Sunday, February 11, 2007

A Map of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

An Overlong Introduction That Stretches the Limits of Even My Own Vaunted Lack of Brevity

Almost 30 years too late, I’d like to offer something of a review of Rorty’s PMN, which is to say I’d like to summarize Rorty’s epochal book by providing a road map to reading it. When PMN appeared in 1979, it had an immediate effect on its readers. By Rorty’s professional colleagues, it was taken as a betrayal, an abandonment of not only the projects to which Rorty and the professionals had dedicated themselves to, but also of the standards of rigor and merit by which good philosophy should aspire. By readers outside of philosophy departments, particularly in American English departments, it was taken as an exciting dragon slaying, the crushing of dreams that had punished and oppressed disciplines living in Philosophy’s tyrannical shadow. It wasn’t exactly either of these, but there is a kernel of truth in both. Rorty was attacking traditional philosophical projects like foundational epistemology, but the book itself did not display any lack of rigor or merit. Rorty was attacking the pretensions of philosophy’s self-image, a self-image that many philosophers held on to. Kant’s image of philosophy as the queen of the sciences held sway in many quadrants and Rorty sought to dispel that image. The effect, however, isn’t as stunning as all that and to dramatize it as Brutus murdering Caesar is to miss the care and love Rorty has for contemporary philosophy. On the other hand, by attempting to give philosophy a new self-image, people shouldn’t follow the professional philosophers’ love of drama by buying into the “Et tu, Brute?” story and rejoicing in the saving of Rome. Despite their often pretension, philosophy has never had the regal position it wished and Rorty’s aspirations are not that of Beowulf, but that of an underlaborer clearing away some brush.

One of the surprising things at the time of PMN was Rorty’s choice of heroes, his lineup of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey as “the three most important philosophers of our century.” (5) We might not get so excited about that announcement now (“Yeah, of course they are important and of course they have a lot of similarity. Du-uh. We know that.”), but that is only because we are living in the wake of Rorty’s written corpus, who probably did more than any other single person to ensure all three’s entwined legacy. In 1980, analytic philosophers, Rorty’s fellow professors at Princeton, could accept the choice of Wittgenstein, but Heidegger? Most believed that Carnap had successfully and satirically dispensed with him years ago, which isn’t to mention his deplorable behavior before and after World War II. Admirers of Continental philosophy, mainly located in English departments, could understand Heidegger, being Derrida’s precursor, but Wittgenstein? Sure, he was from the Continent, but his first book was perfectly boring (who writes that systematically?) and his second goes on and on obscurely about obscure topics. And Dewey? Dewey hadn’t been in vogue anywhere for at least 30 years, barely kept alive by marginalized philosophers like Sidney Hook, Morton White, and John McDermott. What was the deal?

It turns out that Rorty was performing one of the most impressive rhetorical power plays I have ever seen. For years Rorty had been accruing a very respectable and pronounced position in American philosophy, with important, influential and tightly argued papers in the philosophy of mind and metaphilosophy. He had become so respectable, in fact, that he had been elected the President of the American Philosophical Association in 1978—just in time to drop the bomb of “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in 1979 at New York in front of a whole crowd of the most important American philosophers, from Princeton, Harvard, MIT, Yale, all the eastern universities, just as PMN was being released, read, and the indigestion was just beginning to be felt.

Of course, there was nothing suspicious or underhanded about it, like there were back alley orchestrations going on, it was all serendipitous (though as I understand it, Rorty caused a lot of consternation with the analytic establishment that year, not with his book or with the presidential address, but with regular ole’ stupid, peripheral academic politics: he made a ruling against the establishment in favor of the “pluralists,” who felt they were getting the short shrift, because he felt he was being bullied a little too much), and it is not the power play I was referring to. Rather, Rorty used his respectability and authority (as a “philosopher to pay attention to”) to reinvent Wittgenstein and Heidegger for their respectively uncomprehending audiences (“Wait, Wittgenstein/Heidegger is saying the same thing as Heidegger/Wittgenstein?”) and to all but single-handedly resurrect Dewey—but he did it in a book that, contrary to the appearances of the introduction, actually has only a superficial reliance on them.

Rorty is fairly upfront about all this, but it is still nevertheless very interesting to behold. The general tone and underlying message of PMN is designated by his choice of heroes, a sort of synthesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (with its therapeutic stance towards philosophical problems), Heidegger’s Being and Time (with its redescription of philosophy into existential terms, what Hook and Dewey saw as a recasting of Experience and Nature in “transcendental German”), and Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (with its tracing of the history of foundationalism). But while that may be true of its tone and inspiration, PMN’s closer point of departure is a synthesis of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind, Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It might be summed up best as doing for philosophy what Kuhn did for science.

