Date:          Mon, 13 Jul 1998 12:46:10 EST
Subject:       FYI/Rorty review in _The Nation_


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"Rortyism for Beginners" by Carlin Romano 

       TRUTH AND PROGRESS: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3.  By Richard 
Rorty.  Cambridge. 355 pp. Paper $18.95. 


Witnessing the great American philosopher Richard Rorty at his moment 
of media crossover--the costume change from bookish anchorite to willing 
soundbite, from Dewey Lite to Clinton adviser on the Zeit--is an instructive 
experience. Like the lordly male moose one yearns to behold on a Maine back
 road, Rorty now boasts the characteristic majestic antlers: those appositive 
phrases in newspaper citations, clauses like "America's most famous academic 
philosopher" or "the pre-eminent cultural philosopher in the United States 
today." Part of what makes him ready for prime time, of course, is that he 
appears, fixed at last in the mass culture's headlights, to be all antlers--a 
creature entirely crowned by the tags of others. What makes him the 
awesome figure he is--the command of the deep forest, the nonpareil grasp 
of the philosophical world--necessarily trails behind as he eyeballs, and is 
eyeballed by, his new audience. 

 Rorty, it appears, is ready for the close-up American philosophers get--a 
quick once-over. Thanks to this year's Achieving Our Country (Harvard), 
the widely reviewed tip of his secular, reformist, anti-epistemological iceberg, 
he's drawing the usual misreading and distortion from the political right--
as if he were William Ginsburg in toga, needing to be shown his place. 
To Roger Kimball in The American Spectator, America's 66-year-old 
philosophical maverick is a "happy nihilist" and "the official philosopher 
of postmodern academic liberals," even though Rorty prominently zapped 
"postmodernism" last November in the New York Times's "Most Overrated 
Idea" symposium--he branded it "a word that pretends to stand for an idea," 
and one "it would be nice to get rid of." According to David Brooks in The 
Weekly Standard, Rorty predicts in Achieving Our Country that "we are 
about to become a dictatorship," even though a glance at the text shows 
that Rorty is extrapolating from Edward Luttwak's suggestion that "fascism 
may be the American future." To Arnold Beichman in the Washington 
Times, Rorty seeks "to resuscitate a moribund Marxified radicalism," an 
odd size-up, given Rorty's statement that "Marxism was not only a 
catastrophe for all the countries in which Marxists took power, but a 
disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not." 

 The most disingenuous criticism, however, has to be George Will's May 25 
Newsweek attack on Rorty's "remarkably bad book." Will charges that Rorty 
"radiates contempt for the country" and "seems to despise most Americans." 
Asking, "When was the last time Rorty read a newspaper?" Will declares that 
Rorty "knows next to nothing" about the "real America." Quite unfair, you 
might think, to a book that variously touches on the Wagner Act, Stonewall 
and other non-ivory-tower events. Nowhere does Will advise his Newsweek 
readers that he's derided by Rorty in Achieving Our Country as one of those 
"columnists" who base their "know-nothing criticisms of the contemporary 
American academy" on believing "everything they read in scandalmongering 
books by Dinesh D'Souza, David Lehman and others. They do not read 
philosophy, but simply search out titles and sentences to which they can 
react with indignation." 

 No matter. For those who do read philosophy--and think it behooves critics 
of the country's most influential philosopher to examine his background beliefs
 before whacking him--Truth and Progress comes at an apt time. A selection of 
his philosophical essays from the nineties (along with two earlier pieces), the 
volume undermines widespread shibboleths about Rorty: that he doesn't argue,
 that he rejects analytic philosophy, that he thinks philosophy is dead, that he 
nonetheless celebrates all Continental philosophers from Foucault to Lacan to 
Derrida, that he doesn't believe in truth. Moreover, the book shows that he's 
vulnerable to criticism, but hardly on the sloppy grounds advanced by enemies. 

 Helpfully organized into three sections--truth, moral progress and the role of 
philosophy in human progress--the book enables readers, as Achieving Our 
Country does not, to trace the full arc of Rorty's beliefs. It permits the media 
culture now taking stock of Rorty to locate the challenges of his work accurately, 
to understand the linkage--for there is linkage--between his philosophical beliefs,
his intellectual autobiography and his politics. Finally, Truth and Progress exhibits
 both the dazzle and idiosyncrasy of Rorty's literary style and eristic habits--the sharp
 insider wit, the hyperactive thumbnailing of other thinkers to hawk fresh images 
of their thought, the will to eponymy and syncretism, the vote-with-one's-feet 
reaction to what Imre Lakatos called "degenerate research programs" in philosophy.
 Both rightists and leftists should agree, though with different looks on their faces,
 that Truth and Progress offers a liberal education in contemporary philosophy. 

