RORTY’S USE OF DEWEY James Campbell me University of Toledo

“Those who today defend ‘Platonism’ repudiate half of what Plato said . . .* Richard Rorty

In his two recent volumes, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Consequences of Pragmatism,’ Richard Rorty has done much to cause his fellow philosophers to rethink the directions of their work and to refocus their attention upon the American Pragmatic tradition. Although both of these achievements are of major importance, the manner in which he accomplishes the latter task has given rise in my mind to two general hesitations. The first of these has to do with Rorty’s use of the term ‘pragmatism’; the second, with his use of the work of John Dewey.

The sense of the term ‘pragmatism’ that Rorty is using includes the following aspects: first, “antiessentialism applied to notions like ‘truth,’ ‘knowledge,’ ‘language,’ ‘morality,’ . . .” etc.; second, the assumption that “there is no epistemological difference between truth about what ought to be and truth about what is, nor any metaphysical difference between facts and values, nor any methodological difference between morality and science”; and third, “the doctrine that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones . . .”(CP 162-165). Although this is not the whole sense of historical Pragmatism, it is at least continuous with some of the various strands within that broad movement; and the content of Rorty’s characterization is not the primary source of my objections. My qualms are more centrally related to his frequent assertions that ‘pragmatists deny this’ or that ‘the pragmatist must assert that.’ I have qualms here because the stance suggested by Rorty is often so unpragmatic, at least in the historical sense, that I am led to wonder who these pragmatists are.

If we approach Rorty’s understanding of ‘pragmatism’in terms of the individuals he considers pragmatists, we find that his focus is upon the two “great pragmatists-James and Dewey”(CP xvii). But his discussion ranges much more broadly. Rorty includes himself as a pragmatist (cf., e.g., CP xlv); yet he omits Peirce, whose “contribution to pragmatism was merely to have given it a name, and to have stimulated James” (CP 161). G.H. Mead and C.I. Lewis are apparently not pragmatists according to Rorty; but Quine is, as are Nietzsche and

Jomes Campbell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy ot The University of Toledo ond author of o number of articles in the oreos of American Philosophy and social and politicol thought.

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others. All in all, I am not certain that Rorty is working with a notion of ‘pragmatism’ sufficiently continuous with the historical one to prevent serious confusions; and, were his understanding of ‘pragmatism’ to become the accepted one, we might need to adopt some new term to describe historical Pragmatism-perhaps some term “which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers.”2

However interesting this question might be to pursue, I wish to leave the inquiry into Rorty’s sense of ‘pragmatism’ for another time and concentrate here upon his use of Dewey. Although James and Dewey are Rorty’s “great pragmatists,” it is actually Dewey who-together with Wittgenstein and Heidegger3-is the hero of Rorty’s recent work. In this paper, 1 will explore Rorty’s presentation of Dewey’s philosophy and his claim that Dewey’s work is best seen as leading in the direction he suggests. I will emphasize in this exploration Rorty’s selective reading of Dewey to bring into relief the portions of Dewey’s philosophical position which do not appear in the portrayal which Rorty offers.

I shall begin with a brief indication of what I believe does appear in Rorty’s portrayal, starting with his discussion of our contemporary academic situation. The philosophy profession, Rorty tells us, has become pretentious and arrogant. Much of this inflated self-evaluation results from philosophers’ beliefs that we alone hold the keys to conceptual legitimacy and thus intellectual respectability. Not sur- prisingly, few non-philosophers share this view-a fact that we interpret as further evidence of our own purity. And, all the while, we move farther away from the broader culture of the world outside of philosophy (narrowly construed).

Rorty, like Dewey before him, is troubled by such aspects of the contemporary philosophical situation. Rorty sees the futility of a narrow concentration upon what Dewey called “the problems of philosopher^,"^ and calls, like Dewey before him, for a reconstruction to bring about a new and better philosophy. At this point, however, the two part company, for the rest of Dewey’s philosophy does not appear in Rorty’s portrayal. In the place of Dewey’s call for criticism and evaluation to reconstruct our intellectual and social structures, Rorty calls for edijkation. In the place of Dewey’s call for “a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men,”5 Rorty calls for conversalion. And, in place of Dewey’s call for social action directed at attempts to ameliorate critical social ills, Rorty calls for play. It is this other side of Dewey’s philosophy-omitted by Rorty-which I believe contains its most vital elements: the calls for criticism, for evaluation, and for work, to make of our collective situation one which offers to all the fullest experience possible.

