Austin Gets Rhemed

*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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J. L. Austin occupies a curious place in the philosophical canon. On the one hand, he began practicing what came to be known as "ordinary-language philosophy," which a professor of mine said John Searle picked up and beat to death and made ugly. And this is why Rorty can be found saying that, as with Derrida and deconstruction, ordinary-language philosophy isn't a program, but whatever it is that Austin was doing. Yet, on the other hand, as the close of Rorty's wonderful introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, intimates--Austin did seem to want to be programmatic.

I'd like to focus on a section in Austin's How to Do Things With Words in order to bring out why one shouldn't (like Searle) push Austin for programmatic purposes.

At the start of Lecture 8, Austin reminds us of his distinction between phonetic, phatic, and rhetic acts (95). The phonetic is the "act of uttering certain noises," the phatic "noises of certain types," i.e. linguistic noises, and rhetic is defined as "using those vocables with a certain more-or-less definite sense and reference."

The first thing to notice is that it is difficult to maintain the distinction between phatic and rhetic. Both phatic and rhetic are, roughly, intelligible noises, noises we recognize as linguistic, and therefore functioning in a linguistic manner (which is to say, having sense and reference). Austin quickly allays our fears of collapse by giving a simple example of what he means:

Thus 'He said "The cat is on the mat"', reports a phatic act, whereas 'He said that the cat was on the mat' reports a rhetic act. (95)

Oh, that seems simple--take off the quotes, and add "that." The trouble arises again, though, when we we try and think about how intelligible a foreign language is to us:

'He said "gibba gobba gooba"' reports a phatic act, whereas 'He said that gibba gobba gooba' reports a rhetic act.

It's gibberish. If we don't already understand prior to hearing certain noises, in a fairly definite way, what the sense and reference are of certain noises--if we don't already recognize it as a language--then all we'll hear are phonemes.

Austin doesn't quite say this, but the set-up seems to suggest that we can distinguish a pheme prior to being able to distinguish a rheme, that we can hear it's a pheme without it necessarily making any rhetic sense. Austin says later, "it is clear that we can perform a phatic act which is not a rhetic act, though not conversely." Can we? "Thus we may repeat someone else's remark or mumble over some sentence, or we may read a Latin sentence without knowing the meaning of the words" (97). So, just knowing that a set of noises is supposed to be linguistic is enough for the noises to be phatic? "If a monkey makes a noise indistinguishable from 'go' it is still not a phatic act" (96). Because the monkey didn't realize he said "go"? What if he did? What if it was a gorilla and the language ASL? What if the gorilla made a gesture, and we just sat there stupidly while the gorilla's thinking, "Hey, idiot, I just told you to get out of my seat"? We didn't recognize it as language, and so no phatic or rhetic act, despite that it was intended as such.

"The pheme is a unit of language: its typical fault is to be nonsense--meaningless. But the rheme is a unit of speech; its typical fault is to be vague or void or obscure, etc." (98) But isn't part of Austin's point (or rather, shouldn't it be) that there is no static "language" outside of the act of it's performance, outside of, e.g., speech? (It is apropos to recall Donald Davidson's remark that "there's no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed."[1])

I bring this up is because of what these set of three--phonetic, phatic, rhetic--have in relationship to the more famous and important set of three--locution, illocution, perlocution.

Locution : "Look out!"
Illocution : warning
Perloction : he was warned

The locutionary act are the words being emitted, the illocutionary act is the intended effect of the words, and the perlocutionary act is the actual effect of the illocutionary act. These seem on the surface much more likely not to collapse, I will agree. What seems to be the case in the way Austin uses the first set and the second set is that he intends a locution to be a full phonetic-phatic-rhetic combo act--a fully intelligible linguistic act. From there, and this is what prompts his distinctions, we still get fuzziness in isolating meaning (which was the quest of his predecessors, something like the linguistic version of Descartes' "clear and distinct ideas"), and so he distinguishes the linguistic noise from the noises intended effect, let alone what it causes in a hearer.

Or is that right? What if the locution is simply a phonetic-phatic act, linguistic, but bereft of "more-or-less determined sense and reference," which is the rhetic? This would make sense, for to determine the sense and reference of "Look out!" we would determine that it was a warning. This would make the illocutionary effect a rhetic act, which brings us back to some trouble.

Some literary critics have turned the notion of "speech acts," and specifically the illocutionary act, towards practical duties in reading. For instance, in reading poetry (and this could really go for any piece of language) one might distinguish between the speech act of a line from its tone. To take an example:

Sorrow is my own yard
where the new grass
flames as it has flamed
often before but not
with the cold fire
that closes round me this year.

These are the first six lines of William Carlos Williams' "The Widow's Lament in Springtime." When treating a selection, the first thing you'd need to do is parcel out speech acts. A period followed by a capital letter, particularly in a poem, need not be the typographic cue for a new speech act (notice, too, the fluid nature of demarcation in speech, and follow that through in written language). The speech act of a poem would be the intended effect of the poetic speaker in "uttering" the particular words and phrases. In this case, we have a widow: "sorrow is my own yard." Noticing the elevated diction created by the odd syntax (let alone the metaphor), we might say that the widow in the first line is insisting to herself the state of her mind--speech act: to insist. We might hold from calling the tone of this speech act, however, insistent. The diction makes it dignified.

I do not doubt the efficacy in using Austin to help climb into a poem--but what I wonder is how the collapse of the phatic/rhetic, locution/illocution might effect the further plunge into a poem. For instance, wouldn't tone be part of an illocutionary act? To take "look out," wouldn't the tone in which I said it create, to a large extent, the intended effect of a warning? And if tone is part of the illocutionary act, the rhetic act, then are we really talking about the same speech act--the same poem--if we get the tone wrong? In other words, if we get the tone wrong, might we be getting the speech act wrong, and if the speech act, then the poem? Might this be why we can still talk about better and worse readings of a poem?

There are a lot of interesting theoretical conundrums lying around this area, and though the distinction between tone and speech act might seem a little artificial, it can be quite useful. The above considerations are probably more like an explanation of why any one of us may have trouble climbing into poems--poems are what they are because of their active attempt to flout their very composition as language, i.e. as having definite sense and reference. It might be important to remember Davidson on metaphors here. Davidson said that metaphors aren't the kind of things that have two meanings, one literal and another metaphorical, but are rather simply noises. Until you beat these surprising noises or marks on a page that have no initial meaning down (by giving them sense from repeated use), they are just unintelligible noises or marks. But when you do, you eventually get dead metaphors we don't even bat an eyelash (i.e. don't even recognize as metaphors, but just as having one literal sense)--like rivers having mouths or mountains feet.

Endnotes

[1] From "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," collected in Truth, Language, and History, 107.

Cavell at Criticism

This is a companion piece to, as opposed to a part of, “Cavell and What We Are Doing,” primarily because I got a little carried away with reading his essay “Aesthetic Problems in Modern Philosophy.” I think there could be no better introduction to what it is that Cavell does then the second essay, “Austin at Criticism.” Seeing Cavell read Austin, one of his primary philosophical forefathers (with Wittgenstein and Emerson), is very interesting and shines a brilliant light on how Cavell views philosophy. It is filled with bits of philosophical wisdom concerning their self-image that philosophers would do well to think about. I shall try to highlight some of them.

Cavell talks a bit about “Austin’s procedures,” but as I had mentioned before, I don’t think there is anything much procedural. Instead, I think Cavell gives us a very insightful read as to where accepting Davidsonian philosophy of language leaves us (before Davidson had even finished his work besides). The first thing Cavell does is dismiss the notion that “Austin attends to ordinary or everyday language” which “is to go on saying, roughly, nothing.” (98) He also dissociates what Austin does from what a descriptive linguist would do: Austin is most assuredly not simply reporting the behavior of the majority of language-users. Cavell builds three insights out of how Austin writes as a better beginning towards a description of how ordinary language philosophy proceeds:

“(1) that one can as appropriately or truly be said to be looking at the world as looking at language; (2) that one is seeking necessary truths ‘about’ the world (or ‘about’ language) and therefore cannot be satisfied with anything I, at least, would recognize as a description of how people in fact talk—one might say one is seeking one kind of explanation of why people speak as they do; and even (3) that one is not finally interested at all in how ‘other’ people talk, but in determining where and why one wishes, or hesitates, to use a particular expression oneself.” (99)

(1) is the Davidsonian point about the erasure of the distinction between knowing a language and knowing your way around the world generally. Since this is Cavell’s starting point, his insights can be fairly seen as what we do after the destruction of the ghosts that Davidson was trying to exorcise from us, the dogmas of empiricism, namely the ones Quine identified, the dogma of the analytic/synthetic distinction and the dogma of reductionism, and Davidson’s third dogma, the dogma of the scheme/content distinction.

