Pragmatism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 207–28, 220ff. 66. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” xxii. 67. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 163. 68. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, n.124 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 49e. 69. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 379. Rorty also speaks of the “choice” of a certain set of metaphors for speaking about knowledge (ibid., 159), and refers to the desire for an epistemology as the most recent result “of the dialectical development of an originally chosen set of metaphors” (ibid., 163). 70. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 378. 71. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Collins, 1959), 182. 72. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8. 73. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 166. 74. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, 88. 75. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 11. 76. Ibid., 9. 77. Richard Rorty, “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 43–62, 48. 78. Cf., for example, Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” Monist 66 (1983): 387–409. 79. Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” in Philosophy and Cultural Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–26, 8. 80. Farrell, “Rorty and Antirealism,” 158. 81. Robbins defends Don Cupitt and Christian “naturalists” against charges of irrealism in this way. Cf. J. Wesley Robbins, “When Christians Become Naturalists,” Religious Studies 28, no. 2 (1992): 195–206, 201. Rorty makes similar points about the charge of “aestheticism” in Rorty and Vattimo, The Future of Religion, 31. 82. Mark Okrent, “The Metaphilosophical Consequences of Pragmatism,” in The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? eds. Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989), 177–98, 194. 83. “Given the failure of pragmatic justifications for pragmatism it seems clear that, on its own grounds, if pragmatism is true it is true as a philosophical theory and, given the actual way in which it has been defended, pragmatism is best seen as comprised of transcendental claims concerning necessary conditions on language,

90

Chapter 3

truth, and semantic content.” See Okrent, “The Metaphilosophical Consequences of Pragmatism,” 194. 84. Rorty, “Introduction: Relativism: Finding and Making,” 12–13. 85. Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean Philosophy,” 1–6, 2. The Nietzsche reference is to The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), secs. 480–544. 86. Richard Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 27–49, 43. 87. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 11. 88. James, The Pragmatic Method, 427. 89. Ibid., 428. 90. Ibid., 427. 91. Putnam, “The Question of Realism,” 227. 92. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, 5. 93. Ibid., 6. 94. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8. 95. See, for example, ibid. 96. Richard Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 12. 97. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism,” 163. 98. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 8. 99. Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” 389–90. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 7. 100. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 18. 101. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 5. 102. Ibid., 192. 103. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 19. 104. Ibid., 20–21. 105. Ibid., 22. 106. Ibid., 20. 107. Ibid., 15. 108. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 161. 109. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 10. 110. Ibid. 111. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 161. 112. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 9. 113. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 179.

Part II

RELIGION

Chapter 4

Pragmatist Religious Belief

A PRAGMATIST UNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION Rorty’s discussion of belief in God is best understood against the background of Brandom’s account of the priority of the social. The account has a pragmatist direction in that the adoption of a grid, along with the style of life it makes possible, is seen as developing and enabling a society’s purposes. Rorty’s reflections on belief in God fit into this picture, and run largely as we would expect. If they wish, individuals can adopt theistic beliefs with their characteristic discourse to articulate the deepest things in their lives. This is not a choice for a second-rate discourse, as if theistic talk belongs to a “symbolic” space that sits uneasily alongside hard-nosed scientific talk about what is really there. Theistic talk takes its place on an equal footing alongside other ways of talking in a liberal society. Rorty is, however, fiercely opposed to attempts by religious believers to introduce talk about God into the public discourse of a society without further ado. God is not an additional object whose existence has been hitherto overlooked and that can be added simply to a society’s public grid. The question of how religious believers should operate in a public sphere that has decided against theological belief as part of its basic framework, needs lengthy discussion. Rorty therefore offers the believer a place in an overall scheme that falls under the primacy of the social, where religious individuals are allowed to opt for a theistic way of talking if they wish. Their behavior here can be understood by the wider society inasmuch as their belief is seen as articulating something useful that is broadly shared by believers and unbelievers alike, namely the hope for a better future. Rorty recognizes the need for people to be drawn beyond the limitations of current life possibilities, into an anticipation of something that is better. Aspiration of this sort is important even for those 93

94

Chapter 4

who may not in fact manage to achieve a better life. The hope itself has an importance, giving life an upward lift that brings a kind of energy and focus. The difference between believers and unbelievers comes down to the way they articulate this hope. Some want to give it a religious name, and a liberal secular society should respect this. Rorty quotes the writer Dorothy Allison as an example of what is meant by this general hope for a better future: There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.1

Especially in his later work, Rorty offers a qualified tolerance of religious belief as a private option that articulates this hope for a better future in its own particular way. Such a program might seem odd to religious believers, who do not usually think of their belief in this way. But Rorty’s description fits with recent developments in the way religious belief is often regarded. If it was once embedded in a culture that experienced religion as a response to a call from beyond, religious belief is now often seen simply as a choice. And if it is a choice, it is natural to think of it as aimed in the first place at a personal goal. Charles Taylor explores possibilities of defining a “secular” age in this way, seeing it as an age where religious belief is regarded as a particular personal choice among others.2 Individuals might want to make such a choice, even in fortunate and enlightened times, and Rorty is happy that such choices be accommodated, so long as they are confined more or less to the private sphere. The religious option is, therefore, accepted as one of many discourses people may adopt in order to articulate their personal hope. The tensions associated with this sort of accommodation should not be underestimated. In other places, Rorty himself draws attention to some of the implications of adopting a view of existence that goes back to the primacy of the social, where the grids within which the things of the world acquire significance rest on human interpretative decisions. The very fact that the primacy of the social sees value and significance as coming back ultimately to ourselves and our interests, seems in conflict with the fundamental religious affirmation that sees God as the center of things. In commenting on a view of Thomas Nagel, Rorty expresses the point with his customary clarity: Brandom’s doctrine of the ontological priority of the social would, of course, only be adopted by someone who has little interest in “reaching a conception of the world which does not put us at the center.” Brandom, Sellars, and

Pragmatist Religious Belief

95

Wittgenstein simply lack the “ambition of transcendence” that Nagel, resembling in this respect the orthodox theologians of Western monotheism, thinks it desirable to have.3

This judgment is historically contentious—particularly as regards Wittgenstein—but it shows the hidden power of the pragmatist approach, and perhaps the way in which it insinuates itself. Pragmatism prides itself on its tolerance in that it promotes openness to the future, with no truths or realities excluded or imposed a priori. Yet the criteria that assign places in the pragmatist framework seem to limit this, in that they put human interests at the center, judging things from a this-worldly point of view. Speaking of concepts of “truth” and “reality,” Rorty says that “like the Sabbath, they are made for man,”4 and he holds that the change urged by Brandom in fact “parallels the change from a theistic to a humanistic worldview.”5 In other words, while such a worldview allows a place for religion within the private sphere, where people can go on believing that God is at the center and that they themselves exist on the created periphery, the framework in which this is understood sees the move as a private “choice,” a measure taken by an individual for his or her own happiness. Many believers accept that a pluralist society will necessarily describe their belief in this way and are happy to adopt the public description as their own, seeing their religious commitment as a “choice” that they have made, among other possible choices. Others, for all that they might see the description as inevitable, would not themselves want to adopt it. A strong religious belief often has the precise implication that the belief does not go back simply to needs of the believer, as if the question of the existence of God came down to a choice of a certain vocabulary, made to achieve a certain style of life. To put the matter in such a way would seem to put too much weight on ourselves, as if it ultimately comes back to us to determine whether there is a God or not. D. Z. Phillips, who holds a position that is in some respects similar to Rorty’s (though as seen above, he disagrees strongly in other respects), is asked in a published discussion whether, if there comes a time when all religious vocabularies and pictures die or decay, God could be said to have died in such a world. Phillips agrees that this may be considered a difficulty with his position, but points out that we accept uncontroversially that certain sorts of goodness cease to exist in the world if certain types of moral conduct pass away. So why should we not say that God dies when religious pictures, along with the talk that goes with them, lose their life and are abandoned? If people feel a problem with this, it is only because “literal-mindedness” has re-asserted itself.6 Elsewhere, Phillips says that we cannot conceive of God as having “the independence of a separate biography.”7 For many believers, this position seems to render God dependent on developments in human

96

Chapter 4

history. But such an objection reflects an assumed metaphysical position, an aspiration to a sense of “existence” that goes beyond simply filling a space on a linguistic grid. The difficulty with the alternative is that it seems to move the status of the divinity too close to the status of Dr. Watson’s wife, who is also said to exist, when considered against a particular background of talk. For Rorty, as for Phillips, the metaphysical aspiration toward a robust sense of existence is a pointless quest, since we can only ever make sense of what it means to exist from within a particular way of talk. To attempt anything further is as pointless as asking about the existence of a chess king away from the game of chess. Such considerations crystallize the strange situation of believers in the contemporary Western world. On the one side, they are part of a society whose epistemology seems in process of farewelling the remnants of a religiousmetaphysical view that placed God (in whatever shape or form) at the center. On the other side, they tend to retain a stubborn belief that there just is a God or a Reality or a Truth, whatever we might think of it. Many believers are simply pulled one way and the other. Rorty has an extended discussion of the views of William James on these topics, with James as an example of one who is pulled simultaneously in two directions. On the one side, he wants to help realize human democratic hopes, and therefore to put into circulation a style of thought which is focused on human activity and achievements. Religious belief can be fitted into such a framework as a particular option that helps us to live a certain sort of life in the world. James’s famous essay, “The Will to Believe,” ends with an exhortation along these lines, that we should focus our energies on achieving a better historical future, concluding that even if hopes in an afterlife are disappointed, this remains the best sort of life that we could have lived. “If death ends all, we cannot meet death better.”8 Yet as well as this endorsement of a program that closely parallels Rorty’s hopes of bettering society and the world, James leans toward a more traditional belief in a God who plays a part in human history from outside it, who offers a guarantee that the moral order will be upheld through the fluctuations of time. When in this mood, James holds that because of God’s action, we can rely on “an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved.”9 The theologian Wayne Proudfoot commends this latter aspect of James’s treatment of religion, with its guarantee that the order of intelligence and mind will not be overwhelmed by the historical flux, and brute history will not have the last word. Proudfoot thinks that we can gain a valuable assurance here that there is a final union of being and value so that we can trust in “a moral order that is shaped to human interests, and to which humans can shape themselves.”10 God’s directing intelligence supports this order and assures us of its continuing existence. Rorty wants nothing to do with this. He believes that James fluctuates between courage and nostalgia, a view that the word

Pragmatist Religious Belief

97

“God” names a better human future, and a view that sees it as naming someone who plays an active part in bringing about or guaranteeing such a future, or at least in preserving the conditions that could enable its realization.11 Rorty sees the latter view as an unfortunate throwback to a past that needed to look beyond itself to find a reason for hope. He believes that the contemporary world has outgrown the need for any such narrative to underpin its hopes. He agrees that private individuals might still feel the need for such a thing. Such is the overall proposal that Rorty offers to believers: provision for a logical space within a secular liberal society, which can accommodate large parts of traditional theological belief. Religion comes down to a choice of articulation of life-hopes, which individuals can make in order to shape their lives as they wish. For others, earthly life is now self-sufficient, and they do not have to look to a supernatural realm or an afterlife to articulate the hope that enables them to live. While it tolerates religious belief, the framework of interpretation of Rorty’s proposal could be seen as quite opposed to it. The Hebrew psalms include prayers that are aimed precisely against a framework that sees human interests as the final context of significance. For all that, it cannot be denied that large numbers of believers have more or less accepted Rorty’s offer, and have internalized a description of their religious belief as a choice they have made. And there is perhaps a suspicion that attaches to more traditional believers who hold out for a stronger form of revealed religion: that they are simply nervous that should they give Rorty’s recommendations a try, they too might be converted and come to accept the pragmatist interpretation he proposes. DEFENDING PRAGMATIST RELIGION Rorty discusses two consequences that follow if his proposed understanding of religious belief gains ground within a pluralist secular society. On the one side, religious belief will have a defence against suggestions that it is intellectually disreputable or dishonest. It will be seen as legitimate in the way any other discourse is legitimate, so long as it facilitates a desirable form of life. The price that Rorty exacts for this accommodation is a strict delimitation of boundaries, where religious discourse is not allowed to stray into the areas of other contemporary discourses, especially those of science or history. These two consequences, one of which gives a place to religious belief, while the other restricts it, are in some tension with one another. Rorty’s views on how they can coexist are set out the essay quoted above, which was published with the papers of a theological conference at which Rorty was the keynote speaker.12 The essay addresses the question of how religion is to coexist with science, and how it is possible to advance beyond the post-Enlightenment view that regards science as the model of reasonable discourse, while religion

98

Chapter 4

fails to measure up even to minimal standards of rationality. The only remaining niche that it can occupy seems to be that of willed dogmatism. To clarify the possibilities, Rorty rehearses a debate between William James and his contemporary critic W. K. Clifford, who serves in the discussion as the representative of enlightened rationality. In a way that recalls Locke’s development of criteria for reasonable religious belief, Clifford asks whether religious belief is ever intellectually responsible, that is, whether it can satisfy even the most minimal requirements of adequate evidence. Clifford expresses this requirement as a demand that a religious approach connect argumentatively in some way with the wider social discourse within which it is located. Rorty connects Clifford’s criterion with the positivist assumption that religious discourse must trace a path from the sort of everyday speech everyone accepts, to the belief that a religious perspective wants to affirm, if it is to make the grade. Positivism dismisses religious language because it never satisfies this minimal criterion. Expressions of religious belief are “typically not hooked up to the rest of the language in the right inferential way.”13 Rorty notes, however, that the positivist criterion is not universal and that other parts of human lives, such as our wants and desires (e.g., a choice as to whom I will marry), are regarded as exempt from any justificatory requirement of this sort. Could religious belief also be exempt because it enjoys this sort of status? Rorty observes that even Clifford recognizes that human desires are essentially private and nonarguable, and therefore, exempt from the requirement of public justification. Yet Clifford holds that beliefs are different and do not fall under the exemption. They need an argumentative relation to the wider public sphere if they are to be taken seriously. If believers do not manage to satisfy this requirement, they should be dismissed as irrational. Rorty’s first move is to join with William James in attacking the requirement of public justification for all beliefs. He points out that society in its contemporary form already accommodates a wide variety of beliefs that it exempts from the need for justification. Not only a decision for a marriage proposal but also the background beliefs that lead into the proposal are exempt. Whatever reasons people may have for wanting to get married, society does not think of scrutinizing either the reasons or the background beliefs. All that matters for marriage is that the prospective partners want it. In this, the beliefs differ from those that play into a business proposal. Here, they can be dismissed as “irrational” if they do not relate to the rest of the public sphere, and the person who holds them can be considered at fault in some way. Rorty proposes that “getting religion” should be seen as exempt from public intellectual responsibility in the same way as is getting married. He mentions a further example, that of the parent who continues to believe in the essential goodness of an errant son or daughter, against all the evidence, and who usually meets with a surprising degree of understanding and sympathy

Pragmatist Religious Belief

99

from the wider society.14 These examples are probably contentious, but the overall conclusion is clear enough: that although religious belief falls outside the circle of things for which a society expects justification, this does not make it disreputable. However, the argument might seem to confirm the familiar positivist suspicion that religion is not a cognitive matter at all, so that it is simply impossible to talk about it. Rorty wants to deny this line of criticism as well. His general argument fits positions he has already developed, particularly the “tool” analogy for speech, which is an important part of what Robert Brandom calls Rorty’s “discursive pluralism.”15 Religion is a discourse aimed at achieving certain purposes, while science is aimed at a different set of purposes. Positivist critics (as well as some misguided defenders of religion) assume that religion and science share many of the same purposes; in particular, attempting to pronounce on the final status of the things and processes of the world. When placed in competition with science on such questions, religion always seems insufficient. Yet a pragmatist approach points out that tools are only in competition with one another when they are seen as aimed at performing the same task.16 The mechanical cutter threatens the scythe because both are means to the same end, which one achieves more quickly and effectively than the other. Science has been in conflict with theology only because the latter has understood itself as sharing some of the same purposes, seeing itself, for example, as helping believers to predict and control the future, and offering an account of the past that is in competition with the science of history. As a result, religious discourse has come to look vague and ineffectual when placed alongside the spectacular success of science in predicting and controlling forces of nature, or uncovering and reconstructing the past. As well as making the general argument that religion is not meant to achieve the same purposes as science, Rorty also suggests a moral critique of competitive religious belief, seeing it as promoting a sort of infantilism, where believers indulge childish desires for control, and try to make tactical alliances where they get large and powerful divinities on their side. Rorty considers this a mistaken approach to belief, if only for the reason that it does not work. “[W]hatever God is good for, he is not, like our earthly fathers, a powerful controlling force. He is not somebody we are trying to get on the right side of in order to prosper.”17 To be reborn within a pragmatist context, religion needs, therefore, to give up the kinds of aspirations that turn it into a competitor of science. Rorty proposes a simple division of labor where the scientific vocabulary as developed in the contemporary Western world takes care of prediction and control of the environment, while a theological vocabulary exists for the purpose of offering “a larger hope, and thereby something to live for.” If this is accepted, the different descriptions proposed by science and religion need not conflict any more, just as there need be no

100

Chapter 4

conflict between the way a carpenter and a physicist describes a table.18 Rorty refers favorably to the essay of Stephen J. Gould, where science and theology are regarded as “nonoverlapping magisteria,”19 discourses developed for different purposes that can leave one another in peace, so long as each agrees to live within its own boundaries. Rorty’s pragmatism, therefore, offers a place to theological discourse that does not relegate it to a second-class status. In some ways, he offers it a higher status than does a demythologizing theologian like Tillich, who holds that theological truths are merely symbolic and that theology is concerned with “finding an adequate symbol of ultimate concern.”20 Rorty’s offer takes the objects of theology beyond merely symbolic significance, to a status that is as robust as that of any other discourse. If God appears as a correlate of a way of talking, this is true of every other object of our talk as well. A religious believer can answer in the affirmative when asked whether there is a God, in the same way that a particle physicist affirms that there are neutrinos, or a mathematician that there are transfinite cardinal numbers. God is not a “posit,” as if he were an idea of ours which is projected into the world, but is “as real as sense-impressions, tables, quarks, and human rights.”21 THE COSTS OF PRAGMATIST RELIGION This division of labor exacts significant costs for theological discourse, particularly with regard to its relation to history. Basically, it is to be purged of anything that would set it up as a competitor with scientific or historical approaches. This includes any affirmation of direct divine interference in the order of history. Rorty is aware that there are movements within theology itself that are sympathetic to his programme. He is impressed by the early twentieth-century theological movement of “demythologization,” with its tendency to exclude or reinterpret narratives of transaction between the divine and earthly realms, and to remove such transactions from the scientific or historical sphere. At very least, “[d]e-mythologizing amounts to saying that, whatever theism is good for, it is not a device for predicting or controlling our environment.”22 Theists might be taken aback by the wider list of doctrines that Rorty sees as being implicated in the attempt to predict and control, or to intrude on the domain of scientific history. His list includes personal immortality, interventions of providence, efficacious sacraments, the Virgin Birth, the resurrection, the covenant with Abraham, and the “authority of the Koran.”23 All except the last are traditional Christian doctrines, some of them disputed within Christianity, while others are shared between Christianity and other monotheistic religions. Presumably, divine intervention, the covenant with Abraham, the Virgin Birth and the resurrection are indicted

Pragmatist Religious Belief

101

because they make claims about historical happenings, and are, therefore, in potential conflict with the results of physical or historical sciences. The status of immortality and the sacraments is less clear. The doctrine of immortality makes a prediction about a state of affairs after death, and is, therefore, perhaps in conflict with alternative philosophical claims. The sacraments could be understood in their stronger interpretations as drawing upon divine help in earthly affairs, and therefore as competing with scientific or historical accounts of the same phenomena. Religious believers either have to drop such doctrines or reinterpret them in such a way that they do not make direct physical or historical claims. Rorty remarks breezily that such demythologizing is a small price to pay for insulating religious discourse from scientific critique. He implies that religious believers who still show concern for such things—wanting to hold to the literal reality of the resurrection, say, as a basic measure of belief, and not simply an object “shaped by human interests,”24—are more or less “fundamentalists.” Clearly being a fundamentalist is not good. Rorty associates the label with those who burned people at the stake, prohibited divorce and dancing, and generally found “ways of making their neighbors miserable for the greater glory of God.”25 (He does get rather carried away.) The basic meaning he attributes to “fundamentalism” comes, however, from a discussion of Dewey, where the word is used broadly as covering the belief that “ideals must be grounded in something already real.”26 His use of the word is obviously controversial and rhetorical, and does not particularly correspond to the usual use of “fundamentalist,” which describes an approach to the Bible that regards all of its contents as literally true. Many Christian believers who insist they are not fundamentalists in this strict sense, nonetheless, hold to a literal view of the resurrection as fundamental to Christianity, given it is the mystery of which St. Paul said that if it did not happen, then “faith is in vain.” Rorty, therefore, offers a place for religious discourse among the vocabularies of a pragmatist-minded society. Given that there is no privileged overarching standard to which discourses must conform if they are to be counted as respectable, religious discourse has as good a status as any. On the other hand, it must accept its limits and refrain from trespassing upon the domain of other discourses, or claiming in some way to rule them. In particular, it must not stray into the territory of science or history. For many religious believers, this price will seem rather heavy. THE NOTION OF CULTURAL POLITICS While he is prepared to accommodate private religious belief, Rorty thinks a society is better off if religion is not part of its assumed public framework. In

102

Chapter 4

some moods, he would prefer that religion simply disappear altogether from the area of public discourse. The reasons offered are straightforwardly pragmatic: that religion excuses cruelty, saps people’s initiative for improving the human condition, encourages divisions, and thereby hinders the formation of a “global cooperative commonwealth.”27 In short, talk about God hinders the search for human happiness. Some think a case can be made for its being banned from public life altogether. Rorty himself does not favor this, for all that he concurs with the argument that religion is ultimately a bad thing and that we would be better off without it. The doctrine of the primacy of the social admits in principle that all discourses are valid possibilities, and allows them to compete so as to find better ways of living. Rorty certainly accepts that in the past, religion had a justified public role in the life of Western societies in safeguarding human hope. Societies that had little chance of improving the fundamentals of their condition needed to believe in the possibility of an intervention from outside the human, where an extraordinary power would weigh in on humans’ behalf. Significant progress from within human history was unimaginable, and people needed to envisage an escape from history if they were to sustain hope for a better future. There was, therefore, a place for a power that exceeded mere human capacities. “To be imaginative and to be religious, in those dark times, came to almost the same thing—for this world was too wretched to lift up the heart.”28 We could attain in the beyond what could not be attained in this world. Such hopes for a better life imparted a momentum to history and offered a sense of upward lift, raising the tone of individual lives with the aspiration to a better future. Rorty offers an odd-sounding list of practices, which connect to such hopes for a better life: “baptism, pilgrimage, or participation in holy wars.”29 Rorty thinks that all this has changed radically with technical progress, the developing promise that human life can be made liveable while remaining within a temporal focus. It is no longer necessary to appeal beyond the historical order to achieve a fulfilled human life. This does not refer just to improvements that we can imagine at the present time but also to improvements that we cannot ourselves foresee, which the human race might discover and implement in the future. We can relish the thought that our descendants may envisage useful options we ourselves cannot imagine.30 Once human hope is accommodated within history like this, religion as directed to a transcendence beyond this life is rendered obsolete. “Now the things of this world are, for some lucky people, so welcome that they do not have to look beyond nature to the supernatural, and beyond life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human future.”31 This indicates the sort of response that a pragmatist society should make to those who appeal to religious authority when engaging in a social decision-making process. Religious groups sometimes invoke the divine as a

Pragmatist Religious Belief

103

transcendent norm, claiming that social practice should conform to it. Rorty wants to return all such appeals back to the “primacy of the social,” showing that they are embedded in an original human projection of significance. Society must resist direct imposition of an ultimate authority or law from beyond it, and must also repudiate appeals from human representatives who claim to speak for such an authority. It reserves the last word to itself. What can look like an appeal to an overarching state of affairs or superior law (e.g., that God’s will demands such-and-such) is to be dealt with not as a call to obedience, but rather as an attempt at political persuasion, to get a society to adopt a specific final vocabulary. Rorty calls this area where final vocabularies are contested, the area of “cultural politics.” He claims that liberal Western societies would have to alter their identity if they were to accommodate a direct religious authority of the sort sometimes proposed by conservative religious critics. As a result, religious authority never bears directly on the sort of society that Rorty wants to recommend. Whether a religious injunction is to have any force is taken back to original decisions of the society on whether it wants to incorporate a religious code as part of its practice. Rorty remarks that discussions of cultural politics often just focus on particular ways of speaking, as happens, for example, with debates about “hate speech.”32 Yet cultural politics has a wider range than this and encompasses discussion of the most fundamental categories that should or should not be used in public discussion. For example, some in Western society call in question expressions that refer to race, and the styles of talk that follow on these, holding that regardless of what is actually said, the ways of talking themselves cause harm, and should be dropped. Here the argument is not whether the objects spoken of are accurately described within the categories that have been opened up, but rather whether use of the categories and their objects simply does more harm than good. A society might try to ban them for reasons of cultural politics, holding that they have no place in the forms of social life it wants to develop and maintain. For example, it might decide to give up talk about “race,” and just talk about “genes” instead.33 Sometimes cultural politics decides to exclude a type of discourse altogether, along with the things it talks about. Rorty offers the expression “of royal blood” as an example.34 The expression projects a certain grid and opens up positions on the grid that categorize people as being of royal blood in various degrees, setting them apart from others, the “commoners.” A particular society can decide that it does not want to talk in this way and can relinquish use of the grid and the distinctions that it opens up. All this illustrates the primacy of the social. The status of the principle itself can be questioned. It can be asked what sort of principle it is, and how it is established. As noted earlier, Rorty does not regard it as an empirical discovery, as if an examination of individual

104

Chapter 4

societies had revealed that this is the way that they work. Nor does it express a conceptual necessity, as if there were an argument that the very notion of society implies the validity of the principle. Part of the principle is simply aspiration, a statement of how we think such things should be understood, in that this is the most useful way to think about linguistic authority, if we are to achieve the goods of a pragmatist society. Rorty believes that as far as liberal Western societies are concerned, they already largely operate with an implicit understanding of the primacy of the social, and there is no other way in which they could proceed to settle contentious matters. Cultural politics is “the only game in town.”35 The place of cultural politics also stands out when there is an attempt in a society to appeal simply to “what is the case,” either as regards a factual situation, or as regards the intent of a law. Rorty argues that responses to such appeals always come down in fact to decisions of particular people. An appeal to the authority of God is always made “in the name of some interest group,” contradicting the views of some other interest group, for example, in the way that Hindus contradict Muslims, or Mormons contradict Catholics, and vice versa. As discussed earlier, Rorty likens this situation to that of a court decision, where two opposed sides appeal to the authority of the law. The principle of the priority of the social insists that the law itself never decides such things, since what the law says with regard to the particular case is precisely what is in dispute. A law gains authority in a particular case only when the community opts for a particular interpretation, as when, in the above disputes, it “decides to adopt one faith rather than another.”36 The ultimate authority always lies therefore with a decision of the community. Once this sort of story is told about the dispute, it is hard for a group to maintain its belief that there is an authority that bears in directly on the society from outside it. In fact, such an interpretation can start to look like a form of selfdeception. To go on appealing directly to a nonhuman authority (a Platonic idea, or a word of divine revelation) seems to cover up a secret choice of ours, for which we do not want to admit responsibility. The mere suggestion of a hidden choice is powerfully subversive, and the hint of such a possibility damages the credibility of the original appeal. Rorty certainly does not want to say that a society that recognizes the priority of the social in matters of group decision always comes to good decisions. Communities can decide to adopt “faiths” of all sorts, and Rorty agrees that cultural politics might create a society that finds interracial marriages repulsive.37 It is probable, however, that once a society recognizes there is no authority beyond it, the tone and even the content of its decisions will change. Rorty’s only claim here is that we should not regard responsibility for such things as lying beyond the human, in a set of original norms to which we are obliged to conform, but as coming back to the priority of the social. He particularly

Pragmatist Religious Belief

105

wants to argue for this when it is a question of the existence of a divine authority, which supposedly rules over all other authorities. PRAGMATIST RELIGION IN PUBLIC LIFE It follows that it is not permissible for a group to invoke God and God’s will directly, as an original requirement to which societies are challenged to conform. Rorty claims (against Brandom) that there are no “potential” facts at all that force themselves on us like this, making a claim that is independent of our ways of talking, and representing a privileged articulation of the way things are. Religious believers are not exempt. Rorty considers the objection that the existence of God is a reason precisely for rejecting belief in the primacy of the social.38 Should there be a God, so the argument runs, then society’s current views or predilections are not particularly relevant. The important question is simply whether, as Rorty puts it, “God exists. . . .”39 If there is a deity who has final authority over all areas of human life, including the social, then even the highest human authority has a duty to conform itself to its will. The objection can take a pragmatist turn in that religious believers can argue that regardless of society’s felt aspirations, every society has an interest in relating prudently to a powerful and potentially dangerous force that could affect its own future. Laws against blasphemy can presumably be understood against such a background. If society’s goals and ambitions do not take account of the existence of the almighty, so much the worse for its goals and ambitions. This position implicitly lines up the theologian with someone like a climate scientist or an international relations specialist, people who want to bring uncomfortable truths to the awareness of a society, so that it has all the relevant facts for its policies and decisions. No one would want to exclude such facts on the grounds that they clash with the current goals of a society. Their proponents would insist that the possibility of such a clash offers all the more reason for the opinions to be expressed. Defenders of a place for the will of God in political discussion can argue that the religious facts should be treated no differently, and that no limits should be placed on believers or on anyone else to hinder them from introducing in good faith what they consider relevant to the discussion. Whatever society might think about it, the threat exists, at least in the opinion of the believer. Rorty wants to show that there is no analogy here, and that there is no parallel between the introduction of God into a political discussion and the introduction of physical or political factors that a society might have overlooked. Rorty sums up the argument he wants to make at the end of his most significant article on the matter: “I have been arguing that we should substitute the question of the cultural desirability of God-talk for the ontological

106

Chapter 4

question about the existence of God.”40 While he agrees that some overlooked entities or topics can be introduced directly into a society’s reflections, they are always factors that belong to ways of talking which have already been adopted. Rorty refers to Brandom’s example that the social authority of Western societies has accepted that scientific results can speak for themselves without further ado. The results of DNA analysis are allowed to determine whether someone is found guilty or not. Someone might question the scientific detail of the case, but no one would question the introduction of scientific considerations in themselves. Theological discourse is not currently accepted as having a social role in this way. Rorty seems to think that it could be, in that a society might decide through its processes of cultural politics to adopt a particular “faith.”41 This was the case in Europe prior to what Jonathan Israel calls “the radical Enlightenment,” when it was assumed that religion was a topic on which we are entitled to ask for universal agreement.42 But it is no longer the case in Western societies. Rorty’s argument makes use of recent developments in Western philosophical and theological traditions. He draws on familiar philosophical positions associated with thinkers like Wittgenstein and Brandom, that we cannot ask about the existence of something in abstraction from the language background that determines what “existence” means in a particular case. We have seen examples to do with the pantheon of Greek gods, or the system of prime numbers. If people do not use these language-games, and see no point in using them, they cannot be converted by an insistence that there are “really gods or goddesses,” or that there are “really numbers.”43 The only way to identify such objects is to adopt the language games that are in question. This negates any attempt to come to a neutral identification of the existence of an object that could then validate a particular language-game. If a society has decided against theistic talk, believers cannot therefore simply appeal to the “existence” of an object of theological discourse as a way of forcing their style of talk on the others. Given religious language is not accepted in the public sphere, there is no shared understanding of what it means to say that there is a God. “If discussion of God’s existence or the reality of the world of common sense were to be discussable . . . we should have to have somehow transcended both God and the world so as to see them against a ‘neutral’ background.”44 Rorty’s point here can be expressed in terms of the chess analogy: if people cannot see the point of chess and refuse to play it, there is no point in an appeal to a neutral realm of existence, along the lines of “but there really are chess kings.” Nor could we say, reflecting an example of Wittgenstein’s, “there really are chess moves, and to play the game is just a recognition of something that already exists.” There is no neutral ground on which to decide such an appeal to existence. We identify a chess piece or a chess move only by means of the game itself. Wittgenstein also notes that