I1

Before 1 develop these critical points more fully, let me develop the points of commonality between Rorty and Dewey. Rorty’s criticism of

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the contemporary philosophy profession has many similarities to Dewey’s earlier critique. Allow me to consider five.

The first of Rorty’s similarities to Dewey is his belief that it is necessary for us to undermine the pretentiousness of the philosophy profession, to question its inflated self-evaluation. Although the philosophers’ claim to primacy is now quite different than it was in Dewey’s day-when many philosophers claimed to have special access to Being or Realityb-Rorty’s attack is similar. He denies that philosophers have either “an overriding claim” to the attention of others, or some special license for “judging other areas of cu1ture”or for “keeping the other disciplines honest” (PMN 392, 8, 162). Philosophy may at present prefer to see itself “as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion”; but, to Rorty, such a preference is no more than an“episode” in the history of Western culture (PMN 3, 390).

The ongoing basis of such claims to primacy for philosophy is, as Dewey writes, the belief that philosophy is “in possession of a higher organ of knowledge than is employed by positive science and ordinary practical experience. . .”’ Rorty’s formulation of this comment on the history of philosophy is similar: “philosophers are forever claiming to have discovered methods which are presuppositionless, or perfectly rigorous, or transcendental, or at any rate purer than those of nonphilosophers”(CP 19). At present, we see this claim to a privileged access to reality made with regard to philosophy’s role as the foundational discipline-as “the area of culture where one touched bottom”(PMN 4)-through its theory of knowledge(cf. PMN 132,357; CP 87-88,148). In this regard, Rorty writes that, for example, “whereas a physician faced with a medico-moral dilemma may use the concept of ‘person’ or ‘best interest,’ we, the philosophers, can analyze . . . [and] . . . clarify it” (CP 222), because we have the theory of knowledge.

Needless to say, this self-image has justified philosophers in a great deal of intellectual arrogance, which our culture has taken no more seriously than it should. As Rorty writes, our claims “to ‘ground’ this and ‘criticize’ that were shrugged off by those whose activities were purportedly being grounded or criticized” (PMN 5) . Some of them thought, no doubt, that our recondite remarks were ‘above’ them-but most knew better and went on undisturbed. Faced with bafflement and mistrust from its supposed audience, philosophy turned inward. Rorty writes that our expertise became centered upon the command of “a certain technical vocabulary-one which has no use outside of philosophy books and which links up with no issues in daily life, empirical science, morals or religion” (PMN 22). A third similarity between Rorty and Dewey is thus their condemnation of the isolation of the philosophy profession.

For Dewey and, to a lesser extent, for Rorty (as we shall see below), philosophy should be rooted in the issues and problems of its culture.

This is their fourth similarity. Dewey writes that “philosophy, like politics, literature and the plastic arts, is itself a phenomenon of human culture”; and, more significantly, “philosophy ought in the future to be connected with the crises and tensions in the conduct of human affairs.”* In fact, for Dewey, “the chief role of philosophy is to bring to consciousness, in an intellectualized form, or in the form of problems, the most important shocks and inherent troubles of complex and changing societies since these have to do with conflicts of value.”’