 To understand Rorty's refinements of his views here, consider the most compact 
version he has given of his own career--the short self-portrait he contributed to 
the recent Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. In it he describes how in the late 
seventies he sought to combine insights from analytic philosophers Wilfrid 
Sellars and W.V.O. Quine "to formulate a generalized criticism of the notion 
that knowledge was a matter of mental or linguistic representation of reality. 
This anti-representationalism was the principal thesis of Philosophy and the
 Mirror of Nature (1979), a book which went on to argue that the end of 
representationalism meant the end of epistemologically-centered philosophy 
(though not of philosophy itself)." He describes his second book, Consequences
 of Pragmatism (1982) as a collection of essays "elaborating on some of the 
points made there." 

 Moving on to his next essay collections--Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989);
 Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (1991); and Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991)--
Rorty writes that "I tried to bring together the anti-representationalist doctrines 
common to James, Dewey, [Donald] Davidson and Wittgenstein with some similar
 doctrines shared by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. The main argument is 
that once one puts aside foundationalism, representationalism and the sterile 
quarrels between 'realists' and 'anti-realists,' one comes to see philosophy as 
continuous with science on one side and with literature on the other. I have 
also argued that the traditional tasks of moral philosophy should be taken 
over by literature and political experimentation." 

 "Although frequently accused," Rorty drily sums up, "of raving irrationalism 
and unconscionable frivolity by the political right, and of insufficient radicalism, 
as well as premature anti-communism, by the political left, I think of myself as 
sharing John Dewey's political attitudes and hopes, as well as his pragmatism.
 In my most recent work, I have been trying to distinguish what is living from
 what is dead in Dewey's thought." 

 Rorty keeps to his program in Truth and Progress, making clear that the
 pragmatist conception of truth anchors all else. What American 
pragmatists from Peirce, Dewey and James to Sellars, Quine and Davidson
 established, in Rorty's view, is that we understand truth better when we 
abandon such notions as "the intrinsic nature of reality" and "
correspondence to reality" for something like James's famous phrase 
that "the true is the good in the way of belief." We must, however, 
 understand James to be saying that "we have no criterion of truth 
other than justification," and that justification will always be relative 
to audiences. While Rorty accepts (pace his caricaturists) that "true" 
is semantically "an absolute term," he notes that "its conditions of
application will always be relative." For complex reasons whose 
articulation Rorty credits, as he does much of his epistemological 
perspective, to Davidson (a magisterial analytic philosopher now 
retired from Berkeley), Rorty believes pragmatists cannot sensibly 
attempt "to specify the nature of truth" because its very absoluteness 
makes it indefinable. In practice, it, like "objectivity," amounts to 
intersubjective agreement within a particular community. Rorty sees 
the substitution of "objectivity-as-intersubjectivity" for "objectivity as 
accurate representation" as "the key pragmatic move." The link between
 independent reality and thinking is causal, not rational. 

 Rorty's first section of eight essays explores nuances in his views 
on truth by grappling with those very epistemologists he describes
 as engaged in "sterile quarrels." The greatest canard about Rorty is
 that he's intellectually lazy in a way peculiar to so-called relativists. 
On the contrary, no modern philosopher has read a wider range of 
both Anglo-American and Continental peers--and commented on 
them more indefatigably--than Rorty. Whatever one thinks of Rorty's 
emerging rules of thumb, it's a sociological fact of recent American 
philosophy that his once-eccentric practice of reading (and urging 
students to read) both Quine and Heidegger, both Davidson and 
Foucault, helped to wear down (if not tear down) the Heavy-Meta 
Curtain that made reading both analytic and Continental philosophy
 until the seventies as weird as practicing two religions simultaneously. 

 In these essays Rorty takes on the work of Davidson, Crispin Wright
 (a realist completely at odds with Rorty's views), Hilary Putnam, John
 Searle, Charles Taylor, Daniel Dennett, Thomas Nagel, Robert Brandom,
 John McDowell and Michael Williams. He acknowledges that the tone is
 "dismissive," that his aim is "discouraging further attention" to the topic. 
Yet sentence by sentence, he argues--that is, he presents complex
 theoretical considerations, richly footnoted, meant to persuade us 
to abandon realism. 