That being said, Cavell does seem to get off on the wrong foot when he immediately starts talking about “necessary truths.” This, I think, is negligible, both because of how little Cavell spends on it and because of how easy it is to ignore it. The invocation of “necessary” raises the spectre of the appearance/reality distinction, but it we excise it from the sentence, we still get the common sense distinction between being right and wrong—people may describe themselves a certain way and believe it, but they still might be wrong. Psycho guy might talk about his mom being alive, and sincerely believe that she is, but the fact is she isn’t. (2) is pointing out that, just because people do in fact talk a certain way, doesn’t mean that it is the most efficacious, that it is the best way to talk. What we need is an explanation of why people speak the way they do and those reasons will help us decide how to speak.

(3) seems the largest leap, but it seems perfectly reasonable and very insightful, particularly as to why philosophers could sometimes care less about counter-examples of speech. The investigation of others may help, but we finally rest on ourselves, on our own intuitive grasp of how the world is and what we want to say about it. The Davidsonian picture produces this particular kind of philosophy because in our person-community-world relationship, our “I” is produced in part by its relationship with the community and the world, but it is distinct. The sway of language use then becomes a conflict between a person and the community, as the person who wants to deviate from accepted linguistic behavior tries to convince the community to follow them. By trying to enunciate to others the reasons why you would want to withhold the label of “love” from the capricious philanderer’s feelings towards another person, you try to explain how you want to use the word love, how they should use the word love, what love in fact is.

Cavell talks about “Austin’s procedures” and “proceeding from ordinary language,” but after we learn from Davidson that we are everywhere and always in touch with the world, that no language gets the world wrong and was produced by something and for some reason, we see that Cavell’s description of philosophical procedure is obfuscated by saying “from ordinary language.” Cavell would seem to like to restrict the Davidsonian point to “ordinary language,” but it isn’t clear that Cavell or anyone else even knows what that might be—especially considering the efforts Cavell makes to ward us away from others. Davidson, however, goes the whole way and provides us a good reason as to why we should be suspicious of Cavell’s greater and greater fascination with “the Ordinary.” All languages are in touch with the world and the trick is to find out which ones are better than others, not which ones are more ordinary than others. I don’t think Wittgenstein’s spirit is best served by thinking that he espoused the elimination of linguistic innovation. It is one thing to think that philosopher’s problems are created by taking ordinary words out of ordinary contexts and transplanting them into new contexts. That is certainly true, but if people never did that, then cultural evolution would grind to a hault. The problem with the Plato-Descartes-Kant sequence is that not everything they did, not all of the new contexts, panned out. Sometimes the new contexts, the new metaphors, worked; sometimes they didn’t.

What we have between Cavell and somebody like Rorty (who I summon in my moments of need) is a struggle over the spirit of Wittgenstein, just as Rorty has struggled over the spirit of Dewey with Richard Bernstein (among others) and the spirit of Heidegger with Hebert Dreyfus (among others), and just as I have struggled with others over the spirit of Pirsig. One of the bonuses of Cavell is his cognizance of this kind of struggle. In this particular essay, Cavell is struggling over the spirit of Austin, but what he says here about Austin and his fans is cogent just about anywhere you apply it:

“To accept Austin’s explanations as full and accurate guides to his practice would be not only to confuse advice (which is about all he gave in this line) with philosophical analysis and literary-critical description (which is what is needed), but to confer upon Austin an unrivaled power of self-discernment. It is a mystery to me that what a philosopher says about his methods is so commonly taken at face value. Austin ought to be the last philosopher whose reflexive remarks are treated with this complacency, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because they suffer not merely the usual hazards of self-description but the further deflections of polemical animus.” (101)

So not only for Austin, Wittgenstein, and Pirsig, but also for Cavell himself. “Procedures” is far to methodical sounding a word to be appropriate for what Cavell enacts on the page.

Cavell locates in Austin (and Wittgenstein for that matter) a new style of philosophizing: “a change of style in philosophy is a profound change, and [is] itself a subject of philosophical investigation.” (102) What we see in Austin’s practice, in his manner of investigation, is a focus on the nuances of particular words, like the difference between a “mistake” and an “accident,” and this focus in distinguishing and comparing creates a “crosslight” in which we see that the “capacities and salience of an individual object in question are brought to attention and focus.” (103) This crosslight doesn’t just tell us what the difference between a mistake and an accident are, it tells us “what a mistake is and … what an accident is.” (104) This is the appropriate response to the panrelationalism that pragmatism unfolds in front of us. We can’t simply define a mistake in isolation, we can only define it in relation to other things, non-mistakes, because the very act of definition is a relational act. That is what Wittgenstein taught us when he said there is no ostensive definition by itself.

In this seed-crystal we find the pearly wisdom of Bloom, that life is an agon, a family romance, which it is so much more in philosophy if for no other reason than that philosophy purports to be in love with wisdom, that is life. Cavell mounts a series of explosive questions to show how Austin might sunder philosophy’s pretensions, though in the end I think he might claim too much for Austin and not enough for those following after him:

“How can we learn something (about how we—how I—use words) which we cannot have failed to know? How can asking when we would say ‘by mistake’ (or what we would call ‘doing something by mistake’) tell us what in the world a mistake is? How, given such obvious data, have philosophers (apparently) so long ignored it, forgetting that successful knowledge is a human affair, of human complexity, meeting human need and exacting human responsibility, bypassing it in theories of certainty which compare knowledge (unfavorably) with an inhuman ideal; or elaborated moral philosophies so abstracted from life as to leave, for example, no room for so homely, but altogether a central, moral activity as the entering of an excuse? What is philosophy that it can appear periodically so profound and so trivial, sometimes so close and sometimes so laughably remote, so wise and so stone stupid? What is philosophy that it causes those characteristic hatreds, yet mysterious intimacies, among its rivals? What kind of phenomenon is it whose past cannot be absorbed or escaped (as in the case of science) or parts of it freely admired and envied while other parts are despised and banished (as in art), but remains in standing competition, behind every closed argument waiting to haunt its living heirs?”

Here someone like Rorty may wish to lodge a complaint, that Cavell is housing too much power in philosophy’s past. Cavell, in the years after, will start talking about something called Skepticism that is a condition of humanity. Rorty’s problem is not that skepticism isn’t common, but rather that it doesn’t look properly philosophical, that it isn’t entirely clear why we will always have to keep talking about the Platonic canon when we talk about skepticism. This may be true, and Cavell may imply too much (in this case overpowering) power to the philosophical canon, but I think there is some truth in the idea that we still haven’t yet overcome it. Cavell’s view of spectres still captivates, but we see in these lines what exactly Rorty’s effort of therapy has been. Rorty wants us exactly to break off our agon with Plato, to view Plato as we might a piece of art rather than as a competitor to be wrestled with. And Rorty’s practice is to compare and to distinguish, to tease apart and give new contexts to old words, to show when skepticism means Skepticism and when it simply means showing a little doubt.

Cavell and What We Are Doing

Just as Santayana is my favorite name to throw out when I need an example of an early 20th century philosopher, Stanley Cavell is clearly my favorite of a late 20th century one. They aren’t quite arbitrary examples, for the reason I usually need an example, and the reason why I’m usually grasping for them, is because the topic I’m often discussing is the difference between charismatic and systematic philosophers, philosophers who are respected and brilliant while they are alive and philosophers who leave behind a problematic and a school of followers. Santayana has no school, and as far as I can tell Cavell does not either. However, like Santayana (who famously left philosophy mid-semester when it was just too beautiful in Harvard Yard to spend it in a class room), Cavell is an extraordinarily intriguing figure and I’ve been collecting his books for some time.

Cavell made his name as a brilliant interpreter of both Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. He was one of the foremost members, though most certainly the most idiosyncratic, of the now defunct school of “ordinary language philosophy,” or “Oxford philosophy.” I’ve known about Cavell for many years from my readings of Rorty, but he has remained enigmatic. After reading Danto’s essay, and having the book in question on my shelf, it became too irresistible to ignore. However, while the book isn’t unreadable, it isn’t exactly what you’d want if you were either trying to get into Cavell’s philosophy or find stuff you might find useful for yours. You’d already have to have a preexisting desire to know more about Cavell (which isn’t to say that it isn’t interesting to read).

