Cartesian Epistemology, or Incorrigibility as the Mark of Something

There’s an early essay by Rorty, “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology” (1970), that I think marks the point at which Rorty figured out that he had to write PMN and how he would do it. The paper serves to point in the same general direction and uses the same style of partial historical, argumentative narrative and partial contemporary engagement of issues. The paper is, for the most part (like most of Rorty’s earlier papers, though probably more so), entirely replaceable by PMN . . . but essays are so much shorter. And, in my experience, Rorty has a way of saying the same thing over and over again in rarely the same way. Each experience opens you up to new angles. I’m not going to lie and say that I can reread every single piece of his writing with relish, but for being predominately a self-acknowledged one-note Nelly, he has the surprising capacity to hold your attention throughout most of his corpus of writing. I’m not sure the same can be said for many others. But then again, maybe I just have the same obsessive interests as he does and like hearing that one same thing over and over again. At any rate, I’d like to take that earlier paper and use it to help illuminate a portion of Pirsig that has always gotten my panties in a bunch.

First, I shall present Rorty’s six claims he hopes to make:

1. A necessary condition for participating in ontological discussion during what I shall call the ‘Cartesian period’ was that an answer be given to the question: Given that we have incorrigible knowledge only of the contents of our minds, how is it that we can know about anything else?

2. The paradigm of an answer to this question was the claim that the nature of the object of knowledge—reality as opposed to appearance—was different than either common sense or science conceived it.

3. The justification for the existence of ontology as a distinct discipline came to be the fact that neither science nor common sense could offer an adequate reply to the epistemological sceptic. Giving such a reply became the paradigm of what it was to do philosophy.

4. The refusal of many contemporary philosophers to take seriously the suggestion that reality is different from either common sense’s or science’s picture of it is due to the fact that they no longer accept or find it necessary to answer the epistemological sceptic.

5. The reasons why this premise is no longer accepted can be traced back to the abandonment of certain more general principles.

6. These principles are such that, once they are accepted, it is not clear why there need be a discipline called ‘ontology’ over and above empirical science. The justification of the existence of such a discipline thus requires to be rethought. (275, emphasis his)

The first thing I should note is Rorty’s use of common sense and science. These were his earlier years and I do not think that he’s suggesting that only science gives us knowledge, or some such thing. The object of his attack is the notion that there is a special discipline called “philosophy” (or ontology, in this case) that gives us a special kind of knowledge that only it can give us, something different than what we gain from physics, sociology, literary criticism, or walking down the street.

The second thing I should note is that Pirsig doesn’t seem to obviously fit in this schematic of claims. There are three reasons: 1) it isn’t obvious that Pirsig is practicing a discipline called “ontology” that is over and above anything, and this because 2) Pirsig doesn’t consider offering a reply to the epistemological sceptic to be a big deal, and this because 3) Pirsig doesn’t talk about something called the “mind” a lot. Pirsig really doesn’t have a philosophy of mind, just as it would be curious to say that he has a philosophy of language. He has latent views about mind and language, but he doesn’t spend time constructing a large view of the subject that hooks up to other views and can be used to rebut perceived criticisms. However, time and time again I find things in the philosophy of mind and language that make me think of Pirsig, but not always in a good way. In particular, it’s Pirsig’s notion of “immediate experience” that always raises my hackles. “Immediacy” is notorious for causing philosophical problems. With respect to the above, it’s Pirsig’s attendant claim that the value that is immediately experienced is known with absolute certainty. (Lila, 76) This certainty is a mark of the mental, of mind, that Rorty popularized as “incorrigibility.” But if Pirsig doesn’t obviously have an extensive notion of the mind (let alone a problematic one), what is a problematic mark of the mental doing in Pirsig’s account (Rorty has said that incorrigibility is ­the only property of the mind that can make it problematic, or at least make epistemology seem necessary)? What is it doing? Is it problematic?

I think it can be, but it all depends on how it is put to use. For instance, in Pirsig’s example the notion of us being certain about our experience is completely commonsensical. Of course we are going to be absolutely certain of whatever value-experience we have with the stove. The trouble is when Pirsig pushes this certainty into other services. Pirsig will eventually want to claim that mystics shouldn’t be ignored because they have direct experience with Quality. And, in fact, this direct experience carries with it the full weight of being absolutely certain knowledge because it was an immediate, direct experience. This is where things become problematic. For instance, if somebody says that they see water, should we believe them? What if you’re in a desert and it turns out to be a mirage? What happens to the absolute certainty? By using such an example we should notice how far the certainty extends: not very far at all. If the person who saw water was being sincere, then we can say that they were absolutely certain that they saw water, or even that they did actually experience the sight of water. It turns out, however, that they were wrong. They didn’t experience the sight of water, they experienced an optical illusion. This is what I’ve called the shibboleth problem: when do we believe the mystic? Do we believe all mystics? How do we tell the Lao-tzus from the gun-toting, compound nut-jobs (aside from the guns)? They both claim a direct relation, so how do we tell?

There are obvious, pragmatic answers to this (like the guns), but they burn a hole in the binding of “immediate experience” with “absolute certainty” that Pirsig affects, which then destroys the reason he gives for including formerly excluded mystics. I think the bridge can be built again to include mystics, but I think a different route needs to be taken.

I'm not going to explore this particular issue further, but I’d like to bridge back to the Rorty essay. The claim I’d like to make is that it would appear that when Pirsig makes claims about the exclusion of mystics, which hinge on a problematic mark of the mental, he’s tripped into doing a special discipline called ontology.