 In "Is Truth a Goal of Inquiry?" for instance, Rorty answers no, because
 pragmatism doesn't permit the notion that we ever get closer to a 
capital-T truth that trumps all others for all times and communities. 
But not before he enters the nomenclature of his opponent, Wright, 
and explores the possibilities. Similarly, in "Hilary Putnam and the 
Relativist Menace," Rorty painstakingly seeks to identify the differences
 between their pragmatist positions, and accepts some rebukes. He agrees,
 for instance, that for pragmatists, "the question should always be 'What 
use is it?' rather than 'Is it real?'" Throughout the essays, whether he's
 pondering everyday phrases like "representing accurately" or manipulating
 such peculiar notions as P.F. Strawson's that facts are "sentence-shaped 
objects," or training intense attention on the signature phrases favored 
by lead actors in the realist/anti-realist follies--McDowell's "answerability
 to the world," Bernard Williams's "how things are anyway," Taylor's "in
 virtue of the way things are"--Rorty does his homework. 

 Along the way, he also explains the philosophical hats he is and isn't 
willing to wear (since you ask, he's a naturalist, holist and psychological
 nominalist, but not a reductivist). And always and ever he elaborates, 
coloring in his big picture. The pragmatist conception of truth, Rorty 
admits, should not claim to be "commonsensical," because most people
 hold on to "realist" and "representationalist" intuitions. Rather, 
pragmatists must be, like Dewey, reformers "involved in a long-term 
attempt to change the rhetoric, the common sense, and the self-image
 of their community." He also airs the Darwinism that structures most
 of his other beliefs. By Darwinism, Rorty means the view that humans
 are "animals with special organs and abilities," but those organs and 
 abilities "have no more of a representational relation to the intrinsic 
nature of things than does the anteater's snout or the bowerbird's skill
 at weaving." Those who charge Rorty with simplistic relativism might 
consult this and other parts of Truth and Progress to confirm that he 
knows the traditional argument that relativism is self-contradictory and
 easily slips it. He agrees, in fact, with Putnam: "Like Relativism... 
Realism is an impossible attempt to view the world from Nowhere." 
Rorty says his "strategy for escaping the self-referential difficulties into
 which 'the Relativist' keeps getting himself is to move everything over
  from epistemology and metaphysics to cultural politics, from claims 
 about knowledge and appeals to self-evidence to suggestions about 
 what we should try." 

 It is in such observations that Rorty indicates that big, nonepistemological
 choices--linkages--follow from the knowledge situation he describes: 
"Once one gives up the appearance-reality distinction, and the attempt
 to relate such things as predictive success and diminished cruelty to 
  the intrinsic nature of reality, one has to give separate accounts of
 progress in science and in morals." Pragmatist accounts, that is, which
 require that the answers reflect our interests as problem-solving 
organisms and that the distinctions they utilize make a difference in 
ordinary practice. Scientific progress becomes "an increased ability to
 make predictions." Moral progress turns into "becoming like ourselves
 at our best." Philosophical progress occurs when we "find a way of 
integrating the worldviews and the moral intuitions we inherited 
from our ancestors with new scientific theories or new sociopolitical 
institutions and theories or other novelties." 

 In his second section of essays, on moral progress, Rorty similarly
 eschews representation for creativity. We should, he suggests, stop
 asking, "What is our nature?" and ask instead, "What can we make
 of ourselves?" He rejects foundationalism in human rights as in 
epistemology. The "question of whether human beings really have
 the rights enumerated in the Helsinki Declaration," he remarks,
 "is not worth raising." While strongly supportive of feminism, 
he wishes certain feminist writers would abandon realist "rhetoric" 
that suggests women have a "nature" or oppression needs a "theory." 
Stories, not principles or definitions, lead to moral progress, so "the 
difference between the moral realist and the moral antirealist seems 
to pragmatists a difference that makes no practical difference." Instead
 of theories, we need "sentimental education" of the sort movies, 
journalism and novels provide, which will expand the set of "people
 like us." In morality, as elsewhere, we make progress, Rorty insists, 
by becoming bold narrators and Romantic inventors of better vocabularies. 

 In his final section, Rorty drives home a related point about philosophy. 
For him, "philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but
 by becoming more imaginative." Geniuses like "Frege and Mill, Russell 
and Heidegger, Dewey and Habermas, Davidson and Derrida" spark this
 kind of progress, not "underlaborers" like himself, who do the useful 
"dirty work" of clearing philosophical rubbish and "drum-beating" for 
new narratives and vocabularies. Geniuses induce "Gestalt-switches," 
which no method can guarantee. Because "the history of philosophy is
 the history of Gestalt-switches, not of the painstaking carrying-out of 
research programs," Rorty denies he has "any views about what form 
philosophy ought to take." Philosophy should have the freedom we 
offer, at our most liberal, to art. He concludes that to "give up on the
 idea that philosophy gets nearer to truth, and to interpret it as Dewey
 did, is to concede primacy to the imagination over the argumentative
 intellect, and to genius over professionalism." 

