Literature as Equipment for Living and as Spiritual Exercise

1. What is a literary scholar, critic?; 2. Kenneth Burke, literary critic — And his idiosyncratic vocabulary; 3. Sociological criticism — Naming a situation strategizes it — Literature as alembicated naming; 4. Acts of distillation — Warehouses of equipment; 5. Life as adventure — Beliefs as habits of action; 6. Spiritual exercises — You only know what you can remember — Cycling through pathways of belief — Reflection as detour from action; 7. Literature as self-help? — You don't only believe what you can remember — The self as equipment; 8. Complex literature and simple assertions; 9. Exercise with the narrative form — A longing for shapeliness; 10. The experience of reading — Acting through literature; 11. Literature is difficult — Not everything should be difficult — Democratic humanism

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1.      In my English department, the graduate students have formed a small colloquium that regularly meets to discuss someone’s work in progress. What has increasingly become pressing to me as a scholar-in-training is the question of what a scholar is, of my self-image as a literary critic. And this partly because it’s obvious that we grads all individually seem to have different ones, have an increasing variety available to us as critical tradition extends itself, and don’t have a space in which we can reflect together on this kind of self-reflection. There are literary theory courses, but rarely an opportunity to talk together about what it is we do. So I delivered the following as a talk to provoke a discussion about our own, individual self-images as literary critics. I framed the discussion around the two slogans in my title, in part because what I find helpful is to talk about alternative images or metaphors or distinctions for self-definition.

2.      “Literature as equipment for living” is a slogan of Kenneth Burke’s. A friend of mine in the department had asked me what I had been reading this past winter break, and I said excitedly, “Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes Toward History,” and my friend scrunched up her nose and mouth like she’d eaten a stink bug and replied, “ugh, the rhet-com guy?” Rhetoric and Communications is a growing subdiscipline in English Departments around the country, and rhetoric as a disciplinary study has taken Burke to be the father of contemporary rhetorical theory. There’s often an amusing, though sometimes churlish, rivalry between these two halves of English Departments, but let me say, once and for all, that Burke’s main vocation was literary criticism, and not as a founder of rhetorical theory. In fact, reading his work, it’s hard to imagine a school formed out of it at all. (Side note: Richard Rorty once said to an interviewer asking about Rorty’s criticisms of Paul de Man, “I can imagine being grateful for de Man’s obsessiveness, that is, his habit of reducing to nothingness any given text he reads. When de Man does it it’s interesting, but when you get … thousands of de Man clones, it’s merely formulaic. I don’t think anyone would have objected to de Man if he had been a kind of Kenneth Burke figure, not training up generations of students.” [1] Rorty, apparently, wasn’t acquainted with the other side of some English Departments.)

The idea of literature as equipment for living has its seed in Attitudes Toward History (1937), a book that is part Emersonian-pragmatist in affirming the Optimistic, part speech-act/genre theory (the kind of thing you get out of an Ortega or Lukács or Bakhtin), part quasi-Marxist history, and part idiosyncratic dictionary of a critical vocabulary (things like “alienation,” “transcendence,” “efficiency,” “casuistic stretching,” “character-building by secular prayer,” “being driven into a corner” and—my favorite—“heads I win, tails you lose”). “Equipment for living” is a metaphor that Burke regularly employs, like the pragmatist habit of asking for the “cash-value” of an assertion or how one would “cash out” a metaphor. What follows is an attempt to spell out how I cash out his metaphor, but I begin by taking it to be his master-trope for the relationship between language and action. Here is a characteristic way Burke talks with it—in his discussion of William James, he begins by saying:

For his philosophic trinity [James] proposed ‘rationality, activity, faith.’ Faith invigorates the power of action; rationality provides method for the act. And since by rationality is meant a willingness to consider all available evidence, it should shape the act by tests of completeness and consistency. All of his fundamental assertions were designed to equip him and others for living. He ‘accepted’ the universe by admitting any faith (in progressive evolution, in God, in the benefits of prayer) that enabled him to have the sense of moving towards something better. … And so strongly did he need the concept of Better rather than the concept of Best, as a way of equipping himself for action, that he rejected absolutism always, preferring even the asymmetry of ‘pluralism,’ a doctrine that outraged his form-loving colleagues. (5-6)

One will notice that this is fundamentally a pragmatist stance because it treats language—in this case, assertoric prose—as having an ethical function that swings free of truth. Indeed, by foregrounding assertion as having a function that is not truth-affirming, he risks outraging the same pieties the classical pragmatists did in their own instrumentalism about truth, potted in the misleading formula “truth is what works.” [2]

3.      But literature is not assertoric prose—it does not make assertions, at least not explicitly. Or rather, not explicitly by the author. So we have at least two different pragmatic contexts with which to judge the metaphor. Before I get to talking about what that might mean for us, I want to just keep plunging ahead with literature. In 1938, a year after Attitudes Toward History was published, Burke published an essay entitled “Literature as Equipment for Living,” codifying his thoughts about this metaphor and the orientation it implies for the literary critic. (You can find it in his Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), a book whose first few pages has a line poets love, “the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude” (9). To understand that line’s formal dimension, you have to read it against Yeats [3], but its embodiment of pragmatism I’ll return to momentarily.)

In the essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Burke suggests that what he is up to in his work, and his selection for key critical terms “purpose” and “motivation,” is a “sociological criticism of literature” (293). To unpack this, he takes up the notion of proverbs and says that what they do is name “typical, recurrent situations” in the life of a culture. We then “find” ourselves, as it were, in the proverb and are directed in our thinking by it about our own situation. So, as examples, Burke lists off proverbs for consolation (“The worst luck now, the better for another time”), for vengeance (“fools tie knots and wise men loose them”), for foretelling (“keep your weather eye open”), and for wise living (“first thrive, than wive”). “Proverbs are,” Burke says, “strategies for dealing with situations” (296). And playing off the war metaphor of “strategy,” Burke says as against a baffled interlocutor, that “surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command the army of one’s thoughts and images…. One seeks to ‘direct the larger movements and operations’ in one’s campaign of living” (298). [4]

And so, Burke says, “each work of art is the addition of a word to an informal dictionary” for one can think of novels as “the strategic naming of a situation.” They “single out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, that recurs sufficiently often mutandis mutatis, for people to ‘need a word for it’ and to adopt an attitude towards it” (300).

4.      This might be a good place to stop and collect our thoughts and codify some of the issues in play. I like the idea of taking books to name situations and provide the resources for thinking through them. It first of all requires an act of distillation on our part—these acts can be exceedingly useful, even outside the exam structure. What they provide is the framework of a perspective on how the book is to be read, the pattern in it to be called to the fore. For example, I could say that Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady displays the difficulties a woman faces in searching for autonomy in the face of both a culture of monogamy that infantilizes female choice and an aestheticist culture that flattens the moral parameters of autonomy. And what this distillation does is coordinate the ratios between paradigmatic moments in the text that provide the lens with which to read the other moments—for example, Mr. Touchett telling Isabel that “fortunately ladies are not obliged to give reasons,” Isabel telling Mr. Goodwood that she wishes to be free even to commit some atrocity, and Ralph hoping with delight to see what Isabel will do with her money. From this perspective (spoiler!), Isabel going back to Osmond is the inevitable tragedy precisely because it is the attainment of a robust moral autonomy wherein one takes on the burden of one’s choices.

What we don’t need to say is that a novel names only one situation—I think we can wipe away that possible implication from Burke’s formulation and say that novels, like life, are made up of an indefinite number of patterns of experience. And this, in fact, is what makes them such treasure troves for our equipment for living. For while I say “indefinite,” and really do mean it, novels really don’t present something so unmanageable as all that for the precise reason Burke says: they are concerted mobilizations of a finite range of textual phenomena. No matter what future interpretive lens comes down the pike, Isabel Archer will be a woman. Maybe someone will argue someday (or probably already has) that Isabel Archer is not the “lady” of the novel’s “portrait,” but it had better be the case that Goodwood’s got the penis and Isabel the vajj.

5.      Now, after Burke’s suggestion about naming there’s the actual image of “equipment for living.” “Equipment” suggests to me a wider metaphorical value than the more narrow war metaphor of “strategy.” I think Burke should absolutely be read against Nietzsche in “Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” but both should be drained of their violence to establish the underlying adventure of life—and no adventurer ever leaves home without his or her equipment, as every D&D player knows. Without your equipment, you are naked and vulnerable. And this equipment, in this case, is language. This, again, dovetails with a certain philosophical pragmatism about language. The central strain of pragmatism from Peirce, James, and Dewey to Rorty and his student Robert Brandom—they all follow Alexander Bain, the American psychologist and, as it happens, rhetorician, in defining beliefs as habits of action. Our beliefs are not just indicators of but also shapers of our actions in the world. Our linguistic formulations are as much a technological development as anything wrought of iron or wood.

6.      This leads me to a partial segue to the second term of my title: “spiritual exercises.” This is a term established by Ignatius of Loyola’s 17^th century book of that name, but it has been resurrected by Pierre Hadot to talk about a mode of philosophy. Hadot was a colleague of Michel Foucault’s at the Collège de France and was one of the major scholars of ancient philosophy at the end of the last century. (I cannot more highly recommend the English translation of his 1995 book, What Is Ancient Philosophy? as an introduction to Greek philosophy, both for its readability, scope, and erudition.) In an essay entitled “Spiritual Exercises,” and reprinted in his Philosophy as a Way of Life, Hadot suggests that Ignatius’s Jesuit practices were built out of the resources of the earlier Stoic tradition, which had its own traditions of spiritual exercises (if perhaps avant la lettre). Hadot says that “attention (prosoche) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude. It is a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit. … Thanks to his spiritual vigilance, the Stoic always has ‘at hand’ (procheiron) the fundamental rule of life: that is, the distinction between what depends on us and what does not.” And this for the Stoic, he says, “frees us from the passions, which are always caused by the past or the future—two areas which do not depend on us” (84-85).