Instead of this intimate relationship, however, we find in con- temporary philosophy isolated intellectuals who spend most of their time, as Dewey writes, in “intellectual exercise,” “refining and polishing tools to be used . . . . only in refining more tools of precisely the same kind.”I0 As Rorty notes, such individuals may be “clever” but they are hardly “wise”(CP 221). In addition, philosophy, without its roots in the events of a culture, loses what Dewey calls its “human significance.”II Philosophers carry on, doing what intellectual tasks we find interesting, regardless of social or human need. “Meanwhile,” Dewey continues, “there ure issues of utmost importance” which fail to be addressed; and, without intelligent help, “the vacuum left in practical matters” will be filled in by “custom, prejudice, class interests, and traditions . . .”I2

Our present situation need not be this way, of course. The fifth and final similarity between Dewey and Rorty to which I shall point is their belief that philosophy should be deliberately reconstructed. Both Dewey and Rorty agree that we need not worry about preserving the identity of future philosophy with past philosophy. For Rorty, philosophy names no “natural kind” of activity (CP 226; cf. 62), nor does it consist of pre-determined problematic areas (cf. CP 214-218; PMN 394). And, as Dewey noted, it would be futile to speculate about “what philosophy will specifically consist of in the future . . ..’I3

Philosophy as a human activity is evolving-toward what we do not know exactly-but both Dewey and Rorty believe that it can be made into something better than it is now. They differ substantially, however, as to what would constitute ‘better’ philosophy; and it is to these differences that I now turn.

On one level, we should not be surprised when we recognize that what Rorty offers us as a treatment for our present ills would not be Dewey’s prescription. Frequently, individuals will seem to agree fairly closely about the existence of a problem while disagreeing sharply over proposed solutions. As Rorty himself writes of the relationship between Dewey and Heidegger: “an extraordinary amount of agreement on the need for a ‘destruction of the history of Western ontology’ can be combined with an utterly different notion of what might succeed ‘ontology”’ (CP 42). On another level, however, it should bother us that

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the relationship between Dewey and Rorty is not a close one, since Dewey is one of the heroes who, Rorty maintains, stands behind his reconstruction of philosophy (cf. PMN 5,368).

Rorty’s difference from Dewey is most clearly seen in his repeated use of a series of terms, that he takes to be interrelated and complementary, to reduce our philosophical options to only two. Our choice of philosophies must be, Rorty writes, either:

- confrontational and argumentative or conversational; - systematic and foundational or edifying; - constructive or therapeutic; - analytic or holistic; - professional or playful; - epistemological or hermeneutic; - the work of a philosopher-king or the work of a dilettante; - truth-seeking or satisfied with no more than meaning.14

For Rorty, of course, the latter alternative is always the better one. To see how this forced choice operates in Rorty’s work, I would like to concentrate on his exploration of three key ideas: conversation, edification, and play.

First of all, Rorty would have us replace philosophy-as-con- frontation-and-argument with philosophy-as-conversation (cf. CP 2 18- 223; PMN 170-171). He writes, for example, in what seems a most unDeweyian fashion, that we need “to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry,” by which he means “the search for knowledge” itself narrowly construed (PMN 372, 8). Rorty sees “keeping a conversation going as a sufficient aim of philosophy,”and he characterizes “the ability to sustain a conversation”as “wisdom”(PMN 378; cf. 372).

As an understanding of the role of philosophy in culture, this position is problematic enough. However, this position is not just a suggestion about contemporary philosophy. It is also how Rorty understands Dewey: as a “historicist” or “relativist” or “ae~thetist ,”’~ as a thinker who, although he occasiona1ly“forgets his own Peircian subordination of truth to beauty”(CP 5 I ) , in actuality sees aesthetic satisfaction as our highest possible goal. Gone from this conversational Dewey is the carefully-preserved distinction between desiderata and desideranda, “between ends that merely seem good and those which are really so- between specious, deceptive goods, and lasting true goods.”’6 Gone from this conversational Dewey as well is the recognition that “[tlhe fact that something is desired only raises the quesrion of its desirability; it does not settle To “settle $”for Dewey, requires inquiry-inquiry not in the sense of the search for knowledge narrowly construed, but in the sense of the search for the particular reconstruction which will solve the problem at hand and preserve the “lasting true goods.”