Pragmatist Religious Belief

107

a move in chess doesn’t consist simply in moving a piece in a certain way on the board, as if it could be reduced back to a neutral meaning of “move.”45 The matter cannot therefore be adjudicated by appeal to neutral data. Rorty says that “there is no neutral logical space within which discussion can proceed between people inclined to deny and people inclined to affirm existence of the relevant entity.”46 The dispute is rather about whether we want to enter the game or refuse it. So believers cannot appeal to the existence of God without further ado, to justify introducing theological motifs into a political discussion. They need to go the long way round, and come clean about trying to introduce a new way of speaking, a language game that is not yet commonly agreed, before they have the right to invoke God’s existence, or God’s will. Rorty associates this position with Brandom and Heidegger, but he also draws on the theological tradition, mentioning Tillich by name, the view that God is not a being, but “Being-as-such.”47 While Rorty agrees that this phrase can take its place in a theological style of talk, he insists—along with Tillich—that it cannot be made the object of a straightforward existence-enquiry, as if it were question of an additional object that comes on top of the other objects we know about. The theological proposal is not about an additional object, but rather a way of talking. The existence of God is to be thought of roughly in the way we might think of the existence of “royal blood,” ultimately reflecting a decision about whether or not to enter a certain style of talk, a matter of cultural politics that falls under the “primacy of the social.” RELIGION AND DEMOCRACY The practical consequences of Rorty’s views for contemporary American political society have been the topic of sharp exchanges involving Stephen L. Carter, Jeffrey Stout, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and others. The stimulus for this debate comes from Rorty’s 1994 essay “Religion as Conversation Stopper,” which is in turn a response to views expressed in Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief.48 Rorty has a later paper, “Religion after Onto-Theology: Reflections on Vattimo’s Belief,” an address he delivered from notes on receiving the Meister Eckhart prize in 2001. The Eckhart prize address was developed into the published paper “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” part of an exchange with Gianni Vattimo.49 Rorty also has a reply to Nicholas Wolterstorff entitled “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.”50 The focus for the debate is political ethics in the contemporary American scene, where there is no likelihood of agreement between large sections of the political community on the place of religion in politics, and a general consensus that religion should be kept out of the structures of public discussion. Rorty mounts an argument that religion should be kept out of public discussion

108

Chapter 4

altogether, because in contemporary society it is a “conversation stopper,” and its introduction into political discussion is akin to the introduction of material that is essentially private into a sphere where it does not belong. Such an appeal stops the conversation, because there is nothing much that nonbelievers can bring in reply. Rorty holds that this is because an essentially private matter has been brought into public discussion. To express religious views in public is therefore to endanger political conversation, and this in turn threatens democracy itself. The sharpness of the discussion reflects tensions in contemporary American society, the feeling that traditional or recently acquired freedoms are under threat from religious forces, those usually described as “fundamentalist.” It is clear throughout this debate that in some sense, Rorty wants religion kept out of the public sphere. But the reasons for this remain elusive. Rorty sees religion as having entered a kind of contract with the democratic state at its inception, receiving a guarantee of religious freedom (and tax exemption), provided it stays out of politics and remains a private matter, at least in the sense that it is not a formal player in political discussion. Rorty refers to this as the “Jeffersonian compromise.” As he says, just about any organization with a set of beliefs can describe itself as a “religion” in the United States of America, and be granted tax-free status. The price that it pays for this is that it agrees to remain outside of the political process. The precise sense in which it is to be kept out is less than clear. At the beginning of the debate, Rorty talks as if the Jeffersonian compromise means that a believing citizen must leave his or her beliefs behind on entering the public sphere, and adopt a neutral set of principles to which nonbelieving citizens could also subscribe. Belief is to remain strictly private in the sense that it does not appear in the public arena at all. Rorty offers the rather crude example (which he admittedly takes from Carter) about a direct introduction of God’s intentions into public discussion, where a person promotes or opposes some measure (e.g., to do with abortion or pornography) because of what God would want, working from a stated understanding of “God’s will.”51 Rorty insists that this is always against the Jeffersonian compromise, as it introduces what should be a private matter into a public forum, and stops the conversation. In a spirited reply, Nicholas Wolterstorff points out that this exclusion goes further than other liberal philosophers want to go and that it is in any case impossible to implement. He suggests that not even Rorty really requires such a thing, given that he himself does not hold back in the public sphere, cheerfully promoting his favorite authors and generally proselytizing so that others will be led to adopt the style of life that he himself finds best. Wolterstorff asks why the bible should be kept out when Rorty thinks he can introduce J. S. Mill’s “On Liberty” without further ado—a text that some religious people might regard as damaging to public order. He holds that there should be no a

Pragmatist Religious Belief

109

priori exclusions of the sort promoted in “Religion as a Conversation Stopper,” and that the issue is not in the end one of enforced privacy, as Rorty implies. For Wolterstorff, people should enter the public square with all of their baggage, and their “profoundly different comprehensive perspectives,” and attempt to engage with others “as equals in a just, stable, and peaceful society.”52 Given this, Wolterstorff thinks it is unrealistic to hold out for a goal of “universal intersubjective agreement” in the contemporary political sphere. He thinks that some differences, including the difference between a reasonably traditional believing Christian like himself and a “Darwinian pragmatist” like Rorty, are basically unbridgeable. Their positions reveal “two profoundly different perspectives,” which no one expects to come together. Wolterstorff finds himself agreeing here with things that Rorty himself says when promoting his larger thesis that the difference between those who hold that humanity and human society are beholden to a larger order, and those who hold that they are just “a lucky accident,” is “too radical to permit of being judged from some neutral standpoint.”53 But Wolterstorff does not think this precludes lots of interchange in the intermediate spaces between the extremes of such large beliefs. He gives some examples of the kind of exchange that can ensue. We test an opponent’s beliefs against the facts, draw out seemingly unacceptable implications of some of the things our opponent holds, and so on.54 Sometimes this results in movement and compromise, which can be achieved without directly invoking the larger positions. Rorty replies to Wolterstorff with a piece that appears in the same journal, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.” He agrees that some of Wolterstorff’s criticisms are well made and tries to reformulate his position in what he calls a “chastened, and more cautious, restatement.”55 He no longer raises objections against individual believers bringing their religious convictions to the public square. He still objects, however, to higher-level corporate ecclesiastical organizations, such as the Catholic bishops or the Mormon General Authorities doing so. His immediate reason for this is straightforwardly pragmatic: such bodies do much harm and little good. They promulgate “orthodoxy,” develop their own power, create ill will toward organizations that do not agree with them, and condemn those whom they consider guilty of immorality. In Rorty’s best of worlds, they would simply wither away. He reaffirms his hope that if a pragmatist-minded democracy comes into existence, most of the motives that turn people to religion— motives that concern problems regarding community, justice, and general life satisfaction—will simply disappear. The only role left for religion will be at an individual level, “to help individuals find meaning in their lives, and to serve as a help to individuals in their times of trouble.”56 In the meantime, he realizes that some believers still want to appeal to religious reasons for supporting or opposing political decisions. Sometimes

110

Chapter 4

Rorty has no problem with this; for example, if religious belief causes a person to support social legislation in favor of the poor. But he has problems with religious believers who cite scripture in order to oppose same-sex marriage legislation, or to support the repeal of laws tolerating homosexual practice, and notes that contemporary opposition to such developments is almost exclusively religious. He sees religious positions here as coming down to incitement to cruel, violent persecution. He does not think such views should be made illegal, but is in favor of believers who try to argue from their belief for such things being made to feel “ashamed” for “inflicting this kind of suffering on . . . fellow-citizens.”57 Strikingly, Rorty does not think he can give a reason for differentiating between the two cases of the use of scripture to support social legislation for the poor (which he approves) or to oppose same-sex marriage. Rorty does not want to make an appeal to “rationality,” as if someone promoting legislation in favor of the poor is being “rational,” while someone denying homosexual rights is being “irrational.” This would be too metaphysical. Nor does he think that American democracy in its current state can enforce a requirement that political decisions should be backed by nonreligious reasons. In the end, he sees his dispute with Wolterstorff as coming down to a disagreement about empirical matters, the harm that religious belief does in encouraging cruelty. Rorty thinks that most countries that have Christianity as the majority religion show “problems of everyday peacetime sadism.”58 His examples here focus particularly on Christian relations to Judaism and to homosexuals. Whatever the status of the historical discussion here, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the argument has shifted its focus. Rorty is no longer talking about the place of religious belief in relation to a democratic political system in itself, but rather to a disagreement within a democratic process, about positions that he thinks should be accepted or rejected. Perhaps there is a further clue in Rorty’s article as to what the dispute is finally about. He refers to the election of John F. Kennedy as president of the United States in 1960, and to the fear that election of a Catholic would mean that the presidency would be controlled from beyond the United States, from the Vatican. Rorty praises Kennedy for making it clear that he has “no intention of taking ecclesiastical authority seriously when exercising the functions of the office”59 and suggests that there should be a general requirement for candidates to offer such a guarantee. The focus now seems to be on the refusal of obedience to an individual institution (like the Vatican), which lies beyond the immediate workings of the political society in question. Rorty perhaps sees religion in general as being like this, appealing to an authority (“the divine”) that is in principle beyond the immediate democratic conversation, and which therefore makes nonsense of the conversation itself.

Pragmatist Religious Belief

111

This seems to be the point of remarks that Rorty directs at views of the then Cardinal Ratzinger in 2005. Rorty frames the discussion in terms of “fundamentalism” and “relativism.”60 “Fundamentalism” refers to any position that appeals to realities that lie beyond the conversation partners and their ideals and that exercises a normative function for the conversation as a whole. Rorty sees this as characterizing traditional religious positions, in that they see the area of the human as secondary, needing to correspond to an ideal outside it. As mentioned earlier, Rorty draws on Dewey’s formulation of the religious perspective here, seeing it as holding that “ideals are valid only when grounded in reality.”61 When portrayed in this way, it seems to appeal to a foreign power, invoking an understanding of the human situation that offends against political autonomy in its contemporary form. Ratzinger describes the position he opposes as “relativism,” using the word to refer to a position that “does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and its desires.” Ratzinger notes that it is often portrayed as “the only attitude that can cope with modern times,” and thinks that we are now threatened by a “dictatorship of relativism.” By contrast, Rorty sees “relativism” as a simple denial of the “fundamentalist” view, and as is to be expected, he sees it as a good thing. Where the cardinal saw it as implying that one is carried about by every wind of doctrine, Rorty describes the same phenomenon as an openness to new possibilities, “willingness to consider all suggestions about what might increase human happiness.”62 As often happens in such exchanges, there is an interesting agreement on the basic alternatives, along with total disagreement as to which alternative should be favored. Inasmuch as the particular views that characterize the “fundamentalist” or “relativist” positions influence the understanding of the basic democratic framework, democracy is understood in two fundamentally incompatible ways. Rorty takes his lead here from Dewey, looking to “a tradition of increasing liberty and rising hope.”63 At the beginning of the address in which he criticizes the views of Cardinal Ratzinger, he sets out the alternatives as follows: Is the Church right that there is such a thing as the structure of human existence, which can serve as a moral reference point? Or, do we human beings have no moral obligations except helping one another satisfy our desires, thus achieving the greatest possible amount of happiness? I agree with John Stuart Mill, the great utilitarian philosopher, that that is the only moral obligation we have.64

When set against this definition of democracy, traditional religious belief, which is a belief in fixed authorities outside the human to which we owe allegiance, is definitely “a danger to democracy.” But there is a suspicion that in order to achieve this characterization, Rorty has reverted to a substantive

112

Chapter 4

vision of how things should be, so that his discussion goes beyond the original question of how a formal framework for democratic discussion should be constituted. His argument seems to come down to a straightforward attack on those who disagree with him on substantive matters, rather than to a disagreement about the structures that democracy should adopt in contemporary Western societies. DEWEY’S “A COMMON FAITH” Much of this story can be seen as filling out the detail of a significant essay of Dewey, “A Common Faith.” Dewey thinks that if religion is to be retained in a form that better fits the style of liberal Western democracies, there needs to be a conceptual move from traditional institutionalized belief in supernatural entities, to “the religious,” an open commitment to realizing ideals that draw us into a better future. He notes the immense variety of forms of religious belief and practice in the world’s history, and sees them as proceeding from a central ideal commitment of this sort. He takes a case where a person who is close to a nervous breakdown prays to God and is cured, and then regards this as a confirmation of the power of religious belief, attributing the cure to the action of a divine being. Dewey points out that the only thing that can be “proved” here is that a complex set of conditions has effected a beneficial adjustment, bringing a sense of security and peace that we instinctively describe as “religious.” Religious belief and action could, therefore, be redefined, functionally, as the set of conditions that produces such effects. This moves the focus away from relation to a supernatural world or supernatural entities, toward whatever produces a properly “religious” outcome. The concrete form of such religious happenings can vary enormously. Dewey says that religious attitudes “may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal.”65 Religious commitment can therefore show itself in a far wider variety of activities than was traditionally allowed. Dewey mentions social action, artistic activity and philosophical reflection, as activities that can be designated “religious” under his definition.66 His sharp separation of the religious from religion suggests a familiar project of emancipation, where the true religious impulse is rediscovered by shedding its contingent historical forms, especially those that involve a permanent organization, or a fixed metaphysics. For Dewey, “religion,” as opposed to “the religious,” always brings cultural baggage, and we are better rid of it. “For the moment we have a religion . . . that moment the ideal factors in experience that may be called religious take on a load that is not inherent in them.”67 Dewey asks how the religious impulse would look in the present age if it had the opportunity to express itself free from historical “encumbrances,”

Pragmatist Religious Belief

113

and raises the question of how we should understand unseen powers and our relations to them if they are to fit with “the best achievements and aspirations of the present.” 68 This overall shift from “religion” to “the religious” means that the business of religion comes down to the pursuit of certain ideals, rather than the development and maintenance of relations to an actual entity that exists beyond us. In this, Dewey’s approach is implicitly critical of most traditional religion. Once a sharp distinction is made between religion as moral pursuit of the ideal, and religion as the maintenance of good relations with divinities, the latter inevitably looks manipulative, as we will see in Merold Westphal’s criticism of both metaphysical and pragmatist approaches, which he sees as trying to contain the divine within manageable boundaries. Dewey suggests that traditional believers who want ideals to be embedded in some way in actually existing realities have failed to see that “in converting moral realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith.” Given that everyday physical existence usually shows no evidence of an ideal order, believers are then driven to invoke a different realm altogether, such as the “metaphysical,” or the “supernatural.” This is seen as reassuring those who are naturally fearful and do not want to risk action. They can convince themselves that nothing needs to be done, because the battle is in fact already won, given that the moral order is embedded in the ontological order.69 Dewey quotes the old saying “fear created the gods.”70 He agrees with Rorty in seeing pragmatism as promoting a new faith and hope in the future. In this, it contrasts strongly with traditional religious approaches. Once the religious impulse is deflected from a relationship with an existing deity, and moved toward the pursuit of a kind of security and peace, the human being gains greatly in autonomy. Dewey has a striking statement of the progression from religious obedience and acknowledgment, to the pursuit of the moral religious ideal, in the early essay “Christianity and Democracy.” In a way that recalls aspects of Hegel’s program, Dewey sets out to reinterpret the Christian revelation so that it becomes ultimately identified with the life of the believer. The task of religion is to empower and encourage believers to have confidence in their original natural endowments. Once it has fulfilled this role, it can effectively drop the ontological form in which it began. The divine no longer stands over against the human, but becomes identified with it. The one claim that Christianity makes is that God is truth; that as truth He is love and reveals Himself fully to man, keeping back nothing of Himself; that man is so one with the truth thus revealed that it is not so much revealed to him as in him; he is its incarnation; that by the appropriation of truth, by identification with it, man is free; free negatively, free from sin, free positively, free to live his own life, free to express himself, free to play without let or limitation upon the instrument given him the environment of natural wants and forces.71

114

Chapter 4

Religion has become the religious, and is assimilated into a life that is autonomous and self-sufficient. The norms that guide the progress of individual life are identified with the best of the life itself, and the old religiousmetaphysical superstructure can fall away. Dewey (as well as Hegel) could claim that thoughts like this are found in St. Paul, who promotes a move away from a life guided by external law, toward a life that is moved internally by the power of love. For St. Paul, however, the law of love remains part of a life of conformity to a norm that was fixed for all time by the mind and will of God. With Dewey, the latter becomes a particular stage in a developing history, which can in principle be jettisoned when it has fulfilled its purpose. Divinities are reduced to “the ideal ends that at a given time and place one acknowledges as having authority over . . . volition and emotion, the values to which one is supremely devoted, as far as these ends, through imagination, take on unity.”72 For traditional religious believers, developments of this sort inevitably seem to leave behind most of what makes religion distinctive. An early review by Frederick C. Grant sees Dewey as “like a child talking in church, unaware that these quiet, gentle persons are saying anything to which he might profitably listen.”73 By contrast, for those whose views are formed by Dewey, an understanding of religion that looks to maintain and develop relations to divinities, looks like mere dogmatism. NOTES 1. Dorothy Allison, Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994), 166. Cf. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 3–21, 15. 2. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 3. 3. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 3–26, 13. 4. Ibid., 7. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. D. Z. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 119. 7. D. Z. Phillips, Death and Immortality (London: Macmillan, 1970), 55. 8. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 16. 9. James, The Pragmatic Method, 311–472, 354. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 16. 10. Wayne Proudfoot, “Religion and Inquiry in William James,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 61–74, 62. 11. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 6.

Pragmatist Religious Belief

115

14. Ibid., 8, 12. 15. Brandom, “Vocabularies of Pragmatism,” 156–82, 168. 16. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 7. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. Stephen J. Gould, “Nonoverlapping Magisteria,” Natural History 106 (1997): 16–22. 20. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 22. 21. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 10. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Ibid. 26. Richard Rorty, “An Ethics for Today,” in Richard Rorty, An Ethics For Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 7–26, 19. 27. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 4. 28. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 15. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 17. 31. Ibid., 15–16. 32. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 3. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 8. 36. Ibid., 9. 37. Ibid., 14. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. Ibid., 4. 40. Ibid., 24. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 29–41, 41. 43. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 20. 44. Ibid., 21. Rorty presumably means that in each of the cases mentioned, we need an agreed background language if we are to broach questions of existence. 45. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, n. 33, 17e. 46. Rorty, “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” 20. 47. Ibid. 48. Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief (New York: Anchor, 1991). 49. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 29–41. 50. Richard Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31, no. 1 (2003): 141–49. 51. Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation Stopper,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 168–74, 171. 52. Nicholas Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Rorty,” Journal of Religious Ethics 31, no. 1 (2003): 129–39, 130. 53. Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Rorty,” 129.

116

Chapter 4

54. Ibid. 55. Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration,” 141. 56. Ibid., 142. 57. Ibid., 143. 58. Ibid., 145. 59. Ibid., 147. 60. Rorty, “An Ethics for Today,” 7–26. 61. Ibid., 11. 62. Ibid. 63. Rorty, “Education as Socialization and as Individualization,” 114–26, 121. 64. Rorty, “An Ethics for Today,” 8. 65. John Dewey, “A Common Faith,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925– 1953, Volume 9: 1933–1934, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, Anne Sharpe and Patricia Baysinger (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), 9. 66. Dewey, “A Common Faith,” 11. 67. Ibid., 8. 68. Ibid., 6, 8. 69. Ibid., 16. 70. Ibid., 17. 71. John Dewey, “Christianity and Democracy,” in John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882–1898, Vol. 4: 1893–1894, Early Essays and The Study of Ethics, A Syllabus, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 3–10, 5. 72. Dewey, “A Common Faith,” 29. 73. Frederick C. Grant, “Review of A Common Faith,” Anglican Theological Review 17 (1935): 44–45, 44.

Chapter 5

Pragmatism and the Theologians

PRAGMATISM AS LIMITING PHILOSOPHICAL HYBRIS Those with a traditional understanding of the religious imperative expressed in the first of the Jewish commandments—that God is owed a primitive and unsurpassable allegiance, regardless of advantage or benefit—will feel that there is an important gap between this sort of religious belief, and the possibility offered by Rorty. At the same time, others see the offer that Rorty makes to religious belief as worthy of serious consideration. They fall into two main groups. Some think that his philosophical approach can be used in a limited way, offering a necessary curb on the theological tendency toward dogmatism and self-aggrandizement. Others, who have a more experimental mindset, set out to explore theological possibilities that accept some or most of the parameters that Rorty proposes, developing styles of Christianity suited to a pragmatist age. The first approach uses Rorty’s position to limit overly ambitious theological aspirations, while hoping to leave more modest approaches intact. Merold Westphal includes Rorty in a group of thinkers who can be used to limit theological discourse in this way, calling them the “Gang of Five.” Along with Rorty, they include Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Westphal later strengthens the group by the addition of Lyotard.1 He recognizes that such thinkers are often shunned by theologians, who see them simply as offering a hostile critique of the theological point of view. Yet he believes that they have something useful to contribute to theological reflection, so that their “major themes and arguments . . . can be appropriated by Christian thought.”2 Westphal’s thesis is that the attacks of such thinkers do not bear on reality or truth or God as such, but rather on a style of knowledge that tries to privilege itself by claiming continuity with what it describes. 117

118

Chapter 5

Theological interpretations have often claimed a privileged standing for themselves that goes back to an illumination of the Holy Spirit, or a revelation, or interpretative offices, all of which are seen as sharing in the sublimity of the objects they talk about. Examples of such claims can be found across the traditional Christian theological spectrum, for example, regarding individual inspiration, or the doctrinal definitions of a church. In Westphal’s formulation, views about absolute truth or absolute values come to be seen as themselves sharing in the absoluteness they express.3 Westphal offers two examples of this transition. The first is that “[w]ith the help of biblical revelation we can achieve a knowledge of God wholly on a par with God’s own self-knowledge.” The second is that “[i]t is not necessary for us to interpret the Bible. The Bible interprets itself.”4 Westphal thinks that both statements make the mistake of transferring the qualities of an object to the mode of thought in which the object is known. He points out that this is a fallacy, noting that we do not become purple by thinking about grapes, and we should agree that our knowledge does not become divine because it concerns divinity.5 He thinks that the Gang of Five can help remind theological disciplines of these points. Members of the Gang insist that there is no naked “seeing,” where we simply come before an object that we register without prejudice, as if we could simply absorb divine things as such, with a privileged experience that we could subsequently regard as normative. “Seeing” is always “seeing-as.” We have to affirm the limited hermeneutical character of perception, recognizing that whatever enquiry we pursue, it remains permanently incomplete in significant ways.6 As Hendrik Pieterse also says, the only transcendence available to humans is a “transcendence within a historical framework.”7 The drive for absolute knowledge is not only pretentious but also sinful, in that it refuses to accept the creaturely status of the human. Westphal sees it as driven not by a love of truth, but rather by a desire “to compel the world to submit to our conceptual mastery.”8 Far from helping us penetrate the religious mysteries, it commits believers to an ascent of a Platonic sort, which Westphal regards as a “withdrawal from the site at which alone is possible a loving, trusting relation with a God before whom one might sing and dance.”9 Westphal goes on to insist, however, that the impossibility of humans holding an absolute viewpoint does not mean that there is no such viewpoint. He sees some secular-minded postmodernist thinkers as guilty of a non sequitur here, sliding from the position that “we have no absolute insight” to “there is no absolute insight.”10 In fact, it does not follow from our understanding’s not being divine, that there is no divine understanding. Westphal develops a striking reading of Kant that goes against the grain of much Kant scholarship, reminding us that Kant is a “theistic” philosopher. While interpretations of Kant have often focused on the attempt to base cognitive activity on the

Pragmatism and the Theologians

119

human subject, making the human being the measure of knowledge, Westphal points out that for Kant himself, the human being is the measure only of human knowledge. In fact, the very notion of a knowledge that is merely human, presupposes another possibility of knowledge, the intuitive knowledge enjoyed by the divinity. Kant assumes the eye of God in order to set up the distinction between the world as it is for us and the world as it is in itself. Noumenal reality is not just material that human epistemological operations form into meaningful objects, but has a reality, one that cannot be known directly by humans. Westphal holds that a strong notion of reality of this sort implies the presence of a superior mind. “Thus, for Kant, the thing in itself is the thing as apprehended by God.”11 As Westphal is aware, this approach remains in touch with aspects of the medieval tradition, which holds that the divine intellect is necessary if there are to be truths that are not just the best beliefs of human knowers.12 God’s original creative activity fixes a point of view within the constitution of the things themselves, so that they acquire a fundamental identity, and exist as a kind of stance toward the world. The Kantian distinction between the way things finally are, and our knowledge of such things, therefore enables Westphal to divert the postmodern attack so that it bears on exaggerated claims to knowledge of holy things, but does not necessarily question the existence of such things. Even Aquinas distinguishes between our best-revealed knowledge of God in this life, which is always limited and perspectival, and the sort of knowledge we might have at the beatific vision.13 Westphal therefore sees the critique of the Gang of Five as insisting on the fallibility of human knowledge, which is always subject to revision and development, leaving the ultimate status of the things talked about as an open question. He is aware that this position promotes a type of epistemology, and therefore goes against Rorty’s attack on epistemology in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. This attack denies we can give any sense to a notion of truth existing apart from human languages. Westphal points out, however, that Rorty’s treatment of the end of epistemology is directed mainly against the programmes of Descartes, Locke, and Kant, which continue the modern preoccupation with correspondence, certainty, neutrality, and privilege.14 The critique can be limited to these approaches, and once they are overcome, a humbler kind of epistemology might be possible, where truth is related more closely to conversational agreement, and “rationality” refers simply to epistemological styles that have been shown to work. Westphal sees this sort of interpretation as following a broad Kantian tradition, showing the role of the a priori in our cognition, though dropping the fixed character of the Kantian categories.15 Theoretical knowledge is seen as articulating an original nontheoretical experience, and is therefore derivative in the way described by the early Heidegger. Westphal refers here to Heidegger’s famous “hammer” example.16

120

Chapter 5

Westphal is aware of Rorty’s reservations about any pretheoretical grounding of knowledge. He sees these reservations as being directed against a naïve realism that appeals to what is “given” or “necessary” or “evident to the senses,” in other words to empiricist foundations.17 So Westphal thinks that his critique does not exclude the possibility that theoretical statements derive from a more general pretheoretical interpretation. He appeals to Rorty’s acceptance of discriminative pretheoretical behavior, the sort of thing that applies to babies and animals, as allowing this sort of interpretation. He thinks this is enough to line up Rorty and Sellars with the position of Heidegger, where theoretical assertion presupposes a deeper level of involvement with a “prelinguistic discriminative awareness.” While Heidegger criticizes straightforward “correspondence” theories of truth, he still sees interpretation as a “development” of understanding in which things that are already meaningful in a pre-theoretical way, become “explicitly” understood.18 Westphal thinks that we can still apply the word “foundations” to this and that it constitutes in the end, “a theory about the nature and limits of human knowledge.”19 Rorty and Sellars are therefore brought into the overall schema Westphal wants to promote, where there is a pretheoretical state of affairs that serves as a starting-point for human interpretations that are always fallible and incomplete, and where “practice is foundational to theory.”20 Westphal’s critique of the Platonic tradition is striking and significant. But it requires too much work, and too much adjustment of what Rorty actually says, to fit Rorty into the overall schema. For Rorty, there is no room for “protomeanings that hover midway between the sort of discriminative behavior displayed by thermostats and full-fledged self-conscious participation in the reason-giving game.”21 He wants to deny any expressive role to a vocabulary, as if it had a kind of duty that a pre-existing self be “adequately or inadequately expressed.”22 Even Westphal wonders in the end if Rorty really belongs with the Gang, and might not be better included in a list of “later idealists,” along with Fichte, Hegel and Husserl, all of whom have jettisoned the notion of the “thing in itself.”23 These differences reflect a larger difference between Westphal’s and Rorty’s projects. Westphal is against metaphysics for the same sort of reason as is Heidegger. With its quest for certainty and control, it tends to reduce the world to materials for our purposes. Even God is downgraded to an object that can be controlled, and religion is regarded as a means for doing this. Heidegger applies this sort of interpretation to the history of philosophy, where Platonic beginnings finish in subject-centred pragmatism. This is not regarded as a good destination. Westphal remarks that “Heidegger’s critique of God as the highest value is a reminder that the technological attitude can rub off onto faith, that piety can degenerate into an instrumental religion in which God becomes a means to our ends.”24 While agreeing that Western

Pragmatism and the Theologians

121

philosophical history has moved toward this, Rorty comes to the opposite conclusion. If Western philosophy leads inevitably to pragmatism, it is a very good place to finish up.25 PRAGMATISM AS NEGATIVE THEOLOGY Rorty’s relation to religion is explored in a more direct way in a collection of essays published in 1997, which come from the conference that begins with the keynote address from Rorty on the religious position of William James.26 Henry Levinson offers a piece from a Jewish perspective that shows how the Jewish scriptures can be accepted in full, but with a sense of ironic distance that keeps us open to the future. Levinson is happy with Jewish traditions of religious celebration and practice, and wants them to continue as they are. He has significant proposals, however, for how we should interpret our involvement in such traditions. He notes a striking development in the Jewish scriptures, that after the book of Job, God ceases to be an active agent in human history. While God still appears in the late books as the one who performed mighty acts in the past, he is no longer directly active in current history. Levinson focuses on the books that make up the Wisdom canon, whose interest is this-worldly and ethical, concerned with what it means to live a godly life in this world. Levinson thinks that this reflects a significant shift in the way in which theological matters have come to be considered. An emphasis on awaiting God’s mighty deeds has changed to an awareness of a call to action within history. Levinson says that the later writing “underscores the immanent character of its Passover message of liberation from oppression.”27 There is a shift away from attempts to describe the final events that will frame world history, so that the old preoccupation with knowing what the future will bring, starts to disappear. The later books encourage us instead to leave the future open and resist the temptation to enclose it within a framework that we possess in the present. They move us toward acts of faith and hope, ways that we can live without the ultimate certainties that have so often proved attractive to religious believers. Levinson notes the humor and irony of the books in question, which are filled with comments that undercut human pretensions to a viewpoint that is valid for all time. He thinks we should take such writing “for the interventionist poetry that it is.”28 It does not tell us about another world, or about a concrete human future that is the object of divine promises, or about the last layer of reality that sits beneath historical appearances. Rather, we are led into a future that will reveal itself when the time comes, learning to live with uncertainty, and even coming to love the unfinished quality of such a life. This does not exclude the possibility that the future will in fact be the

122

Chapter 5

large eschatological fulfilment that has traditionally been envisaged. In a way that recalls Westphal, Levinson takes over something of the negative side of Rorty’s critique, while keeping open the prospect of a mystery that has yet to reveal itself. He sees this overall approach as a drive against idolatry, believing that it also frees us from the anxieties and the joylessness which go with an approach that panders to our fears, rather than encouraging us to find a place where the fears do not matter anymore. He thinks that conventional believers often invest their hopes in framework schemes that enable them to avoid openness to the religious mystery. He mentions “existential authenticity, theological worship, or hegemonic stories about the one and only meaning of history or the one and only purpose of existence” as examples of such idolatrous approaches. He thinks that if we can get rid of such false hopes, we have a chance to discover a new sort of joy and responsibility, and a renewed sense of inquiry. We can perhaps re-discover “the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.”29 There are therefore strong common interests between Levinson and Rorty. In fact, Levinson sees the difference between himself and Rorty simply as coming back to questions of personal biography, the fact, for example, that certain traditional religious practices (“Jewish American festivities”) still move him, and are part of his identity, serving as part of the background for everything he thinks and does. This religious belief, which he agrees might seem to Rorty “more trouble than it is worth,” is important because it is important to him. He would laugh at the thought that he should try to persuade others to become Jewish Americans, or try to develop a theoretical proof that everyone is called to such a life. This is not to say that he wants to insulate himself from challenge or criticism. In fact, the identity he has assumed invites or even demands challenges and trials of this sort, where a believer is pressed to move beyond fixed interpretations of familiar symbols. Beliefs and desires must not become “literal,” as this would imply that they have simply died.30 One is struck by how much this resonates with prominent philosophical themes from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, in thinkers like Nietzsche and Dewey. Life is a process of assimilation (what Nietzsche calls “overcoming”), which is valued as an activity in itself, rather than having to aim at a stable good which is beyond it, in the way that is favored by the Platonic tradition. While Levinson agrees with Plato regarding the human drive beyond the concerns of the present, he dissents from Plato’s view that the goal of this drive already exists. Religious life is no longer aimed toward entities that exemplify a definitive possession of the ideals and values which draw us forward in time. It represents rather the attraction toward something that has not yet revealed what it is to be, though it might emerge at a later stage. Older frameworks that attempt to describe the future

