Here is a late 20th century philosopher who works mainly within the canon of analytic philosophy. Sometimes he announces, not undramatically (self-consciously following Nietzsche), that philosophy is dead, and sometimes he falls back to a more ‘modest’ claim that most of contemporary analytic philosophy has gone bankrupt. Metaphysics and epistemology should have long been abandoned, because the former is infected with problematic Platonism, and the latter, Cartesianism. ‘Part of my ambition,’ he says, ‘to paraphrase Freud, is to help it come to pass that where epistemology and metaphysics were, sociology and history shall be.’ Instead of being the first philosophy, philosophy of language has been wrongheadedly invested in the notion of representation, which, as he sees it, is so thoroughly contaminated by disastrous collateral commitments that we should abandon it altogether, like burning the leper’s rags. He also has fundamental problems with the way analytic philosophy is done: for him, good philosophy is rarely about producing rigorous arguments, but primarily about creating interesting new vocabularies. As he puts it: ‘a talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.’ Mostly importantly, it is producing cultural changes, rather than discovering truths, that should be the aim of philosophy.
These doubtlessly radical claims, liberating for some and outrageous for others, come from Richard Rorty, possibly the most controversial figure in late 20th-century analytic philosophy. While his radical stance remains more or less consistent throughout his academic career, the way he reasons for it has undergone several major changes. Eventually he settles on a line of reasoning that he calls ‘anti-authoritarianism’, which becomes the master idea underlying his cluster of radical theses. The central idea is rather simple: philosophy should be liberating, it should free us from any authority we have no reason to be responsible for. This sounds all very well in moral and political philosophy, but how does it become an all-sweeping meta-philosophical force in Rorty’s hands?
Here is a broad sketch of Rorty’s thoughts. According to him, the only kind of authority we have good reason to recognise comes from our fellow human beings. We are only responsible for our peers; there is no authority external to humankind. The problem of most contemporary philosophy, as Rorty sees it, is that it recognises an authority over and above humankind: namely, that of the external world. Once we see the world as having an intrinsic nature or unique structure, one that we could only discover or fail to discover, only represent more or less accurately, then we have already ceded our authority to something external – it is in the nature of representation that it must be responsible to the represented, must take the represented as the authority. Suppose I see a tree in front of me. For Rorty, I have absolutely no responsibility towards the tree when I try to think about it, conceptualise it, describe it. I have no responsibility to ‘get it right’, on its own terms. What I have is a responsibility towards other people to whom I’m describing the tree: my description had better serve their interests, needs and wants, whatever those are.
He sometimes calls this view ‘pragmatism’, sometimes ‘humanism’, and for him these are merely two sides of the same coin. As he sees it, his view is continuous with the spirit of the Enlightenment: according to the canonical narrative, the Enlightenment liberates us from theological authority. We used to recognise some kind of deity as the source of our moral and political authority, but after the Enlightenment we came to realise that human beings are the only source of moral authority. If some actions are morally wrong, they are not wrong because God says so, but because they violate some standards stemming from human virtue, dignity, or wellbeing. Rorty calls this ‘humanism’, and proposes that we go one step further:
For Rorty, the idea that matter, spirit, the self or other such things have an intrinsic nature that in principle is in no way dependent upon our activities of knowing and that we attempt to represent in increasingly better ways, represents the secular descendent of a conception which should not have survived the era of the theological world-view from which it emerged. (Jacques Bouveresse)
Accepting that idea, Rorty suggests, is casting the world in the role of the non-human Other before which we are to humble ourselves. (John McDowell)
Despite having reclaimed our moral authority, our cognitive authority remains external to us in this post-Enlightenment world. The task of philosophy, now, is to further liberate ourselves and take back our cognitive authority, to bring humankind our of its adolescence into full maturity. What the Enlightenment does to religion, Rorty now proposes to do to metaphysics and science: we give up the notion of absolute truth, and replace it with justification (to our peers); we give up the notion of objectivity, and replace it with solidarity (with, again, our peers). For intelligent and discursive beings like us, conversation is the highest good; when repetitively charged with unseriousness because he ‘merely’ wants to agree with his peers, Rorty replies every time: what’s so ‘mere’ about that?
