Richard Rorty

For my beloved if . . .

Richard RortyLiberalism, Irony and the

Ends of Philosophy

Neil Gascoigne

polity

Copyright © Neil Gascoigne 2008

The right of Neil Gascoigne to be identifi ed as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

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Contents

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: No Single Vision 1 1 Politics and the authority of philosophy 1 2 Actor and martyr 5 3 Far, far away . . . 10

1 Out of Mind 13 1 Our Rortian ancestors 13 2 Materialism and the mind–body problem 18 3 Dogmas of empiricism 35

2 What is Eliminative Materialism? 42 1 Introduction 42 2 Analysis, explication and elimination 46 3 Eliminative materialism 53 4 Incorrigibility 59 5 Troubles with eliminativism 67 6 Far, far away, lies . . . 73

3 Rorty’s Kehre 78 1 Introduction 78 2 Realism and reference 79 3 Scepticism, relativism, truth 90

4 Overcoming Philosophy 107 1 After philosophy? 107 2 The linguistic turn 109 3 The future of philosophy 117 4 Whither epistemology? 123 5 The reappearing ‘we’ 130 6 In conversation 136

5 New Selves for Old 142 1 From epistemology to politics 142 2 Dewey’s redescription 144 3 Contingency, irony and solidarity 149 4 Metaphorlosophy 152 5 Two concepts of freedom 158 6 Liberalism and the limits of philosophy 168 7 The last ironist 175

6 The Whole Truth 183 1 The authority of norms 183 2 The view from nowhere 185 3 Relativism redux 189 4 Triangulation 198

Conclusion: The Ends of Philosophy 213 1 Double vision 213 2 Nothing but the truth 215 3 The ends of philosophy 218

Notes 222Bibliography 234Index 253

vi Contents

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke’s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant’s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! Throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will fl oat light and right.

Ishmael

Acknowledgements

Material from chapters 2, 3 and 6 has been presented at seminars at the Universities of Central Lancashire, Copenhagen, East Anglia, Granada, Keele, and Sussex, and I am grateful to those who took part for their comments. A draft of the fi rst half of the book was written in 2005 while I was a visiting Senior Lecturer at the Univer-sity of Auckland. I would like to thank John Bishop and Rosalind Hursthouse for hosting my visit; other members of the philosophy department for their kindness; and the students enrolled on my graduate class on Rorty for requiring me to give a clear shape to my thoughts. My visit would not have been possible without the support of colleagues at my former employer, Roehampton Univer-sity, and in particular of the Dean of its School of Arts, Lyndie Brimstone.

I have learned a great deal about the subjects discussed in this book from conversations with friends and colleagues; pre-eminently, over the years, with Andrew Bowie and Tim Thornton. Others deserving of special mention are Rachel McEvilly, Julia Borossa, Richard Raatzsch, Jonathan Derbyshire, Jason Gaiger, and in particular Katerina Deligiorgi who gave me encouraging notes on an early draft. Comments from two anonymous readers at Polity also helped greatly in the production of this fi nal version, as did those of my editor Emma Hutchinson. Needless to say, my greatest intellectual debt is to Rorty himself, who invited me out to the University of Virginia when I was a graduate student at Cambridge and showed me great kindness. I hope that in some small way this book will clarify the contribution he made to the subject to which he could never quite say ‘farewell’.

Introduction: No Single Vision

1 Politics and the authority of philosophy

I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spec-trum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position – how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally in mind. Perhaps this bit of autobiography will make clear that, even if my views about the relation of philosophy and politics are odd, they were not adopted from frivolous reasons.

PSH: 5

This passage appears a little way into ‘Trotsky and the Wild Orchids’, an apologia for what many readers will regard as the hallmark of Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism: the primacy of the political over the philosophical. The main theme of this book con-cerns how Rorty came to arrive at and defended such a view. Since this is not a biography, the theme will be elaborated in terms of changes that are internal to philosophical discourse. However, the fact that Rorty’s attempt to exculpate himself of the charge of frivolity took the form of an autobiographical1 refl ection on how he came to view the political as pre-eminent is signifi cant. After all, it is customarily taken to be part of the philosopher’s remit that they strive to transcend the idiosyncratic and subjective in an attempt to arrive at objectively good reasons for the views they

2 Introduction: No Single Vision

hold; reasons that, as such, can be used to convince others of the truth of their beliefs. The purpose of this introduction, then, is to explore both the content and use made of this stylistic device in order to present in outline the shape of Rorty’s changing concep-tion of philosophy’s relation to political life; the detail will of course comprise the content of the subsequent chapters. Before turning to the autobiographical fragment, however, it will be helpful in situating it if we examine briefl y what it is that for Rorty unites these otherwise antagonistic critics; namely, their conviction that philosophy retains a position of critical authority in relation to political discourse.

