Rorty's Early Work

1. 1979 — What was actually radical about eliminative materialism; 2. “The Limits of Reductionism” — The rhetoric of moves — The metaphor of conversation; 3. Why republish the early work? — The technical conversation of philosophy; 4. So much missing — In this age of access — Where are the lectures?

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1.      At the end of his career, Richard Rorty was known as a stylish, philosophical crossdresser and stout reformist liberal who was the prime reason for the renaissance in pragmatism that occurred at the end of the 20^th century. In 1979, though, Rorty wasn’t known for any of this. Rorty’s reputation at that time was as an innovator in the philosophy of mind, and for being widely identified with the phrase “the linguistic turn.” The combined effect of the publication of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and his delivering the APA Eastern Division Presidential Address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in 1979 was to wipe out memory of that early work. From then on, for those inside the analytic philosophy establishment he was known as the betrayer, and for those outside...well, they didn’t need to know anything about it precisely because he’d betrayed it. In particular, philosophy of mind could get on without him because his innovation—dubbed “eliminative materialism”—was being carried on by people more radical than he anyways, namely the Churchlands.

This neglect has seemed a pity, particularly as the Churchlands’ “eliminative materialism,” as Robert Brandom notes, has nothing much to do with what Rorty pioneered. [1] However, it makes a certain kind of sense since it is also true, as Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia note in their introduction to the new posthumous collection of Rorty’s early analytic work, Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy (2014), that Rorty’s philosophical stance changed remarkably little when viewed from the right angle. Indeed, Brandom shows quite well how Rorty’s eliminative materialism quite naturally leads to his mature position on the contingency of social practices, and thus the optionalness of vocabularies. Rorty’s eliminative materialism was the idea that the mind/body distinction is based on the fact that we use two different vocabularies to describe what goes on between our ears, and that we could plausibly phase out the one that refers to it as “the mind” given certain changes in our technical ability to manipulate the brain, the centerpiece of the other vocabulary we use.

The Churchlands took that point—based on Rorty’s view of our practices of observation and reflection—and made it a reductionist claim, that we should eliminate the Mentalese vocabulary and the folk psychology that goes with it as quickly as possible in order to better talk about the world and ourselves, since, after all, all that’s between our ears is really just a brain. As Rorty’s point was simply that it was possible, going the next step and arguing we should make it actual does have the ring of a more radical step. But from the vantage of his later work, one can see how this is regressive—the Churchlands’ claim is just one more metaphysical claim about Xs really being Ys, and that knowing the Truth will help us say more true things. But thinking of Materialism as the Truth just reifies that particular vocabulary, freezing it into the place where we had before thought only Mentalese could exist. Rorty’s thought flowed from the Nietzschean thawing, the realization that all vocabularies are mortal, and thus all should be judged on their own merits for getting a particular job done, not on the false enthronements of a divine right of philosopher-kings.

2.      That Rorty was working his way toward this Nietzschean stance can be seen much more clearly now that Leach and Tartaglia have made Rorty’s early work more widely available. The absolute gem, “The Limits of Reductionism,” (1961) is a wonderful piece of metaphilosophical reflection on philosophical argument, one of a trio of his earliest full essays. He begins with the brazen move of implicitly suggesting that wielders of the epithet “Reductionist!” know not what they wield, for the “general procedure” of inferring from “X has the property of Y” to “X is nothing but Y” is constitutive of abstract thought itself: “all abstract thought takes selected aspects of a subject matter as paradigmatic and ignores other aspects. Thought is reductionistic or nothing, and the criticism only makes sense if it is narrowed down” (39). The idea here is that thinking necessarily uses the “is” to predicate properties, and that rational inquiry can only function if it is legitimate to narrow your inquiry to a single kind of object, with kinds being delimited by the predicate you use to pick it out. [2]

What Rorty is concerned with in the essay is philosophical conversation, how philosophical arguments are traded and for what purpose. Thus the rhetoric of “moves” I’ve already deployed, as in “moves made in a game,” is central to Rorty’s stance and discussions in this early period. What it yields is not only a useful bird’s-eye view of a number of different sites of contention (realists vs. idealists, logical positivists or Marxists or Freudians on the attack, etc.), but an interesting, contextual definition of philosophy. Rorty identifies the three great patterns of argument in the history of Western philosophy as the appeal to simplicity, the appeal to fact, and the appeal to self-referential inconsistency—the latter of which is what the antireductionist is really wielding. What the antireductionist is concerned about is that “the result of the reduction does not permit an account of the reduction itself,” and is thus self-referentially inconsistent.

This treatment of philosophizing as itself a fact in need of explanation is the metaphilosophical attitude par excellence. It is the rhetorical device which moves discussion up to the level on which the questions “Necessary for what?” and “When is a fact not really a fact?” must be raised explicitly. The acceptance of this gambit might indeed be taken as the defining characteristic of that species of discourse which we call “philosophy.” For it is precisely when the gambit is refused, and the reductionist replies that his concern is with a certain delimited subject matter which does not include his own activity of inquiry, that a given type of inquiry is liable to separate itself from philosophy and to set up shop as science. (41)

This, I think, is a tremendous insight with significant ramifications for our understanding of inquiry and its relationship to social institutions. [3] From the beginning, Rorty was concerned with metaphilosophy—thinking about why and how we do philosophy—an attitude impressed upon him most by his teacher at Chicago, Richard McKeon. This collection makes available another gem, “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (1967) This is usefully read as a follow up to “Limits,” focusing now on the specific conversational state of analytic philosophers who took the “linguistic turn” and their older colleagues who resisted the turn by continuing to speak of “essences” and “experience.” Rorty again displays his technique of ad hoc botanization, splitting philosophers into the categories of “critical,” “speculative,” and “empirical,” and though this tempest is largely missing from the teapot these days, it is still instructive to watch Rorty go through his motions. [4]

And it is interesting to see how the man identified with the linguistic turn never really felt comfortable with what it denoted, denying in the essay the usual ways of cashing out the differences between the two putative sides. There are many biographical nuggets like this in these essays, and it’s a little disappointing to see Leach and Tartaglia’s editorial criteria cut Rorty’s “Recent Metaphilosophy” (1961) from being collected. That essay begins with more interesting botanization, the analogy of philosophy to a game, and the first major instance (in, again, one of his first essays) of his deployment of the concept of conversation that he became so identified with in his post-PMN phase, though avant la lettre. Declaring that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules,’” Rorty goes on to draw the conclusion that the goal of philosophy must be communication, then. ”Since communication is the goal, rather than truth (or even agreement), the prospective infinite series is a progress rather than a regress: it becomes a moral duty to keep the series going, lest communication cease.” [5] But as the essay moves on to minute discussion of two philosophers lost to time, it’s understandable that it wasn’t reproduced.

3.      But biographical nuggets and removing the tarnish from Rorty’s reputation isn’t reason enough to publish the collection. The only people who would care about those two things are people already motivated enough to find the originals (as I have). After all, we already have several complete bibliographies of Rorty available, so the difficulty of finding far-flung essays is reduced. And digital archives make getting essays from the Review of Metaphysics or the Journal of Philosophy easier than getting a copy of the book—so long as you have access to a major research library. [6] But who else is going to be interested than those already with such access?

Leach and Tartaglia’s reasoning, and their view of why Rorty’s early work should be more widely available, is that it has something to say to the current conversations of philosophy. (Daniel Dennett—a contemporary of Rorty’s and a continuously major figure in late 20^th century philosophy of mind—says so as well, in his short preface to the volume.) The editors have two basic categories: Rorty’s metaphilosophy and his stuff on language and mind. His reviews have already been cut (this isn’t a “collected works” project), as well as two (excellent) articles in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy and one essay on Whitehead. [7] But what are his essays on mind and language going to add? A lot of it—in particular “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” and “Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth”—was superseded by Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (And some of them, like “Realism, Categories, and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” (1962) and “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism” (1970), just aren’t that interesting.) And again: people working on the technical problems of anglophone philosophy are going to have access to research libraries with databases to throw pdfs right onto your iPad from home.