Here’s Rorty:

The mind-body problem is an offspring of the theory that knowledge consists in the having of certain representations of reality (including perceptual ones), by the subject. As [Wallace] Matson has recently pointed out [in “Why Isn’t the Mind-Body Problem Ancient?”], the Greeks had a soul-body problem but not a mind-body problem—or, at least, not the mind-body problem which has bothered philosophers from Descartes to Feigl. Before this mind-body problem can be made to seem urgent (as Matson also notes) one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of. Once one believes all this, one will have to grant the existence of a realm to contain the objects of immediate awareness. This will be the Mind, or the Subject qua Subject. Psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism. In the great systems of the Cartesian period, the primary task of ontology was to get the Subject and the Object back together. Solutions to the mind-body problem appear as simple corollaries to solutions of the Problem of Knowledge.

Thus the ontologies of almost every important non-sceptical philosophy from Spinoza to Russell consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same. The concomitance of the modes of the two known attributes of Spinoza’s God, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz’s monads, the variations on what Austin calls ‘the ontology of the sensible manifold’ (Berkeley, Kant, Russell), the perfect union of appearance and reality in Hegel’s or Royce’s Absolute, and Whitehead’s panpsychism are so many ways of showing that if you know enough about the sort of thing you are directly aware of (the contents of your mind) you will know everything there is to know about everything. In short, the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects—a redescription which would not have been thought necessary had not the original claim about direct awareness been swallowed. (278-279, emphasis his)

I want to point out the family resemblances between Pirsig and what is said here. First is the claim that “psychophysical dualism follows from epistemological dualism.” While it isn’t immediately apparent that Pirsig carries with him a notion of representation (though I have my suspicions about that, partially articulated here) or that he practices a special discipline called ontology, it should be clear that his direct/indirect distinction is some sort of epistemology, some sort of claim about knowledge and knowing, and that the Dynamic/static distinction which houses the direct/indirect distinction seems to be more than an epistemological distinction. While Pirsig wouldn’t seem to have a psychophysical dualism, the Dynamic/static dualism does deal with “stuff,” what is real, such that we have “things” on one side and “no-thing” on the other (Paul Turner has been working on disentangling Pirsig’s epistemology from his metaphysics). These are pulled together in a muddle which can produce weird effects.

Second, when Rorty says that to engender the mind-body problem “one has to have the notion of ‘immediate awareness’, and to believe that the things we want to know about (tables, other men, stars, the moral law, and the gods) are not things which we are immediately aware of,” notice that while Pirsig doesn’t seem to be hampered by the mind-body problem, he is hampered by both of these notions: we are immediately aware of Dynamic Quality and the things we want to know about are what we are not immediately aware. All things are housed under static patterns—that which we are only indirectly aware.

And third, while Pirsig has rejected claims that Quality is similar to Hegel’s Absolute, one can see here why they were offered. In ZMM, Pirsig takes the Subject/Object divide and shows how they are not divided in Quality—thus fulfilling “the primary task of ontology” of getting the “Subject and Object back together.” There is an immediate difference in that Pirsig is in some sense saying that the divide is illusory, that Quality is primary and the divide is secondary, not the other way around which engenders the problems. This is important and, I think, right. But look at what else Rorty says about these ontologies: they all “consisted in a redescription of the Object—that which we want to know about—according to which the Subject and the Object turned out to be much the same.” They are all Quality. And Rorty suggests further that “the mainstream of ontology has been a redescription (specifically, a ‘subjectivizing’) of the Objects”. Before Pirsig, “quality” was thought to be something that humans had or found, not something that rocks had. It doesn’t take too much imagination to think that critics of Pirsig would call his saying that Quality is Reality is anthropomorphic, a subjectivizing of reality.

These family resemblances begin to mount up. But, hey, Rorty himself obviously has many family resemblances to such despicable characters as the logical positivists. However, I think Pirsig’s family resemblances collude to produce the Myth of the Given. Pirsig’s claim that static patterns are what are deduced from the immediately apprehended Dynamic Quality seem to me to produce the idea that we are Given something completely untainted by language or distinctions or anything else we might do to it, some unblemished content, to which all of our dealings with it, linguistic and such, are the persistence of a certain scheme. Pirsig thinks that our current cultural scheme is unjustly giving mystics the short shrift and that if we got back to the content, we would be able to create a better scheme (see Pirsig’s comments about “cultural immune systems” in chapter 4 of Lila).

This cuts back to what I was saying about how far the absolute certainty of touching a stove or seeing water goes. Rorty calls his Sellarsian thesis the Principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility:

That a given sentence is used to express incorrigible knowledge is not a matter of a special relation which holds between knowers and some object referred to by this sentence, but a matter of the way in which the sentence fits into the language of a given culture, and the circumstances of its user, at a given time. (282, italics his)

Again, not immediately applicable given that Pirsig isn’t motivated by the epistemological sceptic. I think that this is good, but I think we can still see him in these lines. First, with incorrigibility—we gain our absolute certainty by our special relation to Dynamic Quality. And second, Rorty’s linguistic alternative makes knowledge internal to a language game and Pirsig would prima facie reject that because we directly know Dynamic Quality before any language. The differences between these two treatments of incorrigibility are summed up later by Rorty: “The importance of the principle of the Relativity of Incorrigibility is that it undercuts the attempt to discover this nature by casting doubt on the first move which the sceptic makes—namely, to have found some case of knowledge which is a clearer case than others, and is thus a clue to the essence of what it is to be knowledge. It causes this by saying that the cases in which ‘doubt plays no role’ are cases in which we do not let doubt play a role, not cases in which we are in a different natural state.” (283, emphasis his)