If you’re like me, you might say, “well, that sounds wonderful—even bypassing the suspicious idea that the future doesn’t depend on me—but how does this spiritual vigilance work? How do I make sure that my self-consciousness is always awake? You can’t just want something or think you are a certain way for it to be the case.” And this is where I find Stoics to be pragmatists avant la lettre, for one important practical measure is the repetition and memorization of linguistic formula:

The exercise of meditation allows us to be reading at the moment when an unexpected – and perhaps dramatic – circumstance occurs. … We must confront life’s difficulties face to face, remembering that they are not evils, since they do not depend on us. This is why we must engrave striking maxims in our memory, so that, when the time comes, they can help us accept such events, which are, after all, part of the course of nature; we will thus have these maxims and sentences ‘at hand.’ What we need are persuasive formulae or arguments (epilogismoi), which we can repeat to ourselves in difficult circumstances, so as to check movements of fear, anger, or sadness. (85)

In the oral noetic economy—which is a fancy way of saying how the activity of knowing works in pre-literacy cultures—you only know what you can remember (a formula codified by Walter J. Ong somewhere). I think this goes for us, too, when we are away from our books, trying to figure out what to do at any given moment. If beliefs are habits of action, then reflection is a matter of cycling through your pathways of belief.

The idea of beliefs being but nodes on a spatial graph of interrelating lines is in part a metaphor given substance by Hans Blumenberg, a friend of Hadot’s and one of the great German intellectual historians of the last century, rivaling Heidegger and Habermas for both philosophical depth and acuity. [5] Blumenberg, in a little known but incredibly insightful essay on rhetoric, suggests that rhetoric be in part understood as a form of detour. It is a detour from action. This produces the old trope of the “man of action” and the “man of thought,” Achilles vs. Odysseus, or worse Socrates, who would stop Euthyphro from acting against his father for impiety with all his pesky little questions like, “do you even know what impiety is?” But consider how reasoning works—by inference. We infer one proposition from another, which means you transition from one sentence to another. In justifying your action, you take the time of multiplying sentences, which is time taken away from acting. Clearly for the Stoic this isn’t a bad thing—they want to mute action entirely in some cases, relieving us of our passions that form the fundamental motivations (hello Burke) for acting.

7.      Turning back to Burke and “literature as equipment for living,” I pull out one way of thinking about it in terms of using remembered pieces of literature to think through life’s situations. [6] And one way of doing this is by formula—either your own distillation of memorable narrative moments or catchy aphorisms of the text itself. Literature, in this way, becomes part of your armament as you meet the demands of life on the field of battle.

You’ll notice, however, that this has made literature into an assertion-generating enterprise, at least as it relates to one’s life, in the form of these maxims or formulas. But, as I noted in section 3, literature isn’t assertoric prose—aren’t there other ways we might relate to literature that might also be important to living? And also: this is kind of making literature sound like self-help. Before turning this last screw, I want to take up a deficiency in the “equipment for living” metaphor that punches up, I think, one of the most important ethical issues of our time. On its surface, “equipment” suggests—like my description of the body naked and vulnerable without it—that there is an inner or essential or at any rate some self beneath the language that articulates it. This is an image from Romanticism, in part codified by M. H. Abrams’ “lamp,” and it is one pragmatists, at least, have to reject. [7] There is no hidden, ineffable self deep down—it is language all the way down, rhetoric all the way down, equipment all the way down.

And while this might spark a metaphysical argument, I want to first note that a shift from “equipment” to “spiritual exercises” helps articulate the pragmatist perspective. Our linguistified self is better thought of as a muscle, and though you only know what you can remember, you don’t only believe what you can remember in the same way that while you may not know that you have a particular muscle, you use it just the same—however, of course, wanting to throw the baseball harder and knowing what operates the humerus may lead you to pounding those pecks a little harder. (Recall Burke’s “dancing of an attitude” formula.)

But secondly, “equipment all the way down” suggests a new handle on the old fears of relativism and the infinite regress. If it’s equipment all the way down, and the point of equipment is to protect your “self,” then it’s just equipment protecting other equipment. While relativism’s fear is that there’s no non-relative basis upon which to judge one’s values, equipment protecting equipment might produce the more radical fear that one was born into the wrong tribe, given the wrong education. Relativism goes fishing for the bottom of the inferential detours, but this perspective sees that we stop all the time to use the equipment we have, whether or not we know there’s a foundation for it. And in a less radical case, equipment protecting equipment produces the problem of knowing which is the means and which is the end—what is a tool that could be discarded for a better one and what is an essential part of what it is to be me.

8.      So, now, back to assertions and literature—as my reintroduction of “spiritual exercises” indicates, one of the reasons why I like books like Portrait of a Lady, Howards End, and Middlemarch, is that they are obviously produced by an extraordinary intelligence working through a complex situation. Solutions are, unlike in philosophy typically, not to the fore here, and one thing I like is thinking through the situations with the author, either via their intermediaries in the form of characters or their tropes via the complex functions of their narrators. This does not, let me hasten to add, work for every book (as my lengthening train of books I have trouble reading attests) as not all books are best named by this meta-perspective.

9.      However, there is another more recent use of the term “spiritual exercises” that goes some way to opening a window on another use of literature. My way to it is to first go back to Hadot and ask for his reason for choosing the word spiritual:

In the first place, it is no longer quite fashionable these days to use the word ‘spiritual.’ It is nevertheless necessary to use this term, I believe, because none of the other adjectives we could use – ‘psychic,’ ‘moral,’ ‘ethical,’ ‘intellectual,’ ‘of thought,’ ‘of the soul’ – covers all the aspects of the reality we want to describe. Since, in these exercises, it is thought which, as it were, takes itself as its own subject-matter, and seeks to modify itself, it would be possible for us to speak in terms of ‘thought exercises.’ Yet the word ‘thought’ does not indicate clearly enough that imagination and sensibility play a very important role in these exercises. For the same reason, we cannot be satisfied with ‘intellectual exercises,’ although such intellectual factors as definition, division, ratiocination, reading, investigation, and rhetorical amplification play a large role in them. ‘Ethical exercises’ is a rather tempting expression, since … the exercises in question contribute in a powerful way to the therapeutics of the passions, and have to do with the conduct of life. Yet, here again, this would be too limited a view of things. …[T]hese exercises in fact correspond to a transformation of our vision of the world, and to metamorphosis of our personality. The word ‘spiritual’ is quite apt to make us understand that these exercises are the result, not merely of thought, but of the individual’s entire psychism. (Philosophy 81-82)

This, I think, moves us a long way, especially with its emphasis on metamorphosis, self-transformation, transcendence. However, in the Stoic exercises themselves, the emphasis on maxims moves us back to putting thought first in priority, as does Hadot’s own formula that the exercises are “thought which takes itself as its own subject-matter and seeks to modify itself.” Is there another kind of exercise, one which the narrative form is peculiarly adapted to supplying?

In Rorty’s late essay, “Redemption from Egotism: James and Proust as Spiritual Exercises,” [8] Rorty says that

the term ‘spiritual development’ is usually used only in reference to the attempt to get in touch with the divine. But it is occasionally used in a broader sense, one in which it covers any attempt to transform oneself into a better sort of person by changing one’s sense of what matters most. In this broader sense of the term, I would urge that the novels of Proust and James help us achieve spiritual growth, and thereby help many of us do what devotional reading helped our ancestors do. (404)

Rorty says that “aesthetic” and “moral” won’t do in this context because “beauty” and “moral” importance seem too narrow of categories to describe the sense of exaltation that James and Proust cultists feel when reading them. “This sense of exaltation is not the same thing as being bowled over by the sheer rhetorical or poetic power of one’s favorite passages. Such passages play the role that their favorite passages in sacred scripture play for the religious. They become mantras, and reciting them brings very present help in time of trouble.”

The sense of exaltation I am trying to describe is, instead, a result of reading books as wholes, of following plots through to the end, rather than with being rendered momentarily delirious by a startling poetic figure, a perfectly crafted couplet, or a splendidly balanced antithesis. … Following such careers [as Isabel Archer’s or Christian’s in The Pilgrim’s Progress] lifts up the heart by letting the reader hope that she herself might eventually overcome the immaturity, the confusion, and the incoherence of her days. … For the intellectual who finds James and Proust exalting, it is the hope that she will be able someday to see her life in this world as a work of art – that she will someday be able to look back and bring everything together into some sort of pattern … into a coherent story of maturation. It is the hope for rounded completion and self-recognition, and is more like a longing for shapeliness than like the ambition of transcendence. (405)

10.      The experience of reading these books is an analogue to a religious experience—you don’t exactly come away with any new beliefs or formulae. “It is the experience of reading the novel,” Rorty says, “that makes one into a different sort of person, not the utility of a belief one might have acquired by various other means.” And the reason novels are good at this seems clear: they can show maturation. As a form, prose narrative seems better suited for showing it and thus producing that affective conduit that floods our motivational channels with that vague, life-giving substance we call “hope.”