 Which narrative shifts appeal to Rorty? Here, unlike in Achieving Our
 Country, with its moralizing story of political activism and hope, Rorty 
does not offer a full-scale vision. But in assessing candidates, he favors 
Sartre's view that we should "attempt to draw the full conclusions from
 a consistently atheist position." At various points in his essays, Rorty 
returns to a dark notion that draws his epistemology and ethics together
 in a surprising way. Throughout history, Rorty believes, man has evinced
 a "desperate hope for a noncontingent and powerful ally"--God, Reason,
 Truth, Name Your Poison. In his essay on McDowell, Rorty puts it bluntly:
 "I agree with Heidegger that there is a straight line between the Cartesian
 quest for certainty and the Nietzschean will to power." In Rorty's view,
 our traditional seeking of "authoritative guidance"--from God, Reason, 
"the fierce father," "a nonhuman authority to whom we owe some sort 
of respect"--debilitates us as free agents. He opposes the "ambition of 
transcendence" that Thomas Nagel sees as crucial to philosophy. We 
should drop all that. 

 Rorty knows that the subtleties of his debates with Nagel and other 
peers are "as baffling to nonspecialists as are those among theologians 
who debate transubstantiation or who ask whether it is worse to be
 reincarnated as a hermaphrodite or as a beast." Yet his larger themes
 make clear that both the right's objection to Rorty as a wishy-washy,
 postmodernist believer in nothing and the left's gentler charge that 
he devalues cultural analysis misconstrue the challenge Rorty poses
 to all intellectual "stories." His vision of philosophy and art is nakedly 
Darwinian: Let a thousand narratives bloom, and those that survive 
will survive (not necessarily the fittest, since there's nothing to fit 
except differing purposes). 

 What, then, are the most appropriate criticisms of Rorty? Those that 
hold him to his pragmatist standards, then evaluate his narratives by 
how well they persuade us. While Rorty's thought is far too complex 
to permit a comprehensive catalogue of vulnerabilities here, three 
main angles suggest themselves: stylistic, rhetorical and moral. Rorty 
is unquestionably the best philosophical writer since Russell, gifted at
lacing details and abstractions together with a punch few can rival. Yet
 his most famous stylistic signature is his runaway eponymy--he's the
 biggest philosophical namedropper, the most inveterate cartographer,
 in the history of the field. "Brandom is, in this respect, to Davidson," 
he writes in his essay on the first thinker, "as McDowell is to Sellars." 
He begins a sentence in his essay on McDowell, "From a Sellarsian, 
Davidsonian, Brandomian, or Hegelian viewpoint..." 

 Pedantry? Mastery? Regardless, one only has to ponder the adjective 
"Rortyan" to fathom that adjectives aimed at capturing entire webs of
 belief are like webs themselves--full of holes. Can Rorty's narratives, 
fastened together at so many knots by these eponymous adjectives, 
win a long-range battle of persuasion? It's doubtful. In another doozy
 of a sentence, Rorty writes about the imagined conversations of great 
philosophers across time: "The Fregean, the Kripkean, the Popperian,
 the Whiteheadian, and the Heidegerrian will each reeducate Plato in 
a different way before starting to argue with him." Whether anyone 
will be able to speak Rorty after its head griot passes on remains to be seen. 

 Forensically, Rorty also practices a kind of therapeutic proselytization, a 
blend of Wittgenstein and Nancy Reagan. His most common argumentative
 move is to urge the reader to "Just Say No!" to concepts he dislikes. In 
Truth and Progress Rorty says we should "rid ourselves" of the notion 
of intelligibility. We should notice that talking about the "real" has been
 "more trouble than it was worth." We should "dissolve rather than 
solve the problem of freedom and determinism." We should dump 
such mental faculties as "thought" and "sensation." We should "just 
stop trying to write books called A History of Philosophy." We should 
know that "the time has come to drop the terms 'capitalism' and 
'socialism' from the political vocabulary of the Left." And we know 
from Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature what he thinks about
Descartes, representation and realism. We should do all this, he adds, 
in Humean good spirits, to achieve a Wittgensteinian peace. 