Essays collected in a book work differently on our psyche, though, that I cannot deny. But the principles the editors used, I think, should’ve been modified. They say they stopped at 1972 because Rorty began his Consequences of Pragmatism collection in 1972 with “The World Well Lost” and that he could’ve, presumably, selected later essays like “Criteria and Necessity” (1973) if he had wanted to. But this is specious as against the designs of their project because this is about the technical conversation of philosophy—and the reason Rorty says in CP that he doesn’t collect them is because they were technical. So instead of “Realism and Reference” (1976), which is referred to (and thus implicitly “up to date”) in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP), we get the utterly dispensable “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism.” [8] But more importantly, we’re missing “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” (1979), a great piece of metaphilosophy that bookends nicely “The Limits of Reductionism.”

4.      I don’t know what I would’ve done. The criteria Leach and Tartaglia use are kind of arbitrary, but you have to end a book somewhere. When you look out over Rorty’s corpus, though, there are gems everywhere that should be more widely read. The trouble is that there’s no net to capture his career-making (and still fascinating) “Mind-Body Identity, Categories, and Privacy” (1965), the encyclopedia article “Intuition” (1967), “Searle and the Special Powers of the Brain” (1980) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Contemporary Philosophy of Mind” (1982), “Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching” (1982), and “Against Belatedness” (1983)—and this is just a variegated group up through 1983. ”Mind-Body” has historical interest, “Intuition” is interesting, “Searle” is polemical, “Contemporary” is technical, “Hermeneutics” is about education, and “Against” is a book review of Hans Blumenberg. The four basic editorial choices of criteria for inclusion of Influence, Subject, Audience, or Form cannot get all those pieces in the same book, but they all should be read...by somebody.

I assume somebody’s working on a chronological Collected Works edition of his stuff, ala Dewey’s, or at least it’s an obvious enough idea that somebody at the right moment will put it into motion. In this Age of Access, though, I wonder how needed it is after you get a complete bibliography. I already own copies of all of Rorty’s published material. Granted, some of it I was lucky (finding a copy used of some obscure Catholic Association conference proceedings for the one year Rorty was there—can you imagine the odds?) and then not, in one case; I still have not been able to locate The American Peoples’ Encyclopedia with all the high-powered databases at my library. But what do we really need a Collected Works edition for? If the scholarly apparatus doesn’t add a whole bunch of use-value to it (for example, tracking some of Rorty’s sometimes obscure allusions), then I don’t see why we would. [9] What I would like, however, are his lectures. That would be new, and that would be interesting. I see all these collections of lectures by like John Rawls and Stanley Cavell—Rorty taught for years; was it all extemporaneous? They must be hiding in a file folder somewhere at UC-Irvine. Maybe I’ll be the one to have to drag them out.

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Endnotes

[1] See the beginning of Brandom’s essay “Vocabularies of Pragmatism: Synthesizing Naturalism and Historicism” in his Perspectives on Pragmatism.

[2] This move is the first instance of a move that Rorty would later use in discussing the antiessentialism common to, e.g., Jacques Derrida and Donald Davidson. Derrida’s attack on “logocentrism,” which foregrounded the presupposed center/margin distinction implicit in the project of metaphysics, produced in certain crowds (mainly harboring English departments) the repetitious parroting of “binary thinking!” every time a distinction was made. Rorty claims that Derrida and Davidson are “antidualists,” but “this does not mean that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions” (PSH 47).

[3] For if the Kuhnian perspective is right, that disciplines arise around common sets of problems, but those problems are not “natural” in the sense that the metaphysical tradition has used the term to describe what Reality impresses on us whether we like it or not, then what’s to stop every person from being entitled to set up shop for themselves and work on whatever problem they’ve delimited for themselves? The implicit object-Meinongianism here breeds inquiry-Meinongianism, whereby all it takes for a new one-person discipline to arise is a refusal to answer another person’s question. One might take this to be a reductio ad absurdum, and people have, but I think it forces the right kind of metaphilosophical reflections on the two sides of pragmatism, the Emersonian and the social practice traditions.

[4] I’ve discussed this essay previously in my own “Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?” (I consider it juvenilia, but it mainly presents the content of the essay, so could prove a useful summary.)

[5] “Recent Metaphilosophy,” Review of Metaphysics, Dec. 1961, 301-302. Compare that to “the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth” (PMN 377). Also, read it against note 2, above. David L. Hall’s excellent critical introduction to Rorty’s thought, Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet of the New Pragmatism (1994), first dug out this early essay and made much of this line for the continuity of Rorty’s philosophy (see 77).

[6] *NOTE ADDED MAY 2015* In fact, if you know what you're looking for, it's not that hard to discover that the bibliographies aren't quite complete. Rorty wrote a couple short reviews for the Review of Metaphysics in grad school, run as it was out of Yale and partly by his friend Richard Bernstein. (His first was in 1955 on Nelson Goodman's instantly famous Fact, Fiction, and Forecast.) Also, it is unfortunate that Leach and Tartaglia didn't discover the errata for "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" in the Review of Metaphysics, June 1971. One is a partial misquote of James Cornman on 203, but the other is an entire missing line on 203. It kind of made sense, so it's not too surprising that the original editors of the Review and then Leach and Tartaglia missed it. Here's the sentence reprinted:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

Here's what it should read:

Now my answer to (T) is that what appears to us, or what we experience, or what we are aware of, is a function of the language we use. To say that "X's appear to us as F" is merely to say that "We customarily use 'F' in making non-inferential reports about X's."

As you can see, it doesn't really change anything interpretationally. And besides, of the essays reproduced, "In Defense of Eliminative Materialism" is the most negligible. If I could fault the editors for anything, it would be reprinting it in the first place.

[7] Though another essay on Whitehead is included, presumably because the latter, “The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn,” isn’t just exegetical. Whitehead is just not part of the current conversation (“we judged that one paper about Whitehead would probably suffice,” say the editors in a footnote on 7), though those still talking about him did reprint “Matter and Event” (1963), the dropped essay, in 1983.

[8] To be fair, I have no idea what’s happening in the technical conversation of contemporary philosophy professors. (I hope this isn’t too much of a frightening reveal.) My suspicion is that Dennett is being generous when he says that the papers he earmarks should be “required reading” for up-and-comers. But despite my lack of definite knowledge about what current philosophy professors are taking seriously, based on the trajectory of it from the 60s to 90s, which I might claim some know-how with, I doubt that these professors are going to find useful, for example, Rorty’s essay on Kant, “Strawson’s Objectivity Argument.” There’s much to be said about the importance of that essay on a number of different fronts, but none of them seem relevant to what I imagine an aggregate of philosophy professors spend their time on. But maybe analytic philosophy has taken a good turn, back to the concerns that Rorty was speaking to. (Though, come to think of it, that would mean philosophy hasn’t gotten any further than they were 50 years ago. Great for my hero; so much wasted time for philosophy. Or not—if this is all a kind of inquiry, then wasted time is never wasted time because you won’t know which tunnel is a dead-end until you reach it, turn around, and say, “Gee, that was a waste of time.”)