Seeing various forms of literature as spiritual exercises is seeing them as acting on you and as you acting through them. Novels, especially those like Henry James’s or Conrad’s or Faulkner’s, are difficult forests that seem to have to have paths hewn through every time. I find poetry like Dickinson’s and Stevens’s to be spiritual exercises that I respond to, even if I find myself tripping and stumbling, my muscles distorted at angles they normally don’t find themselves in. What do they equip me for? I don’t know always. But I do like making the effort at spelling it out.

11.      But not always. Burke, in his essay on equipment, alludes to his era’s “inspirational literature” and how “it is a strategy for easy consolation” (298). Burke does not shy from this aspect of the sociological approach to rhetorical and literary forms. When I had the chance to teach a course on American Romanticism, on the first day I read them a famous bit by William James in “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” whose punchline, after James shows how ignorant he was of the lifeways of po’ Appalachian folk—“losing,” as he says, “the whole inward significance of the situation”—the punchline is: “I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.” [9] I then posed to my students what I took to be the real problem before us: “how do you, the student, who is likely not going to become an English major let alone become a professional literary critic—how do you negotiate a class like this, what with ‘my strange indoor academic ways of life’?”

It seems natural to me to see this as implicitly a question about literary value, or “what is literature?” I confessed that I had no idea how to define literature or the literary, and instead suggested a distinction between works that challenge and those that don’t. To be properly democratic about “taste,” we can be snobs in our private lives, but not in our theories of the public good—you are not a “better person” for enjoying Moby-Dick over Harry Potter; different books have different purposes, and it isn’t clear that non-challenging works aren’t serving a good purpose (relaxation, for example, or derisively, “escapism”). An example is my inability to watch challenging movies, including most dramas—I rationalize it by saying it’s probably because I read challenging books all day, but either way, I’d much rather laugh to Will Ferrell or watch The Bourne Identity for the eighth time than try and watch Cronenberg or Twelve Years a Slave. [10]

The idea behind the occasional elitist stance toward books, and the idea that every democratic humanist believes intimately, is that it is good to be challenged; it is a primary social good to be challenged; it is an intrinsic good to be challenged occasionally. Notice I say “occasionally,” because it cannot be good to be constantly challenged because then you wouldn’t get anything done—this is the intimate relationship between thought and action that I was early talking about under the heading of beliefs as habits of action and detours. But it is good to be challenged sometimes—that’s the problem of sycophants, “yes men”—but where, when, by whom? Who do you trust to challenge you? I take it to be a mark of freedom that every person gets to decide for themselves when they want to be challenged—though in public matters I take it to be much less up to individual choice about when one can be challenged. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to sample a broad array of areas, avenues, ways of challenging oneself. And that’s pretty much it as far as the root of the humanities goes, and so the idea behind a literature class is to put some books under a student’s nose that I enjoy being challenged by and that maybe they will, too. The title of department under which a course is being offered merely tells you what kind of book you’ll most likely encounter in the course, though all bets are off in the actual course.

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Endnotes

[1] “Worlds or Words Apart?” in TCF 137

[2] On classical pragmatism’s occasional instrumentalism about truth, see “What Pragmatism Is” or the later “Rhetorical Universalism”. An earlier discussion of truth in the history of philosophy that I still like is “Absolute Truth.”

[3]

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
     - Yeats, “Among School Children”

[4] Compare this passage to Nietzsche’s most famous passage on truth: “What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically…” (“On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense,” trans. Kaufmann).

[5] I’ve also deployed it to discuss Brandom’s philosophy of language in “A Spatial Model of Belief Change.”

[6] For more on this line of thought about using literature, see my forthcoming “Touchstones.”

[7] Abrams’s book The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) is a still standard study of the intellectual tradition of Romanticism’s revolution in understanding how the mind relates to the world via those two metaphors. Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature does for philosophy what Abrams did for the intellectual traditions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. (It’s important, in relating those two books and their purview, to remember that people didn’t distinguish the activities of philosophers and poets the way we do now. Abrams’ study is more wide-ranging in its historical depth than Rorty’s, but Rorty’s has more depth in the philosophical significance of the major philosophical figures from Plato to ‘70’s professional philosophy.) Central to the second chapter of Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is this point that Romanticism, despite making the important shift away from mirror metaphors (which create representationalist epistemological models like Plato’s and Descartes’), still retains a metaphysically pernicious model of an ineffable self.

[8] Collected finally in The Rorty Reader (2010), eds. Volparil and Bernstein, though it had been available as a manuscript-file for many years at Rorty’s website.

[9] From Talks to Teachers and to Students, in Writings: 1878-1899, 843.

[10] I did try once to rationalize my love of the form of comedy found in Ferrell-Apatow-Stiller by analogizing it to Romanticism. See “Just Bitching.”

Two Uses of "We"

1. We who agree with me – We as community; 2. Like herding cats – Foucault’s oui – Initiating vs. justifying; 3. Deliberating as a group – Whose heritage? Which communitas? – You are a function of we – You cannot reason your way to hope; 4. The we-initiator is prophetic – And arrogant – Emerson’s Sayer: too confident? – Ellison’s Emersonianism – Carlin’s Millian liberalism

1.      One of the things Richard Rorty was taken to task for most often—from teasing to anger—was his rhetorical use of “we.” It was also one of the earliest things his late-coming to moral and political philosophy was criticized for, particularly by those on the left, and here as in most relevant criticism of Rorty, it was his old friend Richard Bernstein: “Rorty frequently speaks of ‘we’ – ‘we liberals,’ ‘we pragmatists,’ ‘we inheritors of European civilization.’ But who precisely constitutes this ‘we’? Sometimes it seems as if what Rorty means by ‘we’ are ‘all those who agree with me.’” [1] This would, indeed, be disastrous if that is all Rorty meant by “we.” However, it is important to recognize that sometimes you do want to talk to just those “who agree with me,” though it couldn’t be “about all things” because you wouldn’t need to talk then (unless it were simply to remind everyone of the things y’all agree on, which isn’t as silly a task as you may think, but one I shan’t talk about for now). This “relevant we” is a community—all questions, assertions, positions are made and taken in front of some particular group.

In Rorty’s original response to Bernstein, he concedes that he has to spell out better who he means by “we,” and so begins his reply with a “political credo” in order to specify “the audience I am addressing.” [2] This wasn’t, however, exactly Bernstein’s problem with those “we’s,” and I want to slowly bring out the back and forth because both angles the two are standing at are important. Rorty is concerned with the ability of political philosophers—or, really, people generally—to identify with a community in solidarity in order to propose reforms. Perhaps this is an ability to stand shoulder to shoulder, if only metaphorically, with an established political party in order to get things done—this kind of solidarity is exclusionary insofar as the solidarity you have is not with the opposing party(s). However, to get reforms for the whole nation, the kind of solidarity we are talking about is larger—identification as an American in order to convince everyone that the reforms of your party are what’s best for everyone. So you are addressing Americans while also acknowledging that they, obviously, do not agree with you about everything.

2.      Rorty, here, was doing something even more narrow—addressing a subset (“the people whom I think of as social democrats”) of a national-political set (the American left) part of the larger array of America. [3] But Rorty thought that thinking in terms of solidarity was necessary for thinking in terms of getting stuff done. The reason one talks to subsets of various kinds is to get people pointed in the same direction, to add force to force to counteract opposing forces. The old cliché of getting leftists to agree on anything is like herding cats is apropos. And so Rorty criticized Foucault through the ‘80s for never being able to quite countenance himself inside of some solidarity group. “[Foucault] forbids himself the tone of the liberal sort of thinker who says to his fellow-citizens: ‘We know that there must be a better way to do things than this; let us look for it together.’ There is no ‘we’ to be found in Foucault’s writings, nor in those of many of his French contemporaries.” [5] Foucault, in I believe his last interview, replied to this particular point during his conversation with Paul Rabinow:

Rorty points out that in these analyses I do not appeal to any “we”—to any of those “we’s” whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought and define the conditions in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually suitable to place oneself within a “we” in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a “we” possible, by elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that the “we” must not be previous to the question; it can only be the result—and the necessarily temporary result—of the question as it is posed in the new terms in which one formulates it. [6]

Rorty thought it was very important to respond to this point. [7] Bernstein quotes this passage, and Rorty responds to it in a footnote after his concession, earlier discussed, that he needs to be more specific about “we”:

I agree with Bernstein that I need to spell out the reference of “we” more fully. I think that this is best done by reference to a view of current political dangers and options—for one’s sense of such dangers and options determines what sort of social theory one is able to take seriously. However, I cannot figure out what Foucault meant when he said (in the passage Bernstein quotes) that “the ‘we’ must not be previous to the question.” With Wittgenstein and Dewey, I should have thought that you can only elaborate a question within some language-game currently under way—which means within some community, some group whose members share a good many relevant beliefs (about, e.g., what is wrong, and what would be better). Foucault seems to be envisaging some sort of simultaneous creatio ex nihilio of vocabulary and community. I cannot envisage this. As far as I can see, you can only describe or propose radical social change if you keep a background fixed—if you take some shared descriptions, assumptions, and hopes for granted. Otherwise, as Kant pointed out, it won’t count as change, but only as sheer, ineffable difference. [8]

Rorty picks out precisely the bit in Foucault’s passage that is most problematical because of the two roles “we” can play: “we” as initiating a community and “we” as justifying an act. The latter is what Foucault finds so offensive about “we,” and this is what he means when he says he doesn’t want to appeal to the “we’s” “whose consensus, whose values, whose traditions constitute the framework for a thought.” If it had just said “consensus,” Rorty may have not bucked the point in the way he did because the idea that some shit’s gotta’ change is based on the idea that the current consensus needs reconfiguration. But including “values” and “traditions” in his formulation of what he wishes not to appeal to is why Rorty suggests that Foucault envisages some “simultaneous creatio ex nihilio of vocabulary and community.” The whole point of the first half of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is that you can’t just make stuff up—you have to use the tools you were acculturated with. Why? Because there is no you until you’ve been acculturated. This is a Hegelian point. And Foucault’s response is just a little too decisionistic, the meta-ethical stance that suggests that you are an empty toolbox that should look around and put the good stuff in. Meta-ethical decisionism is the heart of right-wing individualism and accounts for the left-wing communitarian backlash in the ’70s and ’80s. [9] “The problem is, precisely, to decide if it is in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values one accepts.” Who is this one? What are you made of, that can recognize and make decisions, if you’ve emptied out all the values and traditions?

