The Death Of The Philosopher (Richard Rorty 1)

[koganbot]

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.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

But your Rorty reminds me of the conversations I had this weekend with my friend Shawn about morality, philosophy, aesthetics, teenpop, religion, bad relationships, movies, and "the unique historical moment in which we, as a culture, no longer feel that there is necessarily any guiding force justifying our moral actions, yet now need to understand why we tell the stories that we still do tell ourselves -- recognizing them as stories and, at some level, as arbitrary stories based on semi-arbitrary impulses, needs, desires -- while simultaneously believing these stories enough to act upon them."

And his answer? We like the story and live by it anyway, so why not tell it while we try to figure it out some more?

I'm grossly paraphrasing, and maybe misrepresenting, but it was really exciting to see our intellectual paths intertwine again after he kinda went off the political philosophy deep end and I went off...uh, a different deep end.

One problem with philosophy is that it's asking us to take a step back and see Issues where the Issue itself is not really an issue unless we call it one. If we think of "dualism" or "morality" or "free will" as a Primary Issue and "the shit that happens as a result of what we're calling dualism etc." the Secondary Issue, what we've REALLY done is created a false "primary" issue because we assume there must be a discernible reason for this shit to happen. But we don't NEED a reason most of the time; we just do it because it's what we do, and philosophy is the only place where this becomes a "problem."

Ditto Leo Strauss and morality -- Strauss is suggesting the amoral role of the philosopher to act morally not because he's moral (according to some God Story), but because it is a prerequisite to "acting philosophically" (or something). But what Strauss is describing is impossible, and what he really seems to be arguing (according to Shawn) is "there is something about us [philosophers] that draws us to philosophy, to asking these questions, now let's forget about THAT 'something' compelling us and answer these questions, because this is what we, the philosophers, do. Everyone else can use God cuz they don't get it anyway and why make 'em try when it'll just get 'em all agitated?"

So now your problem (if you're Shawn and very attracted to Strauss's brain -- "I understand how he thinks!") is that this simply doesn't make any sense, no matter how much you can relate to it. It just doesn't work. One cannot act "amorally," one is moral according to how he/she acts -- we act because we're moral, we're moral because we act (sounds like a Lil' Mama lyric). We're interested in the first place because we notice that we act and that this acting is moral (duh), but "being interested" is also the ACT of being interested, hence is a moral action. It's inescapable -- but more importantly it's a moot point. OK, fine, there's some morality, now what the hell do we DO with it?

"We tell the story because we LIKE it." Well, yes. And we also have to. Because we just do, and there's nothing philosophy can do to describe or define this LIKE, all that STUFF. (Someone should write a book called STUFF.) We describe it ourselves. In part we describe it simply by doing it.

I hope this is even somewhat coherent, I've been thinking about it a lot but haven't been able to articulate my thoughts. Will reread your post and maybe actually respond to stuff you and Rorty wrote if I haven't already.

[(Anonymous)]

Sorry if I misread you. What I read in that Rorty quote (and my reaction was that I should read the rest of that episode) is that you can’t start arguing about what “mental” implies, if you couldn’t explain or prove that such thing exist, so you should stop because what you are really doing is just engage with some philosophical language or dynamic (let’s say: structuralism) and just playing that game, not really working your issue (that should be proving first what “mental” really means, or is). Ok, until here I agree with him. Then is when he tells you, that you should stop, and in some way, end all possibilities to try to explain a thing if is not based on religion, morals, or the scientific method, or things that are evident in life (my baby is burning, should I stop those flames with water or sand or should I ask myself if those flames are real?). The problem here should be the implications that reality will give to our lives. Why should I listen to music, if is not moral, or religious, or based in empirical facts (let’s say: using frequencies under the ear listening spectrum and altering your biorhythms)? Or why questioning “politics”, if they doesn’t make any sense anymore? The system should be just an institution that manages problems on daily life (taxes, giving educational books, repairing the streets), or help science or defend a place for morals. No left, no right. Even if there is a new problem, e.g. people would like that systems like “second life” or the rest of the lot should be a public issue to give everybody a chance to start there a new life, how could the system, or well the State, try to solve it? That would be some kind of inference on the relations between a company giving a service and their users. Probably, this is just an elaboration of thoughts and doesn’t seem very real. But the question is: what is under or what implies or who wins with that dead of philosophy the way we know it?
Anyway, until that point, he is certainly OTM, but, well I’m not an expert on philosophy by no means, but that is the reason why philosophy used to such an extent linguistics, and is the centre of polemics (Foucault and all continental philosophy are wrong because they are using concepts based on Saussure, says Chomsky based on his developments on the field). So philosophy seems solipsistic because are working in that issue (and knowing them they would never resolve it).
About “relativism”, I remember some different people talking about that term. One of them is the actual Pope, so disdaining aspects of the ritual or some moral issue as a problem based on society from centuries ago, just seems like attacks to a believe system. The other one are philosophers and is referred to people that just try to avoid the problems they are facing. Let’s say, in a conversation:
- Imagine that is raining.
- I see no rain.
- Well, somewhere in the world should be raining.
- But I have no information about the weather on the rest of the globe, so I refuse to believe what it seems to me just a lie.
The problem here is not so much that the philosopher would like to beat his interlocutor, nor that he refuses to approach an imaginary fact to start a discussion, but the fact that he is not addressing all the consequences of his mode of questioning reality. I was going to quote Ian Penman, talking about how reading Derrida, understanding him and applying that thought mode to your life, means that you should start to revise all the things you take for granted. Or, in the last conversation, the problem is not the fact that is not raining, is why he should believe his senses, why he accept that what he get from them is “reality”, why he uses the word “lie” and what is attached to that word, or why he uses logic inside a system based in the duality truth/lie, or what is logic. Don’t know if I asked your question, probably not, but giving an opinion about what is at stake with “relativism” from that side.

anhh