[9] I’ll just add here my general unhappiness with Leach and Tartaglia’s introduction. They largely limit themselves to biographical context for each of the essays as they are chronologically published, and this is sometimes useful for somebody who hasn’t read all the interviews or Neil Gross’ book. (See my review “Waiting for More: Gross and Rorty.”) And they make a few good connections between some early parts and Rorty’s later work, and add some useful bits of historical context. But their critical patter is too often genuinely misleading for an amateur acolyte like myself not to be annoyed. One example: during a discussion of his first paper, a compare-and-contrast of Peirce and Wittgenstein, Leach and Tartaglia say that “Peirce was the classical pragmatist for whom the mature Rorty had least sympathy owing to the former’s lack of concern for moral and social issues, a worry foreshadowed here in an ambivalent footnote” (5). I don’t think there’s anything ambivalent about the footnote. After noting that “renewed interest in pragmatism has led to a new interest in Peirce, who somehow seems the most ‘up-to-date’ of the pragmatists” (16), Rorty footnotes, “perhaps because he was neither as concerned with religion and morality as James, nor as interested in social and political issues as Dewey.” This strikes me as ironic, but not ambivalent. The irony is that analytic philosophy can’t countenance James or Dewey because of those commitments, and so they focus on Peirce. It’s an arrow at the analytic establishment’s aridness, not Peirce’s. The reason Leach and Tartaglia’s comment is misleading about the later Rorty’s reason for lacking sympathy in Peirce is because 1) he stated in Consequences of Pragmatism that it was because Peirce was too Kantian and, more importantly, 2) he’s not entitled to have lack of political utility as a reason for lack of sympathy (at least, consciously—but Leach and Tartaglia’s “owing” is ironically ambivalent in articulating which is their claim). The thrust of Rorty’s understanding of the relationship between those sides of a philosopher’s work is that of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: some people are useful for politics, some aren’t. And indeed, Leach and Tartaglia even use Rorty’s use of that idea on Heidegger (i.e. that Heidegger’s politics is irrelevant to our reception of his philosophy) in their introduction just two pages before. It would be strange for Rorty, who was a huge fan of Sellars’ and Brandom’s very unpolitical work, to hold that against Peirce.

Posthumanism, Antiessentialism, and Depersonalization

1. Belatedism — Reductionism — Ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction; 2. General problem of antiessentialism — From ethics to epistemology and ontology — Living in the flux — Essences as stabilities — Making distinctions; 3. Taking humans for granted — Taking humanism for granted — Special problem of demarcation — How to make a human less special; 4. Bennett on actants and assemblage — Giving out intentionality — Doing an action, causing an effect; 5. What intentions are for — Global problem of anthropomorphism — Properties vs. attributions; 6. Instrumentals rationality — Tools of our tools — Ancient science as spiritual exercise — Knowledge as depersonalization — Theoretical practices

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1.      “Posthumanism,” in the last 20 years, has become the latest popular entry into our post-’60s craze for being after something, usually some “ism.” Also in the last 20 years, nearly all promulgations of isms come attached with increasingly anxious qualifiers about the promulgator not wanting to reduce the perceived proponents of the ism to his or her formulation, or not wanting to suggest the essence of what the ism is. [1] I find such hand-waving pointless—partly because I take any good reader or listener to have the good sense to feel free to disagree at any point without the author’s encouragement—but this anxiety plays a special role in my topic because of the way reductionism and essentialism have been tied by theorists into a story about the degradation and oppression of humanity—and, of course, now more than just humanity.

In what follows, I’d like to perform two services: 1) I hope to clarify three problems that any posthumanist theorist will encounter in articulating their view: the general problem of antiessentialism, the special problem of demarcation, and the global problem anthropomorphism. What all three of these problems revolve around is the practical aspect of living the theories we propound. Since many posthumanist perspectives articulate themselves in terms that are inherently paradoxical, I hope by clarifying these three problems to point in the direction of a nonparadoxical mode of articulating the central motive of posthumanism—ceasing to treat “human” as an invidious term of distinction. 2) I will re-tell a familiar story of the last 300 years as a means of bring into focus the problem of our practices as the primary object of our ethical inquiries. Posthumanism is nothing if not ethically motivated, so when posthumanist theory finds itself moving away from ethics to epistemology or ontology, it behooves us to reexamine our priorities and their interrelationships. The basic problem central to the “scientific revolution” of the European 17_th century—which typically stands in as the moment the dam broke, flooding our landscape with instrumental rationality—is the assertion of purely egocentric interests. Working through this conceptual and historical exercise, seeing posthumanism’s broader concern with purely human interests, will put us in a position of seeing a larger project of thinking through ethical authority in a world structured only by material, as opposed to supernatural, agencies.

2.      If the central motive of posthumanism is to cease treating “human” as a term of ethical distinction, then one of its central moves has been to cease treating “human” as a term of distinction at all. This shifts the central theoretical terrain from ethics to epistemology and ontology, from how we treat X to how we know what X is. The primary theoretical current that this move draws power from is the antiessentialism common to Heidegger, Sartre, the American pragmatists, and the Continental poststructuralists. We might embody it in Sartre’s slogan that “existence precedes essence.” [2] By overturning the ultimately Platonic relationship that envisions the flux of lived appearances as conceptually beholden to an order of stable essences, antiessentialism emits a panrelationalism—things are not what they are in themselves, but only as they relate to other things. [3] This dissolves any particular thing into a web of relations, and can ultimately cause a fear for stability—how does the antiessentialistic reversal not just flip us into a nasty flux of relations with no footholds for understanding? I think it is fairly clear that no person actually lives their life as if there were no foothold for understanding, as if they did live a flux like a tempest (as opposed to a flux like an oscillating fan). Sartre’s word for this was “metastable.” [4]

If this seems to dissolve the problem surrounding antiessentialism, why am I calling this a general problem for posthumanism? The reason is that though practically we have no problem living in the flux, our theoretical descriptions still tend to contort themselves when describing this practical situation. At root, I think, is the suspicion that existence only precedes essence, that essentialism will always reconstitute itself in the process of understanding. This comes out as a sense that definition, i.e. giving conceptual shape to any particular X, is essentializing. (Need I add “is essentially” or “by definition” to complete the contortion?) This suspicion can largely be traced to origins in poststructuralism, and is best embodied by Gayatri Spivak’s resignation about the state of affairs we must find ourselves in that demands her notion of “strategic essentialism.” [5] Because of the history of oppression through conceptual means that an entire host of cultural critics in the last century have been busily excavating, what was once Plato’s fear for stability has turned into a fear of stability—that any stable entity is covering over the oppression required to achieve that stability. If at one very real extreme is the actual use of linguistic categories to justify the continued oppression of cultural groups and persons, then at the other extreme is the absurdity of thinking that my body’s stable existence at a particular set of spatiotemporal coordinates is papering over my body’s right to exist at every over set of coordinates. There are stabilities, and then there are stabilities. What we need—but what theorists like Spivak are conceptually unable to provide resources for—is the ability to distinguish between the range of stabilities on that ethical scale. So the general problem of antiessentialism is: how do you de-privilege one distinction without harming your ability to make any distinctions? The way to do this, I think, is to replace Sartre’s existentialist formula with a pragmatist formula like, “practice precedes theory.” This turns all theoretical conundrums back to their origins in practice. This makes one’s fear of stability negotiable by turning the suspicion of a particular stability back to the practice being enabled by it—still suspicious given any kind of oppression, but hardly suspicious at all given a body’s continued existence at a set of spatiotemporal coordinates qua continued existence (though the why for, e.g., the prisoner’s continued existence in the jail cell might be up for grabs).

3.      I suspect, as I somewhat suggested before, that theorists have no problem resolving these theoretical problems of definition and essence in practice as persons or citizens (rather than as theorists). But working through the general problem of de-privileging can give us a handle on a second, special problem that emits from the first: how do we demarcate humans from other things? The problem of antiessentialism and the fear of stability are marks of a desire to not privilege anything—but now how do we tell the difference between us and other animals? The amused self-consciousness that accompanies most articles about posthumanism is, I think, not nearly nervous enough about this as a problem. Most theorists of the posthuman seem to take it for granted that we can just tell the difference, but what their work needs to do is provide some handle for how to tell the difference between a human res and a nonhuman res so as to keep the critical edge of their polemic while not resting on either an unarticulated practical grasp or a paradoxical run around wherein we find, ultimately, that we have to ask some portentous “question of the human” every time we want to articulate the difference between a human and a beaver. The former is antithetical to the project of theorizing and the latter I suspect has become popular because 1) people like imitating Derrida, but more importantly 2) they are beholden to the fear of stability that produces the problem of antiessentialism.