I do have on my shelf, though, Cavell’s earliest book of essays, which shows how powerful he was early on and how little he’s changed in the subsequent fifty years. I’d read his opening preface a little while ago and had taken a few good lines from it, but I knew at the time that, if not quite inscrutable, Cavell wasn’t exactly “ordinary,” as his supposed school implies. Just as Danto says he has in his recent writings, Cavell’s been attempting to make his style reflect his theses since the very beginning, which is to say that Cavell wants “to make philosophy another kind of problem for itself.” (74) What that means is another thing altogether. But suffice it to say, I’ve found in Cavell’s writings an interesting window into a time now past. Cavell isn’t the clearest guide to Wittgenstein or Austin, but he is fascinating to watch.

I read two essays in his collection, Must We Mean What We Say?, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” and “Austin at Criticism.” It’s difficult to read books in your free time if you have no compass, if there’s no particular reason why you’re reading, if you have no purpose. Most of the time when I struggle with books it’s because I find them boring because I’m just not that interested in the problems the author is struggling with. Cavell’s no exception, and his style makes it even more difficult, but as I worked my way through them (the shortest essays in his collection) I began to get a clearer picture of how they could help me. And there are a plethora of sumptuous lines to chew on.

“Aesthetic Problems” was interesting to read because of the lack of attention usually given by philosophers considered to be in the midst of the “central problems” in the field at that time (epistemology, philosophy of language or science) to “peripheral” fields like aesthetics. It gives us a good indication as to why Cavell is seen as marching to the beat of his own drum, even from the very beginning (though even more so from his essays on Beckett and Shakespeare). It is difficult to put the essay together, as it runs in two parts: a first section on two problems in aesthetics (the paraphrasability of poems and the tonality of atonal music) and a second section on the general problem of aesthetic judgment. I’m still not quite clear on how to connect them, but I think it runs along the lines of two specific examples of the general problem, that lack of consensus on the general problem of aesthetic judgment would preclude answering the specific problems of paraphrasability and tonality. Cavell’s treatment of the two specific problems are interesting, though that depends on if you find the problems of literary criticism exciting (I certainly do) or if you could give a rat’s ass about music theory (I could not).

The problem of paraphrasability, as Cavell generates it from a quarrel between Cleanth Brooks and Yvor Winters, is one about what we are doing when we are reading a poem, or more specifically, what is it really that the literary critic is in the business of doing. Brooks suggests that a paraphrase of a poem, i.e. a reading of a poem, does not limn the true essence of the poem, though it does point the way—as long as it’s properly done. Cavell rightly wonders who it is that “has just flatly given it out that the essence, core, structure, and the rest, of a poem is its paraphrase,” considering we should have some trouble “in understanding what is any or all of these things, since it takes so much philosophy just to state them.” (75)

It is in this that we begin to taste the power that Cavell wields from the ordinary language tradition. Cavell, at this stage, talks a bit about the “methods” or “procedures” of ordinary language philosophy, but I should think that, just as Rorty suggests that we distinguish between “deconstruction” as whatever it is that Derrida is doing and “deconstruction” as a method of reading texts (see “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in EHO), we should distinguish “ordinary language philosophy” as whatever it is that Austin is doing and “ordinary language philosophy” as a method that his less imaginative and skilled followers employ. Cavell is certainly not one of these less skilled followers, and whatever it is that Cavell is doing I would be apt to say is the heart of the wisdom in Austin and that so-called school.

Cavell, in the above, is just getting started, and runs us through an imaginary dialectical encounter between a Brooksian critic and his defense of what he is doing. Jumping on Brooks’ concession, that a paraphrase is all right if you know what you are doing, Cavell retorts, “Which is about like saying that of course criticism is all right, in its place.” Cavell then offers a wonderful little description making fun of the lit crit’s typical habits of writing books:

“But how, in particular, are we to assess a critic’s reading the opening stanza of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ Ode and writing: ‘… the poet begins by saying that he has lost something’ [Well Wrought Urn, 116]? We can ransack that stanza and never find the expression ‘lost something’ in it. Then the critic will be offended—rightly—and he may reply: Well, it does not actually say this, but it means it, it implies it; do you suggest that it does not mean that? And of course we do not. But then the critic has a theory about what he is doing when he says what a poem means, and so he will have to add some appendices to his readings of the poetry explaining that when he says what a poem means he does not say exactly quite just what the poem means; that is, he only points to its meaning, or rather ‘points to the area in which meaning lies.’ But even this last does not seem to him humility enough, and he may be moved to a footnote in which he says that his own analyses are ‘at best crude approximations of the poem’ [189]. By this time someone is likely to burst out with: But of course a paraphrase says what the poem says, and an approximate paraphrase is merely a bad paraphrase; with greater effort or sensibility you could have got it exactly right. To which one response would be: ‘Oh, I can tell you exactly what the Ode means,’ and then read the Ode aloud.” (75-6)

Cavell is thus able to quite quickly thrust himself into the middle of a dispute about the self-image of literary critics: what is it that they are doing? Not, what do they think they are doing, but what are they doing? I find the above passage hilarious, if for no other reason than I’ve had such dialectical encounters before, and ended them with something like, “Well, if you’re being such an ass about it, I can just read you the section from Pirsig.” Those are definite endpoints because being pushed there, with no other outlet of response, effectively evacuates the area in which both you and your difficult counter-interpreter were existing—the position of a writer. And we even find in a literary critic like Stanley Fish, from a book from that era, Self-Consuming Artifacts, just those kinds of appendices.

Of course, the need that Fish was forced into fulfilling was entirely antithetical to the need being fulfilled by the New Critics. As Fish would later make more clear in books like Is There a Text in This Class?, he was providing an anti-theoretical rebuttal to the continual theoretical repositionings that literary critics felt they were forced to include ever since Eliot and Frye and their lot became hegemonic. And this is the splash of cold water that Cavell is involved in giving us. The part that should make us laugh is the idea that we need a theory to justify what we are doing. “If you put such phrases as ‘giving the meaning,’ ‘giving a paraphrase,’ ‘saying exactly what something means (or what somebody said),’ and so on, into the ordinary contexts … in which they are used, you will not find that you are worried that you have not really done these things. We could say: That is what doing them really is. Only that serenity will last just so long as someone does not start philosophizing about it.” (77)

Cavell’s Wittgensteinian project is then to try and diagnose why we think we need a theory. Why are commonsensical descriptions not enough? Why must we get into a debate about what metaphors are and what the literal/metaphorical distinction is that allows a theory, and a condemnation of paraphrase on the part of Brooks, to be possible? Cavell would like to get us on the couch and apply the right kind of therapy so that we may stop philosophizing when we want to. The hope is that we may then be able to face up to the self-image problem in literary, and artistic criticism generally (which can just as easily be applied to philosophy): “namely what it is we are doing when we describe or explain a work of art; what function criticism serves; whether different arts, or forms of art, require different forms of criticism; what we may expect to learn from criticism, both about a particular piece of art and about the nature of art generally.” (82)

The next, thankfully brief, part of his essay is about music theory, and specifically tonality. As you may have guessed from my earlier comment, I found it boring and would like to jump right over it. On reflection, however, my gut reaction might highlight something about the problem Cavell is dealing with. I’ve never understood what music or art theory thinks it is doing. It has always seemed to me to be quite stupid. The catch is that, while I’ve always found theory about music or paintings to be stupid, I’ve not always felt the same about philosophy. Why is that? I have a feeling that my gut reaction to music theory is the gut reaction that Wittgenstein and Cavell would like to instill in us in general (not exactly true for either of them, but I’ve read too much Rorty and Fish to care). Why on earth do we need theory?

My general feeling is that aesthetics, and music and art theory, never took off as, or at least are still not today, philosophical hot topics is because they seem on their face to be silly (which isn’t to say that you wouldn’t have to take a theory class if you were in a Music or Art, or even Dance, department). The difference between theories of music or art and theories of knowledge or texts is that, on their face, the former are non-discursive, while the latter discursive. This made it easier for reflections on the latter to be more easily confused with their objects (Cavell’s problem of paraphrasability), whereas nobody confuses a painting with its critical review. As Cavell suggests, for all his talk of approximation, the critic himself “furthers the suggestion that paraphrase and poem operate, as it were, at the same level, are the same kind of thing. … And then he has to do everything at his philosophical disposal to keep paraphrase and poem from coinciding….” (76) But nobody confuses a poem for an essay about the poem. (Pace Bloom, who says delightfully that “All criticisms that call themselves primary vacillate between tautology—in which the poem is and means itself—and reduction—in which the poem means something that is not itself a poem. Antithetical criticism must begin by denying both tautology and reduction, a denial best delivered by the assertion that the meaning of a poem can only be a poem, but another poem—a poem not itself.” (The Anxiety of Influence, 70) But discussion of Bloom’s engrossing attempts to make poetry a kind of criticism, and criticism a kind of poetry, a grand pragmatic attempt I must say, are for another time. Until then, see my “Bloom and Criticism.”) It is this position from common sense, where nobody confuses Iggy Pop with Lester Bangs or Michelangelo with Freud or Shakespeare with Samuel Johnson or reality with dreams, apples with sensations, or people with robots, that Cavell and Wittgenstein would like to return us to. For as long as we make the distinction between theory and practice that traditional philosophy since Plato has taught us to make, theory will itself seem pointless, superfluous, and generally unhelpful.