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To get this conversational understanding of Dewey, Rorty seems simply to have misread the texts. In one place, for example, Rorty draws from Reconstruction in Philosophy, quoting favorably Dewey’s belief that:

When philosophy shall have cooperated with the course of events and made clear and coherent the meaning of the daily detail, science and emotion will interpenetrate, practice and imagination will embrace. Poetry and religious feeling will be the unforced flowers of life. (CP 4 9 ’ 8

But Rorty cites this passage in support of his view of philosophy-as- conversation without. noting that Dewey wrote in the same paragraph that although poetry, art, and religion are “precious things,” such values cannot be created “by action directly aimed at their production . . .” Rather, such goods can only be developed indirectly, “by substituting faith in the active tendencies of the day for dread and dislike of them, and by the courage of intelligence to follow whither social and scientific changes direct us.”19 That is, for Dewey, we cannot simply find these values in the world of conversation. Poetry and art and religious feeling must be worked for. The human good must be constructed through indirect but deliberate action.20 To offer us as the sole alternative to our present philosophical situation an understanding of philosophy-as- conversation will not in any way advance the construction of the good. We need, and we have, other options.

Another of Rorty’s points is that philosophers must be edifying rather than systematic or foundational-attempting “to help their readers, or society as a whole, break free from outworn vocabularies and attitudes, rather than to provide ‘grounding’ for the intuitions and customs of the present”(PMN 12).2’ Again, it would seem that more than these two options exist. For Rorty this new philosophy, rather than attempting to offer another final understanding of Reality, would attempt to offer new versions of “how things hung together” (CP xxxix). In this regard, Rorty sees Dewey “to endorse James’description of philosophy as ‘vision’” (CP 45), although in the place cited by Rorty Dewey goes on to say that such philosophical imagination must be grounded in specific situational hypotheses, warranted by existing knowledge and “tested by the consequences of the operations [the hypotheses] evoke . . .” Otherwise, such philosophical imagination is “dissipated into fantasies and rises vaporously into the clouds.”22 Here too, it seems that Dewey’s rejection of the foundational approach does not lead him into agreement with Rorty’s call for edification. We need, and we have, other options.

Thirdly, Rorty tells us that this reconstructed philosophy must adopt a “spirit of playfulness” (PMN 166). It should be less critical and negative, and more “relaxed” (CP 218). Rather than attacking all positions presented to us, “[wle should let a hundred flowers bloom . . .”(CP 219). And, in the place of closely-argued philosophical tomes,

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we should write “satires, parodies, [and] aphorisms” (PMN 369). Perhaps Rorty is leading the way himself when he offers such remarks as the following: that in the future “we [philosophers] shall kibitz at least as well as any other professional group, and perhaps rather better than most” (CP 221; cf. PMN 393), or that “[a] nation can count itself lucky to have several thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecified unspecialized intellectuals who are exceptionally good at putting together arguments and pulling them apart” (CP 220-221).

Dewey does, very occasionally, discuss the importance of a kind of playfulness;23 but Rorty’s discussions of it owe more to James than to Dewey.24 Dewey’s world is misunderstood as a world of play-it is primarily a world of earnest and serious work. Dewey’s world is a world in which we have never done enough-it is a world in which “the better is too often the enemy of the still better,” a world in which the person who is beginning“to grow less good,”no matter how good he or she has been, is the “bad” person.25 Dewey’s world is not a world in which we put aside what Rorty calls “the spirit of seriousness,’’ but one in which we attempt to cultivate and expand it. And having defended the spirit of seriousness in Dewey, I must go further and say that in no way is it accurate to say, as Rorty does, that “the spirit of seriousness can only exist in an intellectual world in which human life is an attempt to attain an end beyond life, an escape from freedom into the atemporal” (CP 87). Dewey seeks no such escape, but his work is serious nonetheless.

Dewey’s philosophy fits into neither side of Rorty’s neat dichotomy: it is not ‘confrontational’ or ‘foundational’ or ‘professional’-but neither is it ‘conversational’ or ‘edifying’ or ‘playful’. For Dewey, philosophy is above all else work-the work ofevaluation and criticism: “the business of philosophy is criticism of beliefs; that is, of beliefs that are so widely current socially as to be dominant factors in culture.”26 Contrary to Rorty’s position, philosophy for Dewey is not grounded in aesthetics but in ethics: “the business of philosophy is intrinsically moral in its broadest human sense.”27 Wisdom, Dewey continues elsewhere, “is a moral term”; philosophy itself is the “search for the wisdom that shall be a guide of life”; and its “primary concern is to clarify, liberate and extend the goods which inhere in the naturally generated functions of experience.”28