Why Rorty should say “the sceptic’s first move” I’ll skip over. Pirsig isn’t interested in finding the essence of knowledge, but he is interested in being more Dynamic. Dynamic Quality is obviously the kind of “clearer case than others” when compared to static patterns. Dynamic Quality is direct, static patterns are only indirect. The direct knowledge of Dynamic Quality is better and replaces the indirect knowledge of static patterns (the resemblance to the appearance/reality distinction should be apparent). It does this because we don’t doubt it. Its high or low Quality is absolutely certain. However, what of the guy in the desert? In Rorty’s case, it makes perfectly good sense to absolutely believe the guy you see put his hand on the flaming stove when he tells you that he’s absolutely certain that his hand experienced low Quality. However, it also makes perfectly good sense to have some doubt when the guy in the desert says he sees water. Because of our circumstances of being in a desert, though the linguistic cue of “I see…” tells us that he’s absolutely certain he is seeing something, we let doubt play a role. It’s not clear how this is to pan out in Pirsig’s philosophy. It seems perfectly reasonable that Pirsig could frame incorrigibility the same way as Rorty does. All this means is that the person who’s experiencing X has changed his beliefs in a certain way (experiencing a hot stove, the sight of water, the hearing of a good Republican argument). What it doesn’t mean is that everybody else has to change their beliefs (or static patterns) just because the other person did. The absolute certainty, and particularly not the experience of high or low value, doesn’t travel that far. As I suggested before, however, this is damaging to the way Pirsig claims that mystics have been left out of the conversation of mankind. I think one should toss Pirsig’s particular argument. I think that argument tries to put commonsensical distinctions to philosophical use, which is the way philosophical problems are created. Pirsig is better when he is seen as dissolving philosophical problems and suggesting cultural criticism, not using a philosophical apparatus to tell us that we have to do something. Some of the tools Pirsig leaves lying around are good for some purposes, but bad for others.

The Diversity of Goods

Charles Taylor is one of those philosophers (like so many) that I've learned about through Rorty and have their books on my shelves (which I've been talking about a lot lately, all those unread books, staring me down). Taylor and MacIntyre are both philosophers who have been called "communitarians" as part of the revolt against liberalism. Many others have been called communitarians, too, and part of why I think this particular battle line, communitarians v. liberals, bad and outdated is because most of the communitarians look like good liberals to me.

What intrigues me about Taylor is that, like Bernard Williams, he appears to advocate the ripping down of Kantian moral philosophy, but he also still advocates a hard distinction between the natural sciences and humanities. I've commented before in relation to Williams that I find this quite striking, particularly with the thoroughness in Taylor and Williams' narratives of moral philosophy (I'm thinking of, for instance, Sources of the Self and Shame and Neccessity). I still don't know what to make of it, but lately I've been setting aside such issues to emphasize the positive.

Taylor's "The Diversity of Goods" (found in the Anti-Theory book I've been reading) is a general attack on monolithic moral theories, specifically utilitarianism, and what Annette Baier called "normative moral theories". Taylor opens by saying that utilitarianism had a lot going for it, “its seeming compatibility with scientific thought; its this-worldly humanist focus, its concern with suffering. But one of the powerful background factors behind much of this appeal was epistemological.” (223) This attack on modern, Cartesian epistemology is what I take to be in common to Rorty, MacIntyre, Taylor, and Baier. Taylor suggests that utilitarianism caught on because of the craze to make everything “scientific,” that with it we “could abandon all the metaphysical or theological factors—commands of God, natural rights, virtues—which made ethical questions scientifically undecidable. Bluntly, we could calculate.”

There is another contemporary variant of moral philosophy distorted by modern epistemology, and these are the kinds of neo-Kantian formalisms that we get with Hare and Donagan. What both utilitarianism and formalism offer is “the hope of deciding ethical questions without having to determine which of a number of rival languages of moral virtue and vice, of the admirable and the contemptible, of unconditional versus conditional obligation, are valid.” (224) What Taylor suggests is that both of these options flow directly out of a substantive moral insight, “one of the most fundamental insights of modern civilization, the universal attribution of moral personality: in fundamental ethical matters, everyone ought to count, and all ought to count in the same way.” (224-5)

Taylor points out that this insight is historically parochial, that the Greeks for one did not share it. What modern moral philosophies have done is to take this moral insight and enshrine it as a principle to which everything else in the realm of morality must follow. However, Taylor says, “they look like formal principles only because they are so foundational to the moral thinking of our civilization.” (226) But as insights, rather than first, axiomatic principles, we find that these insights are “in need of justification like the others. This points us to one of the motives for construing them as formal principles. For those who despair of reason as the arbiter of moral disputes (and the epistemological tradition has tended to induce this despair in many), making the fundamental insights into a formal principle has seemed a way of avoiding a moral scepticism which was both implausible and distasteful.”

The reason the Cartesian epistemological tradition has come to cause this despair is because it modeled itself on the successes of the fledgling natural sciences. Because “reason” during this time period became so associated with science, and moral and political conflict seemed so interminable in comparison with the rapid beating back of nature, post-Cartesians thought that the only thing that could save morality from being completely irrational was making it quantifiably empirical or axiomatically formal. The successes of Galilean science were so rapid that they essentially made reasoning look simple. And anything that was hard must not be using reason. This seems patently silly, but one can see the line of reasoning that brings us there. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to make life easier? So utilitarians and formalists suggest their ethical theories as providing firmer foundations, as making life easier.

Taylor says that “these claims to firmer foundation are illusory. What is really going on is that some forms of ethical reasoning are being privileged over others because in our civilization they come less into dispute or look easier to defend. This has all the rationality of the drunk in the well-known story … who was looking for his latch key late one night under a street lamp. A passerby, trying to be helpful, asked him where he had dropped it. ‘Over there,’ answered the drunk, pointing to a dark corner. ‘Then why are you looking for it here?’ ‘Because there’s so much more light here,’ replied the drunk.” (234)

Taylor argues that “the price of this formalism, as also of the utilitarian reduction” has been the creation of “the unity of the moral”: “one of the big illusions which grows from either of these reductions is the belief that there is a single consistent domain of the ‘moral’, that there is one set of considerations, or mode of calculation, which determines what we ought ‘morally’ to do.” (226) Taylor suggests, instead, that the “boundaries of the moral are an open question” and that he would argue “that the universal attribution of moral personality is valid, and lays obligations on us that we cannot ignore; but that there are also other moral ideals and goals—e.g., of less than universal solidarity, or of personal excellence—that cannot be easily coordinated with universalism, and can even enter into conflict with it. To decide a priori what the bounds of the moral are is just to obfuscate the question whether and to what degree this is so, and to make it incapable of being coherently stated.” (226-7)