Pragmatism and the Theologians

123

once and for all are to be interpreted metaphorically or ironically. This recalls the distinction made by Dewey between a faith that leads us toward a fixed goal, promising a final restful possession, and one that commits us to ideals that are truly “ideal,” in that they continually call us forward into what is new, looking for a better future within time, rather than aiming at a preexistent fullness beyond it. This understanding, foreshadowed by Nietzsche, promises a fresh appreciation of earthly things, rediscovering possibilities of joy denied by the kind of life that was aimed at an oldfashioned religious good. Such a life can still describe itself as “religious,” in that it uses theological language in the way that Dewey uses the word “God” to describe the enduring pull of ideals and values that are always beyond us.31 And it can reinterpret the texts of the religious tradition in this way. Yet it is clear that there are many ways in which such an “attractive” force can be articulated, and the religious is just one of these. To decide to adopt a traditional religious style, as does Levinson, comes down to a personal preference, a choice to continue perhaps with the articulations one first knew as a child. In all this, Levinson’s sketch exemplifies many of the features of Rorty’s recommendations for religion. We are to be led beyond ourselves, though not beyond our pragmatist selves. PRAGMATIST RELIGION AND “WEAK” THOUGHT The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo takes this a step further, in that he holds that the detailed content of Christian theological belief itself leads us toward the sorts of positions defended by Rorty. In 2005, an English translation of a dialogue between Rorty and Vattimo appeared under the title The Future of Religion.32 Along with an editorial introduction, it contains a short essay by Rorty and an essay by Vattimo, followed by a dialogue between the two. Vattimo had earlier published a small general book on such matters, which is Rorty’s main point of reference in the dialogue.33 Vattimo proposes a radical re-interpretation of Christian belief, which he understands mainly in the context of Catholicism. Fundamental to this is a new understanding of the doctrine of kenosis, traditionally understood as the self-emptying of the second person of the Trinity at the incarnation. Vattimo effectively extends the principle of kenosis from the second person of the Trinity to the first person (the Father), seeing the incarnation as “God’s renunciation of his own sovereign transcendence” so that what was once limited to the Son is taken to be true of God generally.34 Rorty has a brief discussion of the relation of Vattimo’s views to those of Hegel, noting that for Hegel as well as for Vattimo, human history constitutes “the Incarnation of the Spirit, and its slaughterbench as the cross.”35

124

Chapter 5

If kenosis is understood in this extended sense, it follows that Christianity has a natural drive toward certain kinds of philosophical interpretation that emerge in the twentieth century. Vattimo particularly associates Heidegger with this program, seeing him as developing tendencies that are already at work within the Christian tradition, and which tell against the natural authoritarianism of metaphysics. They call in question “strong structures . . . the claimed peremptoriness of the real that is given ‘there, outside,’ like a wall against which one beats one’s head and that in this way makes itself known as effectively real . . . an image of the reality of Being and ultimately of God’s transcendence.”36 Contemporary philosophical approaches go back to impulses that begin with the incarnation, gaining plausibility from a context that was put in place by Christianity. Nietzsche and Heidegger seem convincing to us “only because we are living in a civilization shaped by the biblical, and specifically Christian message.”37 Vattimo believes that this is also the reason why the Western world is capable of taking seriously a philosophical project (i.e., Rorty’s) that is established not by means of direct argument, but simply by persuading people to adopt an alternative narrative. If our civilization had been formed by science, so that the only metanarrative in the field was the scientific one, then Rorty would have to supply proof for his position for it to gain a foothold in Western philosophical culture. As it is, the narrative approach that he proposes strikes a familiar chord with his readers. Even those who disagree with it and demand arguments for his conclusions can feel uneasily that their position comes down to dogmatism, recognizing that Rorty is exploiting resources that are already present in the tradition to which they subscribe. Vattimo believes that Christianity has largely failed to recognize its own deepest impulses, in that it believes it needs the kind of objective truth promoted by Western science, if it is to become intellectually respectable. It has fallen into a “ruinous realism,” trying to justify faith by integrating it into the scientific tradition. Such a way of thinking sets up a contrast between the biblical tradition and a natural reality that exists independently of it, with respect to which the biblical tradition “is obliged to ‘prove itself’.”38 The church finds itself participating in debates on the existence of God, the attributes of God, miracles, the movements of the heavens and so on. Reality stands over against us, a kind of wall with which we have to come to terms, and to which we have to correspond. The scriptural truth that could set us free has been identified with the truth of science, the “objective” truth.39 The texts are not left alone to work their effects on the reader, but are forced into a scientific mold. With this, theology inevitably moves toward authoritarianism.40 Vattimo thinks that the way ahead is not only to separate the message of the gospel from metaphysical positions but also to accept that the gospel is to be asserted precisely against such views, inasmuch as they make objective

Pragmatism and the Theologians

125

and universal claims. The church needs to “assume the evangelical message as the principle that dissolves all claims to objectivity.”41 At times, this project recalls the “demythologizing” position, with its recognition that what seemed to be statements of theological fact were stories told for other purposes, which were not meant to be taken literally. Vattimo is favorable to the position proposed by Lessing, that “Biblical revelation, freighted with myths, is directed solely toward our education.”42 He also holds Luther’s view that the interpretation of scripture is not a matter for authority, but comes down in the end to the believing individual. He sees this as part of modernity, so that we cannot simply set it aside. “Modern religiosity, the only one given us as our vocation, if it is to be authentic, cannot be set apart from one of Luther’s original teachings: the ‘free investigation’ of Scripture.”43 Once this is accepted, much that belonged to traditional belief has to go, because it was introduced in service of the ideal of objectivity. The process of unmasking or overcoming might eventually require that we disregard the idea of revelation itself, along with the notion that God is to be understood “as a person like me.”44 Even the doctrine of creation, that God made the world, starts to look shaky.45 Belief in Jesus is cut loose from its doctrinal underpinnings, including views that the world was made by a Father in heaven and that Jesus literally rose from the dead. “[M]ust we really believe in Jesus Christ only if we are able to demonstrate that God created the world in seven days or that Jesus himself actually rose on Easter morning?”46 Believers might wonder whether the gospel message could remain effective if its historicity is eroded in this way. But Vattimo appeals to the example of art as a medium that works its effects without appeal to scientific objectivity, and proposes that religion should understand itself along these lines. With Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante, we readily accept that “the experience of truth is above all that of hearing and interpreting messages.”47 Just as we do not try to “ground” the things that Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante teach us, but allow the texts freely to work their effects, we should not be worried about our inability to ground the message of scripture, as if we had to give it a justification within an independent philosophical or scientific order. There is a kind of self-authenticating (nonobjective) truth that comes with the message of a great work of art, and Vattimo thinks we should see our relation to Christian teaching in terms of our having been taken over by a truth of this sort. We should believe Christ is risen because we have read it in the gospel, rather than believing in the gospel because we know that Christ is risen. “The commitment to Christ’s teaching derives from the cogency of the message itself; he who believes has understood, felt, intuited that his word is a ‘word of eternal life.’”48 Vattimo accepts that such an argument seems to lack authority and could be accused of opening up Christian belief to any set of whims. In addition, it

126

Chapter 5

contradicts a long tradition of metaphysical theological thinking, at least in the minimal sense that theology understands itself as relaying a word about the ultimate reality of things. Yet Vattimo claims that if Christianity is to come to itself, it needs to overcome false beginnings, and adjust to the view that he proposes. Our problem is that “we have not yet fully developed the antimetaphysical consequences of Christianity itself . . . we still oppose the historical-cultural cogency of the biblical tradition to a ‘natural reality’ that supposedly exists independently of it and with respect to which the biblical truth is obliged to ‘prove itself.’”49 For Vattimo, only one truth revealed to us by scripture is not liable to be demythologized, namely, the message of love and charity. This is the part of the gospel that can “never be demythologized in the course of time.”50 There is a question why, if so much else has been jettisoned, this alone should be seen as resisting dissolution. St. Paul certainly describes it as the only thing that will last, and Christian tradition agrees that it sums up Christian ethics. Yet most Christians have usually thought that a good deal more is required to sustain a Christian life, at least while believers are completing the earthly faith journey. For example, Christ himself is never to be superseded, and should not be “demythologized,” reduced, for example, to the level of a moral teacher and exemplar, as happens in some varieties of Enlightenment thought. Vattimo offers something of an argument here, with an appeal to René Girard’s reading of the meaning of the incarnation, that it shows “the dissolution of the sacred as violence” in that the age-old link between the violent exclusion of the scapegoat and the formation of a reconciled community is broken.51 The truth of love is therefore seen as the enduring purpose of all the rest, so that the meaning of Christ’s action is aimed ultimately at its own supersession. Through all this, there must be a suspicion that Vattimo has settled in the end for an interpretation that fits a deficient cultural situation regarding religion, and has brought the Christian message down to the part that is most congenial to current lax European practice. It does not reassure believers to hear Rorty describing Vattimo’s position as turning away from the kinds of passages in the Epistle to the Romans that appealed to Karl Barth, to “the passage in Paul that most other people like best,” which is well suited to those “who only go to church for weddings, baptisms and funerals.”52 Christianity has tolerated the half-hearted in its long and varied history, but has usually stopped short of determining its doctrines on the basis of their preferences. At least, church authorities would probably try to answer Vattimo along these lines. Rorty and Vattimo could well reply that this comes down to church authorities imposing their preferences yet again, while insisting, as they have always done, that these are not preferences at all, but the authentic interpretation.

Pragmatism and the Theologians

127

PRAGMATIST RELIGION AS A PERSONAL CHOICE Given that Vattimo’s general approach corresponds to Rorty’s on most significant points, it is no surprise that Rorty is a strong supporter of Vattimo. Neither thinker sees any place for metaphysical support for religious views. In a way that recalls Rorty’s insistence that our concepts do not cut the things of the world at the joints, Vattimo insists that appeals to revelation, or claims that we could read the mind of the Almighty without further ado, always operate within horizons of interpretation that become overlooked and turned into absolutes. The metaphysical imagination is always attempting “the absolutization of . . . contingent historical horizons, which are claimed to be inseparable from the truth of revelation.”53 Vattimo agrees with the selfreferential implication that his interpretation of Christianity is substantively tied to his own framework of understanding, and in the end to his own biography. He further suggests that some of what he experiences characterizes the overall time in which he lives, so that the reciprocal relation between his identity and his Christianity parallels a similar reciprocity between the sacred texts and the contemporary epoch. In the background is the relation of the world of late Western modernity to its Judaeo-Christian inheritance.54 As we would expect, he offers no argument for this position, but simply a narrative account, in accord with Rorty’s view that philosophies are not ultimately a matter of argument, but go back to persuasive accounts of strong poets. Vattimo invites anyone who disagrees with him to propose “a more persuasive interpretative hypothesis.”55 Vattimo and Rorty believe that the subversion of the metaphysical framework should lead to a new openness to human conversation, a society in which, as Rorty describes it, “love is pretty much the only law.”56 The difference between Vattimo and Rorty comes down to biography, in the way that recalls the observations of Levinson. Vattimo tends to draw his hopes for the future out of the Christian past, believing that Christian history, by inculcating historical tendencies to dissolve absolute authorities, is a principal resource for this sort of future. For biographical reasons, he remains attached to the faith of his childhood and has developed a narrative whereby he sees himself as remaining true to its deepest impulses. It represents the source of the possibilities that dominate the current situation and functions as a remnant of a historical norm, in that it sets out a fundamental point of reference for what is truly contemporary. While Rorty would probably accept parts of Vattimo’s account of the effects of Christianity on the recent intellectual history of the West, he comes from a different past, without religious affiliation or interest. He is more sanguine about leaving the Christian past behind altogether. “My differences with Vattimo come down to his ability to regard a past event as holy and my sense that holiness resides only in an ideal future.”57 While Rorty

128

Chapter 5

follows Dewey in refusing to identify the “ideal” with any particular entity or state of affairs, Vattimo retains a remnant of the old belief, seeing the present, which we have no choice but to adopt, as fundamentally formed by Christianity. The difference therefore comes down to biography. Traditional believers might well dismiss Vattimo’s approach as the imposition of a personal wishlist, which fails to safeguard anything much of the identity of the Christian tradition it claims as its source. For all that, they have to acknowledge that it is hard to argue for the identity of a phenomenon that develops historically. Why exactly could we not envisage a different world where abstinence from metaphysics joins (or replaces) the older abstinences, so that the attempt to ground matters of faith is abandoned, and Christianity settles into a new mold where the one thing that lasts into eternity is the law of love? While traditional believers may not like the prospect of such a faithworld, the very effort to draw a line can raise a familiar misgiving, in that there seems no compelling reason why the line should be drawn here, and not further on, where Vattimo wants to put it. Vattimo insists after all that he has not excluded anything of the heart of Christianity, apart from the metaphysical accretions that it has taken on through its long history. While God still retains some sort of reality,58 the function of the divine is mainly to remind us of the handover of deliberative and executive authority to the human, while stopping us from lapsing back into the doctrinaire security of metaphysics, where we draw on beliefs whose validity is nonhistorical. Rorty glosses Vattimo’s understanding of the Christian narrative as “God turned everything over to human beings.”59 He therefore sees Vattimo’s Christianity as affirming his own basic hope, in that the divine itself seems to encourage us to situate ourselves within a language that leaves no place for an authority beyond the human. This leaves the large question of why, even if we accept that Christianity first generated the history that delivered us to this point, we should bother to retain it, except as a historical memory. If what Vattimo says is true, and the culture is in the grip of Christian belief anyway, although it may not know this, it does not seem to matter whether we retain a commitment to the historical movement that produced the present moment. Lessing, whom Vattimo cites with approval, regarded the New Testament as a “primer,” and hints that the medieval enthusiasts had a point when they taught the supersession of the age of Christ in the age of the Spirit. There comes a time when our primer has nothing more to teach us, and the mature response is surely to leave it behind altogether, regarding our education as complete.60 Rorty is confident that his own approach can adequately realize the negative moment that historical Christianity introduced, so that it no longer needs Christian belief to sustain itself. In other words, if we take Vattimo seriously, why not forget Vattimo and simply turn to Rorty? Vattimo himself says that Voltaire might be “a positive effect of the Christianization

Pragmatism and the Theologians

129

of mankind, and not a blasphemous enemy of Christ.”61 If we pursue the programme of late modernity, we seem to be doing all that the gospel could require of us in the present age. Our needing the remnants of Christianity to sustain us just comes down to a personal quirk. All of this fits easily into Rorty’s account. If we hold to such a preference, perhaps because of an upbringing that invested our hope for the future in a particular set of historical symbols, then we can choose to retain them. Others will move on. In the end, the difference between Vattimo and Rorty seems to come down to nothing more than this. AFFIRMATIVE PRAGMATIST RELIGION There are further interpretations of Rorty’s relation to religion in the collection of essays mentioned above.62 Most of the presenters are from a middledenomination Protestant background, which offers initial points of contact with Rorty, in that they are well aware of the historical and changing nature of interpretation, and of the dependence of the interpretative process on the interests that dominate a particular time and place. In addition, the anti-metaphysical thrust of traditional Protestantism, with its emphasis on the break that occurs when a believer enters the new life opened up by the scriptures, recalls Rorty’s view that languages open up or constitute a world, allowing perhaps a new type of existence to become effective. The responses bring out further aspects of Rorty’s general approach that prove attractive to theologians. In his own way, he is concerned with ultimate things, the very limits of the world in which we live. These similarities move one of the conference speakers, Jerome P. Soneson, to the startling suggestion that Rorty is becoming “a religious (even, perhaps, theological) thinker, one who reflects on the problems and possibilities of the religious dimension of human life.”63 In particular, Soneson sees the discussion of final vocabularies as evidence for this concealed religious interest.64 Rorty perhaps invites interpretation along these lines when he says that Dewey and Tillich are just “saying the same things to different audiences.”65 A Tillich-style definition of God might seem to empty the concept of its properly religious dimension, so that it arouses the sort of suspicion expressed by MacIntyre and Ricoeur of reducing God to “no more than an interest of human nature.”66 But the relation can also be interpreted in the opposite direction, as pointing to the latent religious dimension of Dewey’s thought. The difference between the two comes down to a question of tone or emphasis. It also reflects the ambiguity already noticed in the idea of pragmatism. On the one hand, it considers things from within a context of significance projected from human interests, so that there is a level where a society’s current projects are left undisturbed,

130

Chapter 5

and current interests rule everything. On the other hand, it encourages an experimental frame of mind that leaves settled ways behind and moves toward novel articulations of the whole, a frame of mind that has similarities with religious faith. Some of the most straightforward theological responses to Rorty emphasize this latter side of the pragmatist impulse. While Westphal and Vattimo set out to use the approach favored by Rorty as a kind of corrective for versions of Christianity that overreach themselves in their dogmatic claims, it is also possible for a theologian to set out to revise religious belief and practice full on, along the lines proposed by Rorty. In a piece called “Rorty’s Neopragmatism and the Religious Humanist Option,” Mason Olds offers an attempt of this sort, set within the historical movement of “religious humanism.” He sketches a portrait of the religious humanist as one who sets about directly remodelling religious belief, without the inhibitions or qualifications that often characterize theological attempts to address such a task. Religion is seen in the first place as something that humans do, an enterprise, “created by humans to serve certain purposes.”67 The kinds of purposes that characterize a remodelled religion fit reasonably well with those that characterize an enlightened human-centered pragmatism. The processes of the world are to be brought in line with human goals in such a way that human moral ideals and values will be allowed to flourish. The final principle of such a world might still be called “God,” a word that was retained by Dewey, though Olds thinks that the religious humanist option can equally well do without it. Olds is undisturbed by Rorty’s radical proposal that we should see religious vocabularies as tools for developing a better human future that serves human purposes. He thinks that many traditional doctrines have become dead metaphors. If they once articulated something important, they have now become flat and stale. What used to move hearts has come down to a jejune description of an alternative world alongside the real one. Olds includes here the doctrines of God, the soul, heaven and hell, and (more surprisingly) “doing the will of God.”68 It must be said that many contemporary churches have toyed with such positions, though rarely on the scale proposed by Olds. He offers a striking sketch of what a church might look like if such reform is carried through without inhibition. The church would be a semipublic body, existing between the individual on the one side and the public sphere on the other. The program of such a church would be aimed at the world, and not toward any “religious” goals in the narrow sense. Its overriding aim would be to make its society “a better place in which to live.”69 Doctrinal beliefs would play no part in determining membership of the church or the kinds of activities its members would pursue. The church would be run democratically, without any of the hierarchy that has so featured in Christian history. Its structures would be close to those of a contemporary political party. A reader might think that

Pragmatism and the Theologians

131

the structure sketched so far has little to do with what we regard as a church. However, Olds emphasizes further features that bring his proposal closer to the familiar picture, showing how life in his church endorses traditional religious attitudes of piety, respect, and gratitude, which are however to be directed toward “the world” or “the natural world,” rather than toward God: “The focus of the liberal church will be on living in the natural world that is our home. . . . [T]he natural world should inspire a kind of piety involving respect and gratitude, though it will be indifferent to these expressions of human thankfulness.”70 Olds proposes a celebration of the “changing seasons”71 to accompany ceremonies marking important passages of a person’s life—marriage, birth, coming of age, and death. His vision recalls aspects of Kant’s sketch of the enlightened church in Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone. There is, however, an element of feeling for nature thrown in, and the whole is centered not on the command of ethical reason, as for Kant, but on the personal call to self-creation that characterizes European Romanticism. Olds does not hold back: “The members will be encouraged to become their own creators, to become their own versions of strong poets and ironist theorists.”72 This pragmatist theological vision of the religious future of the West reflects Olds’ background in the movement of Religious Humanism, which is a development from Unitarianism. This lessens his concern to safeguard continuity with older Christian traditions, and gives his sketch an uninhibited quality, in that it can focus simply on the kind of world we want for the future, without worrying much about issues of historical connexion. For all that, the reader might be struck by how familiar are the proposals he puts forward, most of them clearly traceable to various strands of Western enlightened utopianism. There is even a suspicion that Rorty’s program has lost its philosophical bite, being reduced to a draft of a better future, along with the concepts necessary to bring it about. This occasions a feeling that the proposals simply extrapolate the best hopes of the present, rather than lead us toward a world that is genuinely new. In this, they interestingly illuminate an aspect of Rorty’s account that is easily overlooked. As noted above, Rorty insists that God is not a “mere posit” or an item on a kind of wishlist, as if theology simply puts together a list of aspirations. The aim is not that we develop a utopia from within our current vocabulary, but rather that we try out vocabularies that are radically novel, and explore the worlds into which they bring us. There is an element of passivity about the detail of this process in that we are imaginatively moved into a future that offers a genuine thrill of exploration and discovery, where we do not know in advance what new objects will be thrown up, and what new places we will come to reconnoitre. This remains valid even when we accept that the meaning of the whole process ultimately comes back to us and our aspirations. Rorty compares the appearance of God

132

Chapter 5

to the appearance of other novel objects that first come to light in the wake of a new and unforeseen vocabulary, allowing to God the same reality-status as that of other mysterious things, like “sense-impressions, tables, quarks, and human rights.”73 These are not just the results of acts of “positing” on the part of human subjects, who might want to use such things to realize their own projects. Rather they appear in light of new vocabularies in a way that takes us by surprise, drawing us into a future that exceeds anything we could have anticipated. The decisive move is made at the beginning, where we are startled into a radically new vocabulary that opens a new world, filled with novel objects. It seems that when pragmatist sketches for a new future miss this philosophical moment, they are easily reduced to the utopian aspirations of the present, rather than expressing the first stirrings of a world that is genuinely new. ROBBINS’ DEVELOPMENT OF DEWEY This criticism reflects a problem with views that see the ideals of the future simply as coming back to an act of will that is made in the present. They lack the sort of support that is needed to sustain faith and hope in a better future, given that our faith and hope usually need to be sustained by a sense that they do not come down to just our faith and hope. One way of finding such support without falling back on metaphysical comfort is to wake up to the beauty and interest of a future-oriented approach to the world for its own sake. J. Wesley Robbins refrains from sketching detailed views of the future shape of Christianity, and focuses rather on awakening a sense of the attraction of the pragmatist programme in itself, and the peculiar sense of beauty it can arouse. He focuses particularly on the views that Dewey sets out in “A Common Belief.” Robbins begins with Dewey’s felt dichotomy between human ideals or values on the one side, and the world described by physics on the other. The world described by physics seems to leave no room for any objective value, so that ideals lack confirmation, being reduced to mere wishes of humans that are vulnerable to changes of mind or loss of confidence. Robbins points out that this is a problem only on the assumption that ideals and values need somehow to exist already in the world, if they are to be affirmed with any confidence. Both Platonist and Christian ethical projects hold the view that our moral activity connects with reality itself. As a result, when the ideals and values that they pursue are no longer seen to be present in the world described by physics, they seem to need a grounding from somewhere else, for example, from a “distinct spiritual realm.”74 This is depicted as a higher world that represents the final reality of things, while the world that is the object of the descriptions of physics is relegated to a lower level. The structure of this sort

Pragmatism and the Theologians

133

of understanding also appears in contemporary philosophies such as that of Whitehead, who promotes a primary metaphysical description of the way the world really is, and relegates the descriptions of physics to a lesser status, a result of abstraction from the real reality, so that those who think that physical descriptions give us the world as it really is, fall into the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness.” Other developments in this line appeal to quantum physics, claiming that it uncovers a much richer world which can be described as “holistic or “organicist,”75 against which the objects uncovered by Newtonian physics look abstract and deficient. Robbins notes Dewey’s fundamental rejection of the assumption that underlies all these attempts, that ideals and values must already exist in some way if they are to have any validity. As Dewey realizes, once this assumption is given up, the old religious projects are radically transformed. Religion is no longer a matter of identifying entities that are the bearers of ideals and values, and then approaching them so as to share in their holiness. Religious faith is still concerned with ideals and values, but it loses the impulse to see these as existing in a real ontological order that exists beyond the human. Rather, according to Robbins’ reading of Dewey, “[r]eligious faith is, instead, a matter of devotion to our own imaginative projections and to the realization of these ideal ends by our own efforts.”76 Dewey sees all human effort at improvement as ultimately religious, so long as it can be described as projecting a sense of a self as a whole. Artists, scientists, citizens, and parents are “controlled by the unseen” when they act in the spirit of their various callings to improve things.77 We can choose many different names for this imaginative movement toward a better world. Dewey is happy to retain the word “God,” so long as its meaning is understood to refer to “the active relation between ideal and actual,” the impulse that drives us from one to the other.78 Robbins strongly supports this. He argues against the view of William Dean, who is sympathetic toward many aspects of Dewey’s programme, but who argues that values and ideals must be found already existing in some minimal sense in the world, if the program is to succeed. Dean thinks that the world shows a sort of teleology, in that its natural mechanisms are set up as if it is aimed at creating “ever more beautiful things,” and that this points to the divine.79 This is understood in a panpsychist way, reminiscent of Whitehead. Robbins calls it “theistic radical empiricism,” and holds that it adds nothing necessary or useful to Rorty’s pragmatic humanism. It is better to go the whole way with Dewey and Rorty. Robbins notes the way in which Dewey’s separation of ideals and realities shifts the emphasis back toward the creative human subject, a figure who mutates into what Rorty calls the “strong poet,” the one who forges new vocabularies which others are drawn to use.80 Dewey’s imaginative projection of a whole self and world where people are moved toward ideal ends,

134

Chapter 5

constituting themselves as wholes in relation to the world around them, corresponds more or less to Rorty’s notion of a “final vocabulary.”81 As regards the need to sustain faith and hope in face of what could be seen simply as an unsupported act of human will, Robbins notes a kind of aesthetic wonder that we can feel if we give up the attempt to ground ideals in an external reality, and give ourselves over to the pragmatist project. Rorty similarly refers to a sort of gratitude we can feel toward the things of the world that appear in light of our changing vocabularies. Awareness of the contingency of our linguistic practices can enable us to feel “gratitude for and to those words, those practices, and the beings they disclose.”82 In elucidating this somewhat mysterious notion, Rorty emphasizes that the gratitude is not to anybody or anything for giving us the stars and trees, but is a gratitude to the stars and trees themselves. Presumably, he wants to distance himself from similar statements by Heidegger, who sees the human being as having duties regarding the fundamental process whereby entities appear in the world and develop, so that the human functions as a kind of shepherd of ultimate things. For Rorty this is too metaphysical. He prefers to connect the feeling either to the things themselves, or perhaps to their emergence out of linguistic contingency, given that they might not have existed if we had fallen into different vocabularies. This would correspond to other themes that Rorty notes in Heidegger, particularly an awareness of the questionable quality of the things we know, hiding as they do other unexplored possibilities that would arise from other ways of speaking.83 Robbins admires the way that Rorty supports Dewey’s view of the religious impulse as “the active relation between ideal and actual” without proposing an alternative metaphysics.84 This helps answer the straightforward objection that a traditional theist might make to the pragmatist interpretation of religion, that while the word “God” is still used, its meaning has been altered out of all recognition, so that the divinity is reduced to the status of a heuristic instrument. Robbins discusses an objection by Brian Hebblethwaite along these lines, where Hebblethwaite argues that “God” just means a “supernatural person in which all ideal values are antecedently realized”85 so that Dewey’s pragmatist definition simply falsifies the meaning of the concept. Robbins observes, however, that Hebblethwaite’s objection presupposes the worldview of Plato and Aristotle, which assumes that a name like “God” refers to something that is simply there. This point of view precludes approaches that might attempt something radically new, and freezes a particular framework of enquiry so as to place it permanently beyond challenge. In another article, Robbins argues against attempts by traditionally minded Christians to deny the title of “Christian” to writers like Don Cupitt on grounds that he does not adhere to a particular “realist” theological theory.86 Robbins remarks that “[t]he name ‘Christian’ is not the private property of people who happen to believe that ideal values are nothing if they are not realized in some antecedent thing.”87

Pragmatism and the Theologians

135

Historical styles of argumentation of this sort are familiar to theological practitioners from the mid twentieth-century, that reflection always goes back, for example, to a starting point that is finite and that such viewpoints can usually be overcome, so that what would once have been excluded without further discussion, is now considered as a possible component of a new interpretation. Given the protean character of Christianity and its commitment to a continuing dynamic assimilation of the reality of its message, why should it not admit the kind of transformation proposed by Robbins, following the lead of Dewey and Rorty? It is hard to see that traditional patterns of belief could make any substantial criticism of the directions Robbins proposes, unless they in some way address the question of metaphysics, the view that ideals and values need to be grounded in reality itself if they are to have any validity. In the final part of this work, I will try to uncover just what is at stake in the dispute between religious belief that is metaphysically based, and religious belief that fits the framework offered by pragmatism. While both sides regard themselves as “religious,” they remain divided by a gulf that seemingly cannot be bridged. I will suggest that the division comes down in the end to different understandings of a certain sort of human relation, the one described in what has become a hackneyed phrase, as “a relation to the other.” NOTES 1. The Gang of Five is found in “Appropriating Postmodernism,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, ed. Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1–10. For the Gang of Six, see Merold Westphal, “Christianity and the Postmodern Turn,” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, ed. Myron B. Penner (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005), 141–53. 2. Westphal, “Appropriating Postmodernism,” 1999, 2. 3. Merold Westphal, “Appropriating Postmodernism,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 75–88, 79. It should be noted that this work differs from Westphal’s 1999 essay of the same name. 4. Westphal, “Appropriating Postmodernism,” 2001, 78–79. 5. Merold Westphal, “Father Adam and His Feuding Sons,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 148–75, 172. He also notes that such reasoning “has all the cogency of assuming that to think of the Grand Canyon is to think deeply.” Cf. “Nietzsche as a Theological Resource,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 285–301, 289. 6. Merold Westphal, “Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 128–47, 129. Westphal’s fullest account of Heidegger’s interpretative structure is in “Hermeneutics as Epistemology,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 47–74, 51.

136

Chapter 5

7. Hendrik R. Pieterse, “Rorty Among the Theologians: The Possibility of Theology After The New Historicism,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 273–92, 286. 8. Merold Westphal, “Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 176–96, 189. 9. Merold Westphal, “Overcoming Onto-Theology,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 1–28, 27. 10. Westphal, “Appropriating Postmodernism,” 2001, 86. 11. Merold Westphal, “Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution,” in Overcoming Onto-Theology, ed. Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 89–105, 93. 12. Westphal cites a statement of Thomas Aquinas: “Even if there were no human intellects, there could be truths because of their relation to the divine intellect. But if, per impossibile, there were no intellects at all, but things continued to exist, then there would be no such reality as truth” (De Veritate Q.1, A.6). Westphal, “Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution,” 93 fn. 13. Westphal, “Father Adam and His Feuding Sons,” 164. 14. Westphal, “Hermeneutics as Epistemology,” 48. 15. Ibid., 52. 16. Ibid., 62. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 59. The note refers to Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 188–89, 149–50. 19. Westphal, “Hermeneutics as Epistemology,” 62. 20. Ibid., 63. 21. Richard Rorty, “Reply to Huw Price,” in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, eds. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010), 290–92, 291. 22. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 7. 23. Westphal, “Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution,” 92. 24. Westphal, “Overcoming Onto-theology,” 18. 25. Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” 27–49, 48–49. 26. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 3–21. 27. Henry Samuel Levinson, “Rorty, Diggins, and the Promise of Pragmatism,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 25–42, 41. 28. Levinson, “Rorty, Diggins, and the Promise of Pragmatism,” 41. 29. Ibid., 38–39. 30. Ibid., 39–40. 31. Cf. Dewey, “A Common Faith,” 1–58, 15. 32. Rorty and Vattimo, The Future of Religion. 33. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 29–41, 35. The reference is to Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto and David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

Pragmatism and the Theologians

137

34. Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” in The Future of Religion, eds. Santiago Zabala, Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 43–54, 51. 35. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 35. 36. Vattimo, Belief, 36. 37. Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” 52. 38. Ibid., 53. 39. Ibid., 48. 40. Ibid., 49. 41. Ibid. 42. Vattimo, Belief, 78. 43. Ibid., 60. 44. Ibid., 66, 92. 45. Cf. for example Ibid., 58: “Is it really impossible to listen to Jesus’ teaching unless one concedes that it can be demonstrated that God is the cause of the physical world’s existence? It is true that the Bible calls God father and creator, but it also calls him shepherd, assigns to him many ‘warrior-God’ attitudes and makes him share Israel’s hatred of its enemies, who at times will be destroyed on his command.” 46. Vattimo, “The Age of Interpretation,” 53. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 52. 49. Ibid., 53. 50. Ibid., 51. 51. Vattimo, Belief, 37. 52. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 35. 53. Vattimo, Belief, 53. 54. Ibid., 34. 55. Ibid., 41. 56. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 40. 57. Ibid., 39. 58. Vattimo reports his answer to a tradition-minded questioner as to whether he still believes in God: “I answered that I believed that I believed.” Vattimo, Belief, 70. 59. Richard Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 35. 60. “Perhaps their three ages of the world were not just an empty fancy; and they certainly had no ill intentions when they taught that the New Covenant must become just as antiquated as the Old has become. For them too, it was still the same economy of the same God. It was still—to put it in my terms—the same plan of the universal education of the human race.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “The Education of the Human Race,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 217–40, 238. 61. Vattimo, Belief, 41. 62. Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” 63. Jerome P. Soneson, “Rorty’s Final Vocabularies, and the Possibility of a Historicist Metaphysics,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 293–307, 293.