Dewey’s understanding of philosophy as evaluation or criticism results directly from two assumptions. First, there is his belief that “[nlothing but the best, the richest and fullest experience possible, is good enough for man.”29 Secondly, we have Dewey’s recognition that this idea is never even approximated in the natural world:

If values were as plentiful as huckleberries, and if the huckleberry-patch were always at hand, the passage of appreciation into criticism would be a senseless procedure. . . . . But values are as unstable as the forms of cl0uds.3~

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Consequently, to live happy or even satisfactory lives, we need criticism; and, for Dewey, this criticism remains a large part of the job of the philosopher.

The most obvious result of Rorty’s replacement of criticism, evaluation, and work with edification, conversation, and play is the loss of philosophy as a tool in social reconstruction. For Dewey, the reconstruction of philosophy was always the first step towards reconstruction through philosophy; for Rorty, there is no second step. For Dewey, there was an ongoing goal of solving problems and, with experience, of occasionally forestalling them; for Rorty, there is no assumption that we can influence the overall conditions under which we live. He tells us, for example, that it is vain to hope to be able to shield ourselves by intellectual action from the irrationality and destructiveness of the modern world (cf. C P 171-172). He sees attempts to foster “celebrations of American democracy, naturalism, and social recon- struction” to have “exhausted” their “market” (CP 64). And he writes, that “[i]n the end, the pragmatists tell us, what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right” (CP 166). This statement is true only if we intend “getting things right” to be an epistemological claim about the perfect mirroring of antecedent reality. But, for Dewey, we can do more than cling together in the dark because “getting things right,” for Dewey, means effective social reconstruction to anticipate and deal with social problems.

IV

How could Rorty have presented such a flawed picture of Dewey’s philosophy? The answer seems to be that Rorty has simply omitted key aspects of Dewey’s thought. One reason for these omissions may be that Rorty was interested in presenting a picture of Dewey that was roughly parallel to his understandings of Wittgenstein and Heidegger. As Rorty has admitted, “I knew which philosophers I liked, and I just wanted to connect all my heroes in one big story that showed how they related to one another . . .”31 To fit these three into the same story necessarily caused some trimming of all three figures. Another reason for these omissions may be that Rorty draws upon only a few of Dewey’s books. The key Deweyian texts for Rorty are four: Recon- struction in Philosophy (l920), Experience and Nature (1929, The Quest for Certainty (1929), and Art as Experience (1934). Now, these are surely central Deweyian texts; but they do not contain all of Dewey’s thought, and even they cannot be understood fully without the help of other of Dewey’s writings: for example, Democracy and Education (1916), Human Nature and Conduct (1922), The Public and Its Problems (l927), and selections from the hundreds and hundreds of journal and magazine articles which Dewey wrote. A third reason may

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be that Rorty is attempting to overlook areas of Dewey’s thought which he thinks might blemish his portrayal of Dewey, because in his writings in such areas Dewey was not “at his best” (CP 56 n. 38; cf. 61-65). Perhaps there are other considerations as well; but, whatever the reasons for these omissions, Rorty’s portrayal of Dewey suffers because of them.

The omissions to which I am referring are those of the three central Deweyian themes of democracy, education, and experience. These themes are what gives Dewey’s philosophy its recognizable shape and its motive power as a tool in social reconstruction. Whereas Rorty’s reconstruction of philosophy aims at no broader reconstruction, Dewey writes that “[tlhe reconstruction of philosophy, of education, and of social ideals and methods . . . . go hand in hand.”32 For Dewey, the complex and integrated work of reconstruction lies behind all he wrote. But this side of Dewey is missing from Rorty’s picture.