Posthumanists do much better when they state their opposition as “humanism,” or “liberal humanism,” or “liberal subjectivity.” What they want to pick out and contest are particular ways in which the human subject is picked out of a crowd. As my use of “res” indicates, we are going to be led back to Descartes—since he distinguished between res cogitans and res extensa, “the mind” has too often been used as the repository for our dreams of difference. But as Rorty retails in his opening chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, there are as many ways to pick out what demarcates the mind—and thus the human—as there are fingers on your hands. [6] The typical approach of posthumanism has been to select one of these marks and reappropriate it for res extensa, thus making the human a little less special. So the special problem of demarcation (which is really just a species of the more general problem of antiessentialism) is: how do you make the human less special while retaining the conceptual ability to tell a human from a nonhuman? Darwin’s naturalism made it possible for Nietzsche to think of us as a diseased animal precisely because of our desire to be special, [7] but the flipside of Nietzsche’s cynicism is John Dewey’s suggestion that Darwin made it possible for us to really get to the bottom of our human cultural practices: “the influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition….” Dewey saw Darwin as making possible antiessentialism, as overturning “the assumption of the superiority of the fixed and final” and finally alleviating our desire to “lay hands upon the sacred ark of absolute permanency.” [8]

4.      In order to see better how the blurring motions of antiessentialisms can make it hard to see what makes humans, if not special, at least their own peculiar selves above and beyond physiology, we might turn to Jane Bennett’s recent book, Vibrant Matter (2010). Bennett wouldn’t call herself a posthumanist, but her book works in the same vein, and its utility lies in how thoroughly Bennett wishes to rethink our ontological assumptions—Bennett pushes to the limit certain strategies commonly used by posthumanist theorists, in particular an effort to rethink ontology with ethical implications. Bennett’s ontology centers on the attempt to reinscribe “things” with a “power” she says they’ve been denied by Kantian accounts of agency, thus giving “the force of things its due.” [9] She does so by using Latour’s notion of “actants” as a way of inscribing intentionality in the nonhuman-thing so as to gain a better picture of the “human-nonhuman assemblage” (her term taken from Deleuze and Guattari). [10]

What this power amounts to, however, doesn’t seem much more than being an active force in the material world. Bennett feels this as a point of resistance that deserves the edge of her polemic because of the old notion of the “passivity of matter.” [11] But what extra power is gained by intentionality, alongside causal power, is unclear—and nobody has denied the material world’s causal ability to blot us from existence. Bennett says that “the question is whether other forces in the world approximate some of the characteristics of intentional or purposive behavior on the part of humans” (29), but this makes the mistake of thinking we know what intentionality is. By assuming she already has a conceptual grasp of intentionality, Bennett is able to show how other things have it, too. But this doesn’t seem very hard. Giving out intentionality is easy—just do it, and you’ve done it. Thinking the rock intended to fall to the floor is enough for the rock to have intentionally fallen to the floor. Who, after all, is going to contradict you (except for theorists not assuming we already know what intentionality is)?

Intentionality is simply things behaving as if other things are behaving intentionally. [12] The problem is that the rock behaves the same way whether we attribute intentionality to it or not—or whether the rock attributes intentionality to us or not. So the only question is whether it is useful to attribute intentions to any particular X. To answer this question about a rock falling, we might compare it to a hand going up in a classroom. If the person whose hand goes up gets “called on,” it is because of a practice the caller-on (and all those who expected the person to get called on) is embedded in. If the person was “lifting their hand” rather than “raising their hand,” we can say that the person “unintentionally raised their hand”—we need this locution to distinguish between doing an action (intentionally lifting a hand to get called on) and causing an effect (lifting a hand and unintentionally getting called on). The movements are the same, but only when embedded in a practice can the movement have a certain effect. So, returning to the rock, what is the added bonus of saying the falling rock intentionally crushed my foot if the effect is the same whether I ascribe an intention to the rock or not?

5.      The moral of this story is that one reason we attribute intentions is because by making actors aware of the effects of their actions, we can get the actor to not perform the effect-causing action. This, at least, is not the case with the rock, though it might be with the person who dropped it on my foot. It is clear that Bennett wishes her new ontology to have an effect on our moral discourse. She gives a series of imperatives toward the end of her book that punches up this problem of intentionality: “Give up the futile attempt to disentangle the human from the nonhuman. Seek instead to engage more civilly, strategically, and subtly with the nonhumans in the assemblages in which you, too, participate” (116). But what could it mean to engage civilly with rocks? Do rocks respond differently if you are rude to them? While behaving more strategically and subtly with rocks might make sense, civility would seem to only be in play if you could change the rock’s behavior by doing so. But what the analogy is for politely dropping a rock and it not crushing my foot because I treated the rock civilly rather than rudely isn’t clear.

This brings us to the final, global problem of anthropomorphism. Bennett sees clearly that she must face the problem of whether she’s anthropomorphizing non-anthropo-stuff by, for example, attributing intentions to stuff we might normally withhold it from. The global problem of anthropomorphism is: how do you use categories of understanding that are not human categories? Bennett sees that what she calls her “vital materialism” seems to “entail a performative contradiction”: “‘Is it not, after all, a self-conscious, language-wielding human who is articulating this philosophy of vibrant matter?’ It is not so easy to resist, deflect, or redirect this criticism” (120). However, there would only seem to be a performative contradiction if you haven’t been able to provide an account for what separates humans from nonhumans. More particularly, it is by treating intentionality as a property instead of an attribution that heaves Bennett’s project into paradox when she admits she has no separate method for ascertaining the properties of rocks except for the regular human one’s we’ve always employed.

6.      Bennett’s confrontation with anthropomorphism, like Spivak’s confrontation with essentialism, emits a general helplessness—for, almost all admit, we can only use human categories. But why should we feel helpless? The reason I think we find ourselves to be helpless or stuck in the position of humanity, rather than, say, thankful or unashamed, is because of the way scientific innovation, technological development, economic consumption, and liberal democracy have all dovetailed into a story about instrumental rationality. This is the story, familiar to us from Germany—be it the Frankfurt School of Horkheimer, Adorno, et al or Heidegger—that the history of the West is the history of Reason increasing our ability to control stuff, including ourselves. In its initial form, the concern seemed to be primarily with us, with succumbing to a “blindly pragmatized thought [that] loses its transcending quality.” [13] Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern was that, not only was our thought simply a means to carry out preexisting and unreflectively held ends, but that the end or purpose of thought had simply become the increased efficiency of means. Unreflectively held purposes dovetails with Heidegger’s discussion of the rhetoric of mathematics and method that took over the natural sciences in the 17_th century and was encroaching on the social sciences at the end of the 19_th. [14] But what’s worse is that, in Thoreau’s phrase, “men have become the tools of their tools.” [15] The central idea is that we are caught up in the practices we’ve created and have become beholden to them, and that these practices are working out a destructive teleology. And since the increasing obviousness of the consequences of global industrialization, this sensed destruction has become both to ourselves and nonhuman nature. As should be clear, this is a pessimistic narrative that implies that we no longer have the hope of changing (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Heidegger’s conclusion) or that we no longer have the desire to (Thoreau’s fear).

I think it is something like this story that stands behind most posthumanisms. [16] Without it, it's hard to make sense of why we should go in for all the arid metaphysical talk. And while I think there is sufficient plausibility for Thoreau’s fear, I want to quickly sketch an alternative narrative about our theoretical practices that takes the edge off the conclusion that we are now hopeless. This story is drawn from Hans Blumenberg’s account of the transition from ancient and medieval cosmology to modern. Central to this account is the notion that for the ancients, theoretical descriptions of the nonhuman were spiritual exercises meant to relieve the pressures of theory itself. [17] For example, as Blumenburg writes, Epicurus’s “atomistic physics was not meant to satisfy a theoretical interest in reality but rather to argue for the irrelevance of the physical answers to the shaping of life in the world.” [18] “Only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality” (155). Only when science could demonstrate its practical mastery over life, its “real human power,” could science serve as a mode of overcoming. But overcome what turns out to be the real question. It behooves us to make a distinction between our increased mastery over nonhuman forces indiscriminately killing us off and other forms of overcoming—overcoming our parents, parts of ourselves we dislike, our political enemies, precursor poets, etc.