138

Chapter 5

64. Soneson says that “[w]hat Rorty calls ‘final vocabularies’ seems to me to be very similar to what Paul Tillich identifies as the religious dimension of human existence, our ‘ultimate concerns.’” Soneson, “Rorty’s Final Vocabularies, and the Possibility of a Historicist Metaphysics,” 293. This might seem doubtful, in that final vocabularies are not so much objects of our concern, but rather frameworks within which such objects can appear (I worship God, not the theist vocabulary). Perhaps Soneson would point out that each vocabulary nevertheless imposes some ultimate concerns (as liberalism, even considered as a vocabulary, imposes a negative valuation of cruelty). 65. Rorty, “Pragmatism without Method,” 63–77, 69. 66. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 10. 67. Mason Olds, “Rorty’s Neopragmatism and the Religious Humanist Option,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 253–71, 261. See also Mason Olds, American Religious Humanism (Minneapolis, MN: Fellowship of Religious Humanists, 1996). 68. Olds, “Rorty’s Neopragmatism and the Religious Humanist Option,” 263. 69. Ibid., 267. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” 10. 74. J. Wesley Robbins, “A Neopragmatist Perspective on Religion and Science,” Zygon 28, no. 3 (September 1993): 337–49, 338. 75. Robbins, “A Neopragmatist Perspective on Religion and Science,” 343–44. 76. Ibid., 338. 77. Dewey, “A Common Faith,” 17. 78. Robbins, “A Neopragmatist Perspective on Religion and Science,” 339. Dewey uses the formula in “A Common Faith,” 35. 79. J. Wesley Robbins, “Religious Naturalism: Humanistic Versus Theistic,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty, eds. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 75–95, 81. 80. Robbins, “Religious Naturalism: Humanistic Versus Theistic,” 76. 81. Robbins, “A Neopragmatist Perspective on Religion and Science,” 339. 82. Robbins, “Religious Naturalism: Humanistic Versus Theistic,” 76. The quote is found at Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” 27–49, 48. 83. Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” 45. 84. J. Wesley Robbins, “‘You Will Be Like God’: Richard Rorty and Mark C. Taylor on the Theological Significance of Human Language Use,” Journal of Religion (1992): 389–402, 391. 85. Robbins, “When Christians Become Naturalists,” 195–206, 203. 86. Ibid., 201. 87. Ibid., 203.

Part III

ETHICS

Chapter 6

Pragmatist Social Ethics

METAPHYSICAL AND PRAGMATIST VIEWS OF RIGHTS Could it be that other people stand over against us in a radical way so as to require a kind of correspondence from us, so that even before they speak, they require that we treat them as human beings with dignity? Or is it that, like other things, they appear within spaces opened by vocabularies of ours, and any demands they seem to make on us, come back to the logic of these vocabularies and arise only within them? As we would expect, Rorty encourages us to try the second of these possibilities. In the final section of this work, I want to explore what is at stake between the two options. It is not immediately apparent that a choice for one or the other results in practical differences as regards ethical action. Rorty holds the usual liberal views about how others should be treated, and supports the growing inclusion and acknowledgment of marginalized groups that have characterized recent Western history. In this, he subscribes to a broad Western ethical consensus that spans metaphysical and religious believers and unbelievers alike. Yet Rorty wants to resist the conclusion that such attitudes imply an acknowledgment of something deep in the other person, an intrinsic quality that challenges us at a fundamental level to an appropriate response. Rorty recognizes that when asked, people usually offer religious-metaphysical reasons for their respectful treatment of others. Norman Geras’ Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, begins with a survey of explanations offered by those who helped Jews and others, at risk of their own lives, during the Second World War. The literature finds no particular pattern based on class, gender, politics, or religion, characterizing those who rescued Jews.1 Yet almost without exception, 141

142

Chapter 6

the rescuers invoke large metaphysical or religious principles in explaining their actions, appealing to “common humanity,” or “human nature,” or “what Christ would have done” as reasons for acting as they did. Geras sums up his reading of the literature with a surprising citation from an article about Father Marie Benoit, a rescuer of some renown, where the author is none other than James Rorty, Richard Rorty’s father. James Rorty writes of the rescuers’ abhorrence of Nazi actions and attitudes, and also appeals to a large principle to explain it: “Instinctively they rejected what seemed and was a betrayal of our common humanity.”2 But while Geras’s reflections are striking in showing the reasons people offer when asked why they perform acts of heroism, it may be that these reasons do not reflect anything deeper than an explanatory style that has a long history in Western culture. They might simply go back to thought patterns of a particular historical epoch and nothing more. A pragmatist like Rorty can accept the explanations as they are, but go on to claim that it is possible to support the same outcomes without any appeal to large religious or metaphysical grounds. The view that solidarity with other people might go back to nothing deeper than historical contingencies colors Rorty’s interpretation of the various movements for social inclusion that have influenced recent Western history. Examples are the abolition of slavery and the advance of women’s rights. Rorty has a brief discussion of ancient slavery, focusing on the point that because slaves lack a discourse of their own, they appear in the world only as objects of the frame of reference projected by the speech practice of the dominant language group, the slave-owning class. Slaves are therefore not allowed to appear as subjects who could relate to other subjects as equals. Rorty repeats the common observation that a slave-owning vocabulary can extend even into the consciousness of the slave, being imposed in more or less the same way as are external conditions of life. He remarks that slaves seem to have less personhood “because of the masters’ control over the language spoken by the slaves—their ability to make slaves think of their pain as fated and even somehow deserved, something to be borne rather than resisted.”3 Naturally, Rorty and his opponents do not disagree on what constitutes desirable practice here. The question concerns rather the sort of narrative that is to be put around the practice. The historical movement for abolition of slavery seems to have been driven by strong religious and metaphysical views. Those who regarded the practice as morally wrong usually maintained that slaves already implicitly possessed full humanity, and that the emancipation of slaves was a belated acknowledgment of a humanity that had always been present. Some interpret the advance of women’s rights in a similar way. Rorty notes that the contemporary feminist theorist Catherine MacKinnon looks back to a time when “women are human beings in truth but not in social reality.”4 This description is ultimately metaphysical, because it assumes it makes

Pragmatist Social Ethics

143

sense to talk about possession of rights in a deep and invisible sense, even when the rights are not yet recognized in any way by the society in which they exist. (Rorty, who generally approves of MacKinnon, but who disagrees with such a way of talking about rights, sees this argument as untypical of her writing.) Rorty wants to promote moves to recognize the full humanity of all people, but he also wants to exclude metaphysical reasons for this that see a slave or an unemancipated woman as already possessing rights that are completely denied in practice. Appeals to invisible rights make it sound as if there is a prior standard embedded in nature itself, which can challenge or confirm the language of a slaveowner or a male chauvinist. Rorty remains resolutely nominalist here, and refuses any appeal to deep and necessary structures that supposedly exist in the world or in other human beings beyond the contours that the world and its people assume within particular historical vocabularies. There is no uniform invisible potential that all human beings embody in principle. Nor are there predetermined ends that could serve as criteria for judging whether the history of particular individuals or groups is fundamentally successful or unsuccessful. Historical progress should not be seen as the gradual discovery and embodiment of a structure that was always implicitly present, however much it was covered over during most of its history. Rather, it should be seen as following on conversations and transactions that substitute new ways of thinking and existing for old ways. The seams of our moral universe are not to be aligned with something that exists antecedently in the nature of things: “[The] choice between a realist and pragmatist rhetoric is the choice between saying that moral progress gradually aligns these seams with the real seams and saying that it is a matter of simultaneously reweaving and enlarging a fabric that is not intended to be congruent with an antecedent reality.”5 As regards practical outcomes, it seems that both realism and pragmatism can develop either way on questions of human rights. Aristotle argues that in reality, there are no hidden dimensions to a slave’s life, so that the discourse of a slave-owning society accurately reflects the metaphysical reality of its slaves. Their apparent acquiescence in their own status indicates that they are what they seem, servile “human instruments,” lacking a consequent train of thought and unable to plan or pursue any coherent course of action. The best option for such people is to be coopted into a household, and into the conceptual vocabulary of slavery.6 By contrast, MacKinnon’s metaphysical view supports an emancipatory movement that sees itself as recognizing qualities that always belonged to an oppressed minority, though they were not acknowledged. Metaphysics can thus be used to support either direction on the question of fundamental human rights. The same seems true of the pragmatist side as well. Rorty agrees that a pragmatist society, which sees ethical

144

Chapter 6

and political positions as following from contingent historical developments, can fall into a narrow ethnocentrism, where it simply takes for granted that others are excluded because its own viewpoint has always excluded them. On the other hand, it can become “liberal,” and develop an interest in including the perspectives of others that is internal to its own liberal outlook. There are cultures that have a natural openness, whose members would not feel right if they simply ignored the interests of those who did not belong to the culture. Rorty wants to promote this version of pragmatism, while agreeing that it cannot be philosophically grounded, any more than can the narrowly “ethnocentric” sort.7 Rorty favors the metaphor of evolutionary struggle to account for a society’s reweaving of its principles and practices. The image allows for change toward new forms, while keeping sight of the fundamental contingency of the process and avoiding mention of any overall telos which might give it a deeper dimension. While a metaphysician appeals to what was in some sense always the case, a pragmatically minded rights reformer simply tries to expand the moral imagination of a society, so that its language develops to include those who were formerly excluded. The focus changes from attempting a correspondence, to developing ways of talking which make new sets of interests possible. “From a pragmatist angle, neither Christianity, nor the Enlightenment, nor contemporary feminism is a case of cognitive clarity overcoming cognitive distortion. Each is, instead, an example of evolutionary struggle—struggle guided by no immanent teleology.”8 Rorty refers approvingly to descriptions of cultural progress by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, which see histories of enslavement or emancipation as histories of emergence of new forms of life, none of which has any metaphysical privilege. The claim that the world envisaged by feminism is better than the alternative is therefore like the claim “that mammals are preferable to reptiles, or Aryans to Jews; it is an ethnocentric claim made from the point of view of a given cluster of genes or memes.”9 This is consistent with Rorty’s overall views, offering an account of our dealings with others that is in fundamental continuity with our dealings with the rest of the world. Rorty thinks there is no reason why our dealings with other people need be described differently. PRAGMATIC SOCIAL ADJUSTMENT The vocabulary in question is therefore not formed in accord with some deeper truth to which it corresponds, but is a simple result of the jostling of historical causal factors until they reach a more or less stable equilibrium. In the sort of world envisaged by Rorty, radical changes to a social vocabulary

Pragmatist Social Ethics

145

are not based on deep reasons, but must simply assert themselves causally, relying on achieving a future equilibrium in which they will be included. Rorty discusses ways in which an excluded group comes to be accepted by a hostile society. The discussion relies on a Darwinian analogy and is couched almost entirely in terms of tactical pressures and their resolution, seeing particular groups of genes and memes as forming and maintaining themselves while adjusting to the pressures of other groups. Rorty takes the example of a group seeking recognition so that it might pass from the point where it is seen simply as something to be “coped with” by the larger society, to the point where it is accepted among the community of subjects, being included in a revised common vocabulary. The process begins with a challenge to the society that it reweave its beliefs and adjust its structures in order to accommodate the new group. Rorty sees the crucial aim as the minority group imposing not just its presence on the larger society but also its description of itself. In other words, it is not just to be accommodated within the categories that are already available in the current vocabulary, but is able to transform the categories themselves, so that they accommodate the new self-descriptions. This seems required if the existence of the new group is to be fully acknowledged. Rorty offers a detailed example in “Feminism and Pragmatism,” concerning Marilyn Frye’s description of an emancipatory programme for lesbian feminists. He identifies various stages in the process. At the beginning, the dominant society does all the naming, so that the members of the minority group are distributed among existing social categories. For example, they are accepted as “citizens,” but are not recognized as having any specific corporate identity. The emancipatory goal for the group is therefore not just to exert pressure for “rights” of some kind, but also to impose its own description. If it can do this, it can come to “exist” within the society. Rorty quotes Marilyn Frye: “I think it is only by maintaining our boundaries through controlling concrete access to us that we can enforce on those who are not us our definitions of our ourselves, hence force on them the fact of our existence.”10 Such a move requires tactical expertise, in that the group must first develop in its own terms and then confront the dominant vocabulary as a unified bloc. Unless it is protected during these early stages of development, the new vocabulary will be stifled by the old. As Rorty recognizes, self-descriptions that involve new vocabularies can look like “ravings” in their initial stages. People who want to attempt something like this therefore need to come together into “exclusive clubs.”11 A person who founds or joins such a club emphasizes certain relationships, while reducing the importance of other sets. Rorty thinks that the politics of sexual orientation is not in the first place about sexual preference or civil rights, but about a possibility of defining oneself in terms that are not part of the current vocabulary. He mentions examples

146

Chapter 6

of groups that have attempted new vocabularies and have formed themselves into enclaves in this way to gather the strength needed to change the world: Plato’s academy, early Christians, Copernican thinkers, early socialists.12 The discussion reflects the important point that acceptance of the reality of another subject comes down to acceptance of a viewpoint or perspective from which reality is seen. Rorty proposes a sliding scale here, which runs from the point where others are just objects of our coping, through the point where they are an alien group tolerated by the majority, to the point where they join the dominant group, and contribute to its instinctive judgments. He suggests that Westerners should relate to other cultures rather as buyers and sellers in a bazaar, who have to deal with one another, and who do so within various overlapping circles of common interest. In Rorty’s words, they “get along together without intruding on each other’s privacy, without meddling with each other’s conception of the good.”13 Sometimes they discover areas of commonality, but this is not guaranteed. When a culture has to deal with those who seem “irredeemably different,” Rorty suggests that you “smile a lot, make the best deals you can, and, after a hard day’s haggling, retreat to your club.”14 Usually it is possible to make enough of a deal to establish a basic structure of agreement. During a dialogue with Habermas, Kolakowski, and others, Rorty refers approvingly to Rawls’ position that laws are formulated “for peoples who are reasonable enough to join us in a cooperative community.”15 This raises the question of those with whom “we” cannot work, who seem to lack the necessary reasonableness, and do not pass the minimal test for admission into our society. We do not of course criticize those who are left out in any metaphysical sense, because there is simply nothing to criticize in this way. What we call “reasonableness” cannot in Rorty’s view be grounded in any deep way. Nothing is to be done but to leave such people to themselves. Rorty thinks there is no alternative but to acknowledge with regret that “we” cannot work with them. He recognizes that other philosophers, for example, Habermas, think that there is a larger task for philosophers here, to mount an argument for a minimum standard of reasonableness, offering grounds for the basic prerequisites for joining a human society, showing perhaps that they relate to universal prerequisites for human discourse itself. As we would expect, Rorty sides with Rawls, holding that “reasonableness” cannot be grounded in such a way.16 The unity of a group therefore goes back to overlapping beliefs and desires that are commonly held within the group. Our loyalty simply comes down to sets of “beliefs, desires and emotions which overlap those of lots of other members of the group.”17 The “deals” we make simply go back to agreement on fundamental metaphors that guide our belief and action in the everyday. Our most common shared metaphors are “literalized” so that they enter into

Pragmatist Social Ethics

147

the weave of principles from which we make our everyday judgments, and we do not notice them anymore. Sometimes they are called in question, or new metaphors are proposed. Trading in Rorty’s bazaar goes on over the metaphors themselves, as well as over their implications. Rorty has an example from his own experience, where an activist is trying to persuade an audience that to prohibit high school teachers from counselling gay high school students about being gay is a form of “child abuse.” Rorty says that he came to the lecture thinking that the prohibition was “commonsensical” and that what the speaker was proposing was no more than the kind of forced metaphor that works well for popular public rallies, but does not bear close scrutiny. By the time the speaker had finished, he had “literalized her metaphor,” and was convinced.18 A new association (between the prohibition on counselling and “child abuse”) had entered ways of talking and thinking that he took for granted, bringing him into the same community as the speaker, sharing the same discourse, and presumably supporting the practice recommended. Rorty holds therefore that communities are formed and reformed on historical contingencies. Strikingly, the whole process is viewed as a tactical affair. People with sympathy for a metaphysical grounding of ethical principles might be disturbed at the way the project seems to rest on nothing more than tactics, as people negotiate the best deal they can within the metaphors that guide the life of the society. In spite of the smiles involved in the haggling, the process comes down to what a group can “enforce,” as Frye puts it. The members of the society exercise a kind of “coping,” finding an equilibrium that all can live with, or at least tolerate. Units bump into one another until they shake down to a certain level, and beyond this there is little to be said. THE QUESTION OF ALTRUISM Such a view of human relations can look simply manipulative, in that the formation of a society goes back to the ability of groups to impose their will on others. While we might call the results of such transactions “recognition” or “inclusion,” they seem to involve little of what is traditionally understood by such terms. The suspicion of manipulation probably reflects a tension between the original intuitions that drive a pragmatist style of thought, and the altruism Rorty’s version of pragmatism also wants to accommodate. A general pragmatist approach sees vocabularies as ways of coping that help us get on better in the world. If such coping stands behind everything we do, it seems that other people must be fitted into a schema that is ultimately devised as part of our coping. Rorty tries to broaden his understanding of coping, however, to take in altruistic behavior with its overtones of interest in others for their own sake, an interest that is not just aimed at our own advantage in

148

Chapter 6

a narrow sense. There is a tension here, and we can feel that the meaning of “coping” is being expanded to include possibilities that lie outside its normal meaning. If someone is moved in an extreme situation to give his or her life for a friend, it would be strange to describe this as a form of “coping.” Rorty could, of course, reply that dying for a friend is not itself part of a coping move, but is rather the consequence of wider coping moves that have already been made. My becoming a soldier could be seen as a way of styling my life in a particular direction, taking up a role that makes for an interesting and desirable life, and which perhaps attracts the respect of the community. If it then requires that I lose my life, this could be seen as a consequence of my coping choices, rather than a straightforward continuation of them. Rorty’s reply takes a different tack, however, and looks to the familiar pragmatist point that different vocabularies are set up to do different things. This reply is developed in Rorty’s essay on Freud, where he addresses the contrast between what MacIntyre calls “manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations.”19 Rorty agrees that at the most fundamental level of Freudian explanation, every interaction is seen as “manipulation,” given that the Freudian vocabulary views altruistic behavior as part of an adjustment of an acting self. It does this so that we can formulate a broad account of our lives, one that will enable us to recognize and perhaps deal with our most fundamental conflicts, setting us up for a more fulfilled life. There are things about ourselves that we never notice until we look at them in terms of fundamental drives that are overlooked in the everyday. When we look at them in terms of such drives, our relations with others start to look manipulative. As Rorty says, Freud offers “a coherent and informative narrative to be told in those terms, one that will interpret all personal and social relations, even the tenderest and most sacred in terms of ‘making use of’ others.”20 But it does not follow that we cannot act selflessly in the everyday or that we are mistaken when we think we are acting selflessly. Our usual descriptions of selfless or selfish actions belong to languages that have different purposes. The validity of each language is to be determined in relation to its purposes. So the pragmatist denies that the Freudian account is metaphysically basic, as if it gets at what our other vocabularies are always really about. We should drop all talk of ultimate accounts, and simply describe ourselves as speaking in different ways for different purposes, including in a way that we describe as “selfless.” At the highest level of Freudian analysis, everything will look like manipulation. Rorty comments wryly that there are too many selves involved at this level for the notion of “selflessness” to have any use.21 But this should not affect other vocabularies that we use for other purposes. When we make a declaration of love, we are not pretending an interest in another, for all that such a declaration, when seen through the lens of a Freudian analysis, appears as a way for the self to get more of what it wants: “The increased ability to

Pragmatist Social Ethics

149

explain, given by Freud’s postulation of additional persons, hardly prevents us from drawing the common-sense distinction between manipulating people (i.e., consciously, and deceptively, employing them as instruments for one’s own purposes) and not manipulating them.”22 The problem can, therefore, be solved so long as we do not regard the Freudian account as articulating the final reality of a life so as to present the ultimate significance of everything that happens inside it. A person who belongs to the new pragmatist order will not even bother about relating ways of talk to one another, any more than we ordinarily bother to relate the language of physics to the language of love. It need not worry us that the language of physics is more or less deterministic, given we use different languages for different purposes. Some allow for the possibility of nonmanipulative behavior, while others do not. This reminds us of the tension between Rorty’s view and that of Wittgenstein, who also endorses the position that we speak in different ways for different purposes, and that we need to look at the detail of our talk in particular situations to make sense of what we are doing. But Wittgenstein does not think that we can then bring these different uses under a single philosophical description, for example, calling them types of “coping,” and seeing this as part of a broader commitment to “pragmatism.” This tension is reflected in two different ways in which Rorty’s central “tool” metaphor can be understood. On the one side, we can emphasize the difference between different tools, and de-emphasize the unitary meaning of the word as something that helps us achieve particular purposes. Within this understanding, parts of our talk might come close to escaping the unitary meaning altogether and seem to leave the functional “tool” framework behind. Parents’ sacrifices for a child are not usually described as tools by which they achieve the satisfactions of parenthood. At other times, the unitary side of the metaphor is emphasized, the fundamental similarity of different practices considered as instrumental means, in that they are all forms of “coping” that help us get what we want. This understanding brings out the interest behind everything we do, which sits uneasily with what is normally understood as altruism. If we really want to affirm the everyday ways in which we talk, a Wittgensteinian approach denies that we can also offer a general pragmatist account. If it is to work here, such a term must be emptied of all proper content, and become a simple covering phrase for the fact that we talk in different ways at different times. It seems to me that this tension makes for serious problems in Rorty’s approach. Pragmatism sees human actions as ways of getting ahead, but also wants to acknowledge actions that are not driven by interests of ours. For all his subtlety and skill at answering difficulties, Rorty seems caught between conflicting impulses. The problem is also evident in his attempt to hold off the

150

Chapter 6

quasimetaphysical Kantian insight that there are large reasons for never treating other people as mere means. Rorty tries to dissolve the sharp division, which the Kantian problematic assumes, between “recognition” of persons and “use” of them. He aims at a middle ground where the sharp oppositions of the Kantian view start to disappear, and everyday generosity can be included as part of our developing the sort of life we want, so that it falls under our fundamental “coping.” It is questionable whether this peculiar amalgam of interest and altruism can be ultimately consistent. THE QUESTION OF ETHNOCENTRISM Rorty addresses similar questions in his discussions of ethnocentrism. If nothing ever gets beyond the projective interests of a particular way of talking, then it seems as if local interests inevitably rule our views of other people and their significance, and we simply judge them according to the interests of our culture. Some think that this is the case even in a culture that includes among its internal preoccupations an interest in other cultures. While such an interest allows us to bring a benign curiosity to our dealings with those who are different from us, it still encourages us to see them in relation to our standards. The choice of who counts as a conversation partner and who is to be held at arm’s length as a mere object of coping, goes back to the attitudes and preferences of our own group. If the criteria of the group should change so that the other person becomes excluded, there is nothing at a metaphysical level that could challenge this. The moral future lies with us, and it is up to us what becomes of it. Rorty’s principal discussion of such matters is found in an essay on ethnocentrism that criticizes views of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. “Ethnocentrism” is defined as an attitude which confidently judges other cultures by the standards of one’s own, and tends to see views or practices which conflict with one’s own as “crazy, stupid, base or sinful”23 so that those who hold to such views or practices are not regarded as worthy of conversation. For an ethnocentric position, there is no point in attempting to take up human relations with those who seem impossibly removed from one’s own attitudes and views. Rorty uses Kantian terms to describe the way we see such people as “at most . . . means to ends.”24 Kant’s celebrated distinction between recognition of others as having “dignity” as opposed to mere “worth,” is transformed into a distinction between those who can become conversation partners for our ethnos, and those who remain mere objects of our conversation, and are never included in it. The question arises as to whether Rorty’s position must remain irreducibly ethnocentric in this way, or whether it can find a way of transcending ethnocentric limitation. Rorty certainly wants to reconstitute the

Pragmatist Social Ethics

151

best of the liberal tradition within a pragmatist framework. At first glance, the framework seems inhospitable. Rorty’s solution relies on the fact that while all of our norms go back to mere contingencies, there is nothing against our attempting to develop better contingencies rather than worse ones. He thinks that Western liberalism has come to a particularly promising balance here. Like all cultures, it has immersed itself in limited local customs and habits into which it socializes its young. But it includes among its customs and habits a powerful drive to view other cultures with curiosity and interest, thereby “enlarging its sympathies.” This can lead to an appreciation of exotic cultural views or practices, a fascination with other ways that opens up a hospitable space within the original culture. “Tolerance of diversity” has become an important part of the selfunderstanding of Western liberal society.25 This is not to say that a society can simply tolerate everything that comes to it, as current controversies over practices like forced marriage among ethnic minorities living in Western societies make clear, but it at least modifies the ethnocentric view that automatically denigrates practices that do not agree with ours. Rorty points to an interesting division of labor by which Western liberal cultures have come to support this mix of ethnocentricity and openness. Like all cultures, they include officers who are responsible for maintaining the internal coherence of the culture, for example, those charged with administering justice. But they also include others who are responsible for trying to understand other cultures in their own terms. Among other things, education systems encourage the young to learn to appreciate unfamiliar sets of beliefs and desires, realizing that what looks like stupidity or sinfulness might just be a different set of customs that constitute a different way of relating to the world and to other people. The task of keeping alive this sense of other possibilities in Western society is entrusted to anthropologists and others, those who have a professional interest in uncovering the point of view of alien individuals or cultures in its their own terms, so that what we might have dismissed as madness can be seen as a distant relative of something we ourselves hold or do. Rorty observes that Western society keeps an army of “connoisseurs of diversity” on hand, to help it respond generously to customs which might otherwise seem simply strange or repugnant. Sometimes the work of anthropologists like Geertz causes society to adjust its norms so that it accepts as conversation partners those who were formerly excluded. According to Rorty, liberal societies should remain ethnocentric enough to insist on their commitment to liberalism as part of their fundamental identity. This might seem hard to do, given that there can be no metaphysical appeal to aspirations of human nature or fundamental religious imperatives. Rorty accepts that historical progress toward a liberal society depended on aspects of Christian history, and on Enlightenment views of the dignity of the human

152

Chapter 6

person. Given the recent erosion of support for religious or metaphysical fundamentals, cultures that have relied on them might seem to have become suddenly vulnerable. A stance based on religion or metaphysics shares the fragility of its foundations, so that when they are exposed as quirks of culture dressed up in universalist guise, then every view can suddenly seem as good as every other. If religion and metaphysics offer the only reason for insisting on Western liberal values, and are in terminal decline, there is danger of collapse. Rorty thinks, however, that if we get rid of the hankering for metaphysical roots altogether, we will be in a position to embrace our cultural preferences for what they are, holding (in inevitably “circular” fashion) that they are good preferences to have. This should leave us in a stronger position. While we come back in the end to an affirmation of the preferences of a particular society, this is what every society does, and there is no alternative. Once this is recognized, metaphysical aspiration is finally banished, the straightforward imposition of ground rules by a society looks more benign, and Western society can insist in good conscience on the basics of its own approach. This should suffice to counter the threat that the openness of Western liberal societies will cause them simply to collapse in face of pressure from other ethnicities. This liberal version of pragmatist ethnocentricity, therefore, takes its adherents beyond ethnocentricity in its narrow sense, and enables Rorty to reintegrate many of the attitudes that were once regarded as based on metaphysics. There is a pragmatist trope for almost all of the attitudes that metaphysically based social ethics have wanted to recommend. This ability to produce a pragmatist double for all occasions accounts perhaps for the frustration sometimes felt by Rorty’s opponents, who feel there is an important difference between realist and pragmatist positions, and that the difference inevitably has an effect on the detailed moral visions and practices of each side. Rorty wants to claim that there need not be much difference, though there is, of course, a difference at the level of meta-understanding. A stance that can describe itself as going back to a pool of genes and memes, which cluster around a particular historical culture, does not exclude abhorrence of racism, support for women’s emancipation, redistribution of wealth in favor of the poor, and so on. We do not have to take such things back to the nature of humanity, or the demands of a just world order, to be committed to them. Emancipatory causes are part of the “good” for our kind of person. In this way, Rorty tries to combine a pragmatist view of liberal culture, along with its historical emancipatory drives, with an openness to other cultures. If to a metaphysical eye it seems to go back to a mere decision of the will, this ceases to be a problem when we switch to a pragmatist view. We realize that it represents the best that is possible in the circumstances, and offers a straightforward example of what every culture does, though some try to conceal this.