The structure of the book is very important to both its readability and to its argument. The book is at its core dialectical and not, unlike philosophical systems from Descartes to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, deductive. System writing in philosophy has often been taken to be the prime motivation of a philosopher, writing something that says something about everything, that creates a context in which to put everything. A philosopher gets clear about his first principles (whether “clear and distinct ideas,” a single substance of God, or the logical form of language) and then derives the rest of his system from that. This is a bottom-up approach, one that is quite fitting for the foundationalism that is commonly associated with it. Rather than seeing our reasoning as sitting vertically on top of foundations that we should secure, Rorty sees our reasoning as stretching horizontally across time. Rorty does not start with first principles with which to construct a system out of, but is rather led back to root assumptions, the uncovering of which will help us understand the structure of our reasoning. These assumptions have a history and if we understand that history we will understand why we think the way we do.

Rorty’s book, then, is laid out into eight chapters split into three parts, plus an introduction. The introduction does a fine job of laying out precisely what Rorty has in mind to do, who the heroes and villains are and a bird’s eye view of what he shall be arguing in more detail. The first part consists of a treatment of a particular problem in the philosophy of mind: the relation between mind and body. Rorty brings us along step by step, getting us clear about what possible problem there could be, what possible solutions there have been, and why this matters to philosophers and to him.

As he works at dissolving the problem of consciousness, he leads us back to why this is important for philosophers—because epistemology has created it as a problem. As long as philosophers feel motivated by epistemology, they will feel that there is a problem with consciousness. So in the second part, the largest, Rorty moves to a confrontation with epistemology—where did it come from, why is it important, what have we done, what should we do? Rorty uses this chapter to range over issues in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language, going over all kinds of attempts to milk some sense out of the idea of a “theory of knowledge.”

And finally Rorty works us all the way back to the very idea of philosophy. What is philosophy if it has expunged epistemology? Here Rorty proffers suggestions about how philosophy has viewed itself and how it might now instead view itself. Rorty begins with the idea of the “mind” and by the end of the book shows how the notion of the “mind” has gained its philosophical strength from a number of other interlocking notions that were also in place, notions about representation, language, and systematic methodology. If you only knock one or two out, the others will still come and bring you down.

This dialectical structure is important for PMN because Rorty is working with an antagonistic crowd. Rorty is trying to convince us that we should question some of our most deeply held beliefs by taking us on a tour of how others have questioned a few of these beliefs. By dialectically going back and forth between his intended goals and his current topics, Rorty is able to meet our current objections and pull us further and further into the story, from debates about materialism, to debates about knowing generally, to debates about the enterprise of philosophy itself—showing us doubts about a particular thesis, to doubts about the general confirmation of such theses, to doubts about the very activity of forwarding such theses.

In what remains, I would like to go into more specifics about each of the chapters, what Rorty’s up to and for what purpose, then move to Richard Bernstein’s very sympathetic review of PMN where I hope to reply to some of his criticisms, and then finally offer a map of Rorty’s corpus, how we might understand his evolution as a philosopher and PMN’s place in it.

3 comments:

  1. Matt,

    You've heard all this before, but what the hell.

    The problem I have with PNM is that, while the anti-epistemology of Part 2 and the general anti-Philosophy with-a-capital-P of Part 3 are commendable, the anti-philosophy of mind of Part 1 is basically just special pleading for the metaphysical view known as materialism. In it he is, as you say, following Ryle in attempting to explain away the elephant in the room called 'consciousness', and he is quite correct that if one wants to maintain a materialist view of everything one must do it. But why should one? Only because one has a particular view of how things really are. As you know, I have specific reasons for not being a materialist, and none of those reasons were addressed in PNM.

    And, since the virtues of parts 2 and 3 do not depend on the materialism of part 1 (one can get to them as Madhyamika Buddhists had long ago, and do so without being strictly "anti-essentialist", rather by rejecting both essentialism and anti-essentialism), one can argue that in part 1 Rorty was being a capital-P Philosopher.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, how about my response as usual.

    Your comment that "the virtues of parts 2 and 3 do not depend on the materialism of part 1" strikes up an interesting point, and that is that I'd go you one further: each further part does not depend on the earlier part--though I'm not sure you can work it the other way.

    This is what I mean: I described PMN as a dialectical trail to emphasize the fact that he's leading you down a rabbit hole that it doesn't appear you have to follow him further in, though you have to contort yourself pretty good to not. Rorty happens to begin in the philosophy of mind, but he could have picked a particular problem in philosophy of science or moral philosophy just as well (though thematically, given the convergence of mirror metaphor in philosophy of mind and epistemology, philosophy of mind was the good choice). What Rorty wants to do is develop certain doubts about what is going on in the problem, doubts about the way the problem is treated. This leads him back a level, to epistemology, where he repeats the process to lead us back to philosophy in general, to part 3.

    At a certain point, people can stop doubting. Take Dan Dennett. Dennett has said of Rorty's philosophy of mind that it is "near perfect." The difference I want to strike up between Dennett and Rorty is that Rorty would never say (or at least for the purposes of the distinction I'm going to make) that he has a philosophy of mind in the same way that Dennett does, because to do so would depend on antecedent demarcations of what kind of philosophy there is to do, demarcations that depend on a specific view of philosophy, the one he demolishes in part 3 (which isn't to say that the demarcations survive for pragmatic reasons, pigeon-holes for departments). In this context, saying that Rorty has a philosophy of mind is like saying that he has a theory of truth--both are misleading for precisely the same reasons. (Dennett is convenient for philosophy of mind, but if Rorty had written about moral philosophy, the example would have been Bernard Williams.)