The upshot of Blumenberg’s story is that we should make finer distinctions among the different projects and practices we’ve put into play over the course of cultural history in order to better grasp why we originally created them so as to better understand why we might continue them. One of the central distinctions Blumenberg makes about the outcome of the 17_th century scientific revolution is that philosophers took two divergent paths, that of Cartesian “self-foundation” and Baconian “self-assertion” (see 181-203). [19] As Blumenberg understands it, the mode of self-assertion preceded self-foundation because the central cultural concern they both had eschew was the authority of the ancients (as read by the Scholastics). Thus we find Bacon bashing idols and Descartes retreating to his fireplace. However, as Steven Shapin notes, there was an intense suspicion that accompanied this “intellectual individualism and the rejection of trust and authority.” [20] At this point, it is helpful to make a distinction between the personal and the individual. The individualism common to Bacon and Descartes states that knowledge begins with an individual’s personal experience. The concern, then, is how to make this knowledge portable, intersubjective. This produces different practices intended to depersonalize the knowledge gained firsthand. As Shapin suggests, this amounts to the elaboration of different “practical procedures” (93) such as Boyle’s recommendation “that experimental reports be written in a way that allowed distant readers—not present as firsthand witnesses—to replicate the relevant effects” (107). But another method of depersonalization lies in Descartes’s search for a foundation to knowledge in indubitable certainty. If one could once establish the foundation upon which all knowledge must repose, then one can gain the assent of all inferences from it as common to all because of the necessity created by the demonstration.

It is now generally agreed that Descartes’s foundationalism is an off-shoot of Platonic essentialism, what Dewey called “the quest for certainty” grounded in a “search for the immutable.” [21] What I articulated as the problem of antiessentialism is the problem of searching for replacement practices for the specific theoretical practice of hunting down immutability. Thus this problem becomes paradoxical only if one thinks that a certain set of theoretical practices inevitably ties us into a certain set of self-descriptions and problems—e.g., thinking linguistic practices are necessarily essentializing or thinking intentionality necessary for ethical consideration. Seeing these practices in the light of history, however, can give us a sense of their continuity with other practices motivated for similar purposes and their contingency as practices that can be altered given new situations that require new purposes.

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Endnotes

[1] Two examples—N. Katherine Hayles, a major figure (displaying only slight anxiety): “What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions. (I do not mean this list to be exclusive or definitive. Rather, it names elements found at a variety of sites. It is meant to be suggestive rather than prescriptive)” (How We Became Posthuman (1999), 2); Neil Badmington, writing an introduction (displaying acute anxiety): “What would it mean to view this as an example of posthumanism? The use of such a term is, of course, far from straightforward. Writing in 1947, Martin Heidegger drew attention to the paradoxical status of an ‘-ism,’ observing that…[etc., etc.]. Was I in danger of giving currency to yet another ‘-ism’ devoid of clarity, coherence and credibility” (Posthumanism (2000), ed. Badmington, 1)?

[2] “L’existence précède l’essence” is from Sartre’s essay, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (translated in Kaufmann’s Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre—see 348). I pass over the irony of using this essay in this context, though the kernel of my reply is embodied in my discussion of anthropomorphism below.

[3] This is the lesson Richard Rorty draws from “philosophers as diverse as William James and Friedrich Nietzsche, Donald Davidson and Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam and Bruno Latour, John Dewey and Michel Foucault” (“A World without Substances or Essences,” in Philosophy and Social Hope, 47). Rorty immediately goes on to say that being an “antidualist,” which is how they articulated their antiessentialism, does not mean “that they are against binary oppositions; it is not clear that thought is possible without using such oppositions. It means rather that they are trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality.”

[4] Being and Nothingness, 90. In the context of Sartre’s discussion, metastable seems to connote something closer to instability. But see Rorty’s use of Sartre in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity: “Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old. I call people of this sort ‘ironists’ because their realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formulate criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them in the position which Sartre called ‘meta-stable’: never quite able to take themselves seriously because always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change…” (73-74). Something being subject to change is much different than something ceaselessly changing. I think the lesson is that Sartre’s term is a good description of the terrain of antiessentialism, though it originally had to be deployed with more of the polemical edge of flux.

[5] Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a virtuoso performance showing how ethical and epistemological issues are bound together. Spivak’s term, however, comes from the fact that she does not believe there is any alternative to essentialism, or rather that language is in its nature essentializing. For philosophers like Rorty, as I articulated in note 3, this would be like saying that Platonic dualisms were at the heart of language and unavoidable.

[6] See PMN 32-37. Rorty distinguishes nine different marks of the mental and groups them into three different problem-piles: the problem of consciousness, the problem of reason, and the problem of personhood. I take such refinement of distinction to be the first step toward wisdom in this area.

[7] See On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.28: “If one disregards the ascetic ideal: man, the animal man, has until now had no meaning. This existence on earth contained no goal…. Precisely this is what the ascetic ideal means: that something was lacking, that an enormous void surrounded man—he did not know how to justify, to explain, to affirm himself; he suffered from the problem of his meaning. He suffered otherwise as well, he was for the most part a diseased animal…” (117).

[8] From "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy" (1909).

[9] VM, 29

[10] See ibid., 9 for Bennett’s introduction of Latour’s “actant”; her second chapter discusses the “assemblage.”

[11] See ibid., vii.

[12] I am blithely taking on board Daniel Dennett’s mode of discussing intentionality, principally from The Intentional Stance, as if it is obvious, but clearly this is contentious for philosophers of mind. The general idea is that intentionality is a holistic game that a community weasels its way into by members attributing intentionality to each other. This is how functionalists avoid the Cartesian problem of Other Minds—intentional minds are created when all the members attribute them to each other, and there is no deeper problem than that. What is interesting is that, on Dennett and Rorty’s understanding, Dennett is the heir of Darwin and it is only theorists who wish to retain the mind as a mark of humanity’s specialness that resist Dennett’s functionalism.

[13] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), xiii. I’m quoting from the John Cummings translation, though Edmund Jephcott’s recent translation is likely to become canonical. This line in particular just rings better in Cummings’ translation, though I have no other reason for choosing it.

[14] See Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays) especially of the notion of a “procedure” being a “fixed ground plan” (118). This kind of rhetoric about math and method is charted succinctly by Steven Shapin in The Scientific Revolution—see especially 57-64 on the problematic notion of the “mathematization of the universe” (63) and 89-96 on the notion that “method was meant to be all” (90). Shapin’s comment that “there is much to commend a revisionist view that formal methodology is to be understood as a set of rhetorical tools for positioning practices in the culture” (95) might be expanded to include the use of mathematics. See also the opening section of Rorty’s “Method, Social Science, and Social Hope” (in Consequences of Pragmatism) for a pithy polemic about what the philosophical upshot of the scientific revolution should have been.

[15] Walden, Ch. 1

[16] My use of Thoreau is partly intended to lend plausibility to this narrative standing behind Bennett. Bennett has a previous book on Thoreau as a political philosopher.

[17] “Spiritual exercises” is a term taken from Pierre Hadot. See, for example, his Philosophy as a Way of Life.

[18] Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 181

[19] My understanding of self-assertion owes much to Rorty’s use of Blumenberg. See, e.g., his “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity” (in Essays on Heidegger and Others), especially where he calls Bacon “the prophet of self-assertion as opposed to self-grounding” (172).

[20] The Scientific Revolution, 72

[21] “Philosophy’s Search for the Immutable” is the second chapter in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty, which attempts to locate a tradition of philosophical inquiry—specifically metaphysical and epistemological—in our historical and existential condition as beings in the world.