Beginning with democracy, let me turn briefly to the role that this reconstructed philosophy is to play in Dewey’s method of democratic social reconstruction. Rorty is right that philosophy must stop being the bully of the intellectual neighborhood. Rorty is right as well to abandon the quest for “commensurability”-that is, the ability of a number of conflicting claims “to be brought under a set of rules which will tell us how rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue on every point”-among the various contributors to intellectual discourse when the criterion to be used is narrowly epistemological

But this is not all that commensurability can mean. In a democracy, commensurability can also mean the cooperative development of social agreements, the hypothetical advancement of goods, “the participation of every mature human being in formation of the values that regulate the living of men together. . .“33 In a democracy, we can come together and attempt to work out, within our particular situations, an optimum environment for our social lives. We attempt to work together to solve our shared problems. And there is a chance, or at least we do not know in advance that there is not a chance, that relative to these social ills, if we try our utmost, “rational agreement can be reached on what would settle the issue . . .” The solutiop of the problem may be such a discoverable, objective criterion.

Rorty’s presentation of Dewey’s key notion of “warranted assert- ability” as “what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying”(PMN 176; cf. 9) misses half ofthis two-sided concept,. While on the one hand Rorty is correct that Dewey sees no ‘external’ standard of truth or value beyond the accumulated wisdom of the community, on the other hand his relaxed and casual understanding of what our peers should allow misses Dewey’s point of the need for social inquiry entirely. Dewey does not simply see “the community as source of epistemic authority” as Rorty writes (PMN 188; cf. 174; CP 173)

(PMN 315-316).

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without the added proviso that the community be a community of inquirers. For Dewey, “warranted assertion depends upon inquiry,”34 inquiry which is social in nature and aimed at specific efforts t o overcome specific problems. Such inquiry requires an ongoing process of communal appraising and judging, of questioning and testing. In this way, social inquiry can offer us a degree of objectivity-the highest degree of objectivity possible in social affairs. By working together with our fellows through inquiry and discussion, we can come to recognize objectively valid solutions to our problems. Moreover, this cooperative effort is an example of the way in which philosophers and experts from other disciplines can inquire together. “Philosophy cannot of itself resolve the conflicts and dissolve the confusions of the present world,” Dewey writes. “Only the associated members of the world can d o this work in cooperative action . . .”3 This cooperative action, I hardly need mention, is more than edification, conversation and play.

A second central Deweyian theme which Rorty’s portrayal omits is education. For Dewey, philosophy and education are “organically connected,’*3h essential parts of the overall process of cultivating human growth. Dewey sees education as “the most far-reaching and most fundamental way of correcting social evils and meeting social ~ s s u ~ s . ” ~ ~ It is the best way we have for developing individuals “into mastery of their own capacities,”3* for creating better social problem-solvers.

We d o not find this same pedagogical task in Rorty. He manifests no particular interest in education-the term itself he finds “flat” (PMN 360)-and his focus is upon advancing new and different modes of self-expression, which he characterizes as “edification” (cf. P M N 359; C P xvii). But there is much more to education than the conversational goals implied in the term ‘edification’. Education, in our troubled world, means the work of providing the means necessary for all to attain the fullest adulthood possible. Education, for Dewey, means having special responsibilities and meeting special needs. Rorty does not give us this.

The third central Deweyian theme missing from the Dewey which Rorty offers us is Dewey’s emphasis upon experience. What Dewey sought to attain through his metaphysics of experience was “a detection and description of the generic traits of existence”39 which would both compel and facilitate criticism. However unorthodox this aim may be, his conception of metaphysics as “a ground-map of the province of criticism”40 makes clear his intent. Rorty, however, misses this; and he writes at times that Dewey wanted a metaphysics (CP 73,84-85) and at times that Dewey abandoned metaphysics as a possible discipline (PMN 6), that Dewey both produced a metaphysics (CP 35) and failed to produce one ( C P 72, 213-214). What is probably worse, Rorty can find no value in Dewey’s use of the very term ‘experience’ itself. In Rorty’s words, Dewey uses the term ‘experience’ “as an incantatory device for blurring every possible distinction . . .” (CP 16).

