Ron Yezzi
Philosophy Department
Minnesota State U., Mankato
©2001 by Ron Yezzi
(May be downloaded for per-
sonal, non-commercial use)
Richard Rorty
(Based Upon Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity)
I. Rejection of Philosophy As We Have Known It
A. The Nature of Truth
1. Truth is not the discovery of a correspondence between our language and a non-linguistic state of affairs, as philosophers have maintained traditionally.
2. The term "true" is only a linguistic attachment to sentences within language, a wholly human creation.
3. "Most of reality is indifferent to our descriptions of it (p. 7)," such that our descriptions are useful creations rather than adequate or inadequate expressions of it.
a. ". . . the fact that Newton's vocabulary lets us predict the world more easily than Aristotle's does not mean that the world speaks Newtonian (p. 6)"
b. We become aware of this indifference by considering the nature of our vocabularies (holistic collections of descriptions in language) rather than by focusing upon particular literal statements.
4. The belief in truth as a discovery of reality is a remnant of theological thinking where we try to understand the mind of God.
5. Truth is whatever we agree upon after free and open discussion of our creative descriptions (p. 67).
B. Essences
1. Philosophy does not, and should not attempt to, discover the essence of things such as human nature or justice—as it has done traditionally.
a. This follows from his account of truth.
C. Method
1. Traditionally philosophers proceed rationally—by constructing arguments, avoiding contradictions, functioning logically, rationally responding to objections—as if there is truth and essences to be known.
2. Rorty's method relies on the dialectic of persuasion rather than on rational justification: he tries to make his descriptive vocabulary more attractive than older ones.
D. Once we turn away from traditional philosophy's attempts to arrive at final truths and essences, we recognize the contingent nature of our vocabularies—particularly their temporary nature and their dependence upon historical circumstance. —This is why Rorty views himself as a historicist.
1. In particular, we need to end concern with the distinction between "absolute" and "relative"—so that charges of relativism become irrelevant as an objection to a vocabulary.
II. Rejection of Science
A. Science as "Knowledge"
1. Science as knowledge is subject to all the problems associated with the traditional search for truth and essences. In particular, the claim of methodological objectivity must be given up.
2. Historians of science (e.g. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) have shown that scientific achievement is not governed by methodological objectivity and "how pointless it is to try to isolate something called 'the scientific method'" (p. 52)
B. Science and Culture
1. Science is no longer the "most interesting or promising or exciting area of culture," (p. 52) despite the ways in which expansion of the sciences have made possible realization of political goals never before possible (presumably, something like the technology that allows large masses of people to avoid much backbreaking labor or starvation or to enjoy the comforts of contemporary life--RY).
2. We have to cope with the receding of science from cultural life due largely to the way its highly specialized languages become increasingly difficult to master.
3. Art and utopian politics are much more useful as activities that can excite the young.
III. Contingency
A. Language
1. Borrowing from Nietzsche and Donald Davidson, Rorty regards all language to be metaphor—so that literal statements are familiar (often tired) metaphors rather than a medium that captures reality.
a. There are no facts or real meanings that language is supposed to represent.
b. New metaphors rely on old metaphors to some extent for language to be communicable; but the old metaphors are not thereby rendered descriptive of reality in any special way.
2. Language is a task of self-creation rather than of discovery.
3. Our current vocabularies are subject to time and chance and therefore are contingent—despite our tendency to try to give them permanence by reciting platitudes.
B. Selfhood
1. Traditionally philosophers have tried to achieve self-consciousness of our own essence by transcending the contingencies of our existence (and mortality) through identification with imperishable truths. Or, with Kant's treatment of morality, there is the quest for achievement of a moral self whose rationality transcends the contingencies of life.