(I might at this point say something about Wittgenstein, silence, and the fact that I’ve just made the differentiation of discursive modalities as easy as that between the discursive and non-discursive, but I don’t know enough about Wittgenstein to do so. However, for all that, I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that differentiation between discursive modalities is necessarily easy. It can be hard, just as science fiction tells us that the differentiation between people and robots might someday be hard. For instance, is it easy to tell the difference between what Derrida does and Christopher Norris or Jonathon Culler does? Probably. But what about Foucault and Ian Hacking? Or worse, Heidegger and Gadamer? It’s a practical problem, not a theoretical problem. At his worst, Pirsig seems to think that its easy to tell the difference between what Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus and Heidegger did in his lectures on Nietzsche (reflective system-building versus parasitic criticism), but Pirsig’s distinction between philosophy and philosophology has nothing to do with the continuum I just drew. For more on criticism and philosophy, with special attention to Pirsig, see the first part of my “Philosophologology”.)

Moving on to Cavell’s second section on a general problem of aesthetics, Cavell suggests that “the aesthetic judgment models the sort of claim entered by these philosophers, and that the familiar lack of conclusiveness in aesthetic argument, rather than showing up an irrationality, shows the kind of rationality it has, and needs.” (86) This is a good suggestion because one of the problems Platonic philosophy set itself is the rationality of its own claims. As time wore on, fields like mathematics, science, and logic all showed themselves to be able to gain consensus, whereas philosophy more and more looked like a field like aesthetics, where the slogan “in the eye of the beholder” rose to prominence. Plato wanted philosophy to look like geometry and contemporary philosophers want philosophy to look like science for this very reason—the ability to gain consensus seems to mark its rationality. Cavell, however, comes to much the same conclusion that Rorty has, that philosophy is something different. Cavell even uses the same Hegelianism, aufhebung, to refer to what (as Rorty calls them) strong poets do to philosophical issues, “a criticism in which it is pointless for one side to refute the other, because its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way.” (85) If this gloss on a familiar Rortyan point remains obscure, it is only by working through what Cavell is saying (and saying Wittgenstein is saying) that some of his more opaque lines (usually left to sparkle by Cavell) gain resonance.

Cavell provides an interesting discussion of the genesis of the aesthetic problematic in Hume and Kant before facing us off between the positivist and post-positivist: “the positivist grits his teeth when he hears an analysis given out as a logical one which is so painfully remote from formality, so obviously a question of how you happen to feel at the moment, so psychological; the philosopher who proceeds from everyday language stares back helplessly, asking, ‘Don’t you feel the difference: Listen: you must see it.’” (90) In a fascinating reversal, Cavell aligns the anti-pragmatist efforts of Frege, Husserl, and Kant with the efforts of Wittgenstein to help suggest a way out of this standoff:

“We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the ‘psychologizing’ of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology, to show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioral categories; even, one could say, show the necessities in human action and passion themselves. And at the same time it seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives.” (91)

In an excellent footnote, Cavell adds:

“Consider, for example, the question: ‘Could someone have a feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second—no matter what preceded or followed this second?’ [Philosophical Investigations, §583]. We shall not wish to say that this is logically impossible, or that it can in no way be imagined. But we might say: given our world this cannot happen; it is not, in our language, what ‘love’ or ‘hope’ mean; necessary in our world that this is not what love and hope are. I take it that our most common philosophical understanding of such notions as necessity, contingency, synthetic and analytic statements, will not know what to make of our saying such things.”

I think this is a tremendous description of Wittgenstein’s achievement and it links quite well with the hopes of Iris Murdoch, who, in The Sovereignty of Good, reacts to the underpinnings of analytic and existentialist moral philosophy, with their conception of the individual as a monad who chooses freely, by suggesting a phenomenology of choices that seems to make more sense with the way in which we proceed in our lives: we don’t simply choose, willy-nilly, between two alternatives, our attempts to choose by weighing pros and cons and the like force our hand into making the choices we make. By the time we make a choice (at least in the things that matter), the route we choose doesn’t even appear to us as a choice, but rather as the only good option available. This is the kind of real life necessity that Cavell is talking about that analytic philosophy can hardly acknowledge.

I’m going to leave to the side for now Cavell’s perceptive treatment of the “procedures of ordinary language philosophy” at the end of his paper, one in which we find an illuminating cross light for Rorty’s legendary “we’s” (I will continue on in a second reflection on Cavell), and instead end with a comment about where Cavell leaves us with this description of Wittgenstein’s achievement, with the hopes of illuminating Cavell’s earlier opaque claim that the cause and topic of philosophical criticism is “the self getting in its own way.” With where he leaves us, Cavell says that is difficult to name it, that “Wittgenstein called it ‘grammar’; others might call it ‘phenomenology.’” (93) Murdoch herself doesn’t, I believe, use “phenomenology” to describe what I noted above, but these seem like fitting descriptions, and as Cavell notes in “Austin at Criticism,” Austin’s nigh only title for what he did, thrown out sheepishly once, was “linguistic phenomenology.” (99) The title captures something important, that what Wittgenstein, Austin, Cavell, and Murdoch were all doing is making themselves at home in the language games we find ourselves inhabiting. They wish to shove aside some recent philosophy as pathetic, failed attempts to flee these language games, these forms of life.

But can we flee our language games? I believe we can, but my grasp of Cavell leads me to believe that he isn’t so sure we should want to, that all fleeing endeavors are perverse. As I understand it, in recent years Cavell has been apt to talk about something called the “Ordinary” that is supposed to be the object philosophers strive after. This, to me, seems to be a maneuver that kills the imaginative genius of our poets, those intellectuals that try and conceive a new form of life. No doubt, Plato created a new form of life, but not all new creations are necessarily good ones. Talk about the “Ordinary” as some kind of control on what we should be able to think about or conceive seems to me to be just one more Platonic twist on ending philosophy, ending the progress of intellectual life, as if once everything were “ordinary” it’d all be hunky-dory and we philosophers would be out of a job.

There are two other ways of putting this point. One is by reference to the wisdom Rorty pulls out of the two competing schools of linguistic philosophy circa 1960. In Rorty’s brilliant, expansive and informative introduction to his anthology, The Linguistic Turn, Rorty pits “ordinary language philosophy” (with alums like Austin, Strawson, Cavell, and Urmson) against “ideal language philosophy” (with alums like Carnap, Quine, Goodman, and Bergmann) to see what their differences might be. His concluding wisdom runs along the lines of, “Any stick will do to beat the devil, and it would seem that offering an alternative to ordinary English might be effective in some cases, whereas demonstrating a misuse of English would be effective in others.” (LT, 15) What lies at the bottom of Rorty’s difference with Cavell is that Cavell would like to read Wittgenstein as simply returning us to common sense, whereas Rorty would like to read Wittgenstein as envisioning a new form of life, that for the Philosophical Investigations to “return” us to common sense, we must also extirpate the Platonisms and Cartesianisms that are our common sense, thus changing it and not leaving it as it always was, us where we always were.

The other way of putting this point is to say that Cavell’s description of Wittgenstein as undoing the psychologizing of psychology, which itself ironically psychologizes philosophy, parallels precisely Rorty’s description of Davidson’s achievement: “Davidson, in other words, seems to me to have found a transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments—one which tears down the scaffolding upon which the standard paradigms of ‘realistic’ transcendental arguments were mounted.” (“Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism,” 78*) The idea Rorty is suggesting about Davidson, and that I think Cavell is suggesting about Wittgenstein (though unwittingly counter-productively), is that they worked through the dialectical structure of the language game of Platonic-Cartesian philosophy to its very end and showed how it defeated itself, and was therefore a pointless, superfluous, and self-defeating enterprise (“its cause and topic is the self getting in its own way”).