Taylor says that we need a notion of “qualitative contrast” to embrace the plurality of purposes and goals of ethical thinking. The notion of qualitative contrast “is the sense that one way of acting or living is higher than others, or in other cases that a certain way of living is debased.” (229) He suggests that treating them monolithically as all pointing towards the attainment of some common good distorts these individual values. “Integrity, charity, liberation, and the like stand out as worth of pursuit in a special way, incommensurable with other goals we might have, such as the pursuit of wealth, or comfort, or the approval of those who surround us. Indeed, for those who hold to such views of the good, we ought to be ready to sacrifice some of these lesser goods for the higher.” (230)

Not only that, but recognizing the distinctions between these goods “is an essential condition of his realizing the good concerned.” We wouldn’t often apply the virtue of charity to a person’s actions if they themselves didn’t recognize the high value of acting charitably. Taylor says that “motivation enters into the definition of the higher activity or way of being in all these cases.”

Another part of these virtues is that they are obligatory in some sense. Wealth may be a goal for some people, but we don’t usually look down on those who don’t have that goal. “By contrast, it is in the nature of what I have called a higher goal that it is one we should have. Those who lack them are not just free of some additional instrumental obligations that weigh with the rest of us; they are open to censure.” (231)

Not all qualitative contrasts are in the moral realm. Taylor points out the aesthetic domain and the judgments we make there. It is here that Taylor lays out most plainly the fuzzy nature of the moral realm. Taylor suggests at several points that perhaps one term, “moral”, may not suffice for all of our language, for our ways of condemnation and appraisal. We can make ad hoc distinctions, but they all remain fuzzy. Most of Taylor’s paper consists in attacking the pretensions and illusions engendered by epistemological distorsions (including a very good one about another motivation for formalism and reductionism: naturalism), but it paves the way in suggestive ways for the greater appreciation for “qualitative contrasts”.

*All citations for Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Conservatism, ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson.

Important Rorty Essays, or So You Want to Dig Into Rorty?

I figured I’d give a run down of important essays of Rorty to read for people who like reading lists. The essays I’ll be choosing from are the ones that are anthologized, ones that are easily accessible. If you’ve never read Rorty and want a general intro to him, there’s no better place than the beginning of his Philosophy and Social Hope (PSH):

1. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids”: his autobiographical essay, this gives a brief synopsis of his philosophical motives and his general project. Probably the best overall single essay for getting one oriented with Rorty.

2. “Truth without Correspondence to Reality”
3. “A World without Substances or Essences”
4. “Ethics Without Principles”: these three essays taken together probably outline succinctly the effects of pragmatism Rorty foresees in the broad areas of philosophy, roughly metaphysics and ethics (meaning, "What happens to the other two traditional branches of philosophy, metaphysics and axiology, when you take out the third branch, epistemology, at its knees?"). I also leaned on these three essays for my Intro to Richard Rorty.

Outside of that, the single best essay for seeing the broad brush of pragmatism is:

5. “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism” in Consequences of Pragmatism (CP)

Aside from that essay, the next best two are:

6. “Solidarity or Objectivity?” in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (ORT)
7. “Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor, and as Politics” in Essays on Heidegger and Others (EHO)

The best essay for Rorty’s philosophy of science is:

8. “Is Natural Science a Natural Kind?” in ORT

The best essay for Rorty’s mature views of materialism is:

9. “Non-Reductive Physicalism” in ORT

The best essay on Rorty’s political philosophy is:

10. “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” in ORT

The two best essays for Rorty on literary criticism are:

11. “The Pragmatist’s Progress: Umberto Eco on Interpretation” in PSH
12.“The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature” appended to Achieving Our Country

Aside from that, everything else is cake. Of Rorty’s two books, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS) is the most important and probably worth reading straight through after reading several of the above, or first (if you have the time) because it (somehow) blends together pretty much every preoccupation Rorty has ever had. Everything before leads up to it and everything after leads out of it. The first third blends Davidsonian philosophy of language, Freudian moral philosophy, and Rawlsian political philosophy into a pragmatist picture of language, self, and community. The second third blends this all together with his preoccupations with Heidegger and Derrida. And the last third takes the mess and throws in his love of literature. I say “mess”, but the result, in my opinion, is very successful. He somehow manages to include quite a lot of subjects and gear them all in the same direction, and all under 200 pages. For something that can be seen to be so comprehensive, it is by far the shortest great work of philosophy in the 20th century.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (PMN) is worth reading on its own merits, but for people just looking around for extra tools or a little excitement, you can probably neglect it. It is something of a Mystery Tale for Pragmatists, and most philosophers consider it to be a classic, but those philosophers are professional philosophers. For amateurs (like myself), one can neglect it unless (a) you’re really jiving for more Rorty and want to work your way backward into the older stuff, (b) you want more specific, technical arguments for some of the issues raised in his later work, or (c) you want to learn about the history of early 20th century analytic philosophy.

If (c), then I couldn’t suggest a better place, though just remember that it all ends in Rorty’s lap. If you want other suggestions about the history of analytic philosophy I would suggest John Passmore’s comprehensive A Hundred Years of Philosophy and Ian Hacking’s Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?.

If (b), then knock yourself out, just remember that they are ­technical, which means it will be difficult to understand them without understanding what analytic philosophy is up to. Thankfully, my answer to (c) suggests that PMN does that for you along the way, which it does, but, in my experience, it is still difficult to get into. PMN was definitely not the first thing I read.