Pragmatist Social Ethics

153

THE CASE OF THE FERAL CHILD While Rorty can accommodate most traditional ethical values within his approach, an examination of particular examples also shows how a pragmatist metadescription can affect the tone of a detailed case. To illustrate the pragmatist position, Rorty takes the example of a child found living in a feral state, having grown up without any connection to human communities. When first discovered, such a person “has no share in human dignity.” As we would expect, there is no talk about a deep essence, as if the child possesses an as yet unrecognized dignity. There is no room for appeal beyond the actual relations that the child already has, or is already capable of sustaining. The kinds of relations to others that would enable us to describe it as having “dignity” are simply lacking. In a Western liberal society, it does not follow, however, that the child is to be treated like an animal. The community takes her in and does its best to treat her as a human being. The distinctive tone of pragmatist ethics emerges not in the practice, but in the kind of reason that the community gives for acting as it does. Reasons go back not to something in the child, but to something in the community. Rorty expresses the community’s position like this: [I]t is part of the tradition of our community that the human stranger from whom all dignity has been stripped is to be taken in, to be reclothed with dignity. . . . The existence of human rights in the sense in which it is at issue in this metaethical debate, has as much or as little relevance to our treatment of such a child as the question of the existence of God.26

Rorty repeats the point more extensively in a later essay, which develops many of the same examples. The older theological–metaphysical basis for relations with others has given way to a simple recourse to the best of our own values, which support the kind of society in which we want to live. These chosen values are sufficient grounds for actions where Western society looks to the good of others in need. The reasons go back to the society’s own preferences and not to the imperatives of a divinity or obligations toward reason or nature that are imposed on it from beyond. Grounds for ethical action come back to ourselves and the values we endorse: To say that God wills us to welcome the stranger within our gates is to say that hospitality is one of the virtues upon which our community most prides itself. To say that respect for human rights demanded our intervention to save the Jews from the Nazis, or the Bosnian Muslims from the Serbs, is to say that a failure to intervene would make us uncomfortable with ourselves in the way in which a knowledge that our neighbours are hungry while we have plenty on the table ourselves makes us unable to continue eating.27

154

Chapter 6

A reader might feel that something important is missing here. If the lines of meaning come back simply to the final vocabulary of the community, and there is nothing further to which they are answerable, moral attitudes seem to lose their proper relationship to the world. In the case of the feral child, while the actions and attitudes of the pragmatist community are beyond reproach, they seem strikingly unrelated to the child. The community acts as it always does, and while the child is the happy beneficiary, there is no real relation between the two. The motivation of the community simply goes back to itself and its chosen attitudes, so that its response corresponds to the way the community is, rather than the way the child is. At very least the impression lingers that the recipient of help is overlooked in some important way, as is shown by the fact that the moral views of the community could change without leaving any room for appeal. We might even feel that in the end, the help that the community offers is oddly uncomplimentary to the recipient. I am to be helped by a community, not because of any dignity that it sees in me, but because it has itself adopted a particular way of life. If I am the beneficiary, this does not go back to anything of mine, but to the way things are done in the particular locality in which I happen to have surfaced. Significance is therefore tied to the framework created by the community’s attitudes and practices, and not to the child. This seems always to be the case when it is question of a pragmatist understanding. After all, something or someone takes on significance inasmuch as they appear among the objects of discourse of a vocabulary. As Rorty puts it: “My position entails that feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary.”28 While some have misgivings, Rorty is not short of a reply. He can point out that there are different levels at which the case needs to be considered, and while there is no deep metaphysical quality in the child that can serve as a motive, all of the usual everyday motives still apply. People say things like, “Look at the poor mite, can we not do something for her?” which is exactly what might be said by someone who holds a religious or metaphysical perspective. And the community does not just give its help anywhere. It takes in feral children in a way that it does not take in feral animals, for example, so that the qualities of the child make a difference—at a nonmetaphysical level—to the response of the community. For those who feel misgivings, these considerations do little to counter an unease at the fact that everything still seems controlled by the framework of significance projected by the community. There is no hint of an obligation that the child’s status imposes regardless of the community’s attitudes and responses. But Rorty’s proposed explanation is far-reaching, and he can easily explain the situation where an appeal of this sort might come into play. He could point, for example, to the

Pragmatist Social Ethics

155

conflicting feelings that come to members of the community if they do not act. They might want to take the child in, but feel they cannot do so, given their limited resources and the size of the commitment involved if they accept the child. What the metaphysician describes as a conflict between practical interests and unconditional moral duty, can be seen instead as a conflict between one of the everyday principles that guide a community’s conduct (to take in helpless strangers), and another principle that is in tension with the first (not to take on obligations which cannot be seen through). In this interpretation there is no large call from the “other” which comes regardless, and bears in on us and our vocabulary from outside. Rorty holds that the larger narrative of obligation could only ever interest a religious believer or a metaphysician. In fact, the actual feelings and reactions that the child causes in the community constitute the only relation between child and community. If we imagine a historical form of life for which this sympathy vanishes, this is simply the way it is, and it is pointless to insist on the existence of something that remains embedded and forgotten, waiting to be acknowledged. The sympathy that once existed will have disappeared in the way that, as D. Z. Phillips says, certain sorts of goodness might disappear, or the idea of God might disappear from the world. A form of life has passed, leaving nothing but a memory of what once was.29 PRAGMATISM AND CONSEQUENTIALISM As applied within a contemporary Western context, Rorty’s approach has a bias toward utilitarian views, and moves away from the kind of deontological ethical approach that sees certain actions as always unworthy of human beings. This bias can be seen in a response to an article by David Owen in a collection of critical essays on Rorty’s work.30 Owen quotes a passage from Judith Shklar, which looks at the consequences of regarding cruelty as the “supreme evil” for humans. Shklar sees this position as directed against the religious view that offences against God are the supreme evil that lies at the root of all other evils, so that the evil quality of lesser sins comes ultimately from an original religious rejection. To see cruelty as the worst of things is to challenge this religious view. As Shklar puts it: “To put cruelty first is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion.” It is not just that the focus has shifted to a different option of the same sort. Rather, the whole framework has changed so that Shklar is recommending a version of Rorty’s basic project, that we are better off if we get rid of the point of view of the Almighty as standing over against us, claiming to give things their ultimate sense. Shklar’s this-worldly approach brings moral judgments away from metaphysics to a point where they relate to our “normal private life and

156

Chapter 6

our daily public practices” so that there is no appeal beyond these to anything which might relativize judgments made in time. The only relevant order that is allowed is that of “actuality,” as Shklar puts it, understanding by this the viewpoint of an actual historical culture. She further notes that this means that cruelty cannot be excused or forgiven, given that forgiveness assumes a viewpoint which gets above the historical judgment that an offence is simply “wrong,” placing it in a larger context. The view that cruelty is the ultimate evil requires a “purely human” verdict, which remains within temporal horizons, and holds religious considerations at a distance. Shklar does not deny that someone who is religious in the biblical sense can hate cruelty, but she insists that anyone who sees cruelty as the greatest of evils is “irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion.”31 In his response to Owen, Rorty strongly affirms the position of Shklar, remarking that he wishes he “had quoted at similar length from those pages of Shklar’s in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.”32 Shklar’s position shows a determination to carry through a now familiar program initiated by Nietzsche, that the viewpoint of the eternal should be banished from earthly judgments, and temporal things considered resolutely from within a temporal context. There is an irony in the fact that Shklar uses a Nietzschean starting point to promote a human ideal that sees cruelty as the worst of things, and Rorty concedes that Nietzsche himself might well see the ideal as concealing in fact a slavish resentment.33 Yet overall, the example shows an important attitude that is at stake in the choice for a pragmatist viewpoint. Shklar and Rorty want to exclude any perspective that would allow us to look in on ourselves and all our attitudes at once so that even when we are doing our best according to our best lights, what we are doing could still be called in question, in that it might not measure up to the ultimate standard of things. For example, if we have suffered cruelty from others, a religious viewpoint tells us to look hard at our infinite sense of offence, and to moderate it with an admission that we too are sinners in the eyes of God, and need forgiveness. The larger order of things, where the eye of God is allowed into play, offers possibilities that a temporal viewpoint cannot access. The natural reactions of humans toward those who have committed offences against them are not regarded as final intuitions on the matter. A viewpoint from beyond sees us whole and raises the disquieting possibility that all our beliefs, along with the reasons we use to support them, have their limitations, and are perhaps ultimately self-interested. The admission of a reflective viewpoint of this sort can lead, however, to skeptical problems about the ultimate status of our knowledge. Rorty and Shklar’s exclusion of the religious viewpoint is an attempt to get rid of such intrusions from beyond, ruling out anything that bears in on us so as to affect our fundamental view of who we are, but which we can in principle never fully

Pragmatist Social Ethics

157

assimilate. Because of the difficulties that such an external viewpoint brings, recent Western theological thought has often retreated from a belief in one who looks on human reality from outside it, and settled for a divinity who basically endorses human reason and its best outcomes, and does not intrude further. While Rorty wants to exclude the eye of the divine, it should be acknowledged that even here he allows a kind of pragmatist double of such a viewpoint. It comes in the form of irony, an attitude that looks at our vocabulary as a whole, even while we continue to use it, emphasizing that it is just one of many possibilities. In a way that parallels a religious viewpoint, the ironic glance keeps us aware that even our best insights depend on the workings of a particular vocabulary into which we happen to have fallen. They have no deeper status than this, so that we bring an ironic awareness to our talk as a whole. In contrast to religious or metaphysical perspectives, irony does not claim, however, to lead us into any higher space. In a way that reflects typical twentieth-century perspectives, it enables us to recognize our contingency, but does not allow us to advance beyond it. We see ourselves as having alighted on a particular vocabulary when we could have chosen others. We also see that this is what everyone does, and we have no option but to make a choice in the way that we have. The knowledge that there are other possibilities perhaps affects our attitude to what we have, but does not move us beyond it. Rorty describes the ironist as having “radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses.” Yet she realizes that no argument phrased in the current vocabulary makes much difference to these doubts.34 The absence of a positive standard that could call in question the final status of the pragmatist subject itself sometimes has an effect on the detail of pragmatist ethics. While much of the agreed morality of contemporary Western societies comes down to favoring actions that have good consequences and forbidding those that have bad consequences, traditional ethics also includes judgments about actions that fall outside these categories, where it is a question of conduct that does not threaten harm to others, but is nonetheless felt to be unworthy of a human being. It is harder to make sense of such things from a pragmatist viewpoint. Incest offers a straightforward example, at least in as much as it is possible to imagine cases of incest where there is no harm to others. These sorts of examples show the far-reaching consequences of the move recommended by Shklar. Perhaps a society which recognizes the ultimate contingency of all its views, and which excludes any transcendent viewpoint that could judge it as a whole, can still maintain older taboos. But it seems less likely to maintain them in face of questioning, given the pragmatist insistence that a difference must be seen to make a practical difference. “Deontological” approaches appeal implicitly or explicitly to a viewpoint beyond interests and advantages, calling into question the status of the very selves that are being advantaged. A pragmatist approach gets off the ground

158

Chapter 6

largely by excluding such viewpoints. It seems therefore naturally inclined to a consequentialist ethics, lacking any real basis to judge actions as wrong in themselves in a deep sense that goes beyond the viewpoint of utility. In removing the point of view that allows such a possibility, Shklar and Rorty opt for a society whose moral judgments show a utilitarian character. Rorty reflects this bias in his discussion of “consequentialism,” which he sees as opposing the view that some acts are “intrinsically abhorrent.” He thinks that recent gay rights legislation is a prime example of a development toward consequentialism.35 Generally, the position excludes rigid ethical principles, which are to be held at all costs in every circumstance. Does this go against the definition of a liberal as one who holds the firm opinion that cruelty is the worst thing we can do? Rorty recognizes tensions here. He holds that in a particular case, a liberal can see a cruelty prohibition as “worth dying for.” But he denies that this means the commitment is “unconditional” so that it applies regardless of circumstances. “Unconditional” carries too many deontological overtones, and seems to assume that it is possible to predict in advance all situations that the world might throw up, and to formulate a strategy for them. When pressed, Rorty agrees that it is possible to come up with a situation where it might be morally right to be cruel, or even where we are obliged to be cruel. His example is of the sort that turns up in discussions of consequentialism, where a terrorist is holding a thermonuclear device somewhere in a city, and threatens to destroy the lives of large numbers of people. Rorty comments that the “best” thing to do might be “to torture in her presence, the children of the terrorist,” in order to save the lives that are in danger from the device.36 Some will think that this lets the cat out of the bag, and shows the consequences of the pragmatist view that nothing is ultimately “holy.” If pragmatist moral judgments are made simply against our own changing horizon of value, they finish up sooner or later embracing the principle that the end justifies the means, so that in extreme circumstances there is nothing that cannot be contemplated, so long as it seems to lead to better consequences than the best alternative. While the position agrees that in normal circumstances there are principles that can be held precious, and even defended to the death, they are never “sacred” in pragmatist eyes.37 In his essay on feminism and pragmatism, Rorty further indicates the reasoning that can lead toward justifying the torture of innocent children in extreme cases if the circumstances seem to demand it. The reasoning is straightforwardly consequential, in that a controversial action that seems to do evil in order that good may come of it is to be redescribed simply as a choice of a lesser evil. “Evil” is understood here in Dewey’s phrase as a “rejected good.”38 No actions are to be described as evil in a way that implies that their very nature is a reason for prohibiting them. Good and evil are situated in fact on a sliding scale of better to worse. The

Pragmatist Social Ethics

159

moral person chooses from among the better things and does not deliberately choose the worse ones. So what we call “evil” is to be seen as the deliberate rejection of the better in favor of the worse. In the case of the terrorist, we assess the various possibilities, and choose one of the better ones. The object of the choice may not be very good, but it is better than the next possibility. There is no room for traditional “absolutes” in such reasoning. It should be admitted that many contemporaries probably agree with Rorty’s conclusion in the terrorist example, while emphasizing, of course, the extremity of the example, and expressing the hope that the circumstance will never come to pass. Perhaps Rorty would say of those who oppose his suggestion regarding this example what he says of those who oppose gay marriage, that the opposition is more or less confined to those who hold religious views.39 Rorty’s exclusion of religious and metaphysical perspectives excludes the possibility of questions about the overall status of the self who makes moral judgments. By contrast, religious judgments allow such a possibility to come into play, holding that in the last analysis, human agents are judged from a point beyond them. There is a possibility that even their best criteria might not measure up when caught in the gaze of the one whose judgment really matters. The consequentialist program as sketched by Rorty excludes this troubling further perspective, insisting that we act from within a horizon of interests and values that remains ours. At best, some of our interests and values might conflict with alternatives. But it has no sense to appeal to something that could judge the whole. The pragmatist view agrees, of course, that we might have second thoughts, and our criteria of judgment might change. We could imagine a succession of historical selves, all of them judging by their best lights, aware of the possibility that they might be judged negatively by a future self. This progression comes down to a continually developing weave of contingencies. Rorty sees this view as a choice of Hegel over Kant, keeping the relativity of the Hegelian historical narrative, while excluding the absolute viewpoint in which Hegel believes that it issues. By contrast, as Westphal notes, Kant still has a place for the eye of God, a viewpoint that coincides with the final reality of things. Even the categorical imperative, proceeding as it does from reason itself, and therefore from within the autonomous human being, can be made to look like a command of the God of the Hebrews, as was noticed by Schopenhauer.40 The pragmatist alternative settles in Hegelian fashion for a succession of finite viewpoints, with their various finite judgments on one another. It refuses the religious view that there might be a glance that can look in on our finite selves from beyond them, and assign them a final value. This is perhaps the most significant point to be made about Rorty’s treatment of ethics. I will now examine its effect on the way the question of human recognition is conceived from within Rorty’s framework.

160

Chapter 6

NOTES 1. Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind (London: Verso, 1995), 15–17. 2. James Rorty, “Father Benoit: ‘Ambassador of the Jews’. An Untold Chapter of the Underground,” Commentary 2 (December 1946): 507–13, 507. Cited by Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind, 43. 3. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 202–27, 220. 4. Catherine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 126. See Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 208. 5. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 208, fn. 13. 6. Aristotle, Politics, 1254a20. The Complete Works Of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. B. Jowett, Bollingen Series LXXXI, 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1986–2129, 1990. 7. Richard Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 203–10. 8. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 206. 9. Ibid., 207. 10. Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983), 108. See Richard Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 222. 11. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 223. 12. Ibid. 13. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” 209. 14. Ibid. 15. Richard Rorty, “Comments on Philosophy and the Dilemmas of the Contemporary World,” in Debating The State Of Philosophy, eds. Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), 116–25, 125. 16. Rorty, “Comments on Philosophy and the Dilemmas of the Contemporary World,” 125. 17. Richard Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 197–202, 200. 18. Richard Rorty, “De Man and the American Cultural Left,” in Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 129–39, 138. 19. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985), 24. See Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” 143–63, 159. 20. Rorty, “Freud and Moral Reflection,” 160. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” 203. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 204.

Pragmatist Social Ethics

161

26. Rorty, “Postmodern Bourgeois Liberalism,” 201–2. 27. Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), 72–90, 85. 28. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 192. 29. Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, 119. 30. Richard Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” in Critical Dialogues, eds. Richard Rorty, Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 111–14, 111. 31. Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 8–9. Quoted by David Owen, “Avoidance of Cruelty: Joshing Rorty on Liberalism, Scepticism, Ironism,” in Richard Rorty, Critical Dialogues, ed. Matthew Festenstein and Simon Thompson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 93–110, 94. 32. Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” 111. 33. Owen, “Avoidance of Cruelty: Joshing Rorty on Liberalism, Scepticism, Ironism,” 98. 34. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 73. 35. Cf. Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” 113: “One can imagine, in the future, a . . . use of state power to inculcate consequentialism at the expense of the idea that some acts are intrinsically abhorrent.” 36. Richard Rorty, “Response to David Owen,” 114. 37. Rorty associates philosophers like Mill, Dewey and Habermas (as well as Vattimo and himself) with the view that democracy ultimately implies that “nothing is sacred because everything is up for discussion.” Cf. Rorty, “An Ethics for Today,” 8–26, 12. 38. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 207. 39. Rorty, “Religion in the Public Square,” 141–49, 146. 40. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), 55.

Chapter 7

The Question of Recognition

RORTY’S ACCOUNT OF HUMAN RELATIONS A number of writers have asked whether Rorty’s position, for all its professed openness to exploring new worlds, can really accommodate relations with other people. There is a suspicion that the object of such relations is ultimately reduced to its role in facilitating the immanent development of a subject, without ever being really recognized as having a significance of its own. Other people can provide the sort of challenge that a subject needs if it is to develop properly, but this means that in the end, their contribution is assimilated into the life of the subject that deals with them. The “other” is at best a stimulus for further growth, and an occasion for a work of assimilation that remains immanent to the pragmatist subject. It has no role beyond this. This question is posed by Mark C. Taylor in his essay “Paralectics,” which begins with a discussion of Rorty’s Hegelianism, trying to show how, for all his professed commitment to dialogue or conversation, Rorty ultimately promotes a monological version of human relations. Taylor takes Rorty’s discussion of the German Romantic concept of Bildung, which articulates a notion of growth or maturation where a person’s horizons are expanded by confronting and incorporating what lies outside them. Hegelian dialectics expresses an ideal of this sort in that the subject moves to more mature stages by assimilating positions which had seemed at earlier stages simply to be opposed to its identity. Taylor notes how much Rorty’s account of Bildung uses phrases like “self-formation,” or “man as self-creative,” which seem to imply that the central event is the development of an individual subject, which implicitly regards whatever lies outside itself as more or less material for its growth. He quotes an unguarded Rorty statement from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which seemingly promotes a subject that assimilates everything into 163

164

Chapter 7

itself in that we are encouraged to adopt “an attitude interested not so much in what is out there in the world, or in what happened in history, as in what we can get out of nature and history for our own uses.”1 Taylor observes that a statement of this sort accurately describes an aspect of Bildung, namely that it is aimed in the end at producing just itself, a process “in which subjects perpetually remake themselves through ongoing interrelationships.” Taylor draws the conclusion that “[t]he ‘other’ is not really other but is actually a moment in my own self-becoming.”2 In a sharp but revealing response to Taylor’s remarks, Rorty denies that he favors a position that could be described as “monological.” His reasons are significant. He points out that as well as playing a role that is assigned by our own chosen discourses (i.e., playing a part in our monological development), other people also at times impose new vocabularies on us, and therefore change us. They effect a kind of disturbance of our normal discourse, which serves precisely “to keep our dialogues from turning monological.”3 Rorty approaches the question (as does Taylor himself) in the context of a Hegelian description of the forces that move history forward into new epochs. He insists that relations with others are the “engine of perpetual renewal and proliferation.”4 The “occasional intrusion of . . . Otherness” keeps us on our toes, so that things do not stagnate, and we find ourselves pushed to try new ways of looking at things. Hegel thought that such developments go back to the pressures exerted by emerging reason itself, which acts as a kind of subject that raises up the cultural agents that are destined to move a civilization toward a new stage of development. Rorty resists any attempt to view the workings of “Otherness” as a metaphysical force in this way. He thinks that the “engine of perpetual renewal and proliferation” in human history just comes down to the random activity of history’s strong poets—people like Euripides, Plato, St. Paul, Newton, Goethe, Hegel, or Darwin, who stumble on new vocabularies and put them into circulation.5 He refuses any suggestion that a confrontation with alien vocabularies brings us face to face with a power stronger than ourselves, or with something that presents us with an infinite task of assimilation. For all that this response denies Taylor’s charge that the position is “monological,” it is striking how much of it could be taken to confirm the charge, in that the action of others is reduced to an influence that is merely causal. This means that the other is limited to sparking a reaction in the developing subject. It seems to exclude others from entering the life of the developing subject in any way beyond serving as causal stimuli. The detail of what is at stake in this discussion stands out in a perceptive article by Farid Abdel-Nour on Rorty’s position on relations to others.6 Abdel-Nour examines an example discussed by Rorty, taken from a paper of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. It concerns the “Drunken Indian and the Kidney Machine,”7 a historical example of a Native American alcoholic in

The Question of Recognition

165

the Southwestern United States who signs up for kidney dialysis and refuses to stop drinking once he has started his treatment. To the bewilderment and annoyance of the doctors, he wilfully continues to drink until he dies. Geertz sees the example as demonstrating a certain ethnocentrism on the part of the different actors in the drama, in that when the sides are confronted by a viewpoint that is alien, neither makes any attempt to understand it. There is no effort to “grasp the alien other.”8 The doctors are simply indignant, while the Native American cheerfully sets out to extend his lifetime of drinking, untroubled by the fact that dialysis treatment is in short supply and that he is occupying a place in the list that could be taken by others. The public ethics of the situation are not in dispute. Geertz, Abdel-Nour, and Rorty all agree that it is good that the treatment be continued (as in fact it was). The question is whether there is something further that the players in the drama should address, a task of recognition or acknowledgment, which goes beyond the basic question of whether the treatment should be continued. In his own discussion of the example, Rorty maintains that it shows how a degree of ethnocentrism can be a good thing when it is a question of a liberal ethnos. A liberal culture at its best develops rules and procedures that safeguard a basic fairness, and instil habits of action in its citizens that ensure that the structures are upheld even when the feelings of the moment go against it. Because the doctors belong to a culture that assumes equality of opportunity, they determine the order of access for dialysis by a kind of “blind” test that recalls the Kantian tradition of ethical universality. As a result, the Native American is left on the machine, regardless of the attitudes and feelings of the doctors involved. The patient is spared the consequences of being judged by the doctors in light of immediate reactions. The procedural measures aim to keep the basic dignity of the Native American in view in spite of his disastrous behavior, ensuring that he is treated carefully and conscientiously until the end. Rorty thinks that once such questions of access and treatment are settled, there is nothing more to say. No large further question looms about the need for the sides to engage with one another in any deeper sense. For Rorty, it reflects well on the achievement of anthropologists like Geertz that people who would otherwise have been marginalized by contemporary society are seen as having the same rights as everybody else, and become (in Rorty’s sense) potential conversation partners, rather than outsiders with whom society simply deals tactically (in the way it deals with “criminal psychopaths”).9 For all that, once the development of a liberal ethnos is achieved, the anthropologist’s work is basically done. There is no further duty of helping members of a liberal society relate to a (nonliberal) “other” in such a way as to come to a fuller understanding. At least if members of a mainstream liberal society set out to do this, they do it as private individuals pursuing their private obsessions.

166

Chapter 7

Abdel-Nour thinks that Rorty misses something here. He agrees on the legal issues, and is happy that liberal ethnocentrism avoids the bad effects of what he calls “vicious nonliberal ethnocentrisms.”10 These are ethnocentrisms that classify others according to a stereotyped group image, and see them simply as outsiders, because they do not share the values and interests of one’s own group. A liberal society avoids this sort of ethnocentrism by internalizing rules that ensure its agents do not act simply out of the prejudices which belong to their narrower cultural group, for example those of doctors from the Northeastern states of the United States. But Abdel-Nour holds that Rorty’s vision lacks a further aspect that is an important part of our moral outlook. It is “worrisomely short on the moral resource of other-regard.”11 This is to say that the liberal attitudes that Rorty promotes set out to treat others in the end as though they are members of one’s own group. There is no further interest in recognizing or exploring the gulf that in fact separates agents of a liberal society from others with whom they deal. Abdel-Nour points to the sorts of encounters that occur at human rights conferences, or at the United Nations, or in other situations where liberal inclusion reigns. For all their stated goodwill, the parties “refuse to acknowledge the gulf that group membership and concrete particularity places between them.”12 Abdel-Nour further specifies his position with discussion of an example in which the American writer Alice Walker, a campaigner against female genital mutilation, is speaking to a group of West African women, an encounter that is recorded in her film Warrior Marks. She sets her address in terms of an injury she received in her childhood, which resulted in the loss of an eye, seeing herself as “maimed,” just as the women she is addressing have been maimed, so that their encounter begins from a point of shared experience. Abdel-Nour quotes from a part of the address where she says that “mutilation of any part of the body is unnecessary and causes suffering almost beyond imagining.” She continues: “We can tell you that the body you are born into is sacred and whole, like the earth that produced it, and there is nothing that needs to be subtracted from it.”13 Abdel-Nour notes that the remarks drew adverse comment from some anthropologists, and suggests (perhaps exaggerating) that Walker manages to reduce the women “to a shadow of herself.” In his view, she overlooks the enormous difference between herself and her audience, and the complications that surround a liberal Westerner’s attempt to make sense of what has happened to the women. While the approach of Walker or Rorty respects the rights of the other, it does not necessarily have much interest in the other as holding a point of view that remains different. At least, whatever interest is shown in coming to grips with such a point of view, goes back simply to the habits of their own culture. Abdel-Nour thinks that something is missing, and contrasts Rorty’s view with the program of Emmanuel Levinas, who sees an infinite task in “the face of the other.”14

The Question of Recognition

167

Rorty agrees that examples like the one mentioned by Abdel-Nour present the task of coping and adjusting in such a way that it is suddenly writ very large. Yet no more is required than coping and adjusting, the everyday strategies that are necessary for the stable functioning of all societies. What some philosophers want to call an “irruption of Otherness” is dealt with by Rorty in a way that brings it down to the level of other adjustments we make in our lives. Our responses can be explained in Darwinian terms as responses to metaphorical random mutations, unpredictable events that happen to take hold of us in such a way as to demand a response. If the random event involves a strong poet who stands over against us with a proposal for a whole new vocabulary, this is not much different from the situation where a physical force bears in on us, requiring our adjustment. Rorty notes that some want to interpret a philosopher like Derrida as a sort of prophet of Otherness who shows how our discourse is always liable to disruption by those who are outside it. He thinks that this is just a complicated way of articulating the effects of contingency, our need to deal with the chance events that cause us to adjust our vocabularies.15 To Rorty’s “astonishment and dismay,” Derrida himself has indicated that his philosophy should be seen as bringing something larger into play than just everyday contingencies, so that his philosophy claims an “ethical-political-religious point.” Rorty thinks this a mistake, and insists that the impulses that disrupt our current vocabulary and move it in new directions should be seen as coming back simply to contingent causal factors.16 According to Rorty, positions that give a large positive role to the “other” are in fact descendants of metaphysical attempts to take us outside of space and time and the contingent workings of nature, presenting us with a task that is ultimately religious in form. While contemporary “a/theologians” like Taylor deny that they have this in mind, Rorty thinks that it is nonetheless the effect of their work, seeing them as defending the religious or metaphysical programme that is Rorty’s target. “They help re-enslave us to the thought that we are, or can get, under the protection of Something or Somebody Bigger Than Ourselves.”17 Even when they do not state this explicitly, Rorty remains cool toward such programmes, with their commitment to exploring a difference where we never get to the end, so that we are faced by an infinite task. He wants to understand our jostlings in the bazaar as tactical affairs, where we can look forward to returning to our familiar confines at the end of the day.18 As to Taylor’s charge that this tends to turn others into functions of one’s own self-development, so that “[t]he ‘other’ is not really other but is actually a moment in my own self-becoming,” Rorty thinks that this charge simply reflects an alternative way of defining the identity of a person who wants to change. If we wish, we can include a person’s desire to change within the current descriptive identity of the person, seeing the change they attempt as proceeding from a desire that is already part of their liberal

168

Chapter 7

curiosity. We then say that because the desire for change is already part of their identity, they should not be described as having really changed. We can even claim, if we want to be troublesome, that they are not really interested in change at all, because their liberal curiosity along with its impetus toward change—their fundamental identity—remains stable throughout. On the other hand, it is possible to describe the process differently, so that the identity of a person genuinely changes through engagement with the world, and they seem to have suffered an “irruption of otherness.” According to Rorty, debates between these positions are a waste of time, given that they make no difference to the realities on the ground. He likens them to theological disputes about whether the very striving to get free of sin might itself be a continuation of sin, in that it comes out of human pride, the self-centered struggle to achieve for ourselves what can only in fact be achieved by God’s grace.19 Rorty thinks it pointless to agonize over something like this, which makes no real difference to our life in the world. RORTY’S QUESTIONABLE “WE” The concerns of this discussion are developed in a series of papers from a 1993 seminar which brings together Rorty, Derrida, Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. The overall topic of the seminar is whether deconstruction has ethical and political significance. The question arises whether it might have a role to play in keeping members of a society open to the challenge of the Other, so that the society’s vocabulary does not collapse everything into its own monologue. As might be expected, Rorty thinks that deconstruction has no such role. He has often written in favor of the view that Derrida is best understood as pursuing a type of irony that is limited to private projects. Other participants in the seminar, especially Mouffe and Critchley, do not agree, and raise the familiar suspicion that Rorty’s liberalism comes down in the end to an attempt to build an in-group that holds homogenous views, a “certain community with a similar set of moral intentions, which Rorty calls ‘we-intentions’.”20 This community does not allow fundamental conflict into the workings of a democratic society, but tries to build up a set of core convictions that are simply agreed. In a way that recalls the concerns of Christian opponents of Rorty’s view of the liberal public square, Mouffe raises the question of those in the society who do not agree with such fundamentals, and are therefore effectively excluded from the conversation. She sees Rorty as tending in his later writings to exclude such people, even to the point of presenting this exclusion as a “product of the ‘free exercise of democratic public reason.’”21 She criticizes a style of politics that is founded in the end only on agreement, and makes no

The Question of Recognition

169

provision for the inevitable fact of disagreement about fundamental ends. She warns against “the illusion that it is possible to establish a ‘we’ that would not imply the existence of a ‘them,’”22 accusing Rorty of developing a position that “allows him to exclude from the conversation of justice all of those who do not agree with the liberal premises.”23 In her alternative view, it is accepted that people will always be fundamentally at odds with one another regarding some of their goals. She sees this continuing contestation as setting out what is in fact a condition for a robust democracy, whose very robustness comes from the acceptance of contestation of this sort. She holds that deconstruction is a useful means for keeping alive the sense that a healthy democracy assumes this fundamental contestation, in that it performs the service of “subverting the ever-present temptation that exists in democratic societies to naturalize their frontiers and essentialize their identities.”24 Critchley agrees with this general direction, and believes that the ethical thread of deconstruction comes into play as soon as ethics is understood “in the particular and novel sense given to that word in the work of Emmanuel Levinas.”25 The presence of another person offers a peculiar challenge to freedom and subjectivity. Critchley accepts the elusiveness of the sort of ethical relation articulated by Levinas, which goes beyond ordinary categories of the understanding, and yet still bears in on us in a tangible and perceptible way. “The other person stands in a relation to me that exceeds my cognitive powers, placing me in question and calling me to justify myself.”26 Somewhat unconvincingly, Critchley suggests that Rorty is rather like Levinas here in that he sees fundamental political obligations in terms of a relation to the suffering of others. Both agree that “cruelty is the worst thing that there is,” holding that this is the only bond that we need in order to establish a democratic society.27 Critchley also believes that there are significant similarities between Levinas and Derrida on this question. He notes that deconstruction comes down to an experience of the “undecidable,” and sees this as implying an infinite task when it comes to responsibilities to others. No political form can ever embody this in such a way as to resolve the tension.28 Derrida’s response to the various authors at the seminar supports Critchley’s comments, acknowledging a commitment to an approach he shares with Levinas. He agrees that responsibility has an infinite dimension, and holds that to give up on the kind of approach proposed by Levinas, with its infinite tasks, is to give up on responsibility itself. Derrida draws from this the striking conclusion that we can never be in “good conscience” with regard to responsibilities we have assumed or decisions we have made. The reason is that if we behave well toward one person, we inevitably exclude others, so that our good work is always to the “detriment” of another, a point that can always be applied to relations between friends, families and nations. The responsibility that precedes our assuming a

170

Chapter 7

duty is never in fact settled by our merely assuming it and seeing it through. An unsettled responsibility stays with us, in that our attempts to fulfil the duty keep us entangled in responsibilities that we never satisfy, and lead us into conflicts that are “interminable.” “[U]ndecidability is not a moment to be traversed and overcome.” It continues to “inhabit the decision.”29 Derrida insists nonetheless that the impossibility of resolution should not lead us to give up on attempts to satisfy the complex ethics of choice. In spite of Critchley’s suggestion of an affinity between Levinas and Rorty, we could not expect Rorty to respond with enthusiasm. He thinks that a Levinas-style ethic, with its emphasis on infinite tasks, inevitably brings overtones of religion or metaphysics, even if it is described in terms independent of these, as it is by Levinas himself. And yet Critchley is not the only writer who identifies an affinity between Rorty and Levinas. Michael D. Barber interprets Rorty as moving straightforwardly in Levinas’s direction, suggesting that Rorty’s promotion of freedom in society and his general push for social justice lead to a sense of general responsibility for the other that resembles Levinas’ main preoccupation. Barber thinks that for both Levinas and Rorty, “I find myself ‘obedient as though to an order addressed to me.’” He holds that members of Rorty’s liberal society are led to respond with sympathy to other selves whom they encounter, who have not yet managed to form their own identity and that they see themselves as obligated to do something about this.30 Barber appeals to Rorty’s discussion of Freud to show how Rorty encourages us to appreciate lives that might otherwise be dismissed as mistaken or deficient in terms of a universalist ethic, seeing them rather as having their own interesting idiosyncratic sense.31 Barber’s discussion picks up something that is certainly true of Rorty’s approach, in that he is concerned to open our eyes to the cruelty that resists the inclusion of others. Yet the assimilation of Rorty to Levinas is clearly dubious, given how much of the tone of Levinas’s project goes against Rorty’s overall approach. Barber is perhaps misled by Levinas’s disavowal of metaphysics as first philosophy, and thinks that this is similar to Rorty’s exclusion of metaphysics. The terms are understood very differently in each case. The “infinite” quality of Levinas’s view of the ethical call brings it into the purview of what Rorty would call “metaphysics.” Others, more plausibly, emphasize the fundamental incompatibility between Rorty and Levinas, noting that the liberal individual subject still dominates Rorty’s approach. The subject falls under no representational constraints from the world as to how it should react, or as to which associations or dissociations it should affirm. Such a subject remains understandably deaf to the sorts of questions that Levinas wants to raise, seeing them simply as invoking a remnant of old-fashioned religious or metaphysical authority. The question of the dominance of the liberal subject is sharply formulated by John