Rorty begins ‘Trotsky . . .’ by locating his political position:

[the left] see [America] as what Foucault calls a ‘disciplinary society’, dominated by an odious ethos of ‘liberal individualism’, an ethos which produces racism, sexism, consumerism, and Republican pres-idents . . . I see America . . . as opening a prospect on illimitable democratic vistas. I think that our country . . . is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented. (p. 4)

While the right regard his pro-American stance as vitiated by the ‘nihilism’ of his ‘relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering’ (ibid.), the left see it as little more than old-fashioned, cold war lib-eralism; the result of an invidious failure to follow through on the ‘relativisitic’ and ‘deconstructive’ critique of the philosophical tradi-tion he purports to favour.2 As Rorty observes, ‘my philosophical views offend the right as much as my political preferences offend the left’ (p. 5). The insinuation, then, is that the critical responses of leftist and rightist alike are shaped by a presupposition regarding the nature of the relationship between philosophy and politics. For rightist critics this is expressed in the belief that one’s commitment to democracy and liberal values is genuine only if the latter are regarded as objectively good: expressive of a rational order that all right-thinking people will acknowledge once prejudice and paro-chialism are overcome. The American philosopher John Searle offers a pithy account of the central tenets of this traditional philosophical picture:

Knowledge is typically of a mind-independent reality. It is expressed in a public language, it contains true propositions – these proposi-tions are true because they accurately represent that reality – and knowl-edge is arrived at by applying, and is subject to, constraints of rationality and logic. (1992a: 69; emphases added)

Introduction: No Single Vision 3

As we’ll come to see, one of Rorty’s long-standing aims was to debunk this metaphysically realist or ‘representationalist’ view of the relationship between language (or mind) and the world. What Searle brings out nicely is the assumption that this philosophical thesis has a much wider import. Specifi cally, on this account of knowledge we have the idea of a ‘mind-independent reality’ being ‘accurately represented’ (‘mirrored’ as Rorty famously has it) by knowers only when subject to the ‘constraints of rationality and logic’. Since these normative constraints are operative across all discourses, the clear implication is that philosophy, which takes them as its unique subject matter, has a natural authority over not just political discourse but all areas of action and inquiry.

It would appear, then, that the rightist’s conviction that an authen-tically held liberalism requires a rigorous Realism about values presupposes this structure of authority. Turning once again to Searle, we fi nd this conclusion given ingenuous expression:

An immediate diffi culty with denials of metaphysical realism is that they remove the rational constraints that are supposed to shape dis-course, when that discourse aims at something beyond itself. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, without metaphysical realism, anything is permissible. (1992b: 112)3

At fi rst blush it seems odd that a mere denial of a philosophi-cal thesis could have so corrosive an effect on our norms. To adapt an example of Carnap’s (1967), Idealist and Realist chess opponents have incompatible metaphysical beliefs, but they don’t as a result disagree either on the norms (rules) of the game4 or on its value. Since it seems improbable that even the majority of those who espouse liberal values would know what metaphysical realism is, Searle seems to be suggesting that they are either self-deceiving nihilists or unwitting Realists. Of course, we can reject this disjunction without denying that there are strong infer-ential connections in the minds of some between Realism and liberalism; even to the extent that they appear to them to be nec-essary. But this implies that what is being challenged when Realism is denied is not the validity of a person’s beliefs or values but the authority of a certain discipline to identify the norms (‘con-straints of rationality and logic’) that are ‘supposed’ to shape them: philosophy qua representational realism. Indeed, this helps explain why Searle’s foreboding sounds so paradoxical. After all, if the contents of our beliefs are fi xed by something as hard and