If (a), then oddly enough I don’t think reading PMN is the best place to start unless you already understand some technical, analytic philosophy. What this means is that, if you want to read back into Rorty, start further back, not with PMN—again, unless you already understand some analytic philosophy. I seem to be repeating this a lot, but you won’t understand why until you try getting into technical analytic philosophy. I didn’t find it easy. I still don't find it easy. I still don't understand it and I still don't like it. God, I'm reading a paper right now by Michael Williams, one of Rorty's former students, and it's about Davidson and it's all like "Convention-T" and "if and only if" and some other incomprehensible words all strung together.

My advice for amateurs looking for a way into Rorty’s old stuff is his three papers of 1961, pretty much the first things he ever wrote: “Recent Metaphilosophy”, “The Limits of Reductionism”, and “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language”. The last is technical, but if I remember correctly it’s readable and a great lead on a number of issues. Aside from them, there’s no better entry point for Rorty’s old stuff then the heavily anthologized “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” of 1965 which is the paper that made Rorty’s name.

If you want to read PMN, or back into his corpus, my advice is to read CP’s “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” and the volume's large Introduction as a litmus test. If you can read the former, you’re good to go. If you can only read the latter, then you’re almost ready and could give it a run. But if you still can’t get into PMN, try reading the beginning of Richard Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. That book parallel’s PMN and Rorty and Bernstein disagree on very little. The latter half of the book has more to do with Continental philosophers than analytic, but the first half is about analytic philosophy of science which may help gear one into the terminology. Another outlet is some of Hilary Putnam’s later work. I’ve suggested The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy before, but there is also Putnam’s Reason, Truth, and History. I haven’t spent a lot of time with that book, but it sees Putnam at his closest to Rorty and it even suggests that you can read the last half before the first if you aren’t acclimated to technical philosophy.

Okay, I’ll close with three more essays. The first is the best about Dewey, the second the best about Derrida, and the third is an important essay about education.

13. “Dewey Between Hegel and Darwin” in Truth and Progress
14. “Deconstruction and Circumvention” in EHO
15. “Education as Socialization and as Individuation” in PSH

Epistemological Crises and Dramatic Narrative

I have Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue on my shelf and have read parts of it. As much as I like authors like MacIntyre, I have something like philosophical ADD. I start reading books, but usually I get distracted and start reading other books, all in an unending series of movements from MacIntyre to Toulmin to Putnam to Stout to Geertz, back to MacIntyre, on and on. I do wish to get through them, but I've decided that, for now, it's probably best that I try not to punish myself too harshly for not finishing them and instead focus on essays. Essays are short and usually last as long as my attention holds.

The volume of essays that has Annette Baier's "Doing Without Moral Theory?" also contains a number of other essays by luminaries like Bernard Williams, John McDowell, Charles Taylor, and MacIntyre. I've contented myself with trying to read those essays, a number of different perspectives all around a common, anti-theoretical perspective. MacIntyre's contribution, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science," is an excellent little thing and contains the basic anti-theoretical insights he carries in books like After Virtue and Whose Justice? Whose Rationality?. (MacIntyre has said that this essay was a turning point for him from his earlier work to the writing of After Virtue.) The basic idea is that the idea of tradition has been woefully lacking in our accounts of rationality.

MacIntyre begins his essay by thinking about what it means to be in an "epistemological crisis". He does so in a very down to earth, real life manner, like when "someone who has believed that he was highly valued by his employers and colleagues is suddenly fired" or when "someone falls out of love and needs to know how he or she can possibly be so mistaken in the other." (241) These are real problems that most of us have faced, or can at least imagine being in similar circumstances. What we think about people is based on how they behave, but sometimes our entire outlook on them changes and all their behavioral cues become transmogrified--and worse, sometimes we cease to be certain about how to take their behavior at all. What we "took to be evidence pointing unambiguously in some one direction now turns out to have been equally susceptible of rival interpretations."

This produces a frightful situation in which we lose our hold on reality. For "my ability to understand what you are doing and my ability to act intelligibly (both to myself and to others) are one and the same ability." (242) If we begin to lose our hold on others, we begin to lose our hold on ourselves. Recurring to the example of Hamlet as an exemplar of epistemological crisis, MacIntyre says perceptively that "to be unable to render oneself intelligible is to risk being taken to be mad--is, if carried far enough, to be mad. And madness or death may always be the outcomes that prevent the resolution of an epistemological crisis, for an epistemological crisis is always a crisis in human relationships." (243)

The wisdom that MacIntyre is pulling out of the example of such an individual in distress has the same implications for disciplines or paradigms of thought in distress. "When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative, which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been so drastically misled by them." I won't reflect very long on Pirsig, but this is the same wisdom that is embodied in ZMM. Pirsig combines both personal distress and paradigm distress in a single narrative that charts both his own course through time and the paradigm's course, all in an effort to make it intelligible--how he could have been an 18 year old college drop out, former Benares student and University of Chicago PhD candidate, and state committed psychiatric patient all the way to technical manual editor and suburban dad. Pirsig weaves in a decisively dramatic way the course of his own descent with that of intellectual history to both make himself more intelligible, the tradition of philosophical thinking more intelligible, and to show how the two are interwoven.

The most important reason for such narratives is that without them we would be taken over by the kind of radical, paralyzing skepticism that Descartes (and every epistemological skeptic after) pretends to have. MacIntyre points out that even Descartes, having formally eschewed narrative for formal deduction from self-evident premises, constructs narratives to couch his process in the Meditations. The epistemological consequences are large. MacIntyre says that an epistemological crisis, even after being abated, can induce two conclusions: 1) that our understanding of a situation, the schemata or paradigms we use to interpret, even the ones we just adopted to end the crisis, "may themselves, in turn, come to be put in question at any time" (244) and 2) "because in such crises the criteria of truth, intelligibility and rationality may always themselves be put in question ... we are never in a position to claim that now we possess the truth or now are fully rational. The most that we can claim is that this is the best account anyone has been able to give so far, and that our beliefs about what the marks of 'a best account so far' are will themselves change in what are, at present, unpredictable ways."