The Question of Recognition

171

D. Caputo in his discussion of the seminar referred to above. He notices that recognition of other people involves a kind of decentering of the self, in that the self is aware that others function as centers of significance, not just in the sense that they can be incorporated into a liberal community of discourse, but also in the sense that they bring the glance of an alternative community of discourse to bear on the liberal subject itself, calling it in question. My dealings with others press me to acknowledge a viewpoint beyond myself, which takes me in and judges me as a whole. Caputo says of Rorty that his “theory of the autonomous subject is too strong,” and that he is not suspicious enough of the liberal community that is formed from such subjects. He contrasts Rorty with Derrida, whom he sees as having realized that his own ultimate community can be called in question by the glance of others: “Derrida is less inclined to want to bring others into our conversation, to bring them up to North Atlantic speed, than to let them set their own terms for getting into the conversation, so that maybe ‘we’ will have to play the ‘them’ to their ‘we.’”32 Rorty’s own comments on Levinas, which are to be found in his political work Achieving Our Country, as well as in contributions to the above seminar, confirm his opposition to a project of infinite ethical responsibility. Levinas is not satisfied with our deciding which finite action is preferable to the next best, and then getting on with doing something about it. Instead we are encouraged to discover a responsibility that we can never finally resolve. For Rorty such a conception hinders effective action for good in the public sphere. He remarks that a notion of infinite responsibility may have a place in individual quests for private perfection. But when it comes to public responsibilities, the infinite is just a nuisance. “Thinking of our responsibilities in these terms is as much of a stumbling-block to effective political organization as is the sense of sin.”33 The attempt to deal with the infinite absorbs all of our strength, and induces a sense of helplessness. However good our politics might be, they are ultimately judged to be ineffectual, because they are “unable to cope with preternatural forces.”34 Rorty agrees with Derrida about what follows if we allow Levinas’s approach into political ethics. But while Derrida sees this as reflecting a situation we should accept and acknowledge, because we cannot in the end avoid it, Rorty sees it as a reason for repudiating Levinas and developing a different sort of political ethics, which helps us negotiate between two possible courses of action in conflict with one another. For example, parents might be called to testify against their own child, and have to reconcile the tensions of telling the truth under oath and supporting the child. For Rorty, human ethics never gets beyond comparing one finite choice with another, and he thinks we should not attempt anything more than this. While such choices can be difficult, it does not follow that we should torture ourselves about the fact that inevitably, one set of interests is neglected if the other is

172

Chapter 7

to be satisfied. There is little point in invoking a vocabulary that points to the presence of an infinite ethical task I can never discharge, bringing me toward an “Abyss that separates me from an Other.”35 Levinasian approaches effectively return us to notions of absolute obedience and therefore to religion. Understandably, Rorty has no time for an approach that claims to bring us up against the limits of contingent decisions as such, implying an infinite obligation to be worked out (or perhaps never worked out) in the realm of the finite. A sense of frustration shows itself in Rorty’s discussions of these matters, and he is perhaps puzzled that something that brings no obvious reward should continue to exercise the energies of capable thinkers. He wants to promote feelings and attitudes that enable people to respect and appreciate others, particularly those of different cultures. He encourages us to try out the vocabularies of others, to see if we can adopt them, or parts of them, as our own. He cannot see that any good is served by our conceiving this as an infinite task, where the vocabularies of the others remain at such a distance that they can never be assimilated, imposing an infinite project of encounter that never comes to an end. Rorty goes so far as to call Levinas’s Other (as well as Heidegger’s “Being”) “gawky, awkward, and unenlightening.”36 While Levinas’s preoccupations can be tolerated as topics for private projects, they do not get us any further as regards our common life. Infinite tasks rob us of energy while delivering nothing useful, implying that even our best efforts are not enough. Such discussions are debates about differences that make no difference. RECOGNITION AND LANGUAGE These concerns raise the question of whether Rorty is in fact missing something fundamental about the relations of speakers to one another. Do these reflect something deep that cannot be adequately interpreted in terms of tactical moves toward equilibrium, so that they require a discussion that goes beyond anything that a pragmatist approach can handle? Rorty discusses relations within language communities at length, attempting to account for their behavior from within his pragmatist scheme. The discussion goes on at various levels. Sometimes he suggests that the common denominator of human speech is simply tactical, an additional means that humans have developed to ensure a degree of predictability and regularity in their lives. When under the influence of Davidson’s discussion of radical translation, Rorty pictures humans’ understanding of one another as an exercise in coping, where they experiment with guesses and theories about what the other might mean. Linguistic understanding begins with guesses about what another person will do, and this leads to the formation of theories that help us cope. As Rorty puts

The Question of Recognition

173

it, when describing an encounter with someone who puzzles us, “[s]he and I are coping with each other as we might cope with mangoes or boa constrictors—we are trying not to be taken by surprise.”37 The human language community seems here to be no more than a further part of the world, with which we have to cope. Rorty’s mature position moves beyond these initial considerations, however, and he comes to see the identity of a speaker as bound much more closely to a linguistic community than some of his earlier remarks might suggest. He discusses these issues in responding to an article by the philosopher James Conant on interpretations of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Conant considers the case of Winston Smith, who is under pressure from the Party to believe things that are not true. Conant wants to separate the notion of “truth” from that of a coping “consensus,” believing that Rorty tends to conflate the two. He argues that truth exists beyond the coping consensus of a community, and points out that Winston’s memories are the best test of what is in fact true, so that a belief in his memories is warranted, even though he cannot justify the belief to those around him, given they are all under the influence of the Party. There is therefore a sense of “true” that is relatively independent of the area of common “justification,” where members of a society have worked out ways of coping with situations that require inference. In his reply to Conant, Rorty insists that he does not collapse “truth” into “justification.” But he denies that Winston has independent access to facts in the way that Conant thinks. While we know that Winston’s memories reflect reality, there is no way that Winston himself in the situation in which he finds himself, can know this. Everyone holds that Winston’s memories are mistaken, and Winston himself has no way of knowing that they are not right. For all he knows, he might be in a similar situation to that of the person who has a vivid memory of “Elvis riding through Yosemite on the back of Godzilla.”38 Rorty thinks that memories require a “consilience” with the views of others, if they are to be seen as reliable, so that even a correspondence theorist is driven back on a coherence with a wider community to secure a warrant for reliance on memory in a disputed case. It follows that a community has a substantive role in regulating the epistemology of everyday belief. This throws into relief a striking situation that often arises in a religious context, where a prophetic figure claims to have a truth that is not recognized by anyone else in the society. In such a case, the prophet does not appeal simply to facts held in memory, as if memories alone were being opposed to what everyone in the society affirms. Rather, the prophet appeals to the viewpoint of another person, albeit a divine one, showing a confidence that God sides with the prophetic voice and condemns the other voices, so that there is still an appeal to a kind of consensus (admittedly an unusual one). While recognizing the structural importance of this sort of prophetic appeal to a final “consilience,”

174

Chapter 7

Rorty understandably sees the appeal as worthless in this case, given that an appeal to the mind of God is no more verifiable than a solitary appeal to a remembered reality.39 Rorty’s further discussion of these matters focuses on later positions of Davidson on the role of a linguistic community in constituting the original possibility of language, truth and meaning. He sees these as an advance on Davidson’s earlier theories of “radical translation,” which focus on the question of how linguistic subjects that are already immersed in language come to understand one another. His later theories of “triangulation” are more directed toward showing what it is to come into language in the first place. Rorty enthusiastically endorses the theory of “triangulation,” implying as it does that a speaker’s dependence on a linguistic community is a fundamental condition for his or her being taken to be a speaker in the first place. Only against a background that includes other speakers can an agent be regarded as someone who is saying something, and not just as a soundemitting object in the world. As Rorty says, other speakers are necessary if a person is to be seen as someone who can “offer descriptions rather than just . . . make noise.”40 Davidson expresses the key point in this way: “[T] o have a belief it is not enough to discriminate among aspects of the world, to behave in different ways in different circumstances; an earthworm or a sunflower does this. Having a belief demands in addition appreciating the contrast between true belief and false, between appearance and reality, mere seeming and being.”41 Discrimination among stimuli characterizes the “actions” of earthworms and sunflowers, and belongs to a basic level of causal action, where everything simply happens as it happens, and there is no room for truth and falsity. If a sunflower turns toward artificial light rather than to the sun, this may be a wrong move if considered in relation to its life interests. Yet it is not a “mistake” in any ordinary sense, as though the movement of the sunflower had revealed a mistaken belief. It is what sunflowers always do in such a situation, a reaction to particular causal stimuli. Any rule we could formulate about their behavior would simply be a generalization of what they actually do, and could not function as an internal norm against which their behavior could be measured and found wanting. Davidson thinks that physical sounds first become language when they can be seen as guided by such a norm. He points out that a norm of this sort requires a background of interpersonal communication. To adapt an example of G. S. Davis, we could imagine a situation where a person is acting on behalf of a group as a lookout for danger, and passes on various signals to the group when danger threatens, with the signal and the group response varying according to the nature of the threat. When it is a tsunami they might run to higher ground, while for an eruption they run to lower

The Question of Recognition

175

ground.42 Strikingly, if the lookout is alone and there is no group, then it does not matter what he or she says. There is no check any more on the correctness of the signal, and the possibility of correctness or incorrectness effectively vanishes, with the signal itself degraded to a mere happening in the life of the lookout, the sort of involuntary expressive reaction which comes upon someone who is suddenly startled. Lookouts can get the situation wrong, and run uphill when they should be running downhill, but this all remains at the reactive level, and results from particular causes acting in a specific situation. Even if they shout while they run, the signal has no communication function any more, and it makes no difference what word is used for a particular danger. In other words, once the group drops out, the contrast between a correct and an incorrect signal collapses. Only with the relation to the group do we see the sort of distance from the immediate workings of cause and effect that allows a view of the world to be right or wrong. It is at this level that an agent first brings an idea of truth into play, an understanding of “what is the case independently of what he or she thinks.”43 So a notion of truth presupposes language, and this presupposes communication with others. “The source of the concept of objective truth is interpersonal communication,”44 as Davidson puts it, so that the very possibility of objectivity depends on intersubjectivity. Davidson’s theory shows how the presence of a second person is necessary for the subject’s reactions to become language. This is the view that Davidson describes as “triangulation.” His theory shows what it is to react linguistically, and to take a speaker’s utterances as speech. At times, the sounds of the world affect onlookers simply at a causal level, as when they cover their ears because a sound is too loud. In Davidson’s discussion, the second person in the triangulation does not just react like this, but approaches the sounds that the other is making in a linguistic way, listening to what is being said, while prepared to check it for correctness against the facts of the situation. Davidson says here that “an entirely new element is introduced,” that cannot be deduced simply from a base of reactions to the world's stimuli.45 The first speaker might simply have reacted to the felt action of the world, and the hearer might have done the same while including the reaction of the first speaker among the causal actions of the world that need to be dealt with. Davidson accepts that triangulation assumes that speakers “recognize each other as embodied minds” and acknowledges that there is more to be explained here before we understand the strangeness of the overall speech situation.46 In the rest of this work I want to explore this further, and will suggest that the large cleft I have been exploring throughout Rorty’s work, between those who recognize a nonhuman authority, and those like Rorty who maintain that we can do without such a thing, comes back to the way in which linguistic relations to other people are understood and interpreted.

176

Chapter 7

THE QUESTION OF RECOGNITION Could it be that important parts of the human reality are lost when it is understood only within a framework of amorphous “coping,” even in the case where “coping” is understood as broadly as it is with Rorty? The most significant contemporary discussions of this question are found in exchanges on the topic of “recognition” or “acknowledgment,” the process of original acceptance of a human being by another as a conversation-partner, with the equality and dignity that belong to such a relationship. The question arises whether such acknowledgment is somehow fundamental, so that it opens up the kind of life that we recognize as distinctively human. Even a thinker who resolutely opposes metaphysics like Wittgenstein says that “[k]nowledge is in the end based on acknowledgment.”47 Axel Honneth argues that “recognition enjoys both a genetic and a conceptual priority over cognition.”48 Could it be that concepts such as “acknowledgment” or “recognition” attempt to articulate what Rorty’s approach overlooks? Yet it is hard to say what exactly is overlooked, and why it matters, so that it seems difficult for such a critique to meet the pragmatist standard: that every consideration that is considered relevant must be seen to make a difference in practical terms. “[I]s the slaveowner missing something I am not missing?” asks Stanley Cavell.49 Significantly, he does not think there is anything specific that is missed in the end, for example, some fact of which he is aware and the slaveowner is not. The slaveowner might well know everything about human beings that he himself knows, leaving no factual remainder. Cavell is aware of suggestions to the contrary, for example that the slaveowner simply fails to see slaves as human beings. Cavell notes that slaveowning behavior shows that this is not the case. The slaveowner understands slaves as human beings, at least in some basic sense. He does not see himself as being served at table by animals, but by humans (he wants a black hand, not a black “paw,” as Cavell says).50 Nor is it the case that a slaveowner holds specific beliefs about qualities such as intelligence, diligence, beauty, or manners, which might or might not be possessed by slaves. He may well hold that some non-slaves (e.g., his son) are more lacking in these qualities than are the slaves. Cavell concludes that the decisive point lies in a different direction altogether, and has to do with the sort of relation the slaveowner sees himself as able or willing to take up toward the slave. It is a relation that enables each of them to appear to the other (perhaps somehow to exist for the other) in an important way, for the first time. But the relation can also be refused. The slaveowner “is rather missing something about himself, or rather something about his connection with these people, his internal relation with them, so to speak. . . . He takes himself to be private with respect to them in the end unknowable by them.”51

The Question of Recognition

177

There is an important way in which he does not consent to face them, or to let them face him, so that he resists a certain kind of community with them. The household runs according to the conceptual associations and dissociations put in place by the slaveowning society, with sanctions that keep the slave’s reality within the boundaries such a framework allows, so that the troubling connection is kept out. Should a slave speak in such a way as to imply possession of an existence that is on the same level as that of the owners’ lives, this would challenge the framework of interpretation that enables the structure to survive. Those who control the dominant vocabulary can silence such challenges through physical threats, or by not taking the challenges seriously, and dismissing them as the kind of nonsense that slaves talk (a variant of “not caring what the servants think”). For this to work, the moment must be excluded where the slave faces on to the whole life of the owner, along with the owner’s vocabulary, in a way that could be understood as judging it as a whole, and finding it wanting. A challenge of this sort from a slave could not be addressed directly in a spoken reply, since the very act of replying would concede the recognition that is in question. The slaveowner needs, therefore, to live within a refusal that excludes slaves from the status of straightforward conversation-partners, and to maintain this refusal so that it cannot be called in question. Cavell thinks that the refusal consists in a kind of avoidance, or perhaps a denial, something more conscious and guilty than simple ignorance, but which does not go back to a straightforward knowing choice. “[T]he alternative to my acknowledgment of the other is not my ignorance of him but my avoidance of him, call it my denial of him.”52 Cavell’s justly famous discussion of King Lear interprets the play along these lines, as a drama about the need for recognition, and the refusal of people to grant it. The Earl of Gloucester has always admitted that he fathered a child out of wedlock—his son Edmund— saying that he is now “braz’d to it.” But as Cavell points out, this jocular emphasis on his historical sin, which he goes out of his way to admit publically, is in fact a means whereby he withholds a deeper acknowledgement or recognition of Edmund himself. While Gloucester acknowledges that he has an illegitimate son, “[h]e does not acknowledge him, as a son or a person, with his feelings of illegitimacy and being cast out.”53 We can imagine some of the reasons that lead Gloucester to avoid this task, a sense that he would enter an area of vulnerability, where his shame would remain with him, to be addressed and overcome every day anew, and not just brusquely dealt with once and for all and forgotten. It would fall into the category of infinite tasks described by Levinas. His refusal to recognize his son in this deeper sense enables him to retain a sort of control where he “deals with” the situation and the son, while avoiding the continuing task of actually recognizing or acknowledging the son.54

178

Chapter 7

The thought that the concept of acknowledgement or recognition comes down to a sort of action of ours in this way, something we can decide to implement or withhold, might seem to play into Rorty’s hands, in that it sounds as if it is just a matter of deciding whether or not to adopt a particular vocabulary for coping. The vocabulary would enable us to construct a type of relationship that does not exist so long as we remain with vocabularies of slave-owning, or with the kind of vocabulary that Gloucester adopts to “deal with” the situation of illegitimacy. Rorty, who can produce a pragmatist double for every occasion, can interpret recognition in just this way, as a pragmatic choice for a certain style of talk that opens up a novel set of relations, and brings a richer social world into existence, something from which we benefit. He could point out that “respectful acknowledgment” is not necessarily opposed to pragmatist “dealing” or “coping,” but can itself be seen as a novel and significant type of coping or dealing. That it can be described in this way, and need not simply be opposed to notions of “dealing” or “coping,” follows from the fact that reality itself does not force any particular vocabulary on us. If people like the slaveowner or the Earl of Gloucester resist the move to recognition, there is nothing in the world that forces them to it, or says that at a metaphysical level, they are wrong to refuse it. The action of the world is restricted to causal influence, which might at most produce a sense of discomfort in slaveowners from time to time, which they can interpret and deal with as they wish. The question remains, however, whether Cavell has not seen something in the concept of “recognition” or “acknowledgment” that is fundamental, in that it brings the possibility of seeing the human subject as a whole into view, and this is somehow basic to human life. A slave-owning life relies on a background vocabulary that needs to remain undisturbed and unnoticed. What would happen if a slaveowner experienced a moment where this whole vocabulary, and the kind of personal life that it supported, suddenly came into view as such, as an object of radical reflection? Rorty can always dismiss such a moment as nothing more than an experience of causal pressure from the world that leads to the adoption of a new vocabulary (which includes a reflective view on the old one). He proposes something like this in the discussion we have seen of the adoption of women’s rights by Western societies during the twentieth century.55 The question arises whether the dynamic that leads me to acknowledge another person is not more mysterious than this. For one thing, it seems to depend on the fact that the other person is actually facing me (a point made by Levinas), and challenges me in a way that differs from the challenge of an abstract question like the advancement of rights, about which I might eventually decide to change my vocabulary.

The Question of Recognition

179

A PRAGMATIST SPIRITUALITY? Rorty, who never ceases to surprise, goes well beyond a simple defence of the view that pragmatism can accommodate and defend what most of us take to be desirable relations to other people. He also goes on the attack, maintaining that in fact, pragmatism is better set up than are its religious or metaphysical rivals, to perform this task successfully. Because pragmatism promotes a view of individual or social life based on contingent historical openings to the world, it is by nature more open to trying out foreign points of view, and to entering exotic worlds that might offer novel possibilities of experience. It does not have to cope with the heavy loyalty that weighs down traditional views that are aimed at correspondence to something beyond them. Those who hold that our relations with others present us with an infinite task can be silenced by the strength of a straightforward pragmatist case that claims to cover everything that needs to be covered, and to do it a good deal more economically than does the metaphysical opposition. Rorty presents the case for pragmatism particularly with regard to the experience of literature. The question is addressed in a posthumously published essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.”56 This essay picks up some of the themes of his encounter with Geertz, promoting the value of novel-reading for making us aware of the effects of our actions on other people, and making us more sensitive in our dealings with them. Novel-reading does this by leading us imaginatively into the worlds of people different from ourselves. We see for the first time how their actions and attitudes appear from the point of view of the agent. People for whom we feel no instinctive sympathy, even perhaps people whose actions might appal us, can suddenly become objects of a sympathetic understanding. We wake up to the ways they have of giving meaning to their lives, and realize that they have needs that differ from our own, which lead them to develop self-descriptions we would never have thought of. With this we begin to encounter their “otherness.” We can then decide how we are to relate to them, learning “how to balance our needs against theirs, and their self-descriptions against ours.”57 Rorty recognizes that this could seem to be a formula for universal toleration, and insists that this is not what he means. There is much in the world that should not be tolerated. We should, however, always make an attempt to understand how something looks to the agent who is at the center of the life of which it forms a part, before we decide it is unforgivable.58 All good novels can help us in this task. Rorty thinks that authors like Proust and James take us further than most, toward an experience “which is vaguely and roughly called ‘a higher state of consciousness.’”59 It takes the form of stimulating a reflective process whereby we come to see parts of

180

Chapter 7

ourselves we had never noticed. Favored authors can “force us to experience vivid doubts about ourselves,” which affect us radically, raising questions of “whether there is any health in us, whether our egotism may not go much deeper than we have realized.”60 Rorty is aware of the elusiveness of what he is pursuing here, and the difficulty of giving it any definite content. It is not a question of acquiring new beliefs, as if our reading of novels simply informed us of things that we did not know before. Rather, the experience of reading itself brings about a change. Rorty even suggests an intriguing parallel, that just as Christian believers say that the decisive thing is not a new teaching, but rather a personal relation with Christ, readers of Proust and James might take up a similar relationship in their reading, a relationship to “the novels themselves, or perhaps to the novelist himself.” He suggests that the experience is like that of a relationship where “two lovers find their loves reciprocated.” Rorty is aware of the strangeness of these expressions, and accepts that they could sound like descriptions of a sort of religious experience,61 as if something is happening in our relations to others that makes us feel we are being taken beyond ourselves. He insists, however, that what he is talking about can be accommodated within pragmatist categories, where it is described simply as the emergence of a new sensitivity that opens up different ways of existing. There is no need for any larger appeal, as if the experience indicates that we have finally broken through appearances to uncover the original relational sources of reality, or humanity. The rest of Rorty’s argument follows a familiar pattern. He thinks that the changes we make in light of our reading experiences can be seen as pragmatic adjustments. While moral philosophy might go on to generalize the elements of novelty that arise out of such experiences, and identify the “principles” by which a new vision works, theoretical reflections of this sort remain derivative of the original imaginative vision. It is the experience that establishes the norm, and gives it what justification it has, and not the other way round. Rorty thinks that reflections that belong to moral philosophy always have this sort of secondary status, and are “parasitic on the larger moral and political experience of the species.”62 When moral philosophy mistakenly claims to articulate “moral reality,” something beyond us that could serve as a norm of conduct, it is in fact appealing to a late generalization of different imaginative experiences that have already established themselves. The norm itself cannot therefore serve as an independent criterion for the validity of the experiences. Here Rorty argues against a thinker like Martha Nussbaum, who maintains that James helps us to a better grasp of “reality,” even saying that James is “committed to the real,” helping us discover “truths” which can be expressed only in narrative form.63 Rorty thinks that Nussbaum wants to view such intuitions as offering us “glimpses of an enduring moral reality.”64 For Rorty, this is to argue in a circular way, understanding post factum generalizations

The Question of Recognition

181

as if they represent underlying principles which lead and guide us in the first place. What seems to be doing the leading does not in fact exist until an artist invents it, by discovering a new way of looking at things. As usual, Rorty is resolutely nominalist, encouraging us to ignore the attractions of deep continuities. We should settle for the fact that we sometimes discover things that are new, and come into worlds that have hitherto never been imagined. The question remains whether Rorty can really do what he wants to do here within a pragmatist framework, or whether the attempt effectively moves us beyond a pragmatist framework and back toward metaphysics or religion. For a pragmatist view, the sensitive form of life that is seen in Proust or James is a choice of ours, going back to interests that we have decided to adopt. This attitude fits well with the word “aesthetic,” with its implication that experiences of ours are central and that the things of the world function in some sense as materials for these. As if recognizing the possibility that the categories might belie the nature of the task, Rorty even recommends that we use the word “spiritual” for the sort of transformation that comes from reading James and Proust. His use of the word includes aspects of what is normally covered by “moral” and “aesthetic,” but also a broader meaning, roughly “any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one's sense of what matters most.”65 It is nevertheless questionable how far pragmatism can really distance itself from the self-centered aspects of aestheticism. The view that things become meaningful in as much as they are incorporated into the developing life-story of an autonomous self, remains strong. Rorty endorses Harold Bloom’s reason for taking up a practice of reading, that it “fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.”66 If reading helps us to transcend our blinkered state, getting beyond the power of upbringing and custom, we take it up in order to arrive at “greater individuality and self-reliance.” Rorty also quotes a phrase of James, which Martha Nussbaum cites from the preface to The Golden Bowl, where James refers to “the general adventure of one’s intelligence.”67 These phrases imply the degree to which the ultimate purpose of the project Rorty recommends is the cultivation of a self. It recalls his discussion of the feral child who is accepted into a community not because of the way the child is in any deep sense, but because of the way that “we” are, or want to be. If something is owed, we owe it to ourselves, and not to the “other” in any deep way. There is a sense of a world that begins and ends with choices of ours, so that our fundamental connection to people or the world starts with our exercising pragmatist options. If we have obligations, they come back to duties we have placed on ourselves. The phrase in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, that we only ever know things under “optional descriptions,” with its implication that the world first becomes meaningful in relation to choices of ours, remains as a telling comment for Rorty’s overall philosophy.68

182

Chapter 7

It is significant that in the end, relations to other people are not seen as differing much from relations to anything else. We are still “coping” in a general sense, existing within a particular chosen horizon, which serves as a background against which we make sense of the things of the world, including its people. The impact of the external world as such is restricted to the causal level. My dealings with others fit this framework, which is not to say that a style of coping might not develop practices that include a real concern for others, and even strong commitments which are to be defended to the death. But I am never subject to the authority of others in any way that goes beyond the everyday sense in which I incur obligations that emerge out of the language I speak. Nothing transcends the pragmatist act of poiesis that gives things significance within particular linguistic horizons. The person I meet does not require a use of words, as if he or she could prescribe a vocabulary. Rorty holds benign views about others, and wants them to be treated well. But as we have seen, if a terrorist is threatening large destruction of human life, perhaps we should not shrink from threatening harm to his or her children, if this is necessary for the greater good. The dignity of a child does not bear in on us categorically, somehow demanding recognition regardless of vocabularies we might or might not adopt in order to cope as a community. For the pragmatist view, the child ultimately appears like everything else within a horizon of judgment that settles what may or may not be done in a particular case. THE “OTHER” IN NABOKOV’S LOLITA This having been said, Rorty never ceases to surprise. As if in spite of himself, he considers at times a position that does see the other person as imposing a sort of view on us of how things ultimately are. For all his impatience with Levinasian infinite tasks, he has an unexpected interest in the issues that occupy Levinas, demonstrating yet again his willingness to be led into areas that test his own views. He addresses some of these issues in a significant essay on Nabokov’s Lolita. The discussion focuses on the central question of how a broadly pragmatist scheme handles relations with other people. Rorty notices a passage in the novel where the principal character Humbert describes the main fear of his later life, long after the affair with Lolita is over. For Rorty, the fear articulates a major theme of the novel, and expresses an important worry of Nabokov himself, as is expressed in an essay of Nabokov’s on the nature of art. While Nabokov sees art as involving “curiosity, tenderness, kindness, and ecstasy,” his great fear is that the curiosity of artists, which leads them to notice things that otherwise go unnoticed, also leads them to overlook “tenderness” and “kindness.”69 The artist is driven to focus on the lives of his or her characters in relation to a possible work of art, so that

The Question of Recognition

183

in a sense the lives themselves become means to the kind of ecstasy that is found only through art.70 In other words, the artist’s relation to the world and its people tends to become a relation toward materials. The curiosity which drives the artistic enterprise encourages the artist to overlook the people themselves whose lives are being used. Rorty notes a place in the novel where Humbert receives a letter from Lolita’s mother Charlotte proposing marriage to him, a letter Humbert can transcribe from memory. But he leaves out “a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita’s brother who died at two when she was four.”71 Here a human tragedy is rendered insignificant because it is not important for the artistic project, and a person is overlooked because he falls outside the artist’s obsessions. This uneasy relation between the demands of an everyday ethical response and the world of an artistic project can be seen to parallel the discussion that Rorty pursues elsewhere about the relation between ethical projects aimed at bettering the condition of the human race, and a person’s private obsessions. The young Rorty felt a sense of guilt at having an interest in wild orchids, when he should have been reading Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution.72 Rorty’s solution is to separate the two sides, so that public life takes on the project of improving people’s lot, and is ruled by a low-level liberal ethic, while art and its attendant cruelties are confined to private life. Some question this solution, asking whether artistic projects can ever really be kept private in the requisite sense. Thomas McCarthy notes that “[w]riting belongs, of course, to the public sphere,”73 even though it is a principal example of Rorty’s pursuit of private perfection. If this is so, then it would seem unavoidable that the inherent cruelties of art, its tendency to regard human beings as fodder for its own operations, will spill out into the public world, where they become actual cruelties. In his discussion of Nabokov, Rorty does not particularly pursue this line. He focuses more on the mechanics of the artistic process in its own terms, as a private pursuit. He concedes that an artist inevitably sees the lives of others as materials for art, and is tempted into a kind of detached cruelty regarding the way that they are seen. This could be viewed as a practical problem that lies well within the range of a pragmatic solution, in that the pragmatically-minded artist can note the problem and adopt remedies that minimize the danger. Humbert could attempt to sharpen his sensitivity to the suffering of the world and its people. He could do this even while remaining committed to the artistic life. There are styles of art that set out deliberately to take account of the suffering of others. Rorty’s discussion of Henry James emphasizes James’s attempt to heighten our sensitivity to the overlooked cruelties of the everyday in this way.74 The discussion of Nabokov raises, however, a deeper problem for the pragmatist, which goes back to a fear that however well an artist behaves in relation to others, a poetic approach of its nature overlooks something important,

184

Chapter 7

and always excludes others in a significant way. Late in his life Humbert articulates a fear he calls the “eternal horror” of his old age. It arises from awareness that the other person, who has been fundamentally overlooked or sidelined in a life dominated by aesthetic drives, also has an understanding of what has happened, and looks back at the artist’s attitudes and activities, judging them as a whole. Humbert expresses this fear in relation to the basic action of the novel, the affair with the young Lolita. Rorty quotes Humbert’s statement in a footnote: “Alas I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her.”75 This sentence registers a striking shift in the overall tone of the novel. A reader might expect a further elaboration on the theme of art and cruelty, an expression of regret for Humbert’s turning Lolita into an object of obsession, so that she was fundamentally overlooked in the way in which things generally become materials for artists. Such a reflection would limit itself to the subjectivity of Humbert, which provides the basic framework against which the events of the novel are assessed. Yet in the above quotation Humbert’s narrative veers in a different direction, and the reader is taken by surprise by the fact that it is Lolita’s memories that are in question. The worry is not about what Humbert thinks of what he did to Lolita, but rather what she might think of it. With this, a perspective comes into play which is in principle beyond Humbert, but which nonetheless faces him and oddly intrudes into his life, calling him in question from a place that remains always beyond him. His whole self becomes relativized by the glance of another, who takes him in as a whole, with all his attitudes and projects and the incessant reworkings they undergo in his head, and finds them all wanting. And yet this alien viewpoint oddly intrudes into the mind of Humbert himself, and presents itself as something that matters to him, and should be of concern to him. It is striking that Humbert’s art is no help when it comes to handling this challenge. Whatever changes of attitude he manages to achieve through further shifts in vocabulary cannot touch the troubling awareness that Lolita has a view on him which stands outside him and his vocabularies, and judges the whole, therefore intruding in some way into his life from beyond it. We could imagine a different story, with a less interesting central character, where Humbert was simply immersed in his obsession, along with the objects it allowed to appear. The world would be reduced to a correlate of the obsession, ultimately an object seen from Humbert’s point of view, which included the worrying fact he had not done well when measured against another part of his moral code (the need for sensitivity and compassion). But the worry about Lolita’s not being able to forget goes further than this. Humbert acknowledges that his obsession is aimed at something that does not just appear in light of his obsession, but rather shows itself

The Question of Recognition

185

as existing mysteriously beyond any framework of understanding which he can project. The target looks back at him so that he is aware of himself and all his projections as caught in the glance of the other, inviting perhaps a question about his own moral and metaphysical status. Most of the time Humbert does not allow this possibility to exist, and enters cheerfully into criminal relations with a minor, subsequently pursuing the reflections and regrets which befit the life of an artist caught up in life’s complications. But in the last pages of the book, just after the description of his arrest, he remembers stopping by the roadside and hearing “the melody of children at play . . . remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic.” He realizes that what moves him has in a sense nothing to do with his own life and interests, and the world they project. It is something about Lolita as she is, or might have been, apart from all these things. “I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”76 In the peculiar regret that haunts his old age, Humbert is aware of Lolita as someone with an existence of her own, beyond the various ways she is depicted when caught in the projections of his own obsessive drives. He glimpses a reality whose contours are strangely independent, and which yet bears in on him and his interests so as to judge them. The process calls him in question as a whole in such a way that the implicit accusation cannot be simply understood as a challenge made by one part of his self to another part. Humbert does not even need to know any of the detail of what it is that challenges him here, and what exactly Lolita thinks of him, if she could be brought to articulate it. (He visits her in later life and finds her quite unremarkable, with little to say for herself about anything.) The important thing is the awareness that there is such a possibility, or place, a viewpoint which looks in on the whole of him. Even to acknowledge the existence of such a thing seems a kind of moral achievement in that Humbert has to somehow agree or allow that his own viewpoint and its world be relativized in this way, so that he and his perspectives are understood as part of an order that goes beyond them. He is never forced to let the troubling otherness of Lolita intrude into his life if he does not want. As mentioned above, we could imagine a story where she remained within the framework of Humbert’s aesthetic narrative, which included perhaps the guilty fate of the artist, with its painful knowledge that the aesthetic impulse always offends against its objects. Lolita’s glance would not be allowed to appear over against this narrative as a whole, facing it and judging it. By contrast, as we have seen, some of Rorty’s critics, those affected by perspectives introduced by Levinas, hold that our ethical (and perhaps even, pace Levinas, metaphysical) sense begins here, with the experience of a call from something radically beyond us, which intrudes into our lives. It brings something uncanny into play, lying beyond our interests and their objects,

186

Chapter 7

even the common interests we share with other people, which lead us to join with them to form a common social order. Rorty obviously admits the existence of experiences like the one recorded by Humbert. He would, however, deny any interpretation of such experiences that might lead toward metaphysics. The key pragmatist move would be to deny that the whole of Humbert’s experience ever comes into question at once, and to propose instead that parts of his experience are being questioned by other parts, or that certain experiences are pushing him to discover ways of being which he has not yet imaginatively been able to enter (or to invent), but which are available to him as implicit parts of a larger self. Even at her most elusive, when she seems to appear simply as the other to Humbert, Lolita might in fact still be appearing as an object articulated within the vocabulary of Humbert. It is just that these interests differ from the erotic infatuation that usually dominates his relations with her, and recall older parts of his moral psyche, or prefigure parts that are still coming into existence. Pragmatist interpretation relocates the viewpoint that seems to lead him into a relation beyond himself, back within his own perspectives. He might then be led to adjust his vocabulary to take account of a novel conflict which he has not experienced before. Lolita’s glance has at best a causal impact, leading Humbert to ruminate further, extending his narrative self-torment in ways that are new. His basic identity as one who transforms the materials of the world into art remains unthreatened. With this, the basic opposition between Rorty and religion or metaphysics emerges. The one pursues a way of looking at the world, which, for all its professed openness to new experiences and perspectives, is ultimately monist. The other starts with an original relatedness, attempting to clarify how new experiences and perspectives stand to a world that already has its lines of significance in place, and where thoughts are latecomers that attempt to articulate something already fundamentally there. Whether discovery of such a fundamental relation matters, is of course disputed. Within the terms of a pragmatist approach it does not seem to matter. A religious or metaphysical commitment to a fundamental relation to others does not appear to affect the detail of our lives in any tangible way. In this sense it does not “make a difference.” Given the ability of each side to defend its own view, and to account for the view that is opposed, it seems unlikely that this difference of opinion will ever be settled by argument. NOTES 1. Mark C. Taylor, “Paralectics,” in On The Other: Dialogue And/Or Dialectics, eds. Robert P. Scharlemann (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 10–41, 16–17. Cf. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 359.