 Rorty is, for better or worse, the Rhett Butler of professional American 
philosophy: a man willing, in the end, to walk away from what's been 
most important in his life--and discipline--with a fine crusty confidence. 
The problem is, it's not always clear why others would want to join him 
in hitting the road. Take realism. For someone hostile to countless old 
distinctions, Rorty can be awfully binary. In Achieving Our Country he 
writes that "objectivity is a matter of intersubjective consensus among 
human beings, not of accurate representation of something nonhuman." 
Yet most battles about objectivity concern a third category--accurate 
representation of something human. Recognizing our hand in shaping 
narrative, we still think some stories more accurate than others. In his 
zeal to launch a thousand narrative ships, Rorty pays little mind to the 
journalistic truth that the first step in establishing a new tale may be to 
discredit the older tale already in place. It's a job he regularly performs--
his apostate rendition of modern philosophy as the mirror of nature is a
 classic--but never overtly honors. 

 On the contrary, he tends to pooh-pooh the enterprise of getting stories 
right, a possible case of Sartrean self-deception for this fine conceptual 
reporter (he'd hate to be called a correspondent), who plainly sweats to
 make his dispatches on other thinkers exact. In Achieving Our Country
 Rorty asserts that "there is no point in asking whether Lincoln or Whitman
 or Dewey got America right. Stories about what a nation has been and 
should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather 
attempts to forge a moral identity." But if we take Rorty at his word in 
Truth and Progress--that pragmatism requires imaginative stories that 
solve problems--then there is a point. It's just not an epistemological 
point. The point is that we want to know which is better for us. Too often, 
Rorty lets his fear of epistemological echoes lead him into diction that plays 
into the hands of those who dub him a relativist. It makes him sound as if 
he thinks that no one story is better than another, which is the opposite of
 what he believes. 

 Finally, Rorty scants another problem that arises from his belief in 
nonfoundational ethics propelled by humanizing stories. He almost 
never acknowledges that clearheaded pragmatism might mandate the 
use of absolutist, realist speech in a culture where absolute, realist intuitions
 persist. The only place in Truth and Progress where Rorty partly concedes 
this is in "Feminism and Pragmatism," where he writes: "Although practical 
politics will doubtless often require feminists to speak with the universalist
 vulgar, they might profit from thinking with the pragmatists." But doesn't
 that introduce a nonpragmatist form of empty mentalism? Rorty remarks 
in his final essay that his least favorite thought in Foucault is that "to imagin
  another system is to extend our participation in the present system." One
 might just as well say that to ignore the tenacity of the present system is to
 insure that one's imagined system will not prevail. For all his vaunting 
of future imaginative labor, Rorty underestimates how current "objectivist"
 tales are themselves imaginative, exploitable work. 

 Rorty's lack of interest in this "prudential" form of realism is best explained
 by the starkest lacuna in his philosophical ecumenicism--the absence of any
  appreciation for the reviving insights of classical rhetoric, the sensible human
 persuasion of others without bowing to eternal verities. One would expect 
greater affection from Rorty toward figures from Protagoras and Isocrates 
down to Gramsci (who knew that cultural battles matter) and Chaim 
Perelman, the Belgian philosopher and leader of the Belgian resistance, 
who abandoned analytic philosophy once he studied how lawyers actually 
argue cases in real life. Rorty often gives the impression that any attempt 
to persuade beyond simply standing up and reciting one's story or screening
 one's film or offering a fresh vocabulary smacks of surrender to old-fashioned
 realism. It is yet another irony of Rorty's ironism that this steadfast foe of realism
 is so insistent that people talk a correct meta-language. 

 Other openings in the Rortyan front line suggest themselves--his distinct lack 
of interest in the role of evil in moral responsibility, for instance, and his 
deafness to the jurisprudential overtones of "justification" that render it, 
in the public ear, a more realist notion than he thinks. Truth and Progress,
 nonetheless, demonstrates that Richard Rorty remains not only the master
 philosophical expositor of his era but a thinker who has raised (some would
 say lowered) philosophical historiography to an art form. Early on, Rorty 
shares an anecdote. "When I was a thrusting young academic philosopher,"
 he recalls, "I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe
 a starstudded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic."
 Hampshire, who'd attended, had been asked to sum up the results. "'No trick
 at all,' Hampshire explained, 'for an old syncretist hack like me.' At that 
moment, I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up." 

 As it turns out, Rorty overachieved. He long ago won a promotion, like it 
or not, to syncretic downsizer and designated Gestalt-switch-hitter. Just don't
 look for those tags in the newspaper articles. 
============================================ Carlin Romano, literary critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches 
philosophy at Bennington College. 



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