MacIntyre, here, doesn't pull out the point most explicitly, but the point is an important one that Rorty has also developed (particularly in relation to the individual in CIS's chapter on Winston). A skeptical crisis is terrifying because we are no longer sure of those around us. It further makes us unsure of who we are. Global skepticism (of the kind Descartes pretended to have) has gotten its punch from imagining that if we change one theory or precept of interpretation, what's to stop us from changing the whole lot of them, and if we change all of them, what's our criteria for getting closer to what's really going on--how do we know any of our canons of interpretation are at all like reality, how do we know we are getting any better, that we aren't just swinging unhooked from reality in a limitless abyss with no touchstone?

What is terrifying is that we, "we" being made up of our paradigms of thinking, could be terribly and radically wrong about reality, and therefore terribly and radically wrong about who we really are. Death has always been terrifying, and death is exactly what's on the table. On the cultural scale, if we keep pulling up floorboards on the deck of the U. S. S. Neurath, how can we identify the totally new ship we will someday be aboard as embodying the culture we now identify with? And if that's the case, wouldn't that count as the death of an entire culture? That is scary, to think that democracy and freedom could someday end, but what is even more pressing is the personal death we risk at the hands of global belief replacement. For if all the beliefs we now own are replaced by others, wouldn't we no longer count as being us? If I had totally and utterly different beliefs than those that I hold now, how would I identify as that person? Would I recognize me as me? Wouldn't, then, I be dead?

MacIntyre and Rorty recognize, as post-Cartesian epistemology does not, the importance of narrative for the ordering and stablizing of beliefs. Without narrative, something like global skepticism would indeed be frightening. However, part of who we are, both as a culture and as individuals, is because of the story we tell ourselves of how we got from our old, bad beliefs to our new, better beliefs (I've talked about this in Phaedrus, the Woolf and, with more attention to Pirsig, in Prospectus, Part III). This gives us continuity, the continuity in being able to claim that I did all those dumb, stupid things when I was younger. It gives you a coherent self. Without the story, we wouldn't be able to claim any of that.

MacIntyre suggests that the difference between Descartes' Meditations and Shakespeare's Hamlet is that "Shakespeare invites us to reflect on the crisis of the self as a crisis in the tradition that has formed the self." (248) Cultures are made up of traditions that create people and an epistemological crisis is a crisis of a particular tradition. A new, successful theory or paradigm or schema of science, art, religion, or philosophy does so because it "enables us to understand precisely why its predecessors have to be rejected or modified and also why, without and before its illumination, past theory could have remained credible. It introduces new standards of evaluating the past. It recasts the narrative that constitutes the continuous reconstruction" of the tradition of discourse. (249) MacIntyre is important for enabling us to to see that when a tradition is in a crisis, the successful resolution of that crisis extends the tradition. And it does so by its own tools. A tradition "is a conflict of interpretations of that tradition, a conflict which itself has a history susceptible of rival interpretations." "A tradition then not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only to be recovered by an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings." (250)

This is where MacIntyre's metaphilosophical outlook comes closest to Rorty's. Rorty argued in the traditional model of analytic philosophy throughout much of the 60s, in the cold, airy night of theses and propositions. Rorty saw quite plainly that such arguments tend to suffocate, cut off from each other, each begging the question over the other. When great sea changes are called for, one can't argue from X to Y, one has to retell the history of Xs changing to Ys. This will still be disputed, but these argumentative retellings of history are some of the only weapons available. One cannot simply argue that Cartesian epistemology was a mistake, one has to offer a history explaining to us why this mistake occured and how we may reverse it (such as Rorty's PMN).

MacIntyre goes on to talk specifically about Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper and the philosophy of science, but I'd like to end by reflecting on MacIntyre's links between epistemology and madness. MacIntyre remarks that "the categories of psychiatry and of epistemology must be to some extent interdefinable." (252) MacIntyre in this essay has been using "epistemology" in a wide sense of "ways of knowing," these schemata or theories or paradigms or canons of interpretation that generate on the other side what we call "knowledge". MacIntyre, by linking back to the individual's sense of an epistemological crisis, of a crisis of what some individual knows to be true, brings us to some of the same insights that Pirsig developed in ZMM and Lila when he talked about being outside the mythos and the philosophy of insanity. This is the idea of tradition-dependent, socially contextualized definitions of epistemology that have replaced the idea of Cartesian foundation-dependent, acontextual definitions.

Doing Without Moral Theory?

Annette Baier is a very interesting moral philosopher who I find quite cogent on a number of issues. Not only is she an anti-Kantian like my favorite philosophers, but she also engages extensively with the history of philosophy. I find that so many of the philosophers who I connect with (which does not include agreeing with) engage the history of philosophy to mine it for wisdom, rather than just spinning off a few theses or positions with attendant arguments. I'm thinking of Rorty, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stephen Toulmin, Jeffrey Stout, Susan Neiman, Robert Solomon. The list goes on. And some of them take up a particular philosopher as standard bearer. In Baier's case, she's devoted a lifetime of study to Hume and holds Hume up as the example of what moral philosophy should look like. (She's also a feminist philosopher, and makes the case in several places that Hume is the "woman's philosopher".)

One of the basic positions that I've occupied through Rorty and Pirsig and others is anti-theoretical, that reality and truth and good and the like are not something to which you can really have a theory about. Opposed to theory, I've been talking about this nebulous thing called "wisdom" accrued from practice. When it comes to moral philosophy, Baier talks about just this sort of thing in her assessment of contemporary moral philosophy, "Doing Without Moral Theory?"