Rorty's Metaphilosophy

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Rorty was hounded for the last half of his career with a reputation for having given up on arguments. It began when Richard Bernstein, one of Rorty’s more perceptive critics, noted that “although [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] is filled with arguments, many of which are brilliant and ingenious, Rorty at several points warns against the love of argument that has characterized one strand in philosophy ever since Plato. What is unsettling and disturbing about Rorty’s argumentative style is that he refuses to play the game…, he doesn’t seem to be primarily concerned with carefully stating issues in such a manner so that one can proceed to develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct ‘position.’”[fn.1] “Style” is a good word here, as is Bernstein’s notion that Rorty has an overall “strategy” that argues at one point, but not at another. This strategy transformed itself into Consequences of Pragmatism’s suggestion that “the really exasperating thing about literary intellectuals, from the point of view of those inclined to science or to Philosophy, is their inability to engage in such argumentation—to agree on what would count as resolving disputes, on the criteria to which all sides must appeal. In a post-Philosophical culture, this exasperation would not be felt.”[fn.2] As this stands, it is slightly misleading to Rorty’s point, for it is not the case that literary intellectuals have an inability to engage in argumentation—it’s just that such argumentation is usually out of point when the main activity is “the inconclusive comparison and contrast of vocabularies” (xli). For, as Rorty goes on but eventually ignores the better wisdom of occasionally in his rhetorical flourishes, “in such a [post-Philosophical] culture, criteria would be seen as the pragmatist sees them—as temporary resting-places constructed for specific utilitarian ends. On the pragmatist account, a criterion (what follows from the axioms, what the needle points to, what the statute says) is a criterion because some particular social practice needs to block the road of inquiry, halt the regress of interpretations, in order to get something done” (xli, second emphasis mine).

“In order to get something done”—this is what ultimately explains a lot of Rorty’s wishy-washiness about philosophy, the activity he was trained to do and continued to do through-out his life, before and after his supposed Kehre in PMN. For Rorty never could become completely convinced that there was something pressing to be done by philosophy. So he couldn’t himself be bothered long enough to work out some of the criteria for “carefully stating issues” in order to “develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct position.” Why would you work hard at developing stronger and stronger arguments for a position that will be aufgehoben tomorrow because (and this is important) the “specific utilitarian ends” to which the position served have passed away? And so, as Rorty felt more and more alienated from his former colleagues at Princeton and more and more welcomed by “literary intellectuals,” this plausible stopping-point turned into his most infamous passage on argumentation: “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality.’ … Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to try to make arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace.”[fn.3] A few perceptive (and apparently kind, though for simply being more clear-sighted) commentators have noticed that there are, like in PMN, more than a few arguments, and good ones to boot. Rorty’s disaffection got the better of him, but his procedure was still the same as it was to remain throughout his career. Berstein calls this “a two-stage strategy” in which the first stage is to offer familiar kinds of dialectical arguments, which are as Rorty points out “parasitic upon” (CIS 9) the entrenched vocabulary you wish to displace,[fn.4] in order to “soften up” (Bernstein’s phrase) the reader for the second stage, which is to account for the historical origins of the entrenched vocabulary.

The controlling motif that underlay Rorty’s philosophy from beginning to end was the sense of philosophy as an on-going conversation. Rather than Whitehead’s metaphor of “footnotes to Plato,” for Rorty philosophy—all inquiry and writing for that matter—is more like a game of telephone: Parmenides said something to Plato who told Aristotle something it turns out is not quite what Parmenides meant. A “science” that has criteria and can argue, then, is something that can only arise if you can get everyone on the same page—say, if Plato had gotten Parmenides right before passing it along to Aristotle. But—why should Plato be required to get Parmenides right? What if Plato’s accidental mishearing and misreporting works better for what Aristotle wants to do? The idea of philosophers wanting to do different things is why Rorty once said that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules.’”[fn.5] If you don’t want to play Parmenides’ Sorry anymore, you change the rules so you’re now playing Aristotle’s Monopoly (a game which lasted quite a while). Philosophy for Rorty is a game of Calvinball in which the philosopher of the present is Calvin and the future is Hobbes. Calvin could never win against Hobbes because Hobbes was always better at making up rules than Calvin, keeping one step ahead of him.[fn.6] If you view philosophy like this, why would you want to play? This feeling comes out of Wittgenstein, too, and has recently come to be called various kinds of “quietism.”[fn.7]

Given this kind of abuse one gets from actually participating in the game of philosophy, always risking becoming outmoded by the next generation, Rorty pulled further and further back from the game. Pulling back from philosophy to make it your object of analysis used to be called “metaphilosophy.” The trouble with metaphilosophy is that it is still philosophy: metaphilosophy, like aesthetics and metaphysics, is just one more venerable subactivity in the larger form. So there’s a sense in which Rorty has continued to play the game. The question is: by what rules has he been playing by? Rorty’s bad reputation largely comes from the idea that he really did give up on arguments and that arguments are essential components of good philosophical activity. After all, so goes this line, if philosophy really is a conversation, isn’t the right thing to oppose to an asserted claim a counterclaim backed by a justifying argument? Isn’t there something pernicious about not meeting arguments with another argument, something that amounts to plugging your ears and squawking “la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” Rorty has struck some philosophers as wanting his cake and eating, too: remaining in the game without playing by the rules. “But whose rules?” replies Rorty. However, that being said, if Rorty is to commend his own philosophy, there does need to be some sort of explicatable standard according to which he can be shown to not be violating. This is the hard thing to do.

“Philosophy is a conversation” was the first metaphor introduced so let us tangle with its implications first. The notion of a “conversation” gives off a sense of dynamism that’s missing when you read one article or book, but gets re-introduced once you start putting articles and books side by side, “in conversation with each other,” as we say. However—these are still all just theories in a certain sense, a sense James gives when he says: “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”[fn.8] Instruments for what? It is paramount that we answer: both for problems outside of philosophy and problems within philosophy. It is hard to keep these two things in view at the same time, and James, Dewey, and Rorty struggled their entire careers to articulate a conception of philosophy that balanced both in a single vision. James and Dewey—because this was against the understanding of the times—typically overemphasized problems outside of philosophy. This was Dewey’s sense of philosophy arising from our contact with the world, in all of its manifestations, for example the story he tells in The Quest for Certainty. Philosophy cut off from the world’s problems, then, is what creates scholasticism, the pointless counting of angels on pinheads. But since all responses are responses to the world in some fashion—even that terribly narrow portion of reality called “philosophy books and the conundrums you’ll find therein”—philosophers cut themselves off from the work of other philosophers at the cost of seeming to play a game by themselves.

This can be fruitful—what, after all, is a philosophical treatise other than, on our first metaphor, a monologue? As I said before, there’s something static about just one vision being articulated, but as Michael Walzer once said, “there are times when we need to listen to a sustained argument, a linear discourse.”[fn.9] This is what Rorty’s detractors feel is missing from Rorty’s later work: there’s no sustained argument. Rorty’s student, Brandom, spent nearly 700 pages articulating a philosophy of language. That’s a long time by yourself, but the game Brandom wanted to set up was intricate and he needed a lot of space, a lot of time alone. So Brandom spent a long time by himself, cut off from other philosophers (in a fashion), and set up his own game to play. What’s Rorty doing? He doesn’t want to set up his own game, he says, but he continues to spend time with other people’s games. What kind of game is this if you do spend some time by yourself (in essays), but it’s primarily with other people’s larger, more intricate games?

Rorty, like his predecessors James and Dewey, wanted philosophy to be a response to life. The principal slice of life Rorty spent his life responding to was philosophy. Uncertain about what was worth standing behind that was philosophical, what was worth pouring energy into creating and strengthening that wouldn’t look like wasted effort tomorrow (when Hobbes the Future changes the rules), Rorty…quit Princeton and moved to Montana to ride horses? No, he spent his life writing about and defending pragmatism, a big fat something if there ever was. So what kind of game is pragmatism and how does one play it?