3.      So, first there’s the conceptual Hegelian point that Rorty wants to press back, and then the rhetorical-political point that I made earlier—that to effect change in this world you’re going to need to form a solidarity group. Foucault finds insidious the consensus because when you use a consensus to justify, you necessarily exclude the dissenters from counting in the justification. Republicans still have a Democratic president even though they may not have voted for the person. But that’s the way democratic politics has to work, right? Well, what if you’ve been excluded from the deliberation? That’s what’s really the problem. And Americans, especially, should be sensitive to the problem of somethingsomething without representation. A “we” that gets too close to the justifying sense can seem like an act of exclusion if you use it in the middle of a debate. And this was Bernstein’s problem when he quoted Foucault:

At times … Rorty seems to be insensitive to the dark side of appealing to ‘we’ when it is used as an exclusionary tactic…. Rorty criticizes those versions of ‘realism’ that appeal to a ‘fact of the matter’ that is presumably independent of my (or our) interpretations. Yet he fails to realize that when he appeals to our shared beliefs and our common historical heritage, he is speaking as if there is at least a historical fact of the matter. [10]

Bernstein is summoning the outrage the oppressed who have been excluded from the process of creating those “shared beliefs” and “common heritage” have when they are told that “this what ’Merca ’sabout.” It’s not their heritage.

But whose heritage should we have? Yours? Who are you? If you aren’t American, why should Americans have your heritage? That’s the conundrum if you don’t form that large kind of solidarity group—the intellectual sword wielded in pointing out the exclusion doesn’t simultaneously let you back in. So what does? Rorty thought the only thing that lets you, any you, into the democratic societas is a liberal communitas—liberalism is an ethics of inclusion. In his second run at Foucault’s point, in Contingency, Rorty says to Foucault’s formulation of the problem, as deciding whether or not to take part in the old community or form a new one, that “this is, indeed, the problem. But I disagree with Foucault about whether in fact it is necessary to form a new ‘we.’ My principal disagreement with him is precisely over whether ‘we liberals’ is or is not good enough.” [11] This is because his “hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs,” [12] and this because “expanding the range of our present ‘we’” [13] is central to the liberal communitas.

So—after the Hegelian point that you are a function of a we, while taking on board the point that you are not thus reducible to that we, and the rhetorical-political point that you have to justify yourself in front of some community and form solidarity groups to affect change, there is still the problem of historical exclusion (or, continued exclusion). How do you decide whether or not to be part of the actual American community when it continues to fail regularly at the inclusionary image it prides itself on? Rorty didn’t think there was anything to say to this. You either hope, with James Baldwin, that the American common project of inclusion might be made, if not new, at the very, very least much better than it is currently behaving, though its dreams are more or less the same, or you cast off America as hopeless as Elijah Muhammad and many others have, both alienated intellectuals and working class folks who actually feel the brunt of the exclusions still left in America’s leaky ship so much more often than the leisured intellectuals. There will never be a deciding factor when it comes to deciding whether or not one should hope, at least no factor that will ever be portable. We, each of us, should have reasons for our belief or disbelief in a community, but reason will never decide the issue. [14]

4.      But how should we use “we” then? Sometimes I think people like Bernstein we’re being too hard on Rorty because how else do you decide what a group should do then a bunch of people saying things like “We should no X” “No! We should do Y!” “No, Z!”? Rorty followed Wilfrid Sellars in thinking of these as “we-intentions,” and since communities don’t speak, only individuals do, somebody has got to speak up and suggest things the community should do and think. I think Bernard Williams may have given all the answer Rorty ever needed in his response to this problem in his Shame and Necessity:

More than one friend, reading this book in an earlier version, has asked who this ubiquitous “we” represents. It refers to people in a certain cultural situation, but who is in that situation? Obviously it cannot mean everybody in the world, or everybody in the West. I hope it does not mean only people who already think as I do. The best I can say is that “we” operates not through a previous fixed designation, but through invitation. (The same is true, I believe, of “we” in much philosophy, and particularly in ethics.) It is not a matter of “I” telling “you” what I and others thinks, but of my asking you to consider to what extent you and I think some things and perhaps need to think others. [15]

As I said before, there are two uses of “we”—the we-initiator and the we-justification. The we-justification counts and uses that count as a reason for a belief. “We, in Wisconsin, counted up our votes, and give our electoral votes to Candidate X.” “Indeed, and there’s reason to believe that we in Wisconsin are beginning to go liberal because exit polls show that the margin X lost by in rural districts diminished, showing a rising left tide.” “Well, then we in Wisconsin should have liberal policies. Let’s furnish some.” You cannot, however, add individuals to get a we-community. You need to initiate it somehow. Declare a border or give yourselves a name—“Cubs fans” or “pragmatists” or “humans.” Like Foucault’s question, the we-initiator is prophetic—it proposes a community we could all belong to though we might not yet. It prophesizes an ideal community we should live in by thinking we do and beginning to behave like it (and criticizing each other when one of us doesn’t). It is a request, an invitation, and as Williams points out, it is an invitation to help think through what we are all about.

The reason people still get miffed about “we” is because it is arrogant—you propose to speak for me? Well, no, not exactly, but kind of. Somebody has got to speak for we. This risk of arrogance is at the heart of Emersonianism, for self-expression is the most important general trait of humanity, but not everyone was given equally to it. Emerson was right to imply that the Sayer, above the Doer and Knower, was king in a democracy, but Emerson’s sense of Providence was far too strong. He saw the agon that was a necessary consequence of self-reliance, but he said, “Don’t sweat it. Just ‘speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense.’” [16] It shall? How? Emerson has no answer for that except his confidence, his optimism, which is to say his faith that Providence will make sure that everyone’s latent conviction (not those false, external ones) is in harmony (and never mind how we tell the difference between the truly latent and the falsely societal). So I take it that Ralph Ellison’s modulation of Emersonianism at the very end of Invisible Man speaks volumes about what we’ve learned is right and wrong about liberalism’s ethics of inclusion and its Emersonian need for everyone to act their own part:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

Who knows?—we will all only know when each of us looks inside and speaks what we find there. There’s a lot on the surface that divides us, but maybe there’s some kind of agreement lower down that needs articulation for us all to realize how much we do hold in common, and how we will need to hold it. And if not—well, there’s always George Carlin’s articulation of Millian liberalism: “Live and let live, that’s my motto. Anyone who can’t live with that, take’em outside and shoot the motherfucker.” [17]

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Endnotes

[1] Bernstein, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Rorty on Liberal Democracy and Philosophy,” in his The New Constellation, 246-7. This paper was original published in Political Theory, Nov. 1987, where Rorty’s reply, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” was simultaneously published (which I shall be quoting from shortly).

[2] Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists,” 565

[3] In fact, it’s more complicated than that, for the subset he is addressing in “Thugs and Theorists” and, say, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is international—he’s addressing not just Bernstein and Irving Howe, but Charles Taylor of Canada and Jürgen Habermas of Germany. However, in Achieving Our Country he is specifically addressing the American left.

[4] This isn’t, in fact, much of a criticism for Rorty, who attempts to have a much more nuanced set of terms with which to praise and criticize. The burden of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is, after all, the attempt to convince people to treat those with different tasks differently, and not test them all with one thermometer. So, Nietzsche and Heidegger, while getting F’s for political views, get A’s for attempting to achieve autonomy from Plato. Likewise, Orwell and Habermas get A’s for politics, but maybe B’s for philosophy. Rorty’s criticism of Foucault basically amounts to unfortunately running together his attempt for private perfection with a dominating concern for the welfare of others. What makes Foucault curious in this regard is that unlike, say, Plato whose running together of those two things emitted a totalitarian-like fantasy, Foucault’s attempt to do both at once had very few adverse effects on the public utility of his best works. This comes out best in Rorty’s essay “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault” in Essays on Heidegger and Others. The lesson he drew from it was, roughly: “[My] critics on the left … think of themselves as standing outside of the sociopolitical culture of liberalism with which Dewey identified, a culture with which I continue to identify. So when I say ethnocentric things like ‘our culture’ or ‘we liberals,’ their reaction is ‘who, we?” I, however, find it hard to see them as outsiders to this culture; they look to me like people playing a role – an important role – within it” (Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth 15).

[5] “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity,” EHO, 174

[6] “Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Rabinow, 385

[7] I say this because of the timing of the essays. Rorty published “Habermas and Lyotard” in 1984, to which Foucault responded in 1984 (just before his death). Bernstein quotes the passage at Rorty in 1987, to which Rorty responds in 1987 in “Thugs and Theorists” (as I will presently elaborate). However, the exchange with Bernstein is after Rorty’s Northcliffe lectures of 1986, which were published that year in the London Review of Books (and Bernstein had already read when he wrote his essay). Those lectures were to become the first three chapters of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but not before Rorty could add the last section of “The Contingency of Community,” which juxtaposes Habermas and Foucault, and begins with a reconsideration of how to respond to Foucault’s point.