4 Introduction: No Single Vision

ultra-human as ‘mind-independent reality’, it’s diffi cult to under-stand why the norms that constitute our methods of inquiry and action should be so vulnerable. It’s almost as if the greater the degree of the world’s mind-independence, the more fragile our purchase on it and the more acutely felt the need for an author-ity to police our norms. This suspicion is reinforced when one considers that amongst the consequences that Searle fears follow from the ‘rejection of the Western Rationalistic Tradition’ and the abandonment of the ‘traditional standards of objectivity, truth and rationality’ is that it ‘opens the way for an educational agenda one of whose primary purposes is to achieve social and political transformation’ (1992a: 72). Once again, the implication is that only a formal commitment to the central tenets of Realism will sustain an otherwise fragile culture and keep the barbarians from the door. The authority of philosophy is reinforced by the view that it is only under its tutelage that the political values of lib-eralism are safe.

Turning now to those leftist critics, Searle’s paraphrase of Dos-toevsky reveals all they need to know about the quasi-religious strivings and authoritarianism of Realism. But, although they mock such pretensions, they believe that if you’re serious about your rejec-tion of the concepts of ‘disinterested knowledge’ and ‘objective truth’ you must be willing to throw out the liberal baby with the ‘Western Rationalist’ bathwater. They see claims like those made by Searle as the shadow-play of an overweening cultural arrogance, or as expressions of the will to power; forces which, when unmasked by theory, will expose ‘liberal values’ for what they really are and bring about the ‘social and political transformation’ Searle fears. Whereas for the right the sign of Rorty’s ‘frivolousness’ is his disdain for the rational foundations of the values he purports to cherish, for the left it’s his blatant disregard for the political implications of his predilection for ‘anti-Platonic, antiessentialist, historicizing, natu-ralizing writers’ (PSH: 128).

From Rorty’s perspective, then, critics from the left and right share the same dogmatic belief that philosophy is privileged over politics. For the rightist, philosophy is authorized to legitimate the norms that shape political discourse; for the leftist, it is authorized to unmask those selfsame norms. The task, then, is to decouple the liberal values shared with Searle and others from the philosophical views shared with those on the left by adumbrating an understand-ing of the source of the authority of norms that neither requires for

Introduction: No Single Vision 5

their legitimacy, nor is subject to the (ultimate) criticism of, a ‘master’ discourse like philosophy. This requires articulating or in some way defending the view that norms are embedded in contingent prac-tices; though, crucially, not by conceiving of the standpoint from which that defence or articulation is made in the same way as those who aspire either to legitimate those norms or to subject them to a fundamental critique. With this in mind, let’s look at how Rorty presents his own path to this insight, which constitutes both a defence against that ‘hurtful’ charge of ‘frivolousness’ and a con-tinuation of the ongoing attempt to persuade his audience that they too could share it.

2 Actor and martyr

In the romantic fragment the then sixty-year-old narrator tells the story of how a ‘clever, snotty, nerdy only child[‘s]’ attempt to combine his adolescent passion for orchids with his inherited belief in social justice led to philosophy:

I grew up knowing that all decent people were, if not Trotskyites, at least socialists . . . So, at 12, I knew that the point of being human was to spend one’s life fi ghting social injustice.

But I also had private, weird, incommunicable interests. In earlier years these had been in Tibet . . . A few years later . . . these switched to orchids . . . I was not quite sure why those orchids were so impor-tant, but I was convinced that they were . . . I was uneasily aware, however, that there was something a bit dubious about this esoteri-cism – this interest in socially useless fl owers . . . I was afraid that Trotsky . . . would not have approved of my interest in orchids.

At 15 I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up . . . by going to the so-called Hutchens College of the University of Chi-cago . . . Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids. I wanted to fi nd some intellectual or aes-thetic framework which would let me – in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats – ‘hold reality and justice in a single vision’. By reality I meant, more or less, the Wordsworthian moments in which, in the woods around Flatbookville . . . I had felt touched by something numinous, something of ineffable importance. By justice I meant what Norman Thomas and Trotsky both stood for, the libera-tion of the weak from the strong. I wanted a way to be both an intel-lectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity – a nerdy recluse and a fi ghter for justice. (PSH: 6–8).