Baier begins by noting that Aristotle and Hume, unlike contemporary moral philosophers beginning with Bentham and Mill, presumed a moral consensus on their actual moral judgments. Nowadays, philosophers presume the absence of consensus. Baier doesn't concern herself here with why this exactly occured, but simply that moral and cultural pluralism is now taken for granted. Baier says that "what is striking about this shift from presumption of moral consensus to presumption of its absence is that the philosophers at the beginning of the transition saw themselves as working for some disputed moral cause, saw themselves as members of the nonagreeing community of moral judges, while more recent moral theorists mostly see themselves as above the moral fray, outside the everyday disputes about what is to be tolerated." (30) Mill, in addition to being a moral philosopher, was a moral reformer, but Baier suggests that there are "very few contemporary Anglo-American moral theorists to whom one would naturally apply the term 'moral reformer.'" Baier looks at the theorists around her and sees them in the "intellectual construction business--one attempts to outbid one's competitor constructors in erecting a theory that rationalizes the moral opinion of some group," but in the limiting case of some constructions "the group is oneself."

This, I suggest, makes moral philosophy into either ideology or into play-ideology. Like most of us, I welcome good ideology for a cause I espouse--I admire J. S. Mill for his cultural crusades and for his effort to use intellectual instruments along with any others he could get. What I am less happy with is professional play-ideology, and with unacknowledged ideology, ideology parading as detachment.

This play-ideology and unacknowledged ideology is what we get with what Baier calls "normative ethical theory": "a system of moral principles in which the less general are derived from the more general." (33) This is the kind we get with R. M. Hare, Alan Donagan, Alan Gewirth, John Rawls--morally neutral edifices rationally deducted from our common reason, and therefore should be held by all reasonable people (though, it should be noted, that Rawls looks less and less normative in his later writings after A Theory of Justice). Baier notes that neither Aristotle nor Hume had normative theories--this was something that we get after Kant. The main practical trouble with normative theories (there are many theoretical ones) is why do we need them? Baier acknowledges that we need theories as accounts of what's going on in the world, scientific theories, psychological theories, political theories, economic theories, etc. "But do we need normative theories, theories to tell us what to do, in addition to theories that present to us the world in which we are to try to do it?" (34)

Baier wants to suggest that "there is no room for moral theory as something which is more philosophical and less committed than moral deliberation, and which is not simply an account of our customs and styles of justification, criticism, protest, revolt, conversion, and resolution" and the consequence is that "any moral philosophy which is not such descriptive anthropology will tend to merge with moral action." (33) Baier's suggestion is that moral philosophers need to get their hands dirty. They need to live life. If we are to be moral reformers like Mill, guides to moral action and not just sketching out the possibility of moral action (as neutral theorists sometimes describe themselves), we need to have knowledge about many different kinds of moral action. Her example for a secular moral philosophy is Hume. Hume's moral philosophy involved psychological and political and economic theories, but no normative theory. Hume's general practice was to go out and test his theories and go back and refine them. During his life, Hume had been a business man, a secretary to a general, a diplomat, a historian, he knew a little law. He was well acquainted with many different aspects of life. On Hume's account, moral philosophy attempts to provide a "mental geography", maps that can be tested and made better. Hume "directs the philosopher to learn from the nonphilosophers before presuming to advise them." (39) Hume is, in a way, directing moral philosophers to be a bit like dilettantes.

Baier notes at the end that much moral advice would seem to be just as easily given by nonphilosophers as professionals, which is something Rorty notes also (in "Philosophy in American Today" in CP). But that still doesn't leave the moral philosopher with nothing to do. They can at least be very well read, traversing a wide array of literature, looking for wisdom. Baier's article does much towards disabusing us of the notion of Kantian normative theory. Baier thinks that a Humean moral philosophy "would merge with other disciplines, and with the reflections of common life, and such a merger might help us to escape from that arrogance of solitary intellect which has condemned much moral theory to sustained self-delusions concerning its subject matter, its methods, and its authority." (46)

I should note that the last fourth of Baier's essay traverses another, though related, topic, of the way in which moral philosophy teachers compose themselves, and so also the very idea of professional moral philosophers, and philosophers in general. This is very interesting and acute, but a lesson for another time.


*Annette Baier's "Doing Without Moral Theory?" can be found in her Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (London: Methuen, 1985) and (where I have it and all pagination is coordinated to) in Anti-Theory in Ethics and Moral Convervatism ed. Stanley G. Clarke and Evan Simpson (Albany: SUNY, 1989).

Introduction to Rorty

The not-so-silent partner in this blog is Richard Rorty. Rorty is the philosopher from whom I've learned most, and all of my philosophical meanderings are infused with his influence. For people who don't know me from moq.org, I can imagine a situation much like Pirsig in ZMM realizing what's going on at the University of Chicago ("In the title of your blog, you've omitted one important name." "Yeah, whose that?" ". . . Rorty . . ." "Oh, I see . . . you didn't know . . ."). So, again very belatedly, I thought I'd offer a brief introduction of some of Rorty's philosophy.

Rorty, in fact, studied at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins School while it was still around. It was there that he studied with Mortimer J. Adler and Richard McKeon (who were mentioned in ZMM, McKeon being the "Chairman"), but also with Leo Strauss, Rudolph Carnap, and Charles Hartshorne. Rorty was most attracted to the classical, history-oriented side of philosophy that occured with McKeon and Hartshorne, but he did learn a bit from Carnap. It is a coincidence of life that he should have studied with three philosophers at Chicago and then at Yale (for his PhD) that so parrallel each other: McKeon and then Robert Brumbaugh, Carnap and then Carl Hempel, Hartshorne and then Paul Weiss. But despite studying with Carnap and Hempel, he came out the other side ill-prepared for work in the linguistic philosophy that had taken over most American philosophy departments. Rorty was well-versed in the history of philosophy, but not in the logic and linguistic tools that, because of emigrees like Carnap and Hempel, had swept from the Vienna Circle. So he spent a few years at Wellesley, and then after being hired by Gregory Vlastos to teach Greek philosophy at Princeton, his first few years at Princeton, the primere philosophy department in the United States, retooling himself as an analytic philosopher, figuring out what everybody was talking about.