2. But given the rejection of traditional views of truth and language, the traditional notion of self-realization also becomes a tired description ready for dumping.
a. Rorty credits Nietzsche with providing an alternate, more useful description, namely, the self-creating self trying to overcome what is merely inherited from others.
b. Rorty credits Freud with establishing the contingent nature of the moral self (in contrast with Kant) by showing how our moral sense develops through internalization of contingent conditions of our social existence rather than through rational thought.
c. The metaphors of geniuses (the works of major thinkers, artists, etc.) result from "the accidental coincidence of a private [idiosyncratic] obsession with a public need" (p. 37) rather than from the discovery of some grander truth.
3. The self should be seen as "a tissue of contingent relations, a web which stretches backward and forward through past and future time" (p. 41) rather than "a unified, present, self-contained substance."
C. Community
1. There is no rational, universal foundation for a moral community (as philosophers have sought traditionally) because there is no morally privileged standpoint from which to make universal judgments.
2. We must embrace (a) a willingness to stand by our own contingent commitments (even to the point of dying for them, p. 189) and (b) a willingness to live with plurality.
3. We need "a historical narrative about the rise of liberal institutions and customs—the institutions and customs that were designed to diminish cruelty, make possible government by the consent of the governed, and permit as much domination-free communication as possible to take place" (p. 68) that is persuasive rather than demonstrative of some suprahistorical truth about society.
a. We need a redescription of a liberal society that is "poeticized" rather than "rationalized" or "scientized." (p. 53)
D. De-divinization - Rorty envisions a liberal society that is thoroughly secular in two senses: (1) The traditional God-language no longer captures the human imagination; and (2) The indirect remnants of God-language—namely, final or absolute truths, language that corresponds with reality, self-realization as understanding of the eternal truths of existence, and a universally just society—will no longer be relevant to present-day vocabularies.
IV. Private Irony and Liberal Hope
A. Conditions for Ironists:
1. Continuing doubts about the finality of their own current vocabularies due to the impressiveness of other vocabularies encountered;
2. Recognizing that no arguments within their own vocabularies can either support or do away with these doubts; and
3. No judgments that their own vocabularies are closer to reality than others or related to a power beyond their own self-creations.
B. Ironist Method
1. ". . . when we surrender an old platitude (e.g. 'The number of biological species is fixed' or . . ., we have made a change rather than discovered a fact." (p. 77)
2. The ironist proceeds through redescriptions rather inferences, with vocabularies rather than propositions as the unit of persuasion.
3. Hegel's dialectic as a model: he exhibited a literary skill making "smooth, rapid transitions from one terminology to another." (p. 78)
4. There is a continuous process of redescription and comparison, fueled by redescriptions relating to ourselves and the alternate redescriptions of others.
5. Reading books is the easiest way for intellectuals to engage in this process of redescription and comparison (hence the value of literary critics who can act as "moral advisers" because their own wide reading has enabled them to escape the limits of a vocabulary developed from a single or few books).
C. Transition to Liberal Hope
1. While the ironist has a method of achieving a "private self-image," this process is not useful in dealing with politics. The non-private directing of our lives rests upon another interest that is never commensurable with the process that leads to one's being an ironist.
2. This other interest for liberals is an attempt to reduce suffering or cruelty through a society of free institutions.
3. The liberal ironist takes along the lessons and methods of irony in also expressing liberal hope.
4. There is no way to bring about a unitary intellectual synthesis of private irony and social (liberal) hope for the liberal ironist: It would be like an attempt to unify the positions of Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill (p. 85).
5. Hence the private-public split for the liberal ironist does not admit of any automatic or reasoned priorities about when we should devote ourselves to private self-creation or the advancement of our social hopes.
D. Liberal Hope
1. Although there is no neutral or higher standard by which to justify and direct any attempt to reduce cruelty, there is a liberal’s hope that a society of free institutions can bring about progress in this direction.
2. By exposing ourselves to alternate vocabularies and providing institutions sufficiently free to maximize discussion of alternatives, liberals can hope to generate a sense of human solidarity with others so as to bring about a lessening of cruelty in the world.