[8] “Thugs and Theorists,” 575n4. Rorty continues: “Attempts at ineffability can produce private ecstasy (witness Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) but they have no social utility. A lot of Foucault’s admirers seem to think that he (or he taken together with Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on) showed us how to combine ecstasy and utility. I cannot envisage this either.” This last points in the direction of Rorty’s concerns in CIS.

[9] A backlash that happened amongst intellectuals, and only some of them, mind you (roughly, those that considered themselves “political theorists” or read Dissent). My right and left contrast here should have obvious resonance in our current American political climate, as it did then, and has in fact throughout the 20^th century. However, one should never forget that many of the debates that ebb and flow in academic journals only rarely spill out into the wider political area. It’s often and usually the other way around.

[10] Bernstein, “One Step, Two Steps,” 247

[11] CIS, 64

[12] CIS, 63

[13] CIS, 64n24. This footnote is Rorty’s reconsideration of the passage from Foucault, in which he emphasizes that he agrees with him “that the constitution of a new ‘we’ can, indeed, result from asking the right question. … But forming new communities is no more an end in itself than is political revolution.”

[14] For a reapplication of this line of thought to the "culture wars" of the 1980s and ‘90s, see “The Legacy of Group Thinking,” esp. sections 3 and 4.

[15] Shame and Necessity, 171n7

[16] The (second) quoted bit is from the beginning of “Self-Reliance.”

[17] One of the early jokes from Carlin on Campus (1984).

Asceticism and the Fire of the Imagination

1. The slow meander — Beauty in criticism; 2. Talking as injury — Talking as love; 3. Pater’s hard gem-like flame and the ironist — The strong poet’s fire; 4. Thoreau’s vital heat — Against obsession — Leisurely consumption and the art of chewing; 5. Romanticism of profusion — Asceticism and suffocation

1.     In what is purportedly the last piece Rorty wrote for publication, Rorty quotes two snatches of poetry that he “had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by” while he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The first is from Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Garden of Proserpine”:

          We thank with brief thanksgiving
               Whatever gods may be
          That no life lives for ever;
          That dead men rise up never;
          That even the weariest river
               Winds somewhere safe to sea.

The second, Walter Savage Landor’s “On His Seventy-fifth Birthday”:

               Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art:
          I warmed both hands before the fire of Life;
               It sinks; and I am ready to depart.

Of these snatches, Rorty says this:

I found comfort in those slow meanders and those stuttering embers. I suspect that no comparable effect could have been produced by prose. Not just imagery, but also rhyme and rhythm were needed to do the job. In lines such as these, all three conspire to produce a degree of compression, and thus of  impact, that only verse can achieve. Compared to the shaped charges contrived by versifiers, even the best prose is scattershot.

I like Rorty’s perspective on poetry. It is a kind of aesthetic perspective that, oddly enough, I’m not really allowed as a professional literary critic, at least in my professional capacity. You get frowny faces if you say you don’t love the beauty of literature, but you also get frowny faces if you try and write about it. There are two reasons for this, I think. One is the simple reason that it’s terribly difficult to write about. Our profession has too many bad memories of early shitty writing about what makes X, Y, or Z beautiful. And when we began to professionalize, say around 1900, the crap gained a stamp of authority that legitimized it in a way it previously lacked. As critics began to feel queer about the personal nature of what was deemed beautiful, they either fell back on Kantian-style aesthetic inquiry or purged it explicitly in order to smuggle it in implicitly as the study of pure form—this was New Criticism. New Criticism and Kantianism began to be rejected in the ’60s, but for many different, not always compatible reasons. One of those reasons was my second reason for why the current profession frowns on beauty—the (re)rise of post-Marxist debunking. Many think of talking about beauty as taking part in an ideological regime, so specifically stigmatize it as a bourgeois conspiracy to keep the people down. That’s changing, thank god, and many of us—and this is where my department largely falls—have felt and feel like beauty is important somehow, but feel uncomfortable talking about it, let alone writing about it.

2.     However, that being said, Rorty once said something in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that fell a little odd on our instincts as literary critics. In a kind of concluding aphorism during his discussion of Heidegger, Rorty says that the only solution to the problem of how to properly treat Heidegger’s power-words (e.g., noein, phusis, alētheia), which are part of his attempt to speak Being without talking about beings, is: “do not put Heidegger’s works in any context, do not treat them as movable pieces in a game, or as tools, or as relevant to any questions save Heidegger’s own. In short”—and here’s the bit—“give his words the privilege you extend to a lyric which you love too much to treat as an object of ‘literary criticism’ – a lyric which you recite, but do not (for fear of injuring it) relate to anything else” (CIS 115).

I thought this really interesting, and asked a friend of mine—who gets poetry in a way I do not—what she thought of it. She said it seemed really wrong. She expresses her love by talking about it.

That has to be, in some way, right for us talkative literary critics. And yet, I still feel like both attitudes of expression are right. I’m not sure I fear injuring Emily Dickinson, but I do know that I love reading her poetry and hate talking about it. (Or, maybe that’s just because I hate looking foolish.) But my friend is right certainly in one sense—Rorty has no business, qua pragmatist, thinking words, i.e. harnesses of relating, hurt anything. That’s a rare moment of ineffaphilia for Rorty. In the context of “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” however, with its description of Rorty’s intensely “snobbish” and solitary love of orchids, we might get a finer-grained picture of what Rorty means by the private/public distinction—some private things we do with friends, but some we do only by ourselves. Sometimes we express our love by burning outwards, engulfing others; sometimes we hold the flame away from the buffeting winds.

3.     It’s not a mistake that I’ve recurred to fire imagery, for this last piece of Rorty’s I’ve been quoting from takes its title from that line of Landor’s: “The Fire of Life.” [1] I don’t know why, but Rorty never quoted from Walter Pater, though the most famous passage in The Renaissance pretty much sums up the romantic view of the strong poet that so fired Rorty’s imagination:

To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. Failure is to form habits; for habit is relative to a stereotyped world; meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems, by a lifted horizon, to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or work of the artist’s hands, or the face of one’s friend. [2]

Failure for Rorty’s ironist, hero of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, would be to take too seriously his own final vocabulary, which is largely inherited through that form of mass hypnosis we call “education.” Beliefs, for pragmatists, are habits of action, and Pater here perfectly describes the fear ironists have—that they’ll miss life if they aren’t able to discriminate finely the gradations between each person’s, thing’s, situation’s unique quality.

Rorty was caught by fire imagery at the end of his life. In “Philosophy and the Hybridization of Culture,” Rorty says that it might be sad if the ability to read ancient Greek and Latin died out, but if wouldn’t be a tragedy—“human creativity and diversity may flourish nonetheless. The human imagination may burn even brighter, even though many of the fuels that fed it are no longer available.” [3] This sense of fire as the imagination that destroys the material that keeps it alive is remnant of an earlier passage Rorty wrote for his contribution to a festschrift for Richard Bernstein, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre”:

For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,” rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal. It is a premise of this culture that thought the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but although it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for a more intense blaze. [4]

Here we get a sense of the strong poet’s self as a bonfire, needing to be fed more and more, burning hungrily through the materials we eventually run out of. There are certainly these Faustian types in literature and life, and there’s often a bit of melancholy surrounding Rorty’s treatment of the Hegels and Wordsworths, who outlived their brightest point, and a bit of embarrassed relief at the Byrons and Nietzsches, who didn’t. [5] And, too, we get a sense of the strong poet’s self as a forest fire, taking on the Nietzschean accents wherein we get cultural traditions as the product of the burning of a poet’s imaginative exercises. And, of course, Nietzsche got that from Emerson: “Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end.” [6]

4.     But does the self necessarily burn itself out? That’s a problem of imagery in the passage above—the imagination consumes, but what is the imagination if we abdicate the Kantian faculty psychology Rorty strictly forbids? There’s a weird hypostatization of imagination that Rorty rarely indulges in—endlessly consuming, subject to chance but enduring, it will continue to transcend. And if we turn back to those fragile lyrics, what does it mean for them to be consumed if we can continue to return to them?

Pater’s sense of the ironist self as a “hard gem-like flame” gets at a self that is more relatable, I think, to the less self-destructive ironist than the strong ironist. And here it’s helpful to turn to another user of fire imagery—Thoreau. In the opening chapter of Walden, Thoreau begins developing an extended metaphor around the notion of the “vital heat” necessary for life that should not be confounded with the tools we use to generate it and keep it.

According to Liebig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion in the lungs. In cold weather we eat more, in warm less. The animal heat is the result of a slow combustion, and disease and death take place when this is too rapid; or for want of fuel, or from some defect in the draught, the fire goes out. Of course the vital heat is not to be confounded with fire; but so much for analogy. It appears, therefore, from the above list, that the expression, animal life, is nearly synonymous with the expression, animal heat; for while Food may be regarded as the Fuel which keeps up the fire within us,—and Fuel serves only to prepare that Food or to increase the warmth of our bodies by addition from without,—Shelter and Clothing also serve only to retain the heat thus generated and absorbed.

Most of “Economy” is given over to railing against our having become beholden to the mere things we created to help us keep up our vital heat, life. What once kept us alive, now keeps us from living. “But lo! men have become the tool of their tools.” Sliding Rorty’s Deweyan-Wittgensteinian notion of language being a tool to help us get what we want over Thoreau gives us this: the fire inside not only destroys but creates—the trick is to not become obsessed with any particularly product for risk of starving your fire.