The Question of Recognition

187

2. Taylor, “Paralectics,” 17. 3. Richard Rorty, “Comments on Taylor’s ‘Paralectics’,” in On the Other: Dialogue And/Or Dialectics, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991), 71–78, 75. 4. Rorty, “Comments on Taylor’s ‘Paralectics’,” 75. 5. Ibid. 6. Farid Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 207–26. 7. Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” 217. Cf. Clifford Geertz, “The Uses of Diversity,” Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (1986): 105–23. 8. Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” 217. 9. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism,” 203–10, 206. 10. Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” 219. 11. Ibid., 216. 12. Ibid., 219. 13. Alice Walker and Pratibha Parmar, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 19. Quoted Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” 220. 14. Abdel-Nour, “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism,” 219. 15. Rorty, “Comments on Taylor’s ‘Paralectics’,” 76. 16. Ibid., 74. 17. Ibid., 76. 18. Rorty, “On Ethnocentrism: A Reply to Clifford Geertz,” 209. 19. Rorty, “Comments on Taylor’s ‘Paralectics’,” 77. 20. Simon Critchley, “Derrida: Private Ironist or Public Liberal?” in Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 19–40, 23. 21. Chantal Mouffe, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, eds. Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty, Jacques Derrida and Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 1–12, 10. 22. Mouffe, “Deconstruction, Pragmatism and the Politics of Democracy,” 9. 23. Ibid., 9–10. 24. Ibid., 10. 25. Critchley, “Derrida: Private Ironist or Public Liberal?” 32. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 33. 28. Ibid., 35. 29. Jacques Derrida, “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, eds. Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty and Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 77–88, 86–87. 30. Michael D. Barber, “Rorty’s Ethical De-divinization of the Ethicist Self,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (2006): 135–47, 141. 31. Barber, “Rorty’s Ethical De-divinization of the Ethicist Self,” 144. 32. Caputo, More Radical Hermeneutics, 104. 33. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 96–97.

188

Chapter 7

34. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 96–97. 35. Richard Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, eds. Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, Richard Rorty and Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), 43–48, 43. 36. Rorty, “Response to Simon Critchley,” 43. 37. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 14. 38. Richard Rorty, “Response to Conant,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 342–50, 343. 39. Rorty, “Response to Conant,” 346. 40. Richard Rorty, “Response to Ramberg,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 370–77, 372. 41. Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153–66, 156. 42. G. S. Davis, “Donald Davidson, Anomalous Monism and the Study of Religion,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 19 (2007): 200–231, 203. Davis’s example is in fact restricted to animals, and makes a more basic point than the one developed above. 43. Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” 157. 44. Ibid. 45. Donald Davidson, Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 124. 46. Donald Davidson, “Externalisms,” in Interpreting Davidson, eds. Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin, and Gabriel Segal (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001), 1–16, 13. 47. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, eds. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Harper, 1969), 378 fn. 48. Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 40. 49. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 375. 50. Cavell, The Claim of Reason, 376. 51. Ibid., 376–77. 52. Ibid., 389. 53. Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, ed. Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 267–353, 276. 54. Elsewhere Cavell asks: “What is the sense that something escapes the conditions of knowledge? It is, I think, the sense, or fact, that our primary relation to the world is not one of knowing (understood as achieving certainty of it based on the senses).” Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 106–7 fn. 55. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Vol. 3, 202–27, 208. 56. Richard Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” in The Rorty Reader, eds. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard Bernstein (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 389–406. 57. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 393.

The Question of Recognition

189

58. Ibid., 394. 59. Ibid., 396. 60. Ibid., 397. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 402. 63. Ibid., 401. The reference is to Martha Nussbaum, “Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Martha Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 148–67, 163–64. 64. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 402. 65. Ibid., 404. 66. Ibid., 389. The Bloom quotation is from Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Touchstone, 2000), 195. 67. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 399. It is cited by Martha Nussbaum, “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” in Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 125–47, 143. 68. The use of “optional” in this sense is not restricted to Rorty’s earlier works. It is found (referring to scientific, theological and philosophical theories) in the late essay “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism,” 27–41, 40. 69. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 158. 70. “[Nabokov] has to face up to the unpleasant fact that writers can obtain and produce ecstasy while failing to notice suffering, while being incurious about the people whose lives provide their material.” Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 159. 71. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 163. 72. Richard Rorty, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 3–20, 5. 73. McCarthy, “Private Irony and Public Decency,” 355–70, 365. 74. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism,” 393. 75. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 162 fn. 76. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 308. Rorty mentions this passage in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 162.

Conclusion

TENSIONS IN RORTY’S POSITION As has been noted, Rorty’s understanding of pragmatism has two sides. On the one side, it encourages an experimental approach that is open to trying out new ways of living in the hope that they might improve our way of life. This side of Rorty’s project reflects the fascination of post-Romantic Western culture with possibilities not yet thought. The promise is not so much of an increased technical mastery of possibilities already to hand, as an emergence into interesting life-spaces that are fundamentally new. Rorty thinks that the refusal of metaphysics is a condition for this sort of openness, at least if it is to be radical, given that metaphysics wants to establish a final framework that will survive all possible historical developments. Rorty’s focus on this open future often disguises the other side of his position, which commits itself to a very particular way of describing the whole process, seeing it as a pragmatic coping or adjusting. Rorty insists, of course, that he is not making any claim finally to have discovered the truth about how human beings relate to the world. He is merely recommending that we give pragmatism a try, confident that once we do so, we will not want to revert to older ways of looking at things. For all that, the recommendation is for a pragmatist description that remains specific and permanent. These two sides—an experimental approach that hopes for a better life, and a fixed pragmatist description—are in considerable tension. Whatever developments the future might hold, they are to be described in the end in a pragmatist way, foreclosing developments that might lead away from the pragmatist description itself. Rorty can hardly be blamed for proposing a permanent description in this way, given that every philosophical position does something like this. Rorty admits at times that he can speak only for the 191

192

Conclusion

present that he himself inhabits, given that this is the best that any thinker can do. He agrees that a future map of the heavens may make Copernicus look as bad as Copernicus made Aristotle look, and implies that his own reflections might one day be overcome in the same way.1 But for the moment, while affirming an experimental openness to a better future, Rorty also recommends a specific way of understanding this openness, where the world we inhabit presupposes an act of poiesis, and comes forth in an important sense as a sort of product, whatever qualifications are then applied to this description. The approach conflicts with the self-understanding that accompanies many actual human ways of existing in the world, especially those of a traditional religious character, which usually see people as bound to an original order not of their making in a way that includes recognition of a higher authority. D. Z. Phillips, who criticizes Rorty for substituting a metaphysics of pragmatism in place of an old-fashioned metaphysics, holds that the pragmatist narrative alters the feel of our lives. He remarks of Rorty’s ideal of hermeneutic conversations that “[t]he all too apparent danger is that the hermeneutic conversation is the conversation of the dilettante, someone who cannot give himself or herself to anything.”2 Rorty would, of course, contest this, insisting that the contingency of a commitment does not exclude it from being firm and unrelenting. Phillips might reply in turn that this misses the point, which is not whether a particular pragmatic decision could harden into a sort of personal absolute, but rather whether this kind of description is not fundamentally misguided as a way of articulating deep human commitments. The force of the criticism is apparent in the offer that Rorty makes to oldfashioned religious believers, if they are to win acceptance in the new order. They are to see their religious faith as a more or less idiosyncratic way of making sense of their life-experience. Religious commitment is to be seen as resting in the end on a choice, which could in principle be undone by the opposite choice. Rorty puts it this way in his discussion with Vattimo, where he places himself in a broadly “relativist” camp, opposed to the one described as “fundamentalist.” He says that in the end, “the struggle between relativism and fundamentalism is between two great products of the human imagination . . . two great visionary poems.”3 In other words, we should regard the conflict as obtaining between two poetic choices. The “historicist” side of Rorty’s project, the one that commends us to an open future, is limited by the condition that this future is always to be seen as going back to something like a choice of a poem. Again, this is hardly a criticism of Rorty, who is doing what every philosopher does. It is just that at times he gives the impression that he avoids altogether the sort of stable description that belongs to ontology, and manages to expose its shortcomings while himself avoiding anything of the sort.4 In fact, he promotes a stable description of his own.

Conclusion

193

It takes a considerable amount of work to maintain the pragmatist description in face of contrary experiences, like the ones noted in Rorty’s discussion of Nabokov. His proposals accommodate to a remarkable degree many of the preoccupations of more traditional philosophical approaches. His philosophy remains, however, the narrative of a pragmatist voice, where the significance of things goes back ultimately to a choice of vocabularies. The pragmatist subject, which is not itself called in question, controls the overall narrative, and assigns places to everything else. This explains why discussions of “recognition” or “acknowledgment” seem to threaten the position in that they suggest a relativizing description of the pragmatist subject, forcing on it the question of whether it might itself be the result of a particular and idiosyncratic choice, perhaps even of a wilfulness in face of possible alternatives. Rorty has to deny that the whole self and its purposes are being judged when say, Lolita looks back at Humbert and does not forgive him. Such situations have to be interpreted as if a part of Humbert is being judged by another part, so that the action remains internal to Humbert. Anything else would challenge his defining poetic agency, and draw him into a larger order of significance that precedes any choice of his, and calls in question the whole poetic (or pragmatist) approach. The threat is hidden by Rorty’s enthusiasm for conversations with others. He holds that philosophy should stop being a monologue and become rather a “conversation with strangers.”5 This means a preference for positions of relational moral philosophers like Annette Baier, against those on the Kantian side, who hold that morality begins with insight into universal law, and that this is in principle available to everyone capable of rational reflection. Philosophers in the tradition of Baier want to defeat what they see as the flaw of most of the moral philosophy tradition, which is “the myth of the self as nonrelational, as capable of existing independently of any concern for others, as a cold psychopath needing to be constrained to take account of other people’s needs.”6 Instead, morality is to become part of a communal enterprise, “simply a new and controversial custom,” where things are constituted by their relations to other things. So Rorty sees himself as fighting against an understanding of a moral subject centered on itself, something that needs to be called to order by a moral law that exists beyond individual interests, and which represents a tribunal of pure practical reason. He quotes Dewey’s distinction between acting as a “self” (which is described as “truistic”) and acting “selfishly,” where the narrow interests of a particular self are played against the interests of others.7 Dewey accepts the former, while claiming to avoid the latter. He is followed by Rorty, who holds that ethical responses that fit a broad pragmatist description of “coping,” can include the altruistic features that have such emphasis in most ethical understandings. The

194

Conclusion

obligation to feed the stranger has become “as tightly woven into my selfconception as the desire to feed my family.”8 This shows, however, the effect of a unitary pragmatist description, in that the lines of significance still come back to the acting subject. Whatever obligation I feel arises as part of my coping and does not come directly from the world or from others. Later in the same discussion, Rorty repeats the point made about the feral child, emphasizing that moral motivation comes from us, and the way in which we have formed ourselves. “To say that God wills us to welcome the stranger within our gates is to say that hospitality is one of the virtues upon which our community most prides itself.” To fail to intervene in cases where human rights demand that we intervene is to say that “a failure to intervene would make us uncomfortable with ourselves.” To speak of “human rights” is really “to explain our actions by identifying ourselves with a community of like-minded persons—those who find it natural to act in a certain way.”9 We recognize the differences between the views of others and our own, and take account of them, balancing our needs and theirs. But they do not bear in on us from outside in a way that carries any fundamental moral weight. In the words of J. Aaron Simmons, the relational aspects of Rorty’s discussion concern “how a constituted self decides to move forward in the world” and not “how the self is constituted from the outset.”10 This is simply to set out the position that Rorty himself affirms, in that it comes down to the recommendation that we give up the view that some large authority constrains us from outside ourselves and our community. This side of Rorty’s project has become a target for critics. Richard Bernstein says of Rorty: “There seems to be no genuine resistance, no otherness. . . . And our interpretations, our self-creations, seem to be little more than an expression of our idiosyncratic will to power, our will to selfassertion.”11 Rorty would of course disagree, not least because Bernstein sees his position as coming down to an alternative metaphysics of the subject. For all that, Bernstein’s interpretation picks up the side of Rorty that confines moral motives firmly within the vocabulary of the subject, allowing only causal transactions between the world and the subject. As Rorty says, the best one can ever do is to “show how the other side looks from our own point of view”12 so that it all comes back to our ethnos, even if our ethnos is one that “prides itself on its suspicion of ethnocentrism.”13 In spite of everything, there is a fundamental sense in which we remain “ethnocentric.”14 This discussion therefore reflects the difference between an understanding that sees relations to others as constitutive of personal identity, and an understanding that sees such relations as coped with by a self that is already constituted, and is therefore seen as existing in principle beyond them, even if there is then an attempt, as there is with Rorty, to describe the self’s existence as “relational.” If Rorty sometimes recommends that we see our everyday attempts

Conclusion

195

to understand the world on the model of our getting acquainted with a person, this is because our getting acquainted with a person is already seen as a more subtle example of the kind of shakedown that characterizes the part-whole dialectic of the hermeneutic circle in general. We form and test hypotheses of meaning until we “feel at ease with what was hitherto strange.”15 “RECOGNITION” IN AXEL HONNETH Rorty’s ideal of autonomy fits with the view that the world only ever exercises causal and not representational influence on the knowing subject, so that it never dictates what a person should think. The things of the world are assigned significance from within a vocabulary. By contrast, reflection on the ways in which we come to terms with others, and the strange phenomenon of recognition, suggest the presence of something we do not simply talk about or deal with, but which stands against our vocabulary as a whole, and challenges us to a kind of correspondence. While the topic of “recognition” has been discussed in Hegelian and other contexts in recent years, the concept is not especially familiar to mainstream Anglo-Saxon philosophy. In a lecture delivered in California in 2005, the third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher, Axel Honneth, considers the concept as it is developed by authors such as Cavell, Heidegger, Dewey and Lukacs.16 His conclusion is indicated in an epigraph from Horkheimer and Adorno, which suggests that the moment of recognition in our relations to others is somehow primitive, and that a model of knowledge based on mere observation is a deficient form of this more primitive kind of contact: “All reification is a forgetting.”17 The discussion is controversial in that it seems to return us to a moment that is foundational, so that the rest of experience is seen as a sort of decline from this original moment. For Honneth’s critics, this is too close to Plato for comfort, suggesting that the everyday is to be understood in light of a systematic forgetfulness of something more primitive, which can therefore serve as a norm by which we evaluate our more forgetful everyday approaches to the world. In developing his notion of recognition, Honneth draws on Heidegger’s concept of “care,” Dewey’s belief in an original level of prereflective experience, Cavell’s notion of human recognition, and above all, Lukacs’ understanding of a primitive human interaction that gets forgotten in a society dominated by capitalist modes of production. In some ways, this conflation of diverse views is not promising, and works perhaps to obscure rather than illuminate the concept. Honneth tries to associate Dewey’s sense of “interaction,” defined as the “effort to involve ourselves with given circumstances in the most frictionless, harmonious way possible,”18 with larger notions of recognition. Yet Dewey’s pragmatic adjustment seems a long way from what

196

Conclusion

most authors mean by “recognition.” Raymond Geuss observes that Honneth “significantly underplays the strong differences between Dewey, Lukacs, and Heidegger.”19 For all that, Honneth’s discussion is striking and significant. He describes the act of recognition as a move that enables us to lose our “primarily egocentric perspective.”20 He develops this in relation to discussions of early childhood, where recognition is seen as a move that is necessarily positive, and expresses an original acknowledgment of another person. It refers to the moment when a child leaves a world dominated by self-centered drives, where things are regarded simply as correlates of one’s own needs, and makes a transition to a point where we “recognize in another person the other of our own self, our fellow human.”21 This original move gets filled out in many different cultural and historical ways. Honneth sees this as the opposite of what he calls “reification,” which seems related to the sort of attitude Cavell notices in the slaveowner, who registers the qualities of the other while refusing any community with the other. The slaveowner refuses to allow that the slave can be what Honneth refers to as our “fellow human.” Honneth’s critics focus on the fact that if recognition is a kind of transcendental condition that underlies all our dealings with others, it must underlie both positive and negative attitudes toward others, and cannot therefore be regarded simply as a positive acknowledgment of them. An insult assumes recognition of the person who is insulted, in that it has a sense only if the other is regarded as human. It cannot therefore be, as Honneth implies, that recognition is always an act of affirmation toward others. All three official commentators on Honneth’s lecture make this objection, pointing out that the concept of “recognition” wavers between, on the one hand, a transcendental condition that is presupposed by both good and bad moral responses, and an original affirmation of a stance toward others that is always morally positive. One reviewer describes the confusion between these two understandings of the concept as fatal to Honneth’s project.22 The problems are compounded by Honneth’s use of examples from psychology, which gives his discussion the appearance of an uneasy mix of arguments from different disciplines. Given that empirical studies are always disputed by other data, it is hard to see how they can support a primary moment that has the sort of weight Honneth wants to give it. Judith Butler is critical of his favoring the views of particular researchers on child development, which is inevitably contradicted by others in the field. She thinks his theory needs to “engage and refute a rival set of accounts,” to become persuasive.23 She is generally unsympathetic to his positing of an original act that affirms the reality of other people, holding that such a thing belongs to the moral sphere rather than the ontological, and is the achievement of an adult consciousness rather than that of a child. There is no particular connection between the sorts

Conclusion

197

of things a child does, attempting “to secure its basic needs,”24 and the processes that characterize adult moral deliberation. Besides the question of how we should categorize the fact of recognition, she also raises the problem of the sort of affirmation that recognition implies, given it shares the field with opposed impulses that lead in other directions, toward “differentiation” and separation from others.25 In some relationships, “aggression” seems just as primordial as affective involvement, and both of these imply an affirmation of the existence of the other.26 Jonathan Lear raises the question of whether our original condition is not a “mixed bag,” which includes greed, competition, aggression, envy, and jealousy, as well as impulses to empathy and sympathy.27 We cannot attach normative force to an original affective involvement. What looked like the discovery of an origin from which all distinctively human attributes proceed is gradually degraded until it assumes the status of one drive among others, so that no original impulse remains that could help ground morality in “reality.” The child is viewed as a set of impulses that go in various directions, so that the ethical person arises as a late development, formed by a process of socialization. Judith Butler sums up this sort of objection: “And we are not to attribute to the original social bond a kind of ‘goodness’ that, in my view, certainly coexists with the capacity for destruction.”28 She thinks the various positions are better set out as different strategies of coping, where “recognition” refers simply to a viewpoint that takes account of the stances of others. While it reflects a strategy that represents a clear advance in human relations, it is not evident that it is qualitatively different from what has gone before. If it is to be affirmed and favored, this can be seen as going back to nothing more than a preference for a certain kind of life and world, chosen for the familiar circular reasons so that the alternatives are reclassified as competing strategies of coping. Butler glosses the view of Raymond Geuss on taking up the viewpoint of another as “I am compelled to take into account your desire,”29 an expression that reflects an understanding that is ultimately pragmatist. She summarizes the possibilities: We know only our own aims, and the other is an instrument for the satisfaction of our aims. It would seem that, according to this scheme, our choice is either to be merely observational (and hence reifying) and fail to take up the position of the other, or to be participatory, by which we mean, among other things, taking up the position of the other.30

Moral goodness does not therefore go back to any “normative structure of genuine praxis” to which it has to correspond, but rather comes down to good decisions (“our choice”), made in the daily struggle between love and aggression. Our responsibility is not bound by anything that is pregiven, but comes back, like everything else, to ourselves and our task of negotiating among our

198

Conclusion

various impulses and involvements. “It is not a matter of returning to what we ‘really’ know or undoing our deviations from the norm, but of struggling with a set of ethical demands on the basis of myriad affective responses that, prior to their expression in action, have no particular moral valence.”31 Rorty’s own position could hardly be expressed more accurately or precisely. There is a refusal to ground moral ideals in any preexisting reality, as though they correspond to an original norm that is embedded in the nature of things. Conversely, reality does not offer any prior indications for a moral completion that is somehow intrinsic to it and could provide grounds for moral norms. Ideals and reality belong to different spaces, as Dewey says. All we can do is find a way ahead in face of conflicting loyalties and drives. Given the weight and extent of these familiar critical responses, it is perhaps surprising that a voice like Honneth’s is heard at all in the contemporary world. He does not, of course, want to deny the points made by his critics. The crux is whether he can argue a priority for a moment of original recognition, which opens up a space where reality is seen as existing beyond us, and which stands behind later moments that assume this primary opening, which position themselves in various ways in relation to it. As the critics notice, the primary moment is always seen as positive. Honneth says that we “necessarily affirm the value of another person” when we open or maintain a recognition-stance toward them.32 On the other side, a recognition-stance serves as a precondition for everyday ways of knowing the world and positioning ourselves in relation to it, for all the different forms such a move can make. He says that the moment of recognition has a “genetic and categorial priority over cognition” and that it precedes “a detached understanding of social facts.”33 In other words, even the moment when we curse or hate others follows an original recognition that affirms the value of the other. This first acknowledgement of reality, where the persons who appear as correlates of our subjective acts are not just seen as correlates of such acts, is a singular move that is always, in a broad sense, morally good, a primitive acknowledgement of reality. The move is assumed by further interactions with the world, so that even an act of cruelty or sadism toward another human being presupposes prior recognition. Original recognition does not seem to be available to animals, for all the uncanny abilities that some of them show.34 Honneth implies that the breakthrough comes when another person is first recognized as such. This goes beyond a view that sees another as a terminus ad quem of passions and obsessions, where the view of the other is a view of an object, another person as he or she might appear for someone who is paranoid, or for a child in a rage, or for someone in the grip of hate or lust. In an original way that has little to do with what we think or feel, the other presses him or herself on us as having a proper existence of his or her own which is to be acknowledged. In such a situation, the pressure is almost irresistible to

Conclusion

199

offer such acknowledgment. And yet, no one seems forced to it, so that in principle it is possible to maintain a detached stance, and to insist that we are “dealing” with others in the best way we can, more or less as we deal with other things. Honneth suggests that every recognizable human being has in fact made the original act of acknowledgment, for all that it can be distorted or taken back afterward. Probably the paths of those who want to maintain a resolutely pragmatist stance, and those who fall into religion or metaphysics, divide on whether such original recognition is to be interpreted as a move that is qualitatively different, or whether it should be seen as a further complex adjustment that fits a broad pragmatist schema. For a pragmatist view, our respectful treatment of others remains on the same level as other ways of coping. Does Shakespeare’s Gloucester enter a different sort of relation if he acknowledges his illegitimate son in the strong sense that Cavell suggests, or is he simply doing more coping, dealing with a situation by choosing one of the better adjustments, rather than one of the worse ones? Rorty would deny that any clear sense can be given to the notion of a “different sort of relation” here and would see the child in Honneth’s discussion as having exchanged one way of dealing for another way, a way that is “better” in the familiar circular sense in that it opens up further possibilities for an interesting life, from which a subject does not want to retreat once they are opened up. By contrast, a religious or metaphysical position wants to affirm a different sort of relation, seeing a child who has come to an act of recognition as having finally acknowledged the “reality” of its parents, after having lived in relation to them without seeing them for what they are. The parents no longer take on significance as correlates of the needs and desires, but are recognized or acknowledged for what they are. Religious or metaphysical points of view describe this as going beyond “coping,” and tend to see the person who makes such a transition not simply as moving to a new possibility or a new construction, but rather as coming to reality for the first time. Honneth’s critics have identified overtones of the Fall in his schema,35 seeing a basic pattern of thought that descends from such thinkers such as Rousseau, or even Plato and Aristotle, and which posits an original state of integral goodness.36 Lear sums up the common critical remark on this: “There will be a tendency in any theory that has this structure to build too much goodness into the prior condition.”37 The Platonist overtones of the position are clear, with the assumption that contact with reality does not take care of itself, but is a moral achievement that overcomes the self-centered forgetfulness of the everyday. Pragmatists opt for a different ontology, where drives compete with one another, and none has any natural privilege over any other. An eventual synthesis is simply a result of a kind of shakedown, where we decide on an equilibrium we can live with.