3. "But that solidarity is not thought of as a recognition of a core self, the human essence in all human beings. Rather it is thought of as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation - the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of 'us.' That is why I said, in Chapter 4 [Private Irony and Liberal Hope], that detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation (in, e.g., novels or ethnographies) rather than philosophical or religious treatises, were the modern intellectual's principal contributions to moral progress." (p. 192)
4. Liberals must look upon their expression of solidarity as a "we-intention" (Wilfred Sellars' term), that is, as a historically contingent assertion of what we want to do about cruelty and about relating to other people as "us," rather than as an assertion about "our common humanity" or "natural human rights."
5. Liberals (or better yet, liberal ironists) recognize suffering and want to minimize it; but they offer no reasons why we need to care about suffering.
E. Solutions to problems
1. Rorty's view of liberal society retains a fundamental place for non-intellectuals (who constitute the greater number of people in society - RY): While non-intellectuals cannot be full-fledged ironists in a liberal society, they can be "commonsensically nominalist and historicist." (p. 87)
a. That is, they can recognize and accept the contingencies of their linguistic beliefs and historical situations—while also sifting through concrete (in a Deweyan sense) social alternatives and programs.
b. So non-intellectuals can still exhibit the self-criticism and sense of solidarity that appears as well in the full-fledged liberal ironist.
c. Although, in practice, Rorty thinks that a liberal society can exhibit an ironist view, he does not think that the "public rhetoric" of such a society will do so—since it is so unlikely that a culture would raise the young to be as dubious about the beliefs of their own culture as an ironist would demand.
2. The charge that the ironist view will destroy the cohesiveness of society: Rorty maintains that common vocabularies and common hopes, the basis for social cohesion, are still possible—through liberal hope—because persons will be able to retain optimism about social progress.
3. The charge that the ironist view will destroy social hope because there is no foundation (rational or universal underpinnings) for moral action and progress: Once we turn away from the futility of traditional metaphysical demands (as Rorty's redescription requires), we open the way to a society based upon contingency, but still capable of exhibiting liberal hope.
4. The charge that Rorty's view is ethnocentric: Although historical contingency does not allow us to escape ethnocentrism, Rorty claims (a) that the ethnocentrism of a liberal ironist develops out of a basic doubts about ethnocentrism (that is, pointing out the contingencies that undermine ethnocentric judgments) and (b) that the solidarity view based upon we-intentions is constantly expanding toward "an ever larger and more variegated ethos." (p. 198)
V. My Commentary
A. Appreciating Rorty's Position
1. The notion of our engaging in self-creation rather than merely copying our inherited beliefs or vocabularies is inspiring.
2. His shift from discussion of individual statements to vocabularies is challenging. The contemporary difficulties he lays out with respect to resolving different vocabularies resonates with the frequent social experience of not being able to convince anyone to change one's perspectives based upon reasoning or evidence. It is hard to see how my own liberal perspective, no matter how rationally supported, will convince a committed conservative like columnist George Will or a committed celebrity person-on-the-street like Governor Jesse Ventura to come over to my views on a number of social issues.
B. Disagreeing with Rorty's Position
1. One can disagree with his position on his own terms simply by presenting an alternative vocabulary that one hopes will be more attractive than his own, that is, by redescribing his position to make it look bad, while making one's own look good.
2. Granting this, I would prefer to retain much of the traditional approaches to knowledge and society that he rejects. And of course, I could also disagree with Rorty in terms of these more traditional approaches.
3. By reducing the rational criteria and evidence supporting liberalism in traditional vocabularies to nothing while still wanting to retain liberalism as a social goal, Rorty has to recreate liberal hope out of nothing. And he does so by creating what I would describe as a chaotic Rube Goldberg machine: multitudinous and complex routes of voracious book reading to familiarize ourselves with alternate vocabularies, never subject to rational or external criteria, will converge on a sense of solidarity in relieving human suffering.
a. In passing, I might mention that it is difficult to reconcile his insistence on a total absence of privileged perspectives in this process with (a) his characterization of experienced literary critics as persons who can serve as moral advisers because their wide reading does not limit them to a single vocabulary and (b) his recognition of the liberated ethnocentrism of "we liberals" at the end of the book.
