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koganbotRichard 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
Date: 2008-04-24 01:50 pm (UTC)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."
But this sounds so world-important: "we, as a culture, no longer feel that there is necessarily any guiding force justifying our moral actions." This is vague - "guiding force" and all that - but to cast Shawn's sentence into my terms, it would be "we, as a culture, no longer feel that a guiding force that justifies our moral actions must be 100% independent of the thing being guided." Except I'd say that "we, as a culture," never thought in the first place that a guiding force had to be 100% independent of the thing being guided. The only people who ever thought otherwise were philosophers and philosophically inclined theologians, and they only thought this when doing philosophy and theology, dropping this attitude when it came to the rest of their lives. So we aren't in some new epoch here, and the absence of such a "guiding force" is irrelevant, since it was never that sort of force that people were calling on for guidance anyway. It doesn't follow that there are or were no guiding forces. Just that philosophy has nothing interesting to say about the presence or absence of guiding forces.
I could be majorly wrong here, of course, knowing so little of history and cultures. But I don't see why we're supposed to think of our "stories" as just stories - especially when the stories seem to be right (e.g., genetics and natural selection) - or why they'd be "arbitrary stories based on semi-arbitrary impulses, needs, desires." I don't see how our ideas and social practices are any more arbitrary than our brain size and our having legs and arms. They all evolved in specific circumstances. That they weren't guided by something 100% independent of those circumstances hardly makes them arbitrary. E.g., if you pose a question and I answer it, the fact that my answer was influenced by your question rather than basing itself on principles 100% independent of you and your question doesn't make my answer arbitrary. In fact I'd say just the opposite. (See what's going on here? You or Shawn seem to be willing to call something arbitrary because it's not guided by something that itself is arbitrary, not guided by something that guides us while not being at all guided by us.)
no subject
Date: 2008-04-24 02:42 pm (UTC)By "the people who thought otherwise" I mean the people who thought that the thing doing the guiding had to be 100% independent of the thing being guided.
(Btw, it isn't that most people would say they don't think the guide needs to be 100% independent of thing being guided; rather, they don't give the issue any thought, and in their everyday lives don't demand that something guiding them be 100% independent of them. I'd say that this is true even when people think they're trying to take direction from God, though this is a whole complicated issue I'm not going to get into right now.)