And we see in Cavell things that sound reminiscent of Davidson’s working out of this “transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments” first proposed in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” The one that should leap out is when he says, “the philosophy of ordinary language is not about language, anyway not in any sense in which it is not also about the world.” (95) That counterintuitive statement about what Austin is doing should remind us of Davidson saying, “we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally,” which leads to his shocking formulation: “I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.” (“A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” 107**) The erasure occurs, according to Davidson, once we drop the notion of conventions as ruling linguistic behavior and adopt a holistic picture of functioning, Davidson’s picture of triangulation between world, community, and person.

Cavell, I believe, is gesturing towards what Davidson worked out systematically, which isn’t too surprising given Cavell’s love of Wittgenstein and Rorty’s love of both Wittgenstein and Davidson. Unlike Davidson, however, Cavell is a more romantic thinker who is not content to plug away at posed problems, but is also concerned with self-creation, with the giving of wisdom for us, not just the wisdom Davidson dispenses primarily to other philosophers of language. The primary bit of wisdom is this: just as Cavell says that “Ordinary language philosophy is about whatever ordinary language is about,” we should see that what we do in life is about whatever it is that we do—there is nothing deeper, or secret, underlying our actions. We may not always understand what we are doing, and should always seek better descriptions of them, but there is no key to unlock what’s truly happening, certainly not any philosophy can provide.



*Found in Transcendental Arguments and Science, eds. Peter Bieri, Rolf-P. Horstmann, Lorenz Krüger Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979.
**Collected in Davidson’s Truth, Language, and History.

Absolute Truth

The notion of Absolute Truth began from the conviction that, though what we are justified in believing changes, what is in all actuality true stays the same. We can imagine its origins in the notion of a supreme being that looked down on the affairs of humanity from on high and had, because of its omniscience, an invariable sense of truth. Plato still had this notion of omniscience when he suggested that the affairs of humanity were a pale reflection of what was really going on, mere shadows of the actual objects. So, Plato said, we could follow the Sophists and play with shadows if we wanted, but true philosophers seek the actual objects standing behind them.

Plato, however, didn’t just posit his notion of the Realm of the Forms as some explanation of why things change, of why we used to think kings or democracy were good, but now we don’t. Plato also had a much more practical goal in mind. Plato had learned from his teacher, Socrates, that doing what you believe is pious conversationally amounts to the same thing as performing the will of the gods. And yet, Plato thought that we could find out what the will of the gods was. He thought he had found a method, a way of cutting through the thick veil of appearance. This was Socrates’ elenchus transformed into the dialectic. The exercise of the Republic was to show that if we found out more about the Form of Justice, we could be more just to our fellow citizens, more about the Form of the Good, more ethical to other people, more about Truth, less wrong.

If we could find out more about Truth, which is invariable, eternal, and absolute, we could have more true beliefs—truth is the ultimate justification. The trouble that immediately confronted Plato’s project was the sense that its aspirations and ambition was enormous. To undertake the project of looking for the ultimate justification was to bypass run-of-the-mill justification, which we can see in Plato’s bitterness in describing the ship of state—nobody bothers to ask how to run the ship the only people who really know how to run the ship. The problem, of course, is that the Platonic philosopher’s faraway gaze tends to gloss over the here and now. Plato thought that in the long run, philosophers were the only way to go. But in the short run, Aristotle’s practical philosophy took over the hearts and minds of intellectuals.

I follow Stephen Toulmin in thinking that Descartes marked the resurgence of the Platonic desire to bypass the here and now of justification to attain the always and forever of Absolute Truth. This desire is marked by the priority of epistemology, of figuring out and getting straight in advance what the foundations and criteria are for truth and justification. By figuring out in advance what the criteria of truth are we could short-circuit the need to justify for particular audiences. Descartes, like Plato, knew that any particular person or audience could be flawed, though both supposed that every person, deep down, has the same unequivocal capacity to see the Truth.

Post-Cartesian epistemology has struggled long and hard in the face of a seemingly insurmountable difficulty: all criteria are stated by people, people who belong to audiences, audiences that are transitory and perhaps flawed. The counterinsurgency to Cartesian philosophy, led by philosophers from Bayle and Hume to Hegel and Nietzsche to James and Wittgenstein, has been a long trail countering the idea that we may yet erect an ahistorical boundary-water for what we may think, for what truth may appear as to us. The trail has taken many turns and forms, but one thing is worth highlighting here: every step of the way, every counter to proposed methods and criteria, has forced Cartesians further and further away from the lives of their fellow brethren. Cartesian philosophy became more and more insulated from the concerns of humanity the harder they tried to formulate this foundation for Knowledge and Truth. And this surely makes predictable sense: one can imagine that reformulating and refining a project who’s goal is to bypass the need for any particular, historically instantiated audience’s assent (because an audience’s assent is the devil’s curse of transitory historicity) will eventually become remote from what the rest of humanity is doing. As every branch originally grown on philosophy’s tree fell to the earth, from astronomy to physics and psychology to intellectual history, philosophy happily waved good-bye and focused on what increasingly became its only purpose: the search for Absolute Truth, though in these latter days we prudently call it something like the search for independent criteria of veridical validity.

As the 19th-century strolled into the 20th, in the anglophone world old-school system building waned in the face of the waxing of what is now called “analytic philosophy”. Philosophers put the sloppy and tidy speculations aside in favor of the solution to definite and discernible problems. Everything, however, still revolved around the search for criteria. After all, without criteria for the solution of problems, arguments would continue on for centuries—like they had been. Philosophers began to feel anxious about this. What’s more, the movement that many early analytic philosophers had pinned their hopes on, logical positivism, began to fall apart by the middle of the century. Logical positivists had thought that they had finally found their way to Truth. Their first move against the muddy tradition of criterionless, speculative philosophy was to pin all of their hopes on science. The New Science changed philosophy irrevocably in Descartes’ time, but the logical positivists thought that the philosophical proposals marshaled by the descendents of Descartes and Locke, and even Kant (though especially evil Hegel), had fallen away from the science bandwagon and had hoped for something special for themselves. Oh no, said the logical positivists, science is where it is all happening and the sooner we figure that out the better we’ll all be. Science gets results. They have criteria. So, positivists said, the sooner we start acting like scientists, the sooner we’ll solve these trifle things we call “philosophical problems.”

Having already peremptorily relegated themselves to a status lower than physics, they set about trying to help science by getting straight what science was doing. This prompted the second move against the tradition, the move towards the study of language. Since everything has to be stated in language, the sooner we get a rigorous, scientific study of language off the ground, a set of logical and grammatical rules, the sooner this mess will all end—hence the rise of symbolic logic in philosophy departments.

To pull it all together, both the obeisance to science and the lynchpin of language, the logical positivists proposed their great criterion for truth: the verifiability criterion. If what made science so lovely was that it was verifiable, and science got us truth, then shouldn’t the great criterion for truth be verifiability? This wasn’t a bad idea at all, except for one thing: how was the criterion itself verifiable? By any of the interesting versions of the criterion’s own lights, the criterion itself was unverifiable and therefore cognitively meaningless. This broke one of the first rules of philosophy: don’t deny anything you’ve presupposed.

Logical positivism never really recovered and through the fifties and sixties was subjected to continuous attacks by an ever more bolder subsection of the analytic establishment. This subsection began to increasingly identify as pragmatists. The pragmatists from an earlier generation, Peirce, James, and Dewey, were famously reviled by the up and coming analytic movement. Russell said of Dewey that the pragmatist theory of truth amounted to “the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety.” The pragmatists were famous for returning to the realm of human praxis, in focusing on justification, rather than truth. Platonic realists like Russell feared that such an exultation of the powers of humanity might bring the hubris of future generations declaring that Caesar never crossed the Rubicon.

Analytics who led the attack on logical positivism were those like Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Putnam, Davidson, and Rorty. Rorty in particular became a poster-boy for the attacks because of his combination of acute analysis and argumentation, breadth of historical knowledge, range of philosophical acquaintance, and, perhaps unfortunately most of all, his penchant for bombastic turns of phrase. Rorty linked most explicitly the movement away from logical positivism to the movement towards pragmatism, but, like James and Dewey before him, became attached to such notions as relativism, irrationalism, nihilism, and the end of philosophy. For our purposes at hand, he was taken to deny truth. By attacking the notion of “absolute truth,” the Platonic notion of theoretically outlining where and how truth occurs and therefore what is true, Rorty suggested that truth is not a philosophically interesting topic that inquiry into could help in the living of our lives.