    The difference between Dennett and Rorty is that Dennett still has in tact views that Rorty attempts to dismantle in parts 2 and 3 (don't ask me for specifics). And Rorty does criticize him for them (see e.g., his response to Dennett in Rorty and His Critics), but the criticism is much different than straight ahead argumentation--it is basically talk about hopes, dreams, and taking bets about the best way forward.

    This brings me to why I don't think you can go the other way--how, if you agree with part 2, let alone part 3, it would be difficult not to agree with part 1. This is because I think Rorty does offer a completely consistent account of philosophy of mind from a pragmatist standpoint, that it isn't metaphysical materialism. There's this article that was written about Rorty a long time ago, back when he was first writing essays in the philosophy of mind. Rorty's approach was at first dubbed "eliminative materialism" (by James Cornman, I think, but a title that was since taken up by the Churchlands though their views have little to do with Rorty's radical suggestion). The article was called "Is 'Eliminative Materialism' Materialism?" I'm not sure how the author answered the question, but my answer would be no, it is not metaphysical materialism. Rorty's suggestion at the end of PMN, in parts 2 and especially 3, is essentially that we should give up the debate between materialism and idealism, just as we should give up the debate between realism and antirealism.

    This means that there is no pragmatic difference, no difference that makes a difference between saying "there is no mind" (Rorty, Dennett) and "it is all mind" (which, if memory serves, is something like your view). If we learned to speak either way, pragmatically we'd end up the same as long as we'd become pragmatist in the requisite ways.

    And I think Rorty can be seen, in this light, as suggesting something like a rejection of essentialism v. antiessentialism in the same way as above. One only becomes an antiessentialist dialectically--if one engages with an essentialists grandiose claims. But the pragmatist wants to just drop the sterile debate and get on with other, more useful parts of life, parts that will never run into such a debate (like debating about health care or eating a hamburger).

    I may try and emphasize this point as I continue on in Part 1 and beyond.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, to start at the end of what you say, I don't agree that "This means that there is no pragmatic difference, no difference that makes a difference between saying "there is no mind" (Rorty, Dennett) and "it is all mind" (which, if memory serves, is something like your view). If we learned to speak either way, pragmatically we'd end up the same as long as we'd become pragmatist in the requisite ways."

    In the first place, I don't see how one can say that Rorty doesn't have a philosophy of mind. It consists of denying that there is mind, something beyond neural activity, that all the mental vocabulary is only something that developed in Darwinian terms. He is a nominalist, and that too is a metaphysical standpoint. In fact, I see no difference between being a nominalist and being an anti-essentialist, since I pretty much equate "concept", "essence", and "universal" (and "static pattern of value"). It was a bit misleading of me to say that I am neither an essentialist nor an anti-essentialist, since I believe that universals/essences are real. What makes me different from, say Plato, though, is that I hold that essences only become real by being particularized, and so the universal is dependent on the particular just as much as the particular is dependent on the universal.

    So what I find faulty in Rorty's arguments in part 1 of PMN is that he simply assumes that, somehow, animals developed the means to abstract universals from particulars, while I argue that that can't happen. (As a side tidbit, I see his frequent use of the word "just" in his arguments similarly to the way Pirsig saw its use in the phrase "quality is just what you like" -- there is no "just" about it, in that the ability to abstract is, from a materialist point of view, a complete and utter mystery, one that Rorty, Dennett, et al, have to sweep under the rug to maintain a belief in materialism.)

    Now, getting back to the question of what difference it makes, I see a huge difference, simply by imagining how different things would be in contemporary society if materialism were not dominant in intellectual circles (and in fact in all circles in Western society -- much theistic religion is largely a materialist outlook plus God, which in my opinion makes for bad religion). The reason you and Rorty can say that we should just "drop the sterile debate" is because you think it has been settled on your terms.

    How is it, then, than we can agree on the virtues of pragmatism? Well, because we can agree that philosophy, and in particular, metaphysics, as practiced from Descartes to Russell and Husserl was misguided in thinking that it could be made foundational, and so could serve as a ground for science, morality, etc. So I agree with the materialist pragmatist that programs to provide a foundation for knowledge or morality is futile (parts 2 and 3), while disagreeing over the source of this urge to find foundations. To me, the source lies in nominalism, which in removing the mental vocabulary from res extensa led to Cartesian and Lockean dualism that then required a theory of representation and so forth. For Middle Way Buddhism, on the other hand, nominalism is one way of falling off the Middle Way, while realism is the other. (I've got an essay on this, though still a draft and incomplete here. Unfortunately it stops before I get into the universal/particular contradictory identity.)

    ReplyDelete

Want to get in touch with me but are too scared to universalize and eternalize your comments for all everywhere and always to see? Just e-mail me: pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com