C. All Language As Metaphor
1. All language is a selected model that is incomplete with respect to what it is about—hence its being a model. For example, if I set out to describe a room, my language is always incomplete. If you want then to interpret a metaphor (a metaphor for the term "metaphor"?) as a likeness-model, then it follows that all language is metaphor. But this is a very broad (too broad) interpretation of metaphor.
2. There are important differences between metaphorical language and literal language in terms of intention, practice, and result. The broad interpretation of metaphor just mentioned ignores these differences.
a. A poet can reveal facts about the human condition and a scientist can reveal the beauty of nature; but there is a basic difference between aesthetic intent and factual intent. The poet can take creative liberties that the scientist cannot. (The scientist can be creative, but only within a more limited range than the poet.)
b. Similarly with practice: There is a difference between writing poetry or fiction and writing biography or reporting on scientific investigation. Literal language, again, is more limiting and limited than metaphorical language.
c. The satisfyingly exciting, rhythmic babble of a jazz singer can be very poetic; but it doesn’t count for much when we are seeking literal descriptions.
D. All Reality As Language
1. The Non-Linguistic
a. In two of the more mystifying passages of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (p. 40 and p. 94), Rorty admits the existence of a non-linguistic reality that we can "recognize," namely, pain (p. 40 and p. 94) and the power of the world (p. 40)—although he denies that there is any truth in language about them by which we can appropriate them in order to overcome them.
b. The claim about our ability to recognize, without overcoming, pain is especially mystifying in the light of reduction of suffering as the hope of solidarity and in his references (on p. 80) to the usefulness of novelists, poets, and journalists who are very good at putting situations of pain into language. It seems that he is setting forth the task of overcoming pain specifically through the ability of language to aid us in overcoming a non-linguistic reality.
c. Aside from this mystification though, what especially strikes me is the way by which this non-linguistic reality of pain can be expanded. Surely, if there is non-linguistic pain, there also is non-linguistic pleasure. There must also be a further non-linguistic array of sensations or percepts—namely, sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. And if pain is a feeling, there must be other non-linguistic feelings as well. There thus arises a considerable non-linguistic reality that presumably can be related to through language in the same way that is possible for pain.
2. A Pragmatic Point About Language
a. Linguistic reductionism by which Rorty reduces everything to created vocabularies lacking any external limiting referents or any experience beyond the language of the vocabulary itself creates problems related to practical usefulness, or pragmatic application, in human life.
b. Consider statements such as "Practice what you preach," or "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." Regardless what qualifications we may want to place on these statements, they make distinctions that have great practical usefulness. This usefulness is better served by making a distinction between language and physical action rather than a distinction between preach-language and practice-language or between words-language and physical-things-language.
c. In the same way, we can say that a description of an external reality is nothing more than a selected vocabulary because it always occurs in language, although we then have to distinguish, say, purely speculative- or imaginative-language from reality-language. So, in practice, or as a matter of usefulness, we have to preserve the same distinction in the language is everything vocabulary that we have in the traditional vocabulary which separates language as a medium from reality.
d. While we always can stretch the meaning of language to cover everything theoretically, the stretching also produces a pragmatic distortion in terms of everyday existence that casts doubt on the linguistic position. It is not so much that one refutes the language is everything vocabulary as much as it is the stretching distortion that casts doubt on the correctness or usefulness of the vocabulary.
3. Avoidance of Linguocentrism (one of what I like to refer to as a variety of X-centrisms)
a. Even if we always express ourselves through language, it does not follow that language is all there is. We need to ask this question: Do we have sound reasons to believe that language can be related to, or affected by, something external beyond language itself? Traditionally, the answer has been affirmative.
b. Rorty makes a leap from the sound point that language is not simply a transparent medium or mirror of an external objective world to the extreme position of denying that we can ever correlate our language with anything external to it. There is a middle ground here: We can grant that language is not a transparent medium and that it raises barriers in the way of direct and identical representation of external reality, while still holding that there are ways of correlating language with that external reality. The standards of reason and science have proven themselves over time to be very useful and successful in developing better (more adequate) correlations.