Lately Rorty has come to grips with the idea that some of the suggestions proposed by pragmatism are counterintuitive, which itself seems counterintuitive to the idea of pragmatism. Pragmatism was supposed to be about the elimination of extraneous philosophical attachments, appealing to the common sense of our practical lives. But Rorty agrees with Feyerbend that, for instance, as long as we have common speech, we are going to have the idea of “mind,” that which philosophical wrecking balls like Ryle and Dennett have been trying to demystify. Rorty has generalized this sentiment (along with Nietzsche’s that as long as we have grammar, we’ll have God) by suggesting that Platonism is built into our common sense. But philosophy since Plato has been not just about summarizing the way we think, but also suggesting changes in the way we think. In philosophy, the intuitive has always been commingled with the counterintuitive to create a new intuition, a new common sense that is perhaps better than the old.

One of the ways in which this is given effect is by making a distinction between commonsensical conversation and philosophical conversation, so-called “speaking with the vulgar” and more sophisticated, specialized talk. As I suggested above, philosophy has become a highly technical enterprise that has been disengaging itself from everyday life for many, many years. Some people, however, are suspicious of such a distinction between two conversations, seeing it as breeding pointless jargonizing and instead valuing “plainer speech.” However, I think one can still keep, for instance, Pirsig’s criticism of pointless Victorian circumlocutions while acknowledging that, for instance, scientists keep the kind of distinction I’m talking about between their activities at work and at home (by calling it a “table” instead of a “cloud of electrons between vectors X, Y, and Z”), or between writing articles for scientific journals and writing a “popular science” book.

The point is the common sense one that our words gain resonance and meaning from the contexts in which we use them. A great impetus for 20th century analytic philosophy was the notion that the problems of philosophy (so-called “metaphysical problems” like free will vs. determinism) were created by taking words like “freedom” out of the original, common sense contexts in which they arose and creating a new context for them, one that warped their original meaning until it had little to do with the original context, thus creating pseudo-problems—in other words, metaphysics was simply a set of pointless circumlocutions that just confused things.

The subsection of the analytic movement that was based on the above impetus became known as “ordinary language philosophy”, or Oxford philosophy (because of the residence of its most well-known gurus, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and P. F. Strawson). On the one hand, Oxford philosophy foundered just as logical positivism did, but it does create added pressure for us philosophers in justifying some of the contexts we deal in. How does, or could, this effect us? What I think we see in the rise of neopragmatism, basically pragmatism in the analytic idiom (i.e., post-linguistic turn), is the rewrapping of the upshot of both Oxford philosophy and logical positivism. Logical positivism was also known in a slightly wider sense as “ideal language philosophy”. Their goal was to create a language that made it impossible to state or make sense of philosophical problems. They looked to the future, to possible innovations in language to relieve us of these problems, whereas ordinary language philosophy looked to our past, at the ways in which we use words in common sense contexts. I think pragmatism combines these two directions by playing them off of each other. We look at the way in which we currently use words, we look at our current contexts, and if we see problems arising, we either 1) eschew the context as being extraneous, as serving a pointless purpose or 2) change the language we use, change the context so that it may serve its purpose, but without the problems. (This distillation of wisdom from mid-20th century analytic philosophy comes out strongly when we retrospectively read Rorty’s judicious introduction to his 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn.)

With the notion of “absolute”, I would like to say that there’s nothing wrong with it in common sense contexts, but that there is something wrong with some of the notions created in philosophical contexts—that the effects in such contexts do not extend to everyday life at all. As James said after likewise dismissing the free will/determinism problem, it makes a difference that makes no difference. So, on the one hand saying that “my cat absolutely died by hanging itself with its leash” is true and perfectly understandle, saying that “we have to believe in Absolute Truth to be truthful”, while possibly making sense, cannot ever effect our practice. Plato created an activity, that of inquiring into Truth, of creating a theory of Truth that would surround all true statements, that cannot end, and cannot therefore cash out for us in everyday practice, because treating truth as an object of inquiry creates an activity that has no criteria for even knowing if we had found what we were looking for, an activity that would go on indefinitely with no parameters for even knowing which direction is the right direction to go hunting in. Absolute Truth, as an object to be inquired into, theorized and philosophized about, is a wheel that spins idly by itself. And if it is dead weight, it would be best to cut it loose from our philosophical language, thus trimming our own philosophical language and not letting it get away from us with pointless jargonizing.

The reason why pragmatists have often been excoriated about truth is because the so-called pragmatist theory of truth is said to prove its own falsity—if the true is what works, then the pragmatist theory of truth is false, ‘cuz it don’t work. Pragmatists like Rorty and Davidson have learned that this is right, that as a theory of truth it doesn’t work. One of the formulations that Dewey gave is that truth is warranted assertibility. If truth is warranted assertibility, then “truth” becomes the same thing as “justification”. That conflation is exactly what leads people to call pragmatists relativists, because while we see that justification is relative to audiences, communities, contexts, truth is separate from it for the exact reason that relativism is absurd.

So pragmatists should be willing to admit that justification is different from truth. What they’ve realized though is that the problem is with thinking we need a theory of truth, that we need (or can have) an interesting definition of truth. As Davidson says, truth, like good, is indefinable. The development of theories of truth are exactly those philosophical activities that treat Truth as an object of inquiry, inquiries through which we could learn more about truth and therefore, ideally, the application of “true” to particular linguistic items like “Slavery is wrong”. But how can we learn anything if, in such an inquiry, we appear to be in an endless sea with no compass?

In recent years, Rorty has learned to be content with the notion that truth is an absolute concept. Rorty is splitting the difference between common sense and the counterintuitive suggestions of pragmatism. It makes sense to say that justification is relative, but not truth. So we can say in perfect coherence that the Greeks were justified in practicing slavery, but they were still wrong. Truth may be an absolute notion, but pragmatists think we should give up the hope for a theory of it, that we should stop treating it as an object of inquiry. Justification (by such earmarks as Pirsig’s “tests of truth”) is our only criterion for truth, but that shouldn’t lead us to think they are the same, though likewise we shouldn’t hope for some other criterion. Justification is relative to community, but that doesn’t make us relativists because it isn’t clear what other criterion we could have for truth. It simply makes us fallible experimentalists, always in search of betterness. There are no theories for truth, justification, or betterness. We simply accrue them by the living of life.

Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?

I have in front of me a terribly obscure paper by Rorty called "Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?" He wrote it for the 1967 American Catholic Philosophical Association conference to which he attended. I have no idea what the circumstances were that led him to give a paper for this conference, why they should ask an atheist to deliver a paper or whatever. It's lost to time, along with the paper unless you happen to be at a major university with an extensive library that houses most journals. I happen to be at such a university, but that's not how I was led to the paper. Years before I discovered that I could own everything Rorty had ever written for five cents a page by digging up the journals they were originally written in, and photocopying them, I hunted down anthologies at used bookstores. And one day I randomly pulled the Proceedings to the '67 conference off the shelf of one of the many used Madison bookstores I frequent to find, to my utter surprise, an essay by Rorty I'd never read. So I paid six dollars (I talked him down from $8.50, arguing that nobody but me would ever want to buy an ancient conference proceedings by a bunch of nobodys) for an essay that I could've had for 40 cents. A single instance of a long line of such silly financial decisions. But there's also a kinda' funny presidential address by Ernan McMullin, who's kinda' well-known, right? Right?

My disasterous penchant for buying anything with Rorty's name on it is, however, not why I'm writing. This particular paper is, to my mind, very good at bringing together those two disparate parties, pre- and post-linguistic turn philosophers. And, therefore, very good at making sense of how easily Pirsig can be brought into line with contemporary philosophers who, on the surface, seem to have little to do with his pursuits. So I'd like to pedantically summarize and quote extensively (yeah, more pedantic than usual) Rorty's paper so that its insights will be slightly more available.

Rorty opens up his paper very quickly by conceding that, yes, the pigeonholes "analyst" and "metaphysician" are overgeneral, but that "using them is no more unfair to one side than to the other." (39) He says that the metaphilosophical disagreements between the two camps is "usually conceived as centering around a disagreement about what method to pursue. My principal thesis in this paper will be that none of the familiar ways of characterizing such alternative methods are successful." What's more, Rorty says that he will argue that "it would be a mistake to say that analysts and metaphysicians have different subject-matters. It is, to my mind, wildly misleading to say that analytic philosophers take language as their subject-matter, whereas metaphysicians take nature or experience as theirs." The nice thing about this is that it tells us immediately that Rorty is about to sweep out of the way the prima facie objections of metaphysicians who think that analytics are obviously wrong because there is a lot more to life than language (echoes of which we can hear implicitly in Pirsig and explicit cries from most of his disciples) and the naive assumptions of early logical positivists who thought they had brand new, expensive hi-tech weapons to get rid of metaphysics. Both were wrong.