Rorty’s answer was always that it wasn’t, properly speaking, a game at all, not like say Brandom’s systematic philosophy of language. This is his emphasis that pragmatism—under whose banner he gathered a large number of his favorite philosophers, from Gadamer and Derrida to Dennett and Arthur Fine—only makes negative points against positive programs.[fn.10] But if pragmatism is to be a coherent object at all—something that deserves a single name, even if it is more like a family name than it is a single individual’s—there must be a central vision around which can be identified rules that can come under violation: you need to be able to know whether you are a pragmatist or not outside of the fact that Rorty says you are. Rorty has run the range of derision to teasing about his lists, appropriations, and self-conscious ignorings of his “heroes.”[fn.11] But there is a central vision—why can’t this be the game, the system, the positive program?

“What kind of game is a list of negatives?” Rorty might say. What kind of game is a list of “don’ts” rather than a list of “shoulds or cans”? Every game comes not only with a list of things to prepare for the game (where to sit, what to have like dice, etc.) and a list of rules for how play proceeds (“if you land on a Chance space, draw a card and follow its instructions”), but also the all-important “Getting Started” section. Pragmatism is like a game with a list of things you can’t do, but nowhere does it tell you how to even get started with the game. And that is a horrible way to teach people how to be philosophers, for it tells you nothing about what to philosophize about. In fact, the answer is something like “anything you want,” but what if you philosophize about stuff nobody cares about? Playing solitaire gets kind of boring after a while.

But “anything you want” is the entire impetus behind pragmatism being a movement for putting philosophy back into the flow of life—you set your own agenda so that you can respond to the currents and corrugations of life. There is still this nagging problem for Rorty, though: his particular slice of life he’s chosen to focus on is still philosophy. This is like saying that his agenda is the management of “don’ts.” What are these “don’ts” and why should someone like Rorty be in charge of them? The core of Rorty’s answer emerged fully in his 1979 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the APA: “Pragmatists follow Hegel in saying that ‘philosophy is its time grasped in thought.’ Anti-pragmatists follow Plato in striving for an escape from conversation to something atemporal which lies in the background of all possible conversations. I do not think one can decide between Hegel and Plato save by meditating on the past efforts of the philosophical tradition to escape from time and history” (CP 174). Rorty is in charge of the list of “don’ts” because it is a list built out of an experience playing with and looking-on over the games played by others. When a game breaks down or is superseded by another, there stands Rorty trying to figure out why. This “why” is then trotted out as an explanation for other breakdowns—if it works, then it is added as a “don’t”: a warning that if you try and set up your game in such-and-such a fashion, it will breakdown when it reaches such-and-such a point under such-and-such a pressure. One of the easiest examples is the Cartesian skeptic: he will always reply, when you think you know something, “how do you know?” To every response, he simply adds another, “So how do you know that?” The Cartesian game needs a reply to the skeptic that will get him to shut up. No reply, so thinks Rorty and a growing cadre of like-minded philosophers (e.g., Michael Williams), will shut the skeptic up because the criteria for shutting him up are impossible to fulfill. Once you allow the Matrix response as a serious, legitimate response—“what if I were to tell you that this is all a dream?”—to any particular phenomenological experience, then you’ve effectively made it appropriate and relevant to every experience. This is what the Cartesian problematic of beginning with methodological doubt does, so Rorty—following Peirce—says don’t start there.

One of the curious things about pragmatism, then of course, is that it is as much an experimental inquiry as any other. The list of “don’t’s” is grown out of watching experimentations in “shoulds.” The “don’ts” themselves, though, must be experimented on—fiat is not a good reason. “Don’t take things simply by authoritative fiat” we’ve learned through the course of history. Yet—sometimes you need to, like the parents who want to shut up their kid who’s doing his best impersonation of a Cartesian skeptic: “Why? Why? Why? Why?” We don’t have all the answers all the time, so sometimes we have to stop, to block the road of inquiry so we can go on to do something else, and one does that by fiat—one gains legitimate authority for such measures by wielding them only when appropriate. So pragmatism’s list of “don’ts” come with an elaboration of circumstances for appropriateness. As Fish has said, the pragmatist’s principles are “rules of thumb.”

I’d like to go back now to Rorty’s argumentative strategies and the rules of the game he plays and why it’s legitimate. The game of pragmatism, so far stated, consists in a freescape impinged only by a list of “don’ts.” This, on its face, doesn’t seem right, unless “don’t kill people” is suddenly a specifically pragmatist principle. So, the game of pragmatism is first and foremost a philosophical game. As a philosophical game, it doesn’t need to have explicitly rules from other games, it only needs to be able to account for their possibility (recurring to Sellars’ definition in [fn.2]). So there’s a weird sense in which philosophical games are one among many, and yet contain the others within it. The game of pragmatism’s mantra is something like: “get back to life!” which is all those other games. However, this isn’t a disparagement of philosophy, merely the principle that if you can’t make your philosophical game relevant to other games, then you’re doing it wrong. So the philosopher who wants to be a pragmatist has one of two choices: they can either fiddle around with other games in relationship to their philosophical game (i.e. the game of seeing how things hang together) or they can fiddle around with other philosophical games in relationship to their philosophical game. It is this latter practice which is the game of managing the list of “don’ts” by which other hopeful pragmatists keep an eye on in their freescaping. Since philosophical games are both responses to life and tools for improving life, one set of philosophical tools should consist in improving your philosophical tools so they don’t make your life worse. Pragmatism is the game of making sure your philosophical tools are working properly by making sure you can get back to other games with them. (For example, if you can’t shut the skeptic up, you may never have enough confidence that there is an external world out there, and never make it to the In-N-Out you're dying for.)

This doesn’t yet get to Rorty’s own form of list-management. The model I want to suggest for understanding the distinction between philosophy-as-freescaping and metaphilosophy-as-list-management is of war. This is an old metaphor certainly, but what needs to be highlighted is the difference between articulating a strategy and enacting a strategy. On this model, philosophy is what happens when battle is joined between real, live opponents. Metaphilosophy is the devising of strategies for what you would do if a particular kind of opponent appeared before you. Outside of actual war, of course, is peace and all the other kinds of activities one could be doing if one weren’t in the middle of a war. We might say that Rorty’s career, on this model, went something like this: a grunt fighting in the trenches (60s and 70s—e.g., “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” and “Incorrigibility as a Mark of the Mental”) to a captain managing a squadron (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) to a general on the field (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) to a Professor of Tactics at West Point, teaching the grunts, captains, and generals what they should probably do if they get caught in certain kinds of situations (I’m thinking particularly of the series called “Hope in Place of Knowledge” in Philosophy and Social Hope).

Saying that, however, skews the point of making philosophy a freescape that anyone can do because philosophy is a response and tool for life and we are all living. What we should rather say is that the grunts are all of us in our daily lives, dealing with live, flesh and blood people, and all of us dealing with problems (some of which arise from dealing with each other). The captains we might call “intellectuals,” the kind of person that has gained a reputation—for whatever reason: town elder, supernerd, academic, journalist, therapist, parent—for being able to help with other people’s problems. The generals, on this model, are philosophy professors (I should just say “readers,” but nearly the only people who concentrate hard on books from the philosophy shelves are professional philosophers). They are this because of what Rorty said: they deal almost entirely with the people who keep changing the rules of the game. The difference between clarifying a problem and changing it so you can deal with it better is negligible when you reach this height, overlooking the game of life. And then there’s Rorty: the Tactics Professor, retired and not even on the playing field anymore. What rubs people the wrong way is that Rorty seems to want to tell people how to play the game without anymore playing the game.