I find Thoreau’s notion of the necessary “vital heat” in the self hiding behind the final paragraph of Rorty’s “The Fire of Life”:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts—just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human—farther removed from the beasts—than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

To extend our metaphor: the fire inside destroys, consumes artifacts thrown into it, but in so destroying, it produces by an act of transformation. But how to describe that product? Rorty always recurred to Wittgenstein’s notion of throwing away the ladder after climbing it. But might we not want to remind ourselves of that act of transformation, particularly if we backslide? And now I picture Rorty, comfortably sitting back in a stairless 10th-story apartment, roasting chestnuts by an open fire. Or perhaps, roasting them in the pan itself: “we were put into our bodies as fire is put into a pan to be carried about…. [W]e are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it,” says Emerson in “The Poet.” We don’t precisely transform again by going over all our favorite aphorisms or lines of verse or favorite scenes of books or movies—but we do recapture something like that earlier moment. These chestnuts are leisurely consumables. And sometimes they surprise us—sometimes they flare to life again and teach us something new. (The best kinds, of course, are the ones that don’t burn down easily at all. This was the implicit definition of “universal” that I think Harold Bloom always had in mind in his late work—what we haven’t thought through because it is still us thinking. That’s a flame still burning on the fuel it was given. You might roll Landor around in your mouth for a bit, but Stevens’s “Of Mere Being” requires an awful lot of chewing.)

5.     There’s one surprising thing in this final passage from Rorty—his definition of what it is to be “fully human.” Rorty has as little business defining what it is to be human as he does suggesting words harm anything—pragmatists, and particularly Rorty’s pragmatism, abjures such theoretical positioning. The way to read this, I think, is as a last bit of cultural politics. It’s a rhetorical flourish, though certainly not a metaphysical definition of human nature. “Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human.” This is the Nietzschean romanticism of profusion, the form that finds most suspicious of all power-plays the ascetic. If the imagination is the engine of moral and intellectual progress, then a full mind with a polychromatic palette to paint with is the most likely to produce surprising patterns. The imagination needs material—fires need material to burn in them. An empty mind is just simply less likely to produce the bright flourishes that delight us and cause us to rethink our previous commitments and prejudices. That’s the main contention of Nietzschean romanticism. It is simply not the case that an ascetic form of life cannot produce moments of moral or intellectual progress. It’s just not likely. A mind that burns only one fuel is emaciated, and there’s nothing inherently special about an underfed mind.

This is cultural politics because Rorty doesn’t want to suggest that asceticism is illegitimate in any strong sense—it shouldn’t be eradicated, for example, for the health of the state. Mill’s “experiments of living” forbids such a maneuver. But Rorty is pretty sure we shouldn’t encourage it. That being said, I don’t have anything better than Nietzsche to entitle myself to the idea that a full mind will have a higher probability of helping humanity. I know of no empirical studies, and I can’t imagine them being done. After all, to formulate the study-question is to beg the question against asceticism. All us romantic Nietzscheans have on our side is the sense that thinking about your inherited form of life is best when it’s critical and that to be critical is to take a standpoint outside what it is you’re criticizing. That means the more available “outsides” you have, the better opportunity you will have to be critical of your inherited assumptions and predilections. You might be able to breathe for a time on the assumed power of a favorite book, but a hermetically sealed tradition will eventually suffocate the fire of life.

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Endnotes

[1] This was published in Poetry, November 2007. It can be found online here http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/180185.

[2] From the Conclusion of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Studies is the first edition, which was subsequently edited and rereleased in its iconic form as The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Current scholarship suggests that Pater was under some pressure to tame down the first edition, particularly the sexual connotations that so inspired people like Oscar Wilde, but however that may be, I certainly prefer the diction of the first edition in this passage.

[3] Published in Educations and Their Purposes, eds. Roger T. Ames and Peter D. Hershock, 2008, p. 44.

[4] Published in Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment, eds. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser, 2004, p. 12. This essay was reprinted with revisions in PCP, and the parallel passage is at 94, sans the Shelley (which is from The Defense of Poetry) and fire imagery. I suspect Rorty noticed he had too many metaphors going on. Happily, though, I've learned that Christopher J. Voparil, in his admirable collection The Rorty Reader, reprinted the original and not the cut PCP-version. Perhaps we could've lived without the fire metaphors, but there's a final section on Oscar Wilde and Rorty's vision of a literary culture that is excellent and now more centrally preserved.

[5] My favorite line of Rorty’s on Hegel is “What could he possibly do after the Phenomenology as an encore?” (Robert Solomon, in his In the Spirit of Hegel, reports that Rorty said this during an APA symposium on Derrida in 1978.)

[6] From “Circles” in Essays: First Series.

[7] Rorty himself doesn’t distinguish between the ironist and the strong poet, a conflation in the book that gets him in a lot of trouble.

Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism

1. Neo and retro — Rorty’s branding; 2. Pragmatism, radical empiricism, and the experience of life — Rorty’s 1^st argument: why are we forced to use “experience”? — Myth of the Given and being forced — No force, no argument; 3. Rorty’s 2^nd (non-)argument: “experience” is so passé — The linguistic turn did some good; 4. Varieties and the metaphysics of feeling — Getting turned on by religious experience — Metaphysics and asceticism; 5. Making nonlinguistic bliss accessible — Bliss from reading — Ecumenicism and ineffability

1.     I define “retropragmatism” as a recent species of pragmatism that hopes to help, in Barry Allen’s phrase, turn back the linguistic turn. [1] I think such a term is helpful to differentiate it from “classical pragmatism,” which we should reserve for the historical moment now well past. For what usually marks retropragmatists is a disciplish veneration for the classical Peirce, James, and Dewey in contradistinction to their vehement dislike for the neopragmatists, particularly Richard Rorty. “Neopragmatism” was the term Morton White coined in Toward Reunion in Philosophy to house Quine in the pragmatist pantheon, and it has since come to be used to mark the rise of pragmatist theses in philosophers working in the analytic tradition, i.e. those taking the linguistic turn. The most famous, by far, of neopragmatists is Rorty, and the retropragmatists’ ire is markedly reserved for him, I think, principally because those outside of philosophy identify Rorty with the renascence of pragmatism and enthusiasm for James and Dewey—which those on the outside often identify with Rorty’s peculiar brand of James and Dewey. This pisses off those that had been toiling in the gardens of pragmatism these many years, particularly because Rorty’s version is certainly not the original.

I think there’s been a lot of misunderstanding by retropragmatists, more or less rightly resentful of Rorty’s undue influence on the branding of Pragmatism^TM, of both Rorty and his position with respect to James and Dewey. On the side of the man, the emotions churned up by personal allegiance are, in the end I think, a necessary component of intellectual thinking. One might have expected someone in my position to say that such attitudes are “regrettable,” and they are in this case, but pragmatists have to think a little differently about the general role of such solidarity and eros. As Rorty glosses James, “there is no source of obligation save the claims of individual sentient beings” (PSH 148). I don’t think we’ve yet gotten to the bottom of what this claim entails, about only being obligated to each other, and particularly about the role of what James called “our passional nature,” but this isn’t the philosophical problem I want to address here. [2] The reason I do, however all that, think resentment of Rorty on this score is regrettable is that Rorty was too humble a person for such attitudes to find a home. Rorty was happy that he could play a role in pragmatism’s rise at the end of the 20^th century, but he was always deferential about what the gross effect was of his work. I don’t think he wanted people to think his brew of pragmatism was the one marketed by James and Dewey. I think, from beginning to end, he always felt awkward about accepting accolades for having done something people admired, and particularly for being pinpointed as an originator or powerful force of some idea or in some movement. Getting this sense about the man, however, requires rutting around in his writings for quite a while, and in the end—though as I shall be saying towards the end, this is actually not the case—our response to Rorty personally matters less than the position Rorty dug out in the pragmatist trenches. [3]

2.     The best way of isolating the difference between retropragmatists and neopragmatists is wondering about the relationship between, as James distinguished them, pragmatism and radical empiricism. Retropragmatists generally see an indelible link between the two, whereas neos not so much. So while neos would rather dump the radical empiricism as an unnecessary (or even pernicious) adjunct, retros think that without radical empiricism, pragmatism has its kneecaps shot. This is the common way retros express their distaste for analytic philosophy, generally—where did the experience of life go? There’s a lot of that old-timey “love of wisdom” nostalgia built into many of these appeals to experience, or rather the demand that our philosophical vocabularies give pride of place to “experience.” Some of the differences between retros and neos are hard to repair because it seems somewhat attitudinal, or perhaps methodological. For example, retros would really rather insist on saying “appeal to experience.” However, the neos don’t know how to talk philosophy without narrowing in on the actual terms we use to erect our philosophies, and so insist that, rather than deciding the issue by how much one talks about “one’s experience” (whose experience? Yours? Mine? Do we need to do surveys? How do we make sure the all-important “experience of life” is injected in our philosophy?), we talk about the kind of vocabulary we use to do philosophy. So that’s why I say attitudinal and methodological—neopragmatists insist we not conflate the experience of life with something as expensive sounding as “radical empiricism,” and so debate the merits of the ism separately from other issues surrounding our philosophical performance, but retropragmatists are suspicious of conceding the point (probably because of the vague whiff of irony surrounding my earlier handling of philosophia), while yet eager to lock horns over that ism.

