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The Death Of The Philosopher (Richard Rorty 1)
Richard Rorty was an unbelievably openhearted and decent fellow who wished for openheartedness and kindness to spread. And this has something but I don't know how much to do with why I read so much of his writing. The paradox is that his great talent was for demolishing philosophy. He thought of himself as synthesizing other people's ideas, and indeed he did, but what he pulled together were arguments for an endgame here and an endgame there. He also wanted to understand and explain why people ever felt the need for the game in the first place, and, to the extent that their reasons still matter to us, ask if we can take care of the reasons instead of getting entangled in the game. I find this inspiring but I don't think his own answers were all that good. What he was best at was arguing against the game itself; so for me the crucial Rorty is chapters 1, 3, and 4 of Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature.
Rorty adamantly insisted that he wasn't a Death Of Philosophy philosopher, but I never thought he came up with a compelling project for what philosophers should do next, given that they've killed off epistemology; or anyway never came up with a reason why philosophers would be more adept than anyone else (social critics, sociologists, anthropologists, teenpop stars, market researchers, diplomats, political commentators) at what Rorty thought was worth doing.
What I've just written is all very vague, and I'm simply dashing this off. An example of my own version of the Death Of Philosophy is this sentence from my book:
As a proponent of a [pragmatic, relativist] position, I can say "Nothing exists in isolation," and two hours later say, "I grew up in an isolated village," without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences.
In other words, philosophy has nothing to say to villages. To elaborate slightly: "Nothing exists in isolation" is another way of saying, "I can't conceive of what it would even mean to say that the grounds for a social practice are absolutely independent of the practice that's being grounded, philosophy's standard of independence being that if the thing being grounded ceased to exist, the ground for it would remain unchanged." But I'm adding, in effect, "But that doesn't matter, that such absolute independence is inconceivable, given that villages - unlike philosophy - have never demanded this of grounds, that they be absolutely independent." So not only doesn't foundationalist philosophy have anything to say to the village, neither does the critique of foundationalist philosophy. So pragmatism and relativism don't matter. I read Rorty as urging philosophers to rejoin the village, but it seems to me that they rejoin the village as simple human beings, as no more than villagers, not as philosophers.
Of course, if I want to support what I've just said (I'll post my arguments someday, maybe), I'd have to (1) explain what "Nothing exists in isolation" means in the context of philosophy; (2) say why I think it's correct in the context of philosophy; (3) say why I don't think it's correct in the context of villages; so, for instance, say why I don't think villages make the demands on grounds that philosophy had made; (4) say why I don't think you can take the conversation from philosophy to the village; and (5) explain what's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths, uttering words like "relativism" and "mediated" and so forth.
But for now I'll quote a couple passages from Rorty which explain why he helped make me a nonphilosopher, or a philosophy-killing philosopher, even if he insists he didn't do the same for himself. The first passage is from the end of the first subsection of the first chapter of Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature.
I hope that I have said enough to show that we are not entitled to begin talking about the mind-body problem, or about the possible identity or necessary non-identity of mental and physical states, without first asking what we mean by "mental." I would hope further to have incited the suspicion that our so-called intuition about what is mental may be merely our readiness to fall in with a specifically philosophical language-game. This is, in fact, the view that I want to defend. I think that this so-called intuition is no more than the ability to command 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.
--p. 22
Then, from the second-to-the-last paragraph in that first chapter:
Contemporary philosophers, having updated Descartes, can be dualists without their dualism making the slightest difference to any human interest or concern, without interfering with science or lending any support to religion. For insofar as dualism reduces to the bare insistence that pains and thoughts have no places, nothing whatever hangs on the distinction between mind and body.
--p. 68
Now, he's only dealing with a set of particular philosophical issues here, but to my mind he's giving very good criteria for saying when philosophical issues need to be put to rest. And if dualism makes no difference to any human interest or concern, the same goes for attacks on dualism, though of course we do have to explain why people think something is at issue.
My guess is that my Rorty isn't a lot of other people's Rorty.
Rorty adamantly insisted that he wasn't a Death Of Philosophy philosopher, but I never thought he came up with a compelling project for what philosophers should do next, given that they've killed off epistemology; or anyway never came up with a reason why philosophers would be more adept than anyone else (social critics, sociologists, anthropologists, teenpop stars, market researchers, diplomats, political commentators) at what Rorty thought was worth doing.