“Playing the game” in this sense is giving arguments. The trouble for this prima facie criticism of Rorty is that he does give arguments. What he doesn’t do is sustain them for very long, giving off a sense of being more and more distant from the feeling of being involved in philosophical controversy. And this because of the sweep with which Rorty wishes to encompass, a sweep built less out of an ambitious philosophical gaze (like Brandom’s) and more out of impatience for getting back to things that are probably more important. I say “probably” because I don’t think Rorty ever did shake the sense that meeting philosophical opponents wasn’t a good thing to do. Rorty was glad that Brandom did the things he was able to see him do. He didn’t keep doing philosophy because he needed to pay bills or had nothing better to do (though I imagine some days it felt like it), he did it because he wanted pragmatism to win. He wanted his game to triumph. He did have a horse on the battlefield (to mix metaphors even more quickly than I have so far).

So how, finally, do you manage a negative system? Rorty’s rhetorical pattern—from nearly beginning to end—was to talk about something bigger than himself: whatever ism he was promoting that day. What this allowed him to do was forward arguments that were depersonalized: like generals moving pieces on a Risk board. Rorty wanted to win, but you’re able to relax a little bit more and learn more when you take a little of your pride out of it by such a depersonalizing maneuver. You are not your theories, though there isn’t much more to you than that (at least once you expand the notion of a “theory” to the size that James used). We make growing easier through such an attitude. The second pattern that attached itself to the first was to talk of strategies: the strategy strategy. For pragmatists, beliefs are habits of action. Philosophy is the refinement of belief, not through experimental action to see its consequence, but through projection based on similarity of past cases of action. When you philosophize, you tinker with your habits, which themselves are in place to guide your action when the moment arrives. And when you think about philosophy as first and foremost a dialectical encounter with other philosophers, then you’ll talk about what you would do and say should you meet another philosopher. This is the form that system-building takes for a series of negatives: a list of hypotheticals. If such-and-such a condition is met, then I would do such-and-such.

Rorty’s later writings, when they were philosophical, had the simplifying and unsustained quality they did because he was thinking of the future: his goal was to teach the dialectical techniques and gambits that are, while not being themselves sophisticated (because a sophisticated technique spells several pages), in relatively good working order as first responses. I don’t think Rorty ever expected his shorter and shorter arguments to end argument. He wanted, rather, to display some of the tactics that come in handy and chart what, if an actual encounter should find you victorious, the consequences are having used such gambits. If you doubt the veracity of someone’s claim, you might say, “How do you know?” What Rorty wanted to make sure people knew is when pressing that claim turns into a monster and how you might avoid creating that monster, or believing that the monster really exists whether you created him or not. Is such a mode of philosophizing frivolous and disingenuous? Only if introductory manuals are. Only if kindergarten is. People have to start somewhere, and Rorty made the ambitious, courageous, and unenviable attempt to try and write for people who weren’t philosophy professors. It’s much easier to talk to people in your clique, where you don’t need to explain why you do the things you do. What made philosophers peeved at Rorty was that his simplifying maneuvers ended the argument before they wanted to see it closed. So it always must if you wish to move on to something else—Rorty’s mistake, if you will, was to continue to read, appreciate, and haggle with the top guns in the field and try and make them too-quickly-relevant to the other problems Rorty wished to discuss. I’m not sure this is irresponsible. It would only be irresponsible if people thought that a philosopher’s duty was to foreclose on argument—to end the argument. But Rorty only wished to move it further. The trick to understanding Rorty’s accomplishment in his later phase might be in considering them as advanced introductions—or rather, introductions for advanced thinkers. The sophisticated can become stale tramping around in their tired patterns and circumlocutions, and understanding Rorty’s thought might be to understand Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as a mature youth.

Endnotes

[1] Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind” in Philosophical Profiles, 23. I cannot quite figure why Bernstein has quotes around “position” and not “correct.” The standard ironic handling of, from their point of view, philosophically circumspect notions that Bernstein and Rorty share would suggest this was a mistake, but it is in the original printing of the article, too. The only real suggestion I can give about the semantic alteration if they are scare-quotes is that Bernstein is suggesting that Rorty finds the notion of a philosophical position as suspect as (and/or part and parcel with) argument. This is plausible, though out of joint with where Bernstein is in his elaboration and, I think, ultimately misleading about Rorty. To suggest that Rorty’s attempting to conceive of a positionless position is absurd on its face, but the difficulty of finding a comfortable position in a given array of positions that all look uncomfortable is a real motif that came out of PMN.

[2] Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xli. The capitalization in “Philosophy” is due to Rorty’s distinction earlier between a nonprofessional “philosophy,” which at best is captured by Wilfrid Sellars’ definition “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term” (xiv), and professional “Philosophy,” which centers around “interlocking Platonic notions” whose conceptual shape is taken from the impetus to ask “questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., ‘truth,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘goodness’) in the hope of better obeying such norms” (xv, emphasis mine).

[3] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8-9

[4] The claim of “parasitism” has a submerged history in Rorty’s argumentative arc that is too much to excavate here. However, it would trace itself through Rorty’s peculiar understanding of Kant’s transcendental argument, in which Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” eventually becomes cast as the “transcendental argument to end all arguments” (in “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Bieri et al., 1979, 78), to his notion of irony in CIS which is first experimented with in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP). The two aforementioned papers were written about the same time, when PMN was in its final stages of composition.

[5] Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy” in Review of Metaphysics Dec. 1961, 301

[6] There’s actually quite a lot to be made of Calvinball as an analogy to life, particularly insofar as one focuses on Calvin’s need to follow the rules as Hobbes makes them up and compares that to Kant and Hegel on the bindingness of norms, particularly as Robert Brandom explicates them.

[7] Quietism is essentially an outgrowth of the idea of philosophy as therapy that Wittgenstein pioneered. For some of Rorty’s thoughts about recent terminology and the struggle over Wittgenstein, see “Naturalism and Quietism” and “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics. While siding with quietists in the former, he makes a distinction between “Wittgensteinian therapists,” the quietists, and “pragmatic Wittgensteinians,” and sides with the pragmatists against the quietists. This is an interesting move that would pay for more thought, especially given the movement between his appeal to Davidson’s “passing theory” argument in CIS (14) and his later criticism of that same section of Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”: “In the case at hand, they wonder whether the ability to cope with Mrs. Malaprop need be described as the ability to converge with her on any sort of theory, any more than the ability of two bicyclists to avoid collision is an ability to agree on a passing theory of passing” (“Response to Donald Davidson” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom, 75). The “they” opposed to Davidson in that passage are “Wittgensteinians,” and specifically “therapeutic Wittgensteinians.” Given Rorty’s career-long loyalty to Wittgenstein and Davidson as philosophical heroes, ferreting out the ratios of difference given shifted terrain in these instances would give us a good picture of Rorty’s philosophical instincts.

[8] James, “What Pragmatism Means” in Pragmatism

[9] Walzer, “A Critique of Philosophical Conversation” in Thinking Politically, 30. This is a fascinating article, principally about various kinds of ideal-speech theories wielded for political purposes (in particular Habermas). Walzer is that exemplary kind of political philosopher who keeps very well before him the distinction between theory and the real world, the unquestioned need for both, and the unquestioned primacy of the problems of the real world.

[10] For example, after block-quoting Peirce, Derrida, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault, and Heidegger all in a row on the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Rorty says, “This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language—e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points” (CP xx).

[11] I’m thinking of, in particular, Deweyans who point out that Rorty violates a significant portion of Dewey’s corpus. See the exchanges in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, as a representative selection of criticism and how he responds to it. On the teasing end, there’s my favorite from Dennett: “Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English, I am tempted by Rorty’s performance on this occasion to enunciate a useful hermeneutical principle, the Rorty Factor: Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742. After all, if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably done the same or better for Heidegger – which means I can save myself the trouble of reading Heidegger; I can just read Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and come out about 40% ahead” (“Comments on Rorty” in Synthese 53 (1982), 349-50). Dennett, like Rorty, is his own kind of bizarre philosophical character, and this short piece has some very interesting insights into Rorty’s procedure, all the more so because of their disagreements about how to express themselves metaphilosophically.