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Experience is, for Dewey, the key element by means of which he attempts to bridge the dualisms of thing/thought, subject/object, actor/action, etc., and to integrate the various realms of human endeavor such as the religious, the aesthetic, the learning, the political, etc. To do this in terms of experience is neither incantation nor blurring-it is simply recognizing and emphasizing continuities. Rorty should have seen this himself, for he could not have written these two volumes without using parts of Dewey’s understanding of experience. Rorty’s attack upon the isolation of philosophy and his call for its reintegration within the broader experience of contemporary society, Rorty’s rejection of the primacy of epistemology for a fuller under- standing of experience, Rorty’s recognition that the study of mind is an impoverished way to approach experience, Rorty’s call for open-ended standards of growth: on all of these points, as well as on others, he appeals to themes developed in Dewey’s understanding of experience.

1 began by citing Rorty’s claim that “[t]hose who today defend ‘Platonism’ repudiate half of what Plato said. . .”41 Perhaps ‘repudiate’ is too strong a term-‘omits’ might be strong enough; perhaps ‘half‘ is too high a percentage--‘a substantial portion’might be sufficient. As a general point though, Rorty has his finger on something: self-styled followers of philosophers and philosophical positions often follow no more closely than they choose to. With regard to his own work on Dewey, Rorty, who sees himself as a Deweyian and a Pragmatist, certainly omits a substantial portion of what Dewey said.

Rorty leaves out of his portrayal of Dewey’s thought the central themes of democracy, education and experience. In doing so, Rorty offers us a portrayal of Dewey’s thought lacking its core-its role in social reconstruction. Rorty’s portrayal of Dewey, and his own proposed reconstruction of philosophy, are the worse for this.

However, because philosophical inquiry is a cooperative endeavor, as both Dewey and Rorty emphasize, it would be unfair to Rorty to close my discussion on such a negative note. Rorty’s two recent volumes have done a great deal to cause philosophers to rethink their efforts; and whatever problems might be present in these two volumes must be seen in the light of this overall accomplishment. Of particular value is his sense of the importance of the history of philosophy to a philosopher’s work. As Rorty writes:

The self-image of a philosopher-his identification of himself as such (rather than as, perhaps, an historian or a mathematician or a poet)-depends almost entirely upon how he sees the history of philosophy. I t depends upon which figures he imitates, and which episodes and movements he disregards. (CP 41)

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To the extent that Rorty has helped contemporary philosophers to rethink the episodes and movements of the history of philosophy, he may be able to help them redirect themselves out of their contemporary academic isolation. And if Rorty can help contemporary philosophers to reconsider the American philosophical tradition-to explore it afresh, to learn from its various figures and distinctions, to translate its values into contemporary terms-problems like the one I have referred to will take care of thern~elves.~*

NOTES

I Philosophy andrhe MirrorofNature[PMN](Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Consequences of Pragmatism [CP] (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

* The phrase is, of course, Peirce's, part of his justification for his use of the term 'pragmaticism.' Collected Papers, I-V1, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 193 1-1935), 5.414.

3 In this paper 1 have chosen to omit from consideration Rorty's parallel uses of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, although inquiries into Rorty's discussions of each are as necessary as the present endeavor.

4"The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy" [I9171 in The Philosophy ofJohn Dewey, edited by John J . McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 95.

Ibid. Cf. e.g. Reconstruction in Philosophy, revised edition (Boston: Beacon Press, I948),

especially Chapters I and V. 7 Ibid., 23.

Philosophy and Civilization (NY: Capricorn, [I9311 1963), p. 3; Reconstruction in Philosophy, xi; cf. Essays in ExperimentalLogic(NY: Dover, [I9161 1954), pp. 100-101; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 25.

9"Philosophy"in the Encyclopedia oftheSocialSciences(NY: Macmillan, 1932-1935), X11. p. 124.

10 Democracy and Education (NY: Macmillan, [I9161 1966), p. 328; "Modern Phi1osophy"in The Cleavage in Our Culture: Studies in Scientific Humanism in Honor of Max Otto, edited by F. Burkhardt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952). p. 20.