With this master meta-philosophical idea in place, Rorty’s general take on philosophy starts to come into view. If the world is not something that we can accurately or inaccurately represent, then truth as correspondence (between our beliefs and reality) has to be abandoned since there is nothing for our beliefs to correspond to. As he puts it, we don’t copy the world, but cope with it; there is only one right way of copying, but lots of ways of coping. A crucial way of coping is conceptualising: we use concepts to describe and redescribe the world so that we can reach better understandings of it. As with coping, for Rorty, there are a myriad of ways of conceptualising; the ground to evaluate them is not accuracy, but pragmatic usefulness. Good philosophy, as with good literature, generates new ways of describing the world, or, as Rorty likes to put it, creates new ‘vocabularies’ that haven’t been thought of before. If we, following the later Wittgenstein, sees our language as a toolbox rather than a mirror, we might see a new vocabulary as a new tool added to the toolbox, enabling us to cope better and more flexibly. In the Nietzschean spirit, Rorty claims that philosophical arguments are mostly futile: for him, you can’t rigorously argue someone out of a philosophical framework; you can only redescribe, and redescribe attractively, so that other people might see the virtue of your vocabulary and come to adopt it. Same for Rorty’s picture of science (which sounds especially provocative in a school of philosophy that models itself on science): it is just another vocabulary that we find useful for all sorts of pragmatic purposes, but it no more describes the world ‘as it is anyway’ than poetry. He does not deny that scientists like Galileo are significant, but he reinterprets that significance: for him, Galileo is someone who found ‘a tool which happened to work better for certain purposes than any previous tool.’
Given his fondness of vocabulary creation and conversation, Rorty’s vision of politics is determinately liberal: the goal of politics, as Rorty sees it, is to create and protect a safe private sphere, free from cruelty, humiliation and oppression, where people can freely converse and create new vocabularies. ‘Our overarching public purpose,’ summarises Brandom, a student of Rorty’s and a fellow pragmatist, ‘should be to ensure that a hundred private flowers blossom.’
Where does all this leave philosophy, one might ask worryingly, if Rorty’s radical vision comes true? Rorty answers: this is liberating for philosophy as well, curing it from its Platonic, Cartesian and Kantian sickness. It no longer has to play the alienating role it used to, or to provide a ‘foundation’ for all human knowledge, by creating this Other, this external authority that grounds our knowledge. It tears apart the Cartesian veil, which opens up a gap, a distance between us and the world. And when this happens,
we would be left with less encouragement to cling to the pathos of distance. We should be more Nietzschean in our willingness to say “Thus I will it” rather than “Thus the Intrinsic Nature of Reality obliges me.” We should be more “humanist” in the sense of that term which Heidegger endeavored to make pejorative – more willing to take power into our own hands.
Now you, the analytically trained philosopher, might be inclined to respond: yes, let’s grant that his advertisements are not misleading, that his vision is indeed liberating. But then the crucial question is whether it is true, and he has not yet provided any argument that the traditional picture is wrong and his is right.
I could imagine Rorty shrugging at this charge. Remember, his ‘vocabulary’ vocabulary applies back onto his own view: by putting forward his philosophy Rorty is essentially creating a new vocabulary, a new option, a new tool in the toolbox. Whether it’s true is neither interesting nor relevant to him; he would regard anyone who puts forward that question as remaining in the grip of philosophical authoritarianism. What matters for him is whether people (both in the present and future) find it useful and enlightening, whether it gives people freedom to say and do things that they didn’t know before, and whether it makes a genuine contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind, which, according to him, is our only pathway to liberation and maturity.
[This article was originally published by the Phi Magazine, liberation issue, to be found at phimag.org.]