What I've just written is all very vague, and I'm simply dashing this off. An example of my own version of the Death Of Philosophy is this sentence from my book:
As a proponent of a [pragmatic, relativist] position, I can say "Nothing exists in isolation," and two hours later say, "I grew up in an isolated village," without contradicting myself, since the standards for isolation are different in the two sentences.
In other words, philosophy has nothing to say to villages. To elaborate slightly: "Nothing exists in isolation" is another way of saying, "I can't conceive of what it would even mean to say that the grounds for a social practice are absolutely independent of the practice that's being grounded, philosophy's standard of independence being that if the thing being grounded ceased to exist, the ground for it would remain unchanged." But I'm adding, in effect, "But that doesn't matter, that such absolute independence is inconceivable, given that villages - unlike philosophy - have never demanded this of grounds, that they be absolutely independent." So not only doesn't foundationalist philosophy have anything to say to the village, neither does the critique of foundationalist philosophy. So pragmatism and relativism don't matter. I read Rorty as urging philosophers to rejoin the village, but it seems to me that they rejoin the village as simple human beings, as no more than villagers, not as philosophers.
Of course, if I want to support what I've just said (I'll post my arguments someday, maybe), I'd have to (1) explain what "Nothing exists in isolation" means in the context of philosophy; (2) say why I think it's correct in the context of philosophy; (3) say why I don't think it's correct in the context of villages; so, for instance, say why I don't think villages make the demands on grounds that philosophy had made; (4) say why I don't think you can take the conversation from philosophy to the village; and (5) explain what's going on when villagers make philosophy-like noises with their mouths, uttering words like "relativism" and "mediated" and so forth.
But for now I'll quote a couple passages from Rorty which explain why he helped make me a nonphilosopher, or a philosophy-killing philosopher, even if he insists he didn't do the same for himself. The first passage is from the end of the first subsection of the first chapter of Philosophy And The Mirror Of Nature.
I hope that I have said enough to show that we are not entitled to begin talking about the mind-body problem, or about the possible identity or necessary non-identity of mental and physical states, without first asking what we mean by "mental." I would hope further to have incited the suspicion that our so-called intuition about what is mental may be merely our readiness to fall in with a specifically philosophical language-game. This is, in fact, the view that I want to defend. I think that this so-called intuition is no more than the ability to command 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.
--p. 22
Then, from the second-to-the-last paragraph in that first chapter:
Contemporary philosophers, having updated Descartes, can be dualists without their dualism making the slightest difference to any human interest or concern, without interfering with science or lending any support to religion. For insofar as dualism reduces to the bare insistence that pains and thoughts have no places, nothing whatever hangs on the distinction between mind and body.
--p. 68
Now, he's only dealing with a set of particular philosophical issues here, but to my mind he's giving very good criteria for saying when philosophical issues need to be put to rest. And if dualism makes no difference to any human interest or concern, the same goes for attacks on dualism, though of course we do have to explain why people think something is at issue.
My guess is that my Rorty isn't a lot of other people's Rorty.
no subject
The thing is, the idea of discussing - logically or otherwise - ethical or epistemological issues that have no real-life consequences doesn't make sense, since if an issue has no real-life consequences it's not ethical or epistemological.
But let's approach your question this way: Is there value in, e.g., learning the rules of baseball so that you can enjoy watching a baseball game, even though you doubt that the outcome of the game, and baseball in general, is ever going to be a big deal to you? (As opposed to, say, if you know a lot of people who love baseball and want to understand them and do things with them - in which case learning the rules of baseball would have real-life consequences.)
Or, since I'm an atheist, I don't think there's a hell of a lot at stake for me in an argument between a unitarian and a trinitarian (though who knows what I might learn?). But observing the argument and getting to know it - getting to understand what's going on just as one understands various events that take place on a baseball diamond - is a prerequisite for appreciating it on any but the vaguest level, and a prerequisite for getting to understand why these people think something is at stake - though observing them and learning the rules of their game may not answer the question why they think something is at stake, and "Why do you think something is at stake?" is a question that participants in these arguments are very poor at asking with any tenacity ("these arguments" being any theological and philosophical arguments).
And there's value in, say, reading Hume, even though I'm never going to make his assumptions about the mind; broadens one to know what issues someone once cared about, maybe especially if they're not issues I care about now. Helps if they write as well as Hume, however. (And I've not read much Hume, yet.)
But the people I'm likely to run into who argue about, say, "relativism" do think that there's something at stake, and they're wrong - they've sidestepped their issues while thinking they're dealing with them - and this does have real-life consequences, that people argue issues and take sides and maybe even form into groups and create friendships and enmities around this supposed question of "relativism" (one's position being something of a social marker).