4. Vocabularies vs. Particular Literal Statements
a. Although Rorty's preference for discussion of vocabularies rather than particular literal statements suits his purpose of substituting creativity for discovery and dissolving any correspondence between language and an external reality, we need to consider literal statements more carefully.
b. The failure of particular literal statements forms a foundation for holding that language can correlate with the external more or less adequately. Everyone experiences the error-correcting mechanism of accepting a particular statement only to find it does not adequately correlate with the external: "I decided that it was a dead wire; but I got an electric shock" or "I pressed 'delete' even after the warning because I presumed that I was deleting just one file—only to find out that I deleted the entire web page." (It does not take belief in God to infer a correlation, or lack of correlation, between language and the external.)
c. This error-correcting process is extendable to sets of literal statements.
d. At the level of Rorty's vocabularies however, additional problems seem to arise: (1) All the statements in the vocabulary are not coherently articulated at all times; (2) equally determinate error-correcting techniques are not present for all statements in the vocabulary; and (3) there may not be enough evidence available to compare the relative adequacy of correlation with the external for two different vocabularies. These problems establish the greater complexity of vocabularies over particular literal statements; but they do not establish the irrelevance of error-correcting techniques and evidence. That is to say, as sets of literal statements get larger, there is no point at which error-correcting techniques and evidence cease to have a bearing on the adequacy or inadequacy of the set as a whole. Complexity may weaken present judgments of adequacy or it may cause postponement of judgments of adequacy; but it does not do away with the relevance of rational inquiry.
E. Rorty's View of Science
1. Rorty focuses on the natural sciences in trying to dissolve any correspondence between statements and an external reality; in doing so, he ignores the social sciences and, accordingly, gives them no particular role in transforming culture. It is at this point that his (postmodern? - not a term that Rorty likes) pragmatism departs strongly from the spirit and letter of John Dewey's pragmatism. Dewey saw "experimental intelligence" functioning in the social/behavioral sciences as the major hope for progressive change of cultures and the directing of social policies.
2. I do not see why we cannot reconstruct conceptions of science to retain the relevance of correspondence with the external and of rational inquiry and evidence. There is more to be said in favor of this reconstruction, I think, than of Rorty's radical deflation by which we must start over again from nothing.
3. Rorty's conclusion that science is no longer an exciting center of cultural interest (especially to the young) needs to be tempered by the following:
a. There is a considerable amount of scientific education, in both natural and social/behavioral sciences, that occurs in our society and influences both people's beliefs and actions.
b. Even if people, including young people, do not get greatly excited by science, our culture will suffer significant harm (i.e. will experience greater cruelty and suffering) if people do not have a healthy respect for scientific knowledge and what it makes possible.
c. It is difficult to see how Rorty's goal of alleviating suffering and cruelty is possible without serious reliance on science.
4. Whether the issue is history, government policy, or anthrax, you ignore what science can tell you at your own peril.
F. Rorty's Method
1. Although Rorty proclaims a new method by which he is just trying to make a different descriptive vocabulary more attractive and therefore more persuasive, much of what he writes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is equally well interpretable as traditional inquiry and argument. As I see it, he can proclaim his new method in language; but that does not necessarily make it what he claims it to be. And this, of course, is the problem I have with Rorty's whole approach to language. Not all self-creation is equal or equally useful; and devotion to discovery places useful limits on self-creation.
2. My description of Rorty's method as a chaotic Rube Goldberg machine rests upon the claim that traditional philosophical methods are still useful and efficient and therefore more desirable. However I do not thereby want to deny the great value of experiences in the world or the arts that go beyond the professional methods of philosophy.