Charactersand Events, edited by Joseph Ratner (NY: Henry Holt, 1929), p. 1 1 1 . 12 "Modern Philosophy," 20; The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, [I9101 1965). p. 75; Problems of Men (NY: Philosophical Library, 1946). p. 8

13 "Philosophy's Future in Our Scientific Age" Commentary, October 1949, 394. l4 Cf. PMN xii-xiv, 5-7, 73, 166-171, 315-322, 357-394; C P xlii, 20. 15 Cf. PMN 9-10, 13, 174-181,280; C P xxx-xxxi, 35,49, 166-169. 16Ethics. with James H. Tufts, revised edition(NY: Holt. Rinehart and Winston, 1932),

1' The Quest for Certainty (NY: Capricorn, [I9291 1960). p. 260. I * Rorty is drawing here from Reconstruction in Philosophy, 212-213. 19 Reconstruction in Philosophy, 2 12. 20 Cf. The Questfor Certuinty, especially Chapter X: "The Construction of Good.'' 21 Cf. PMN 360, 365-379; C P 169-175. Dewey, of course, does occasionally offer this

kind of edification. Consider, for example, his position that we can evaluate a proffered philosophy by determining whether or not it results% conclusions which, when they are referred back to ordinary life-experiences and their predicaments, render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful. . ."

p. 194.

186

(Experience and Nature, revised edition [NY: Dover, (1929) 19581, p. 7; cf. Essays in Experimental Logic, I 7- 18).

2 2 The Questfor Certainty, 310-31 1. For a further discussion of Dewey’s differences from James, cf. my “William James and the Ethics of Fulfillment,” Transactions ofthe Charles S. Peirce Society, XVI1/3 (Summer, 1981). 224-240.

23 Rorty, in fact, cites no instances of playfulness in Dewey, although there are some. Consider, for example, this passage: “There isa kind of music of ideas that appeals, apart from any question of empirical verification, to the minds of thinkers, who derive an emotional satisfaction from an imaginative play synthesis of ideas obtainable by them in no other way.”(“Philosophy”in the EncyclopediaoftheSocialSciences, 128; cf. How We Think. revised edition [Boston: D.C. Heath, 19331, pp. 182-183).

2‘ Cf. PMN 4; C P xvii, 150, 169. 25 Liberalism andSociaIAction(NY: Capricorn, [I9351 1963), p. 70; Reconstruction in

Philosophy, 176. 26 “Philosophy” in Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Wilson Gee (NY:

Macmillan, 1929), p. 245; cf. “Philosophy” in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 124; Experience and Nature, 37, 398.

27 “Has Philosophy a Future?” Proceedings ofthe Tenth International Conference of Philosophy (Amsterdam: North Holland Publ., 1949), p. 114.

28 Characters and Events, 844; “Has Philosophy a Future?” 113; Experience and Nature, 407; cf. “Philosophy’s Future in Our Scientific Age,” 392; Reconstruction in Philosophy, 124.

2’) Experience and Nature, 4 12. 10 Ibid., 399. J I This admission is offered in Janet Hook’s “A Disconcerting Philosopher Challenges

the Pretensions of His Discipline,’’ The ChronicleofHigher Education,9 December 198 I , 26.

J2 Democracy and Education, 33 I . 3 3 Problems of Men, 58; cf. The Public and Its Problems (Chicago: Swallow, [I9271

34 ProblemsofMen, 335; cf. Logic: The TheoryofInquiry(NY: Henry Holt, 1938). p.

35 Problems of Men, 16; cf. “Has Philosophy a Future?” I 15; “Philosophy’s Future in 393; and my “Dewey’s Method of Social Reconstruction,”

3b”Philosophy and Education”in Higher Education Faces the Future, edited by P.A.

37 “Philosophy and Education,” 382. 38 Ibid. 19 Experience and Nature, 54. 40 Ibid., 413.

19571, p. 147.

9.

Our Scientific Age,” Transactions oj the Charles S. Peirce Society, (forthcoming).

Schilpp (NY: Liveright, 1930), p. 276; cf. Democracy and Education, 331.

“Introduction” to The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 2.

42 This paper grew out of remarks made at a conference on the recent work of Richard Rorty at Hendrix College in April of 1983. I wish to thank the many gracious and helpful individuals associated with that institution, especially John Churchill, and the other members of the various panels, especially John J . McDermott, for making the conference a thoroughly enjoyable intellectual experience.

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