Rorty sets the stage for metaphilosophical confrontation by suggesting that "the only way of describing the subject-matter of either school which does not beg important metaphilosophical questions is to say that both take as their subject the various perplexities and paradoxes found in the philosophical tradition." We can see here Rorty's future position of identifying philosophy as the family romance, or the tradition of writing, from Plato to Descartes to Kant to etc. What's revealing in this old essay (as in his other old essays, where we hear other premature echoes) is the more specific why of the stance: it's to move the conversation along, it's a strategic move in a dialectical encounter, or rather one to produce a dialectical encounter. Here's Rorty at his best:

The aim of both schools is to find a set of truths which will resolve these perplexities and problems--truths which will have a maximum of intuitive plausibility and, taken together as a system, a maximum of theoretical elegance. In my view, the dialectical moves which are made in formulating and defending such truths are much the same on both sides of the fence. [For a further discussion with examples, e.g. Royce and Carnap, see Rorty's early paper "The Limits of Reductionism" (1961).] Among both analysts and metaphysicians, the ultimate criteria are set by a common aim--that of striking a proper balance between effectiveness (at resolving problems), plausibility, and elegance. The apparent differences of subject-matter and method are illusions created by the use of different jargons in which to formulate these dialectical moves. (39-40)

If one, for whatever reason, focuses on arugmentation in philosophy, I think one is led inevitably to a preoccupation with metaphilosophy and, eventually as one reads more and more philosophy, this kind of view. For whatever reason, I find myself drawn to metaphilosophy, probably because I find that the dance of arguments is the beauty of philosophy. Rorty was probably drawn to metaphilosophy because, in lieu of Platonic showing, which he had earlier abandoned as possible, the only way to establish Plato's dream was arguing for it. But it quickly became apparent that that wasn't so easily done either. (Sometimes I think those who are attracted to metaphilosophy are those who never want to lose an argument. Always wanting to win, or at the least never lose, will drive one to being familiar with arguments of all kinds and the various levels of arugments so that one is never caught off guard. This kind of pathology, of which I am no doubt susceptible, leads you to always try and stay one step ahead. Eventually, though, I think you figure out that there are no winners in philosophy qua argument, and so you become an expert at stalemate.)

The bulk of Rorty's paper is taken up by three things: 1) a three-fold division of philosophers into "critical", "speculative", and "empirical", 2) discussion of the distinction between "first-order" and "second-order" questions, and 3) the distinction between "solving" and "dissolving" problems. The first part, of course, is my favorite because I love pigeonholes, even ones that aren't (as Rorty says of this one).

By a "critical" philosopher I mean one who holds that philosophy is, in so far as it is a discipline in which argument and cooperative inquiry are possible, the attempt to dissolve all the traditional philosophical problems and thus to make the discipline of philosophy obsolete.
...
By a "speculative" philosopher I mean one who holds the negative thesis that philosophical inquiry should not be thought of as a pursuit of truths of the sort about which agreement can be reached by argument. On this view, philosophy is much more like poetry than like the sciences. We need not quibble about whether poetry aims at a special sort of truth, as long as we agre that the sort of truth at which it aims is not one about which argument is possible (except in a very diluted and Pickwickian sense of "argument"). On this view, philosophy does not aim at finding solutions to problems. Rather, it aims at finding new ways of seeing things through finding new ways of saying things

It is harder to specify what I intend by the term "empirical philosopher" but the following conditions will have to do: I shall call a philosopher empirical if:

1. He believes that there are procedures by which rational agreement can be reached on solutions to at least some of the traditional philosophical problems.

2. He defends this first belief by saying that (i) philosophy's method is either simply a description of what experience is like, or else a form of the hypothetico-deductive method exemplified by the empirical sciences: (ii) that philosophy is distinguished from these sciences either by (a) being concerned with a different sort of experience than that which supplies the premises for arguments in any other empirical discipline, or (b) having as its task the proposal of hypotheses of a greater generality than those produced by the empirical sciences. (40-1)

Oh, just lovely. So how do we put it to use? Well, Rorty tells us that it is designed to include all traditional metaphilosophical views, save two: rationalism (because nobody nowadays is a rationalist) and transcendentalism (because he's already gerrymandered the definition of "empirial philosophy" to include "whatever Kant is doing in the Transcendental Analytic and whatever Strawson is doing in Individuals."). Rorty suggests that this trichotomy is "a useful heuristic device for spotting difficulties in a philosopher's metaphilosophical views, and disharmonies between these views and his actual practice."

Thus the later Wittgenstein is professedly a critical philosopher, but his practice often makes him seem an empirical philosopher. Austin and Adler are professedly empirical philosophers, but their practice often makes them seem like critical philosophers. Santayana is a professedly speculative philosopher, but his practice often makes him seem an empirical philosopher. Heidegger sometimes talks as if he were an empirical philosopher and sometimes as if he were a speculative philosopher, but his practice is almost impossible to classify. Turning now to an application of these categories to the quarrel between the analysts and the metaphysicians, I think one has to say something like this: Analysts are, by and large, divided into professedly critical philosophers (like Wisdom, the early Carnap, and the early Bergmann) and professedly empirical philosophers (like Austin, Putnam, and Strawson). Nevertheless, one finds in the practice of all these philosophers a bent toward critical philosophy--in the sense that the test of success of the application of their empirical methods turns out to be the dissolution of certain traditional problems. Metaphysicians are, by and large, divided into professedly empirical philosophers and professedly speculative philosophers--into philosophers who have an explicit metaphilosophical view according to which some quasi-scientific procedure directed upon experience will produce philosophical truth, and philosophers who say "don't worry so much about decision-procedures and criteria, just try to find some way of expressing the nature of things, or some way of gaining wisdom." Nevertheless, one finds that a large proportion of the work of both sorts of metaphysicians consists in dissolving problems, in exposing the false presuppositions which have generated traditional problems--in short, in doing precisely the work the critical philosopher wants done. If these remarks accurately describe the contemporary situation, then the difficulty of my title question is clear. For if the analysts and the metaphysicians are, in practice, critical philosophers, and if neither school would whole-heartedly accept this description, then we need to find out why they would not, and, perhaps, wonder if something is wrong with our original trichotomy. (41-2)

One of the things that looks wrong with the distinctions is that "even if such post-positivistic analytic philosophers as Austin, Putnam, and Strawson are (in their explicit professions) neither critical nor speculative philosophers, they cannot be called empirical philosophers, since they deal with language rather than with experience, and pursue linguistic rather than empirical methods." Rorty thinks this looks wrong because "many linguistic philosophers and many critics of linguistic philosophy are still saddling themselves with an awkward and confusing pre-Quinian view" of the distinction between "questions of language" and "questions of fact." Rorty softens up this distinction by noting that "language is part of what we experience. It is not self-evident why consulting language should be opposed to turning to experience." (43) Rorty suggests that this opposition exists partly because analytic philosophers have relied on the analytic-synthetic distinction, but "it seems clear ... that it is a synthetic truth that certain sentences express analytic propositions. In other words, it is an empirical truth that the various expressions of our language exhibit the 'logical' relations to one another that they do." Rorty's point is that languages are grown by us mortal humans and that inspecting how words interact with each other, determining what they mean, is no less an empirical endeavor than seeing how fast a rock falls.

Despite this, and another point, Rorty says it is not "clear what relation such linguistic philosophers take to exist between hypotheses about the meaning ... of expressions on the one hand and solutions to traditional philosophical problems on the other. Prima facie, there is a great gulf fixed between a straightforwardly and explicitly empirical philosopher like Adler and a linguistic philosopher like Austin, and the gulf obviously has something to do with differing conceptions of the relevance of linguistics to philosophy." (43-4) This is where Rorty moves to the heart of what I take to be the irrelevance of a distinction of more than style between pre- and post-linguistic turn philosophers. It is summed up when Rorty wonders "what difference it makes whether we as 'What is the nature of x?' or "How do we use the word "x"?'"

There would be a difference if we were sometimes in a position to claim that we use the word "x" in such a way as to distort our conception of the nature of x, or to claim that more can be known about the nature of x than either language or science reveals. It is natural to suppose that metaphysicians are in such a position--for if they were not, why should they object to their analytic colleagues using the formal mode of speech?