3. Rorty's acceptance of a non-bridgeable divide between the private and the public (so that we cannot set priorities with respect to private self-creation and civic action) is unsatisfactory. While I can accept the two as competing interests that we must constantly agonize about to strive for a proper balance, I cannot accept any claim that seeking a proper balance is an impossible misunderstanding. (If you cannot turn Nietzsche into John Stuart Mill, this reveals an impossible bifurcation of the self and the need for a more accommodating middle position rather than two extreme ones.) This bifurcation is an especially troubling problem for Rorty when he wants to assert as a liberal that "cruelty is the worst thing we do" at the same time that he wants to say (a) that there is no reason why we should care about cruelty and (b) that reduction of cruelty is no more important as an interest than private self-creation.
G. The Meaning of Liberal
1. Rorty's acceptance of Judith Schlar's definition of a liberal in terms of the desire to reduce cruelty does not resonate all that well with me.
a. Conservatives talk about "bleeding heart" liberals and they try to portray President George W. Bush as a "compassionate" conservative; so there is the suggestion that liberals are very much concerned with the avoidance of suffering. And I think that liberals are concerned about suffering. But I think that this concern exists within a much wider context of liberalism. People generally have to draw lines with respect to how much suffering in the world they will tolerate or will try to reduce. Liberals draw these lines differently than conservatives.
b. Conservatives focus upon the role of individual rights (conceived in terms of non-interference) and of personal character in life; liberals add to these roles a special emphasis upon the need for social conditions that guarantee genuine equality of opportunity (a level playing field) for everyone. As a matter of justice then, conservatives have fewer problems with suffering than liberals do.
c. Within this wider context of liberalism, the liberalism of John Dewey as I see it, liberals need to rely fundamentally on the social sciences, with their rational methods of search and justification, to counter the much simpler and commonsensical views of conservatives. I don't think that anyone should be able to portray liberalism as just gushy sentimentality.
d. Along with Rorty, I agree that the popular media serve very useful functions in the advancement of liberalism. Portrayals of everyday experiences in films, plays, and novels can establish the relevance of liberalism in ways that a more sophisticated understanding of social sciences cannot. For example, I have a fondness for a recurring theme in the old Frank Capra films (such as It's A Wonderful Life) that, if you just give average people a chance, they'll make something worthwhile of their lives. And since most people probably have more contact with popular media than works in the social sciences, there may be more exposure to liberal themes there. In contrast with Rorty though, I would add as well the importance of the news media in presenting important information through what is popular (or popularized) social science.
H. Rorty's Optimism About Open, Free Discussion
1. While I share with Rorty a belief in the value of open, free discussion in society, I do not share with him the view that such discussion based upon attracting (attractive) vocabularies rather than upon reasons will converge on human solidarity.
2. I find the following statements significant: "The idea that liberal societies are bound together by philosophical beliefs seems to me ludicrous. What binds societies together are common vocabularies and common hopes" (p. 86)
a. While I grant that testing citizens on their knowledge of philosophy in order to explain their sense of community is ludicrous, I would maintain that their "common vocabularies and common hopes" rest strongly on a variety of traditional philosophical beliefs that just do not happen to be articulated in terms of the typical writings of philosophers.
b. I think that this point is especially evident in Rorty's admission that a culture's public rhetoric cannot be ironist (p. 87). This is another way of saying that a culture's "common vocabularies and common hopes" must rest in major measure upon what are traditional philosophical beliefs.
c. Belief in the value of open, free discussion in society can rest upon traditional philosophical beliefs, as argued for example in the works of John Stuart Mill. I am much more doubtful that an ironist method can support "common vocabularies and common hopes"
3. While Rorty can be optimistic now about the prospects of open, free discussion leading to solidarity, I expect that, over time, the need to rely on traditional methods of reasoning and argument would be necessary to establish standards of adequacy and inadequacy.
a. This is my standard criticism of postmodernist views, namely, that they have no way of settling disagreements but rely on the hope that the disagreements will not occur. To get beyond disagreement, they eventually will make use of the traditional methods of reasoning and argument.
b. These traditional methods have been developed and refined over a long period; they are not bound to one particular content; they are largely self-correcting; and they have greatly advanced the human condition.
E-mail Messages:? ronald.yezzi@mnsu.edu
Last updated 11/9/01