Rorty’s only ever had two basic arguments to wield against radical empiricism, and so against retaining the term “experience” in one’s philosophical vocabulary (the modifier “philosophical” is important here, and often neglected in considering Rorty’s position). The first is implicit in “Dewey’s Metaphysics” (in CP), which begins with the citation of evidence that the master agreed with his rebellious disciple—Dewey’s late-stage hope, expressed in a letter to Arthur Bentley, to rewrite Experience and Nature as Nature and Culture and his regret about the earlier book: “I was dumb not have seen the need for such a shift when the old text was written. I was still hopeful that the philosophic word ‘Experience’ could be redeemed by being returned to its idiomatic usages—which was a piece of historic folly, the hope I mean.” Most of “Dewey’s Metaphysics” revolves around Rorty’s argument against method, and hence metaphysics-as-foundational. However, the piece of historic folly, I think, is created by Dewey’s hope to produce “a statement of the generic traits manifested by existences of all kinds without regard to their differentiation into mental and physical.” [5] So the first argument runs like this: if Dewey hadn’t been looking for a set of “generic traits,” he wouldn’t have convinced himself that he had to include any particular this or that, let alone “experience.” This is not an attack on the attainment of a synoptic vision, though—Rorty’s favorite definition of philosophy, that vague activity, was Wilfrid Sellars’ “seeing how things, in the broadest sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest sense of the term” and right down to the end of his career he was bemoaning its absence on the American philosophical scene. [6] What Rorty rejects is the force of “had”—as a methodological point, we are never forced to use one term or vocabulary over another by anything except other people. So what neopragmatists need is a different argument for the use of “experience” than “you just have to because it’s just there, at the bottom of everything.” As David Lewis put it, incredulous stares are not arguments.

The root of this point is the Sellarsian rejection of the Myth of the Given. “Experiences,” or any other term of art for an unconceptualized bit, cannot force you to think of them in any particular way without being plugged into a network of concepts (i.e. a vocabulary). Meaningful content being just given in an experience is a resurrection of foundationalist empiricism, which the classical pragmatists all rejected (more or less). So against the demand that we use “experience” in our philosophical vocabularies, Rorty flips one coin with two sides: 1) you can’t force me to use it without relying on a foundational epistemology and 2) why would you want a metaphysics of generic terms if you aren’t going to hook it up to a foundationalist epistemology? [7]

Why, indeed—there’s a good answer to that question, but I won’t trail around to it until the end. For now, it’s enough to see that since retropragmatists want to avoid the Myth of the Given as much as the neos, they shouldn’t be able to force the term on us by way of epistemology or metaphysics, about how we know or what we know. But we should notice here, then, that Rorty’s argument against radical empiricism isn’t that it violates pragmatism’s antifoundationalism—it’s that one needs a different kind of reason for taking it up so as to avoid that possibility. One needs an answer for (2). And at the same time, Rorty hasn’t forwarded an argument against radical empiricism at all—if anything, it’s an argument against one particular way of being against the linguistic turn.

3.     The only other argument Rorty’s forwarded against radical empiricism is quite like the first—not really an argument against it at all. This is the argument in “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” (in TP). It’s roughly this—“experience” is so passé. Some argument, right? For just as stares are not arguments, neither are yawns. Rorty notes in the opening pages of the essay, in a sociological manner, that “if one looks at the end of the twentieth century rather than at its beginning, one finds something of a renaissance of pragmatism, but no similar renaissance of panpsychism. The philosophers of today who speak well of James and Dewey tend to speak ill of Bergson. They tend to talk about sentences a lot, but to say very little about ideas or experiences…” (291). This is precisely what’s changing, but we still have here neither an argument for or against taking part in or resisting the shift. The reason Rorty thinks that “experience” is passé is because he thinks that the linguistic turn, on the whole, did some good for philosophy—that the linguistic turn played an important role in helping philosophers kick the incubus of representationalism. However, and this is key, Rorty does not perceive any necessary connection between talking about language and being an antirepresentationalist. He simply notes that Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson seem to have had an easier time turning the tide against an entire host what Dewey called “the whole brood and nest of dualisms” bequeathed us by the Greeks. [8]

So what’s the deal? Where’s the juice? As we should be able to see, both of these arguments boil down to thrusting the burden of proof onto retropragmatists and urging them to answer, “what’s the difference that makes a difference?” I think the trick is to turn from Dewey to James. If one focuses on Dewey, I think it’s hard to see what all the hoopla is about. This is because a metaphysics of generic terms sounds so boring—how or why would we get fired up about that? Only if you thought you had to do it, but we’ve chucked that consideration. However, if we turn to James, we can get a better idea of what’s exciting. For Dewey, using “experience” feels like a purely intellectual measure; for James, it feels experiential.

4.     This is what we get out of a book like The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his late paper, “Some Inconsistencies in James’s Varieties,” [9] Rorty spends some time contrasting the James of “The Will to Believe” and Dewey of A Common Faith to the earlier James of Varieties, and particularly in retailing James’s ambiguities in how he uses “experience.” The main thing that comes out of the discussion, I think, is that what Rorty calls the “metaphysics of feeling” is the only good reason for thinking we need to risk the Myth of the Given (94). This is, essentially, Romanticism’s fire back across the bow of Enlightenment intellectualism. Rorty poses it as the corrective “to the metaphysics of cognition common to Hegel, [T. H.] Green, and Royce,” but rejects the idea that we need a metaphysics at all, a view about “what is real ‘in the completest sense of the term.’” The last phrase is from James’s conclusion: “so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term” (italics James’s). This is a fairly typical formulation of a notion of direct experience that people like Rorty find it hard to understand in a non-Myth of the Given sense. But perhaps even more dangerous is the notion of “completeness” in this context: what could our leverage be for knowing when we have it? One would need a substantive epistemological criterion with an attendant method for telling the difference, and that’s what Rorty spent most of his career debunking.

Rorty concludes by saying that if James doesn’t violate his own pragmatism by wielding “experience” as a weapon in metaphysical combat—something that would, because it is more “complete,” keep the slavering wolves of Freud and other external analyses of religious experience at bay—then this is tantamount to being “left wondering why we need bother with all those virtuosi” of religious experience that James elaborates in great detail, “whether the twenty Gifford lectures add anything to the twenty pages of ‘The Will to Believe’” (96). Why would we? Answering this question, I think, would be to move towards answering (2) above—why would we want a metaphysics of generic terms? Rorty, ironically enough, implicitly answers the question when he nevertheless “happily concedes” that Varieties “will continue to be read with profit for centuries to come.” Why would we read either The Varieties of Religious Experience or Experience and Nature? Because they turn us on. Rorty has repeatedly, throughout his career, articulated this ecumenical approach to life as a function of Mill’s formulation of “experiments in life” being the purpose of democracy in On Liberty. This is essentially an aesthetic attitude. However, it is an aesthetic attitude that is an ethical attitude, the same one Rorty urges toward James, that “exceptionally magnanimous man” whose Varieties, if read, “can help us become more like James, and thus help us become better people.” Why would we bother with all those virtuosi? Because “we take an immediate delight in them; or else it is because we believe them to bring us good consequential fruits for life.” That is from the first chapter of Varieties, which Rorty quotes approvingly as the line of thought that would not have violated James’s pragmatism (91).

Rorty can’t quite get to the point of suggesting Experience and Nature because it not only doesn’t turn him on, but he also thinks it feeds our ascetic impulses, the kind of masochism that leads to Platonism and that Nietzsche diagnosed as just another will to power. A metaphysics of generic terms would be a list you try and pare away to get as small as possible. But why? Who cares if it is small? To so care in this context would be to associate Occam’s Razor with a method to get at Reality as It Really Is. That’s why Rorty thinks of systematic metaphysics as a suspicious activity. But that’s a cultural argument about a certain type of lebensform and how much, on balance, good it has done and might continue to do. And that’s still not an argument against “experience.” [10]

5.     What I find most interesting about Rorty’s conclusion is that blind eye to James’s accomplishment in Varieties, which does not rest solely on the subtlety and generosity of the man’s mind and spirit. It is, as will become clear, an integral part of the achievement, but Rorty seems to suggest it’s the only thing interesting about it. However, what James does for a peculiar, modern lebensform—what Rorty variously calls “the ironist,” “the litterateur,” or “the intellectual”—is make an alternative, older though not quite incompatible lebensform accessible to it: James makes the nonlinguistic experience of bliss (what James, following the Romantics, calls “religious experience”) accessible to those who experience bliss primarily by reading. And what James, an extraordinary writer with an intense admiration for the ineffable, did for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of mystic experience, someone in the future might do for the capacious, aesthetic appreciator of the multifarious forms of effing—call it, The Varieties of Reading Experience.

Until that day, one might think we could console ourselves with reading someone like Harold Bloom, a voluminous reader who in the last half of his career turned to the “common reader” as the last bastion of secular spiritual autonomy. But this actually won’t help completely because Bloom decidedly and self-consciously is deaf to some forms of writing—if it isn’t written with one’s spiritual autonomy as a primary foci imaginarius, then Bloom doesn’t care much in talking about it. [11] A true Varieties of Reading Experience would take us on a grand tour of literary history, and all the forms of writing and the experiences of reading adjunct to them, without apotheosizing any one particular form. It would be ecumenical to Homer, Euripides, Malory, Cervantes, Milton, Pope, Richardson, Radcliffe, Byron, Cooper, Melville, Stowe, Whitman, Dreiser, Hemingway, Stevens—and if the point weren’t already too fine, I’d point out that we’d need to include Plato, Aquinas, Montaigne, Newton, Burckhardt, Pater, Freud, Weber, Bloom, and Richard Posner as well.