200

Conclusion

A REFUSAL OF OPENNESS? Questions of the existence and nature of God are often discussed in modern philosophy as if they are questions about an additional object that exists alongside the ones that everybody already believes in. The radical nature of Rorty’s critique, which expands to cover the whole ontology within which such questions are posed, takes the discussion to a deeper level, where the crucial issue concerns the possibility of a radical address from beyond ourselves, of a sort that is capable of calling the whole of us into question at once. This accounts for the breadth of Rorty’s concept of metaphysics, which takes in everyone who believes in a final framework of whatever sort, including theologians, some of whom would have seen themselves as anti-metaphysical in a more traditional, narrower sense. During a public discussion, Jeffrey Stout denies that theology need involve metaphysical commitments, and sees Christian theologians like Milbank and Hauerwas as examples of a nonmetaphysical theological program. Rorty pronounces himself “dubious” about Stout’s claim, making the usual point that metaphysics is just the shadow of the religious urge, part of an impulse of submission to a nonhuman authority so that a traditional theological position subscribes of its nature to commitments that are ultimately metaphysical in Rorty’s sense. It also implies an epistemological norm that is located outside the human, committing human knowledge to an ideal of correspondence, the notion that “knowledge consists in accurate representation of what is the case independent of human needs and interests.”38 Such an ideal can conceivably judge the whole of us, and find us wanting. When Stout raises the question of whether pragmatism might be seen as “inherently anti-theological,” Rorty replies that this is his exact opinion. “I do in fact think this, at least if the theology in question is Christian.” As long as we allow a traditional notion of God, “we can use analogical language to describe God as looking down on the whole of space-time, and perhaps on other realms of being as well, and getting everything in them right.”39 From a religious point of view, Rorty’s position looks like a refusal. Instead of being drawn in, we remain apart, registering data, and forming hypotheses so that the lines of significance are kept within the control of the subject. Religion sees this as an anxiety that holds out a fear of discovery, where we might wake to find ourselves judged from beyond ourselves. In refusing to be drawn in like this, Rorty skilfully disguises the fact that he is recommending anything like a refusal. His philosophy presents itself as the opposite, inviting us to a new openness that liberates us from fixed schemas. The adroitness of his approach is reflected in his comments on the remark of Chesterton, quoted by Dewey: “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”40

Conclusion

201

Rorty points out that once the aspiration to transcendence is expressed in this way, as a human need, it can readily be seen, following Dewey’s suggestion, as “one we could outgrow.”41 Here it is striking that whatever the conclusion of the detailed discussion (whether or not there is such a need in human beings), the decisive point is already settled. The very pragmatist framing of the question shifts the center of gravity to the human subject so that fundamental categories and concepts are now regarded as means that the subject adopts in order to cope, and the question narrows itself to which means are really necessary. Once the form of the question is conceded in this way, the dispute becomes a struggle that is fought out on pragmatist ground. One set of preferences aspires to philosophical or religious security, while the other commits itself to the hope that the human race will outgrow the need for religion and metaphysics in the way a child outgrows the need for parental care. The fact that it is now a struggle about preferences shows that both positions have ultimately accepted the pragmatist framework. Rorty’s target is seen most vividly in the feeling of absolute obligation that comes over us regarding our relations with others, a sense of a task that is never finally discharged, as if our identity is bound to them in a way we can never overcome. It is remarkable how close Rorty himself comes to appreciating this aspect of the human, seeing it as an important part of the best life that humans have managed to develop so far. Rorty can even claim that pragmatism encourages us to take responsibility in a way that surpasses the possibilities religious-metaphysical views could offer, given that from a pragmatist point of view, religion, and metaphysics are caught up in their turn in a kind of refusal, holding on to coping mechanisms whose usefulness has long since passed. They are afraid to take the risks that pragmatism recommends and remain trapped in a kind of bad faith, enjoying the reassurances of those who have convinced themselves that they have no real choice. From this point of view, Rorty’s position can be seen as a development of the late Enlightenment project of freeing humans from self-imposed tutelage. Can religious belief and its metaphysical avatars find any final word here? Their task is to show that pragmatism, for all its professed openness, is based on an exclusion of something quite definite, the move that has been described as acknowledgment of the reality of the other. Rorty’s discussions come right up to this possibility, only to pull out at the last moment, reverting to familiar pragmatist explanations. But the question arises whether the acknowledgment or recognition of another simply exemplifies a further pragmatic possibility, or is something more original that acknowledges a primitive reality beyond the world of our coping. If the latter point of view is accepted, Rorty’s pragmatist view starts to look like a kind of refusal, the sort perhaps that consists

202

Conclusion

in the refusal to see a face as a face, and which falls back on seeing it as a presentation of data, followed by a hypothetical construction. From this viewpoint, Rorty’s pragmatism loses its broad, inclusive appearance, and looks more like a particular choice that we make in order to deal with the world in a certain way. In face of the sorts of experiences noted in his discussion of Nabokov, and developed in a contemporary setting by a thinker like Honneth, his position starts to look like obstinacy, the declining of a kind of address. While Rorty can always employ the pragmatist explanations he so skilfully develops, their very repetitiveness betrays a determination to retain a pragmatist understanding at all costs. CONCLUDING ARGUMENTS It seems to me that the strange relation described by Honneth, where we come to acknowledge that certain objects of our mind—other people—are not merely objects of our mind, stands behind the belief that things have a reality of their own, and is therefore also the origin of the drive toward metaphysics. The relation challenges the view promoted by Rorty, where it is language alone that gives things their first significance. In this final section, I will suggest two brief arguments, based on the sort of relation described by Honneth, for doubting Rorty’s overall account, and for holding to some form of what he would call “metaphysics.” A useful focus for the first argument is the discussion referred to above, of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as it relates to questions of realism. Rorty, and his critic James Conant, focus on the scene where O’Brien, the representative of the Party, explains to Winston Smith that the Party controls the expression of what is true and what is not. Winston tries to hold out against O’Brien, at least in his own mind, by relying on perceptions and factual memories. When O’Brien holds up four fingers, while saying that the Party holds there are five fingers, Winston mostly recognizes that there are in fact four fingers. In addition, he remembers a photograph that contradicts the Party’s account of a historical matter concerning supposed traitors to the Party. And he knows the Party did not invent the airplane, as it claims it did, because he remembers that airplanes existed in his childhood, long before the Party did. Winston tries to pretend to O’Brien that he complies with the views of the Party, and that he believes in what the Party says is the case. Interestingly, O’Brien sees through this, and insists that it is not good enough. As Conant points out, the Party does not want Winston to believe that it invented the airplane simply because the Party says that it did. This would not count as real believing. Rather, it wants Winston to believe what the Party says “because it accords with the facts.”42

Conclusion

203

Rorty is happy in principle with a distinction between social agreement and truth, and allows the abstract possibility that everyone might believe something, and yet it might not be true. He thinks that such a distinction is essential to the working of the word “truth,” and that it is impossible to imagine a society where the distinction does not obtain.43 This is what Rorty sees as the “cautionary” aspect of the word “truth.” It allows for the possibility that something that is universally believed might, however, not be true, because it is always possible that “somebody may come up with a better idea,” or that “new evidence” or “new “hypotheses” might come along.44 Rorty admits that when pragmatists like himself are “in reductionist moods,” they can tend to the view that truth just comes down to communal consensus. But in their more sober moods, they allow the “cautionary” sense of truth, which is equivalent to saying “watch it!” to a well-established belief, because it is always possible that a later audience will, for good reasons, find the belief unjustifiable.45 So Rorty is not against an appeal to “the facts” in this cautionary sense. But he thinks this is of little help to Winston. Even if it is accepted that “facts” have an independence from social consensus, there is no way that Winston can turn to them (“there is nowhere for Winston to turn”),46 because the actual beliefs promoted by the Party are so overwhelming, that dissenting belief can find no foothold. Winston cannot achieve the “triangulation” needed for his views to be expressed in language. In face of the overwhelming weight of what everyone else believes, Winston’s alternative beliefs come across as like those of a person who has had visions of Elvis riding through Yosemite Park on Godzilla.47 The crucial point is not that Winston is disagreeing with a massive consensus, something that could perhaps be handled, for all its difficulties. It is rather that if this is the case, Winston himself has no way of knowing whether the others are not right, and he might not be mad. His vivid memories are no argument. Beliefs about Elvis riding through Yosemite on Godzilla are just as overwhelmingly convincing, at least to some people. As Rorty says, Winston’s alternative beliefs simply lack the connections that they need to get a foothold in the world in which he lives. In the sort of society controlled by O’Brien, they have no “inferential relations,” which is to say that they make no difference. As Rorty—and O’Brien48—point out, “we do not ordinarily trust memories that fail to cohere with everything everybody else believes.”49 They all regard Winston as mad, and he has no way of knowing that they are not right. This raises a set of questions that have been much discussed in Western philosophy, though not quite in this form. They ask whether, in the end, a narrative can so control the things of the world that someone can just disappear into it, and be left without recourse. As we have seen, the question arises with regard to the status of slaves, whose only reality is to feature in the

204

Conclusion

discourses of others. Metaphysical views might attribute a latent personhood to them, waiting for articulation. This move is, however, not open to Rorty. If slaves have less personhood than their masters, this goes back simply to their masters’ control of the language, and not to any hidden reality in the slaves. “We cannot countenance the notion of a deep reality that reposes unrecognized beneath superficial appearances.”50 The only hope for the slaves is to take over the vocabulary in some way and insist on a new way of describing themselves. Nothing in reality itself indicates that they should or should not do this. The position is expressed at its extreme in Nineteen Eighty-Four. There is a passage where O’Brien makes the point that whatever reality Winston has is in fact granted by the Party. While the old despotisms and totalitarianisms merely told people what they should or should not do, the command of the Party is “Thou art.”51 The questionable nature of this position, whether this is really possible, is also expressed in the novel in a further scene, where Winston asks O’Brien if Big Brother exists, and O’Brien replies that of course he exists—as the embodiment of the Party. Winston then asks, “Does he exist in the same way as I exist?” O’Brien replies simply, “You do not exist.” The text acknowledges the difficulty here in that it continues: “Did not the statement, ‘You do not exist,’ contain a logical absurdity? But what use was it to say so?”52 The implication is that O’Brien cannot in fact reduce Winston’s reality in the way that he wants, though he can of course prevent Winston from asserting it in any way. There is a prior situation that counts as a matter of fact, even though there is no way to get it taken up into common discourse. The situation is not unlike the one where a patient in a hospital hears others talking, and saying, about the patient, “do not worry, she cannot hear.” The patient knows simply that they are wrong. The point throws up a striking distinction that needs to be made about such situations. While it is true that Winston sees things from a certain perspective and recognizes perhaps that Party members might see them differently, the fact that Winston sees them in this way is not itself just part of Winston’s perspective, but has a different status. If others deny it, they do not impose an alternative perspective. Rather, they simply get it wrong. For the others, Winston is not there, while for him, he is there. But—as Descartes famously points out—his “being there for him” is not just there for him. It has a reality of its own, regardless of whether others see it, or how they see it. It seems to me that Honneth’s act of recognition is a granting of this status to others, the status that they are there not simply as appearing for our talk, but exist in a stronger sense, which a vocabulary can get right or not. This goes against the position that nothing significant precedes linguistic articulation. While Rorty agrees that there is a difference between truth and mere consensus, he does not think that it follows that

Conclusion

205

“[t]here is a way the world is, independent of such human needs and interests as O’Brien’s or Winston’s.”53 He puts the general point even more strongly: “It is essential to my view that we have no prelinguistic consciousness to which language needs to be adequate, no deep sense of how things are which it is the duty of philosophers to spell out in language.”54 Recognition of the full dignity of slaves or the full equality of women did not go back to something latent, that waited for such recognition. Yet according to Peter Dews, once Rorty starts talking about such things, not even he can avoid acknowledging something like a latent presence. In talking of past injustice toward women, Rorty refers to a “suppression of past potentiality.”55 Dews asks what else this can be, but the sort of reality Rorty says we cannot have, a capacity that is “unacknowledged, unfulfilled,”56 something that has a reality of its own, waiting to be recognized. There is a second criticism of the stark primacy that Rorty gives to vocabulary, his familiar insistence that we should not allow into our considerations any prelinguistic reality that precedes articulation by language, even though, as he admits, the denial seems to bring strange consequences, implying, for example, that babies have no significant experience of a sort that would guide linguistic representations. The prelinguistic is to be limited to causal experience and discriminatory behavior, until they acquire linguistic competence. The consequent insistence on the radical creativity of vocabularies, along with the denial of any necessary underpinning that could obtain between one vocabulary and the other, and which could possibly serve as a norm for preferring one to the other, has strange consequences. Dews quotes Rorty’s recommendation that we need to try new things, because “we might like them.” Our old interests and values, and perhaps new ones that we may only discover in the future that we have, may be “better served” by the new ways of thinking. But Dews asks “[W]hat could ever tempt a self created by one vocabulary to become a different self defined by a different vocabulary?”57 We simply cannot conceive of motivation here. The same question can be asked in the other direction, about why a speaker of one vocabulary should fear becoming a speaker of a different vocabulary. Rorty imagines a situation where Homeric heroes look with trepidation to the coming of Christians, whom they see “in their nightmares” taking over the Mediterranean.58 The heroes’ distaste for what is coming is understandable so long as they retain the vocabulary of Homeric heroes. But if the Christians really inherit the Mediterranean, the heroes will become Christians, and will change their whole vocabulary. Rational Homeric heroes looking into the future should see no reason to be afraid. They will be integrated into the new civilization, and share its goals, along with its beliefs and customs. Provided they have converted fully to the new

206

Conclusion

vocabulary and have not done it in a half-hearted way, there is nothing to fear. They will have taken on a new vocabulary and come to see the world in a way that is different. The example brings out the strangeness of the view that there is no deep continuity in people’s lives, nothing fundamental that is being articulated first in one way, and then in another, with one of the ways perhaps doing it better than the other. The argument recalls Sartre’s fear that the world might become fascist so that fascism will be “the truth of man.”59 Rorty quotes this passage as reflecting a view similar to his own, that there is no deep continuity in a person that could serve as a standard for good human practice and that could be used to judge between different vocabularies.60 But as Conant points out, Sartre is in a stronger position than is Rorty. He still has a remnant of a moral order that spans present and future, believing in the ideal of authenticity, and holding that a fascist cannot be open about what he or she has become, and is therefore always in bad faith.61 Rorty has no such mechanism of continuity. He recognizes that transitions between vocabularies are messy affairs, perhaps involving—like the Copernican revolution— “fifty years of inconclusive muddle.”62 But by the end, when the change of vocabulary is complete, a person will have changed simply. And before the event, when they anticipate the change, there is no reason for trepidation. There is no deeper level of human nature or whatever, which is being articulated through the changes, and which could condemn the final state, along with its vocabulary, so that the future selves were mistaken in what they became. Given Rorty does not allow any such underpinnings, the human seems to become strangely discontinuous. Rorty always argues well, and it is not hard to imagine considerations he would bring against these arguments. He also holds, with some plausibility, that the present philosophical climate requires narratives rather than arguments. Each side repeats its story over and over, and out of a period of confusion, there emerges something new. For myself, I would hope that, as Rorty remarks, “any millennium now,”63 the religious-metaphysical position can show that it represents a kind of openness, by contrast with which pragmatism looks like an obstinate narrowing or closing of the eyes. It may even be that Rorty will find himself caught in the trap of those who spend their lives warning against temptation, and doing it with great skill and style, only to discover that the temptation finishes up more vivid, and even more attractive, than the warning. In reading Rorty, it is possible perhaps to glimpse the supposed religious-metaphysical enemy for the first time in the way that it presents itself to late twentieth-century Western eyes, and to realize that, like most positions, it has its reasons. Ironically, there are few who enable us to see them as vividly, while also encouraging us resolutely to renounce them, as Richard Rorty.

Conclusion

207

NOTES 1. Richard Rorty, “Dilemmas of the Contemporary World,” in Debating The State Of Philosophy, Habermas, Rorty, and Kolakowski, eds. Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996), 121–25, 122. 2. D. Z. Phillips, “Reclaiming the Conversations of Mankind,” Philosophy 69 (1994): 35–53, 43. 3. Rorty, “An Ethics For Today,” 7–17, 17. 4. He notes the tension between a historical and an ontological view in a perceptive remark on a sentence in Being And Time that shows Heidegger wavering between the two. Rorty, “Heidegger, Contingency, And Pragmatism,” 27–49, 41, fn. 27. 5. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 319. 6. Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles,” 72–92, 77. 7. Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles,” 77. Dewey’s statement is found at John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. 14, eds. Jo Ann Boydston, Patricia Baysinger, and Barbara Levine (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 95. 8. Rorty, “Ethics Without Principles,” 79. 9. Ibid., 85. 10. J. Aaron Simmons, God And The Other (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 4. 11. Richard J. Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” in Richard Bernstein, The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 230–57, 247. Cf. also the comment of Dianne Rothleder: “That is, Rorty’s conception of ‘we’ is willing to bend and stretch to let other people into the ‘we’; is willing to say to those who wish to remain outside the ‘we,’ ‘Fine, no problem, whatever you want,’ but is still, in the end, Rorty’s conception.” Dianne Rothleder, The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), 103. Gerald Biesecker-Mast sums up the point in commenting on work of Scott Holland: “Among the temptations of Rorty’s project . . . is the tendency to make an apparently coherent—even if invented—self the first and final point of reference.” Gerald Biesecker-Mast, “Three Responses: Psyched over Zizek, Disturbed by Derrida, and Running from Rorty,” Brethren Life and Thought (Summer/Fall 2003): 204–11, 209. 12. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 364–65. 13. Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” in Objectivity, Relativism, And Truth: Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–17, 2. 14. Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” 160–75, 173. 15. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 319. 16. Axel Honneth, “Reification and Recognition: A New Look At an Old Idea,” in Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, ed. Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17–94. For Dewey, Heidegger and Cavell, cf. 29ff. 17. Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 17.

208

Conclusion

18. Ibid., 37. 19. Raymond Geuss, “Philosophical Anthropology and Social Criticism,” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, eds. Axel Honneth and Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 120–30, 126. 20. Honneth, “Reification and Recognition,” 40–41. 21. Ibid., 151. 22. Stephen Mulhall, “When Play is a Thing,” Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009, 30. 23. Judith Butler, “Taking Another View,” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, eds. Axel Honneth and Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 97–119, 113. 24. Butler, “Taking Another View,” 114. 25. Ibid., 106. 26. Ibid., 104. 27. Jonathan Lear, “The Slippery Middle,” in Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, eds. Axel Honneth and Martin Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131–43, 139. 28. Butler, “Taking Another View,” 105. 29. Ibid., 111. 30. Ibid., 102. 31. Ibid., 104. 32. Honneth, Reification, 51. 33. Ibid., 52. 34. At least one Levinas commentator raises the question of whether animals and plants should not be included as “others,” noting that Martin Buber “concedes the role of Thou to all creatures.” Cf. Bernard Waldenfels, “Levinas and the Face of the Other,” in The Cambridge Companion To Levinas, eds. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63–81, 68. 35. Lear, “The Slippery Middle,” 131. 36. Ibid., 140. 37. Ibid., 132. 38. Rorty, “Pragmatism and Democracy,” 420. 39. Ibid. 40. Rorty, “John Searle on Realism and Relativism,” 63–83, 77. The discussion refers to Dewey’s “A Short Catechism Concerning Truth,” The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924 Vol. 6: 1910–1911, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978), 3–11. 41. Rorty, “John Searle on Realism and Relativism,” 78. 42. James Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 268–342, 307. 43. Richard Rorty, “Response to James Conant,” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert B. Brandom (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 342–50, 346. 44. Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity?” 23. 45. Rorty, “Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry? Donald Davidson versus Crispin Wright,” vol. 3, 19–42, 21.

Conclusion

209

46. Rorty, “Response to James Conant,” 342. 47. Ibid., 343. 48. O’Brien tells Winston: “You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity. You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.” George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954), 200. 49. Rorty, “Response to James Conant,” 343. 50. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 202–27, 220. 51. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 205. 52. Ibid., 208. 53. Rorty, “Response to Conant,” 345. 54. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 21. 55. Rorty, “Feminism and Pragmatism,” 220. 56. Peter Dews, “The Infinite is Losing Its Charm,” in The Philosophy of Richard Rorty, eds. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010), 635–54, 649. 57. Dews, “The Infinite is Losing Its Charm,” 650. 58. Rorty, “Hilary Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” vol. 3, 43–62, 54. 59. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Methuen, 1948), 40. James Conant cites the passage in “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell,” 309. 60. Rorty, “Introduction: Pragmatism and Philosophy,” xiii–xlvii, xliii. 61. Conant, “Freedom, Cruelty, and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell,” 339, fn. 183. 62. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 6. 63. Rorty, “Anticlericalism and Atheism,” 29–41, 40.

Bibliography

Abdel-Nour, Farid. “Liberalism and Ethnocentrism.” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 207–26. Allison, Dorothy. Skin: Talking about Sex, Class and Literature. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1994. Aquinas, Thomas. Truth. 3 Vols. Translated by Robert W. Mulligan. Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1952. Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. 2 Vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Auxier, Randall E., and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of Richard Rorty. Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2010. Bacon, Michael. Pragmatism: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Baker, Gordon, and Katherine J. Morris. Descartes’ Dualism. London: Routledge, 1996. Barber, Michael D. “Rorty’s Ethical De-divinization of the Ethicist Self.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (2006): 135–47. Bataille, Georges. “Un-knowing and Its Consequences.” Translated by Annette Michelson. October 36 (1986): 80–85. Bernstein, Richard J. The New Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993. Biesecker-Mast, Gerald. “Three Responses: Psyched over Zizek, Disturbed by Derrida, and Running from Rorty.” Brethren Life and Thought 48 (2003): 204–11. Bloom, Harold. How to Read and Why. New York, NY: Touchstone, 2000. Bouma-Prediger, Steve. “Rorty and Gadamer.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57 (1989): 313–24. Brandom, Robert, ed. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2000. ———. “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time.” Monist 66 (1983): 387–409. Caputo, John D. “Richard Rorty (1931–2007): In Memoriam.” Crosscurrents 57 (2007): 434–38. ———. More Radical Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Carter, Stephen L. The Culture of Disbelief. New York, NY: Anchor, 1991. 211

212

Bibliography

Cavell, Stanley. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. ———. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ———. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1981. Critchley, Simon, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Richard Rorty. Deconstruction and Pragmatism. Edited by Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, 1996. Dann, G. Elijah. After Rorty: The Possibilities For Ethics And Religious Belief. London: Continuum, 2006. Davidson, Donald. “Three Varieties of Knowledge.” In A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, 153–66. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Truth, Language, and History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. ———. “Externalisms.” In Interpreting Davidson, edited by Petr Kotatko, Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal, 1–16. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001. Davis, G. S. “Donald Davidson, Anomalous Monism and the Study of Religion.” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 19 (2007): 200–31. Dewey, John. “Christianity and Democracy.” In Early Essays and The Study of Ethics, A Syllabus, Volume 4: 1893–1894, The Early Works, 1882–1898, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, 3–10. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. ———. Human Nature and Conduct, Volume 14: 1922, The Middle Works, 1899– 1924. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. ———. “A Common Faith.” In Essays, Reviews, Miscellany, and A Common Faith, Volume 9: 1933–1934, The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston, Anne Sharpe, and Patricia Baysinger, 1–58. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Festenstein, Matthew, and Simon Thompson, eds. Richard Rorty, Critical Dialogues. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1972. Frankenberry, Nancy K., ed. Radical Interpretation in Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “On Empty Compliments and Deceptive Detours: A Neopragmatist Response to Theodore W. Nunez.” Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1999): 129–36. Frisina, Warren G. The Unity of Knowledge and Action: Towards a Nonrepresentational Theory of Knowledge. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002. Frye, Marilyn. The Politics of Reality. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1983. Geras, Norman. Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind. London: Verso, 1995. Gitre, Edward J. K. “William James on Divine Intimacy: Psychical Research, Cosmological Realism and a Circumscribed Re-reading of The Varieties of Religious Experience.” History of the Human Sciences 19 (2006): 1–21. Gould, S. J. “Nonoverlapping Magisteria.” Natural History 106 (1997): 16–22. Grant, Frederick C. “Review of A Common Faith.” Anglican Theological Review 17 (1935): 44–45.

Bibliography

213

Hardwick, Charley D., and Donald A. Crosby, eds. Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion, Conversations with Richard Rorty. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1997. Hickman, Larry A. Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007. Hiley, David R. Philosophy in Question: Essays on a Pyrrhonian Theme. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Honneth, Axel. Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Howe, J. Thomas. “Affirmations After God: Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins on Atheism.” Zygon 47 (2012): 140–55. James, William. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by John J. McDermott. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London: Collins, 1974. ———. William James: Writings 1902–1910. New York, NY: The Library of America, 1987. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clarendon, 1952. Kolakowski, Leszek. Religion: If There Is No God. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001. Kuipers, Ronald A. Solidarity and the Stranger. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. “The Education of the Human Race.” In Philosophical and Theological Writings, translated and edited by H. B. Nisbet, 217–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984. MacKinnon, Catherine. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Malachowski, Alan, ed. Reading Rorty. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. ———, ed. Richard Rorty, Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought, Volumes I–IV. London: Sage Publications, 2002. ———. Richard Rorty. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. McCarthy, Thomas. “Private Irony and Public Decency: Richard Rorty’s New Pragmatism.” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 355–70. McCumber, John. “Reconnecting Rorty: The Situation of Discourse in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.” Diacritics 20 (1990): 2–19. Misak, Cheryl. The American Pragmatists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. ed. New Pragmatists. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Moore, Edward C., ed. Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1972. Mounce, H. O. The Two Pragmatisms. Oxford: Routledge, 1997. Mulhall, Stephen. “When Play Is a Thing.” Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 2009.

214

Bibliography

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1997. Nagel, Thomas. The Last Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY: Random House, 1967. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1990. Okrent, Mark. “The Metaphilosophical Consequences of Pragmatism.” In The Institution of Philosophy: A Discipline in Crisis? edited by Avner Cohen and Marcelo Dascal, 177–98. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989. Olds, Mason. American Religious Humanism. Minneapolis, MN: Fellowship of Religious Humanists, 1996. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954. Peirce, Charles S. Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings. Edited by Edward C. Moore. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972. Pettegrew, John, ed. A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and American Intellectual History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Phillips, D. Z. Faith and Philosophical Enquiry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. ———. Death and Immortality. London: Macmillan, 1970. ———. “Reclaiming the Conversations of Mankind.” Philosophy 69 (1994): 35–53. Pieper, Josef. “Wahrheit der Dinge—ein verschollener Begriff.” In Werke in Acht Bänden. Vol. 8, Miszellen, Register und Gesamtbibliographie, 381–95. Hamburg: Meiner, 2005. Pihlstrom, Sami. Pragmatic Pluralism and the Problem of God. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013. Plato. Plato. Volume 36 of The Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Harold North Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. ———. Pragmatism, An Open Question. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Robbins, J. Wesley. “A Neopragmatist Perspective on Religion and Science.” Zygon 28 (1993): 337–76. ———. “When Christians Become Naturalists.” Religious Studies 28 (1992): 195–206. ———. “‘You Will Be Like God’: Richard Rorty and Mark C. Taylor on the Theological Significance of Human Language Use.” Journal of Religion 72 (1992): 389–402. Rorty, James. “Father Benoit: ‘Ambassador of the Jews.’ An Untold Chapter of the Underground.” Commentary 2 (1946): 507–13. Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. “Comments on Philosophy and the Dilemmas of the Contemporary World.” In Debating the State of Philosophy, edited by Jozef Niznik and John T. Sanders, 116–25. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1996.

Bibliography

215

———. Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. ———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. “Genus as Matter: A Reading of Metaphysics Z-H.” In Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented to Gregory Vlastos, edited by E. N. Lee, A. P. D. Mourelatos and R. M. Rorty, 393–420. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1973. ———. “James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher J. Voparil and Richard Bernstein, 389–406. Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010. ———. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 3. Truth and Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 1998. ———. Philosophical Papers. Vol. 4. Philosophy as Cultural Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999. ———. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre.” In Power, Critique, Judgment, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, 3–38. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. ———. “Religion in the Public Square: A Reconsideration.” Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 141–49. ———. Truth, Politics and “Post-Modernism.” Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1997. Rorty, Richard, and Gianni Vattimo. The Future of Religion. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rothleder, Dianne. The Work of Friendship: Rorty, His Critics, and the Project of Solidarity. New York, NY: SUNY Press, 1999. Saatkamp, Herman J. Jr., ed. Rorty and Pragmatism. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. Scharlemann, Robert P., ed. On The Other: Dialogue And/Or Dialectics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The Basis of Morality. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965. Searle, John. The Construction of Social Reality. London: Allen Lane, 1995. ———. Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Shook, John R., and Joseph Margolis, eds. A Companion to Pragmatism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Simmons, J. Aaron. God and the Other. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. Sklar, Judith. Ordinary Vices. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Spaemann, Robert. “Rationality and Faith in God.” Communio 32 (2005): 618–36.

216

Bibliography

Stevenson, R. L. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1925. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007. Trakakis, Nick. The End of Philosophy of Religion. New York, NY: Continuum, 2008. Tully, James, ed. Philosophy in an Age of Pluralism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Vattimo, Gianni. Belief. Translated by Luca D’Isanto and David Webb. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Waldenfels, Bernard. “Levinas and the Face of the Other.” In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, edited by Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 63–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Walker, Alice, and Pratibha Parmar. Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1993. West, Cornel, Richard Rorty, Stanley Hauerwas, and Jeffrey Stout. “Pragmatism and Democracy: Assessing Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition.” Edited by Jason Springs. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78 (2010): 413–48. Westphal, Merold. Overcoming Onto-Theology. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2001. ———. “Appropriating Postmodernism.” In Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Merold Westphal, 1–10. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. ———. “Christianity and the Postmodern Turn.” In Christianity and the Postmodern Turn, edited by Myron B. Penner, 141–53. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2005. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. New York, NY: The Free Press, 1978. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. Wright. Translated by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York, NY: Harper, 1969. ———. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. “An Engagement with Rorty.” Journal of Religious Ethics 31 (2003): 129–39.

Index

Abdel-Nour, Farid, 164–67 Allen, Barry, 59 Allison, Dorothy, 94 Aristotle, 3, 17, 45–49, 52, 54–56, 134, 143, 192, 199

Dewey, John, 2, 5, 7, 21, 45, 60–62, 70, 75, 79, 101, 111–14, 122–23, 128–30, 132–35, 158, 193, 195–96, 198, 200–201 Dews, Peter, 205

Baier, Annette, 193 Barber, Michael D., 170 Barth, Karl, 5, 126 Bernstein, Richard, 72, 194 Brandom, Robert, 17, 29, 34, 37–38, 68–70, 75–76, 79, 81–86, 93–95, 99, 105–7 Butler, Judith, 196–97

Eliot, George, 4

Caputo, John D., 3, 40, 75, 171 Carter, Stephen L., 107–8 Cavell, Stanley, 176–78, 195, 196, 199 Christianity, 3–4, 100–101, 110, 113, 117, 124, 126–30, 135, 144 Conant, James, 173, 202, 206 Critchley, Simon, 168–70 Davidson, Donald, 35, 172, 174–75 Davis, G. S., 174 Dawkins, Richard, 144 Dennett, Daniel, 24, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 117, 167–71

Farrell, Frank B., 5, 71–72, 76 Foucault, Michel, 22, 117 Frankenberry, Nancy K., 51 Frege, Gottlob, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 53–54, 80, 82, 148–49, 170 Frisina, Warren G., 21 Frye, Marilyn, 145, 147 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 6, 65 Geertz, Clifford, 150–51, 164–65, 179 Geras, Norman, 141–42 Geuss, Raymond, 196–97 God, 1, 4–5, 7, 19, 22, 35–36, 54, 60, 71, 72, 76, 82–83, 85, 93–97, 99–108, 112–14, 117–21, 123–25, 128–34, 153, 155–56, 159, 168, 173–74, 194, 200 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 27, 164

217

218

Index

Gould, Stephen J., 100 Grant, Frederick C., 114 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 36–37, 146 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 4, 25–26, 70, 113– 14, 120, 123, 159, 163–64 Heidegger, 2–6, 27, 29, 49, 64, 77–78, 107, 117, 119–20, 124, 134, 172, 195–96 Honneth, Axel, 176, 195–96, 198–99, 202, 204 Hume, David, 22, 61 James, Henry, 179–81, 183 James, William, 8, 21, 39, 59–63, 65– 66, 79, 96, 98, 121 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 24–25, 55–56, 60, 82–83, 118–19, 131, 150, 159, 165, 193 Kolakowski, Leszek, 8, 146 Kripke, Saul, 24 Kuhn, Thomas, 17, 30 Kuipers, Ronald, 71 Laclau, Ernesto, 168 Lear, Jonathan, 197 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 10 Levinas, Emmanuel, 9–10, 166, 169–72, 177–78, 182, 185 Levinson, Henry Samuel, 121–23, 127 Lewis, C. S., 74 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 3, 53–55, 129, 148 MacKinnon, Catherine, 142–43 Malachowski, Alan, 30 McCarthy, Thomas, 5, 183 McDowell, John, 5, 22, 24, 79 metaphysics, 1–6, 8, 15–16, 23–24, 31–33, 39–40, 51, 53, 64–65, 71–75, 77–78, 83, 86, 112, 120, 124, 128, 135, 152, 155, 170, 176, 181, 186, 191–92, 194, 199–202 Mouffe, Chantal, 168

Nabokov, Vladimir, 182–83, 193, 202 Nagel, Thomas, 21–22, 30, 82, 94–95 Newton, Isaac, 2, 17, 20, 26–28, 52, 54, 59, 67, 69, 133, 164 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2–4, 19, 52, 68, 72, 77, 117, 122–24, 156 Nussbaum, Martha, 180–81 Okrent, Mark, 77 Olds, Mason, 130–31, 133 Orwell, George, 173, 202 Owen, David, 155–56 Paracelsus, 16–17, 80 Pasteur, Louis, 16–17, 80 Phillips, D. Z., 73–74, 95–96, 155, 192 Pieper, Josef, 19 Pieterse, Hendrik R., 118 Plato, 19, 23–24, 45, 64, 85, 104, 118, 120, 122, 132, 134, 146, 164, 195, 199 Proudfoot, Wayne, 96 Proust, Marcel, 68, 179–81 Putnam, Hilary, 32–34, 36, 39, 62, 79 Quine, Willard van Orman, 24 religion, 1–10, 24, 64–65, 67–68, 70– 71, 73–74, 76–78, 93–102, 105–10, 112–14, 120–23, 125–27, 129–34, 152, 155, 156, 170, 172, 181, 186, 199–201 representation, 16–17, 20–22, 25–28, 30, 32, 34, 38–39, 76, 79–81, 170, 195, 200, 205 Robbins, J. Wesley, 76, 132–35 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24, 74, 206 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 159 Searle, John, 29–31 Sellars, Wilfrid, 24, 85, 94, 120 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 2 Shklar, Judith, 155–58 Simmons, J. Aaron, 194

219

Index

Soneson, Jerome P., 129 Sorrell, Tom, 21 Stevenson, R. L., 46, 49 St. Paul, 2, 17, 82, 101, 114, 126, 164 Strauss, David Friedrich, 4 Taylor, Charles, 19, 22, 26–28, 94 Taylor, Mark C., 163–64, 167 Tillich, Paul, 100, 107, 129 Trotsky, Leon, 2, 77, 183 truth, 4–5, 8, 10, 15–22, 27, 29, 32–38, 52, 61–63, 65, 69, 75, 78–80, 95–96,

113, 118–20, 124–27, 173–75, 191, 203–4 Vattimo, Gianni, 107, 123–30, 192 Walker, Alice, 166 Westphal, Merold, 113, 117–20, 122, 130, 159 Whitehead, Alfred North, 21, 48, 133 Williams, Bernard, 21–22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 16, 64, 73, 80–81, 84, 95, 106, 149, 176 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 107–10

About the Author

John Owens is a graduate in philosophy from the University of Munich. He has taught in different places in New Zealand and Australia and is currently lecturer in philosophy at Good Shepherd College, Auckland, New Zealand. His research interests focus on contemporary writers on philosophy of religion, particularly those in the post-Nietzschean tradition, as they relate to the premodern tradition in philosophy. He has published on Rorty, D. Z. Phillips, Martha Nussbaum, Nancey Murphy, and Aristotle.

221