On the utility of the linguistic turn, Rorty says it helps to "remind ourselves that there are no methods except attending to actual or possible linguistic behavior to decide questions about the nature of x, unless these questions can be settled by further data about the behavior of x's," that "the only poin to asking 'How do we use "x"?' is just to remind metaphysicians that they they have nowhere to turn to except to language." The question remains whether metaphysicians have an alternative method to offer. Rorty uses Mortimer Adler (of Hutchins School fame) as an example of a suggestion, that "philosophy is a 'non-investigative' empirical discipline dealing with 'common experience'". (45) Rorty, however, isn't sure the analyst would find anything here to disagree with and that we would need to know if I can "find out anything about x by consulting 'common experience' that I cannot find out by consulting the linguistic behavior of those who use the expression 'x'?" In trying to answer this question, Rorty turns to Adler's "tests of truth": "empirical truth, logical consistency, harmony between principles pertaining to theory and those pertaining to practice, and ability of philosophical principles to resolve questions arising out of scientific inquiry" (compare this set to Pirsig's in Lila, p. 113). But again, who would quarrel with that?

In lieu of a procedure for discovering the inaccuracy or problems with an account of x drawn from a description of the uses of "x", Rorty speculates that the metaphyscian's discomfort might be something like this: "There could be no quarrel, he might say, with the claim that we found the nature of x by finding out how 'x' was used if it were the case that accounts of the use of various expressions were always consistent with each other. But philosophical problems owe their origin precisely to the fact that our usage generates paradoxes, antinomies, and absurdities." Rorty thinks the analyst would reply that either 1) the perplexities don't really exist, but only appear to because of bad accounts of common usage (which better accounts of usage will clear up) or 2) the perplexities are real but we can eliminate them by linguistic reform, and that most will combine them with 3) "we do not yet know whether perplexity can be removed by better accounts of usage, but that if not, linguistic proposals are the only alternative. If these proposals amount to urging the adoption of a full-scale 'Ideal Language"--or, in older language, a metaphysical system--then so be it." (46)

Here is where Rorty puts all his cards on the table and everything becomes very clear.

Here again we seem to be at an impasse. The metaphysician regards the analyst's appropriation of the term "metaphysics" as merely perverse. The analyst asks why regarding metaphysical systems as so many proposals for the reform of language should be so disturbing. If, the analyst may say, you want to consider these proposals for different ways of speaking as discoveries about the world, go ahead. Just do not pretend that you have any criterion for such discoveries save the absence of paradoxes, antinomies, and absurdities from the language you suggest we use.

This, I think, says it all. If one has discarded all the bad junk, those horrible distinctions from the tradition, appearance/reality, subject/object, conditioned/unconditioned, differentiated/undifferentiated, analytic/synthetic, fact/value, then what does it matter if you talk about language or experience? What's more, what could decide in either favor if the non-existence of paradox is the only non-question begging criterion we have?

In Rorty's expansive introduction to his anthology The Linguistic Turn, Rorty puts it in similar, though slightly more aggressive terms. He asks metaphysicians, "If you were not making proposals for such an ideal language, what were you doing? Certainly you were not making empirical inquiries, nor deducing consequences from self-evident truths; so if not this, what?" (7-8)

If there is a single crucial fact which explains the contemporary popularity of linguistic philosophy, it is the inability of its opponents (so far, at any rate) to give a satisfactory answer to this question. It is no good saying that the great philosophers of the past were not interested in anything so piffling as language, but were interested instead in the nature of reality, unless we can get some clear idea of what it was they wanted to know about reality, and of how they would know that they had this knowledge once they had it. If one construes, for example, Spinoza's 'There is only one substance' as a proposal to stop talking about persons and physical objects in the ordinary (roughly, Aristotelian) way, and to start talking about them as dimly-seen aspects of a single atemporal being, a being which is both mental and physical, then one will have some criteria for evaluating his statement (which, unconstrued, strikes one as patently absurd). If one talks Spinozese, one will indeed be unable to state the propositions about minds and bodies which so worried the Cartesians, or the propositions about God's creation of the world which so worried the scholastics. Now it was precisely upon this that Spinoza prided himself--that the mind-body problem and problems about the relation between God and the world could not (or, at least, not very easily) be formulated in his system. It was this fact that made him confident that he had grasped the true nature of things. (8)

I think if we look at Pirsig, we see very similar things. Pirsig prides himself on his ability to dissolve problems of philosophy with his system. He thinks he has given us a new way to better understand situations like the hippies and ghetto violence and things like insanity and religion. But what is this new way if not a new set of categories or concepts, a new set of linguistic tools?

The rest of Rorty's paper consists of him wrestling with Adler a little while longer, and then James Cornman (over "solving" or "dissolving" philosophical problems). While interesting, they don't shed that much extra light over the previous stuff. I shall end with Rorty's conclusion, which is his short, unargued for suggestion about what the difference is between analysts and metaphysicians. And unlike earlier, where you could read metaphysician and analyst as simply pre- and post-linguistic turn pragmatists, like Pirsig and Dewey and Rorty and Putnam, here you'll want to read analyst as pragmatist and metaphysician as Platonist, as holding an appearance/reality distinction.

I shall conclude with an analysis which, though vague, seems to me at least less misleading than those I have been discussing. The difference has to do with wisdom. I think that analytic philosophers have in common the view that the pursuit of wisdom cannot be served by continuing the inquiries traditionally grouped together as "philosophy." Their examination of the history of philosophy leads them to think that philosophy is indeed, a tree from which all, or nearly all, the branches have fallen. They think that the answers to the questions they pose in the formal mode of speech, and the truths which are brought forward to show the falisty of the presuppositions of some or all philosophical problems, are not truths which will give us wisdom. At best, they will give us the sort of wisdom which Socrates had--the wisdom which consists in not being fooled any more. For the sort of wisdom which Plato sought, we must turn to the sciences, the arts, and, perhaps, to speculative philosophy--to philosophy as the articulation of a vision rather than the solution or the dissolution of problems. They tend to conceive of empirical philosophy as a propaedeutic to critical philosophy, and of critical philosophy as a propaedeutic either to speculative philosophy or to a post-philosophical culture.

Metaphysicians, on the other hand, believe that some species of empirical philosophy will bring us to truths which will offer us wisdom in Plato's sense. They believe that the visions of the speculative philosophers can be backed by argument, and that criteria exist for choosing between such visions. Metaphysicians keep the Platonic faith that argument can bring us to truth--truth about the ultimately important things. Analysts have lost this faith. They have not it (pace Adler, Gilson, Heidegger, Blanshard, and many others) because they have adopted a false epistemology or a false metaphysics. They have lost it because they have looked at the history of philosophy and at our culture and arrived at a judgment about how human life may best be enriched. I believe that their judgment is sound. But I do not know how to prove that it is.

This conclusion is an important marker in Rorty's corpus for a number of reasons. I think it brings together for the first time a number of themes that will become very common in Rorty's later writing. 1) I think it formulates for the first time the lines between pragmatists and Platonists/realists. 2) It defers Platonic wisdom to science (for predicting and controlling), the arts (for moral guidance), and to "speculative philosophers", i.e. strong poets. 3) It reconceives the philosopher in terms of Socrates' wisom: "not being fooled anymore". This is a theme that doesn't appear a lot, but one place it does is in "Philosophy in America Today" (in CP) where Rorty reconceives the model of the analytic philosopher, not on the scientist (as before) or the scholar (as in Europe), but on the lawyer. 4) It shows Rorty first coming to terms with the fact that, as he will later make much of, there is no way to argue between the pragmatist and realist (which recurs most reverberatingly in the Introduction to CP, at the end of "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism" (also in CP), and in the beginning of CIS). Most interestingly to my mind, though, is seeing Rorty make an unconscious slip of projection. Maybe it was because he was young, merely in his mid-thirties, that caused Rorty to either misjudge or hope for the best of his colleagues. But either way, Rorty is sorely wrong to think that it is anglophone philosophers' "examination of the history of philosophy [that] leads them to think that philosophy is indeed, a tree from which all, or nearly all, the branches have fallen." That his analytic colleagues had "lost faith" because "they have looked at the history of philosophy and at our culture and arrived at a judgment about how human life may best be enriched." My bet is that Rorty, at the time, didn't quite realize at that point the extent of the relative historical illiteracy of his colleagues that he would later diagnose in them. "Lost faith"? That is definitely the Rorty we see in "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids" and in interviews, not the run-of-the-mill analytic philosophy professor. Rorty was definitely projecting his route to pragmatism on his colleagues, but who can blame him? He was young. And on the other hand, it may be a precursor to Rorty's famous "we's", his warm, cozy appellations of what "we pragmatists" or "we liberals" think.