One interesting point we can make about this fantasy, though, is that the ecumenicism demonstrated by James toward the various religious traditions he treats and that of my fantasized book are the exact inverse of each other, and possibly properly so. To be ecumenical to ineffable experience is to make all the experiences, in some sense, the same—but to be properly ecumenical to effable experience, one needs to attend to the boundless differences. This might, as well, point to a connection between attraction to the ineffable and asceticism (or reduction) and attraction to the effable and romanticism (or proliferation). And this might be the reason Rorty prefers Dewey’s slim A Common Faith to James’s fat The Varieties of Religious Experience. While Dewey merely says religion is romance, James enacts it. And Rorty doesn’t think we should tempt ourselves to the ascetic anymore by making it look so romantic and enticing. Whatever asceticism we should have should be in our relationship to talking about it—just enjoy the bliss and stop effing telling us to stop effing.

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Endnotes

[1] I say “help” because I get the sense that there is a much wider-spread movement to turn back the clock on analytic philosophy than just the species found in pragmatists. Since this is a broadly speaking “empiricist” reaction to analytic formalism, I cannot help but think that running parallel to a return to empiricist (foundational) metaphysics should make a pragmatist suspicious of the move, but then, an enduring tendency for pragmatists has always been to strike a more-empiricist-than-thou pose. I should also add that Allen, though formulating a number of powerful criticisms of linguistic-turn philosophy in his Knowledge and Civilization, wants little truck with a turn back to “experience.” Allen strikes a pose so reactionary that he’d turn us all the way back to before Plato formulated the quarrel between poets and philosophers—choosing instead the artisan as metaphorical unit for knowledge-production. This is a very interesting redescription of the philosophical landscape with powerful links to Dewey.

[2] Principally because I have only inchoate ideas about what to say about it as of yet. For an earlier discussion of Rorty’s “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” from which that line is drawn, see my "Rorty, Religion, and Romance."

[3] I would point to two things, however, to give some evidence, at least, of the claims I’ve just made. First, on the side of his deferential attitude, I don’t think Rorty was just blowing smoke in his “Comments on Sleeper and Edel” (1985) when, at a conference organized by the Peirce Society, he said, “I am grateful for the opportunity…, but I should begin by confessing that I am out of my depth in addressing this audience. Not only the people here with me on the platform, but practically everyone in this room has read more James and Dewey than I have, and read them more recently.” And secondly, on the side of his shyness about originality in particular, there’s the comment he makes shortly after in “Comments”—“I can only say that my references to pragmatism were an effort to acknowledge my own lack of originality rather than an attempt to make new bottles look good by claiming that they held old wine”—and his more interesting, personal reflection in the introduction to Truth and Progress: “Back in the sixties, when I was a thrusting young analytic philosopher, I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a star-studded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic – a conference from which he had just returned and the results of which he had been asked to sum up at the final session. ‘No trick at all,’ Hampshire explained, ‘for an old syncretist hack like me.’ At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up” (TP 10n5).

[4] I should add that the relative merits of “experience” in our philosophical vocabulary is not the only general point of divergence Rorty, in particular, has with the classical pragmatists. The other basic one is about the relative merits of “method” in our philosophical vocabulary. However, since obsession over method never really went out of style in American philosophical life, it isn’t really all that retro to disagree with Rorty on that point as well. See Rorty’s “Pragmatism without Method” in ORT. (The irony of this footnote should be clear by the end of the piece.)

[5] Dewey, Later Works, Vol. 1: Experience and Nature, 308; qtd in Rorty, CP, 73

[6] Cf. “How Many Grains Make a Heap?” in the London Review of Books, Jan. 20, 2005.

[7] For another, earlier take on Sellars and Quine in relationship to the pressures of the retropragmatists, see my "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."

[8] Dewey, Middle Works, Vol. 12: Reconstruction in Philosophy, 271. For this Rortyan argument, see for example his “Twenty-Five Years Later” retrospective to his 1992 edition of The Linguistic Turn.

[9] In William James and a Science of Religions, edited by Wayne Proudfoot, 2004.

[10] The attitude I have about the relationship between experience and language is essentially the same as Richard Bernstein’s, but the direction with which I’ve pursued the problem (of the relationship) is the exact opposite as his. Both of us are concerned to see this as not a problem at all, but Bernstein’s route in The Pragmatic Turn is to criticize Rorty (on behalf, you might say, of the retropragmatists) and mine has been to defend Rorty (against the retropragmatists). The basic defense amounts to saying that Bernstein overstates things when he says that “it is a slander to suggest that the pragmatic thinkers, who did so much to undermine all forms of foundationalism, were guilty of appealing to experience as some sort of foundation” (152). I don’t think Rorty ever prosecuted that case, though he did collect some evidence for it. I think Bernstein is not chary enough about the various uses the pragmatists put to that term, and that it’s only by understanding constructive philosophical efforts in the context of argumentative moves against opponents (though not only in this context) that we can see fully the relative merits of those efforts (as against other constructive efforts). (Rorty specialized in this kind of context-plumbing, almost to exclusion.) Neither one of us wants to be reductive about experience or language, and Bernstein, I think, would agree with me that the retros shouldn’t be attacking the linguistic turn as such—that language is exceptionally important in understanding our relationship to the world, and that analytic philosophers like Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Robert Brandom have increased that understanding because of their narrow focus.

Perhaps, though, I’m being kind in not thinking Bernstein a retropragmatist himself, because his final paragraph of “Experience after the Linguistic Turn” dreadfully repeats the two basic sillinesses of the retropragmatist position against the linguistic turn as I understand it: that there’s any risk of “sliding into linguistic idealism” and that focusing on, say, “vocabularies” as your central philosophical term of art “severely limits the range of human experience (historical, religious, moral, political, and aesthetic experience) that should be central to philosophical reflection” (152). On the first, “linguistic idealism” is just the up-dated scarecrow the classical pragmatists were constantly fighting. All you have to do to avoid it is make sure to have thought through the consequences of what Davidson called triangulation, “the triangle that, by relating speaker, interpreter, and the world, determines the contents of thought and speech” (Truth and Predication 75). And Bernstein doesn’t recognize the extent to which Brandom, for example, does recognize the naturalized pragmatist notion of triangulation Hegel called Erfahrung. Bernstein, in setting up Rorty as a target at the beginning of his paper, mentions as an extension in a footnote that Brandom doesn’t even have “experience” listed in the index of his massive Making It Explicit—a fact Rorty had noted with some pride when talking about his former student (see TP 122). What makes this more complex than Bernstein acknowledges is that Rorty’s pride stems from the fact that he sees Brandom as “carrying through on the ‘linguistic turn” by talking about social practices—not “language.” (Bernstein otherwise does appreciate this—see Pragmatic Turn 213.) Bernstein, in the footnote, goes on to say, “Even though Brandom closely identifies his pragmatic project with Hegel, he fails to see the philosophical importance of the concept of experience (Erfahrung), which plays such a prominent philosophical role in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit” (232n4). As far as I can tell, this was written/published in 2010, and by 1999 Brandom had in fact written an essay that amplifies Hegel’s notion of Erfahrung (published later as Ch. 7 of Tales of the Mighty Dead), which he refers to when discussing that notion in the classical pragmatists in his introduction to Perspectives on Pragmatism (2011). (And further, to say that Brandom didn’t recognize this in Hegel by the time he finished writing Making It Explicit might be wrong as well. He suggests in the preface to his Between Saying and Doing that he’d begun working on his “Hegel project”—the book that is to be, finally though still yet unpublished, A Spirit of Trust—by the end of the ‘80s.)

However that may be, the more important silliness is the notion that talk of “vocabularies” might “limit the range of human experience” available for philosophical reflection. I have no idea how to limit the kinds of things we reflect about philosophically, and so have no real handle on how people who say this kind of thing wield it. I hear it all the time and am somewhat baffled. I can’t quite see how Rorty was limited, nor—more importantly—how his discussions of history and politics in Achieving Our Country or religion in Philosophy and Social Hope or aesthetic bliss in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity were in conflict with his “linguistic idealism.” For that’s what you have to say if you wield this argument—that if the person does talk about a particular range of experience, they aren’t entitled to be able to do so. But nobody I’ve seen does argue this—they just say the target isn’t doing it, whatever “it” is. That’s the trouble—what does it mean to limit the range of experience? What does it mean to exclude, say, “historical experience” from one’s discussion of history? Then we might be able to get a handle on what it means to include it, and what it might be to construct a philosophy that perhaps allows for a division of labor between injecting the political experience of an age into a piece of writing and perhaps not but still having interesting things to say about the politics of that age. Because my hunch is that not even retropragmatists want or solely value one kind of writing on their favorite topics. After all, once you understand reading to be an experience—as one should given the logical amplification of the Hegel-pragmatist argument—then it would seem an impoverishment to the cultural experience of humankind if we said that we now only wanted writing on religion like James’s Varieties, Laozi’s Daodejing, and perhaps Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, but not Sydney Ahlstrom’s magisterial A Religious History of the American People or Stephen Carter’s A Culture of Disbelief (because they are historical and socio-political, respectively).

[11] Bloom is not a popular critic in the academy right now, and I often find myself cheerfully admitting my admiration in the face of frowns, but if one wants a taste for how self-conscious Bloom is about his blinders, and for his priorities as an intellectual, take a look at his introduction to Richard Wright’s Native Son in the Chelsea House Modern Critical series (collected in his Novelists and Novels).