The point in this little detour through Rorty's biography is that Rorty never felt totally at home in analytic philosophy and he also had far more historical depth then those who came out of Harvard and Princeton. Through the course of the 60s and 70s, watching the downfall of logical positivism at the hands of Quine and Sellars, Rorty began putting pressure on his collegues in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language, calling into question their most basic premises. And then in the late 70s he wrote Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature which summarized the problems he saw in analytic philosophy both in the short view (by neatly showing the dialectical path of self-destruction in 50s and 60s philosophy) and the long view (how this path is part of a larger path stretching from Plato and Aristotle, though more particularly from Descartes to Kant). His acheivement was to not only dialectically tangle with those various positions that had arisen in the course of mid-20th century philosophy, but to also sketch a historical narrative that attempted to show the recurring folly the mode of logical positivism, and analytic philosophy generally during this period, kept repeating, something they had learned from their predecessors.

The position Rorty found himself in during the 70s was that of pragmatism. He took up its mantle and carried it forward, taking what he took to be advances in philosophy (by, for instance, Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett) to show more of the same thing, the things James and Dewey were trying to show us. Three very general positions taken by pragmatism (or at least Rorty's version of it) can roughly be summed up by three slogans (culled from the titles of lectures he gave in Germany and France and published in Philosophy and Social Hope): "truth without correspondence", "a world without essence", and "ethics without principle".

If you take Philosophy 101 and you cover theories of truth, they'll usually describe three: the correspodence theory of truth, the coherence theory of truth, and the pragmatist theory of truth. The first says truth is what corresponds correctly to reality, the second that truth is what coheres best with everything else, and the third that truth is what works. None of those theories work (which is why many philosophers joke that adopting pragmatism will only cause you to reject it). The correspodence theory is roughly something we've had since Plato and the other two have been reactions to that default position of philosophical inquiry--that our statements need to cut through the appearances to the reality of a situation. The coherence theory is something that arose with idealists like Royce. It was also forwarded somewhat by Davidson early in his career. The pragmatist theory came about with Peirce, James, and Dewey's responses to Plato. Rorty's aligned himself with all of them through the course of the sixties and seventies, but by 1980 he had seen that what Davidson and the classical pragmatists should be seen as suggesting is not a theory of truth but the idea that "truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about." (CP, xiii)

The basic gist of this position is that if truth is correspondence to reality (a position sometimes called "representationalism"), then we need to have specific, definable criteria for determining when we've correctly connected up to reality. However, all we have as criteria are such pragmatic criteria as corroboration by evidence, coherence with other beliefs, efficiency of explanation, etc. None of these could tell us that we've correctly seen reality because history quite plainly shows us that our beliefs keep changing according to these criteria. Pragmatic criteria are good for justifying a belief, but not for telling us if it is universally and eternally true. Hence, pragmatists suggest that, though truth may be absolute, there's no sense in having a theory about it because all we'll be able to do is justify our beliefs.

What follows from this is the second slogan, "a world without essence". When one renounces the correspondence theory of truth, one also renounces the idea that there is an essence to reality (or any other particulate). The existence of essences are what produced the idea that we should correspond to them. So with the failure of correspondence, we should redescribe our situation without the use of essences. Rorty says that philosophers like James, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Foucault are "trying to shake off the influences of the peculiarly metaphysical dualisms which the Western philosophical tradition inherited from the Greeks: those between essence and accident, substance and property, and appearance and reality. They are trying to replace the world pictures constructed with the aid of these Greek oppositions with a picture of a flux of continually changing relations. One effect of this panrelationalism is that it lets us put aside the distinction between subject and object, between elements in human knowledge contributed by the mind and those contributed by the world, and thereby helps us put aside the correspondence theory of truth." (PSH, 47. This is the same panrelationalism I talked about with Pirsig and Pirsig also begins to show how the Eastern philosophical tradition can help us shrug these dualisms off, connections that Paul Turner has continued to make explicit, particularly here, here, and here.)

What philosophers need to shrug off is representationalism, the idea that knowledge is an accurate representation of the object. Pragmatists suggest redescribing knowledge in terms of power, "that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else." (PSH, 50) To be able to make this description stick, pragmatists also need to "break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic," (ibid.) between an intrinsic, nonrelational property of X (which is what makes it X) and an extrinsic, relational property that can change as much as it wants without affecting X (defined by its intrinsic essence). Pragmatists reject the notion of a nonrelational property on the basis that all attempts to get at this property are going to be ways of relating to it. "Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations." (PSH, 53-4)

One of the most important areas that this pragmatism impacts is that of moral philosophy, which is what gives us "ethics without principles." Kant conceived of morality as different in kind from that of mere prudence. Prudence are those habits of action that are merely convenient, that arise in our interactions with others. Morality, however, is an area of intrinsic authority, giving us laws of action that must be obeyed. The attack on essentialism and representationalism, however, leaves us without any sense of being able to find these laws. Pragmatism thus breaks down the distinction between morality and prudence and leaves us with rules of thumb ranging from uncontroversial situations ("trust family more than strangers") to controversial ones ("treat others as you would have them treat you"). Morality ceases to be a law-finding enterprise and reasserts itself in the contingent web of relations that we find ourselves. It ceases to be the reflective exercise of finding a priori guides and strictures to action that Kant conceived of and becomes an exercise that must include history and anthropology and literature, the learning of how other people interact with each other to accumulate the experience and wisdom in dealing with different people in sometimes surprising circumstances. General, arid authoritative structures of action are out and living in the detailed, sloppy mess of life with other people is in.

Pragmatism suggests that we give up the attempt to find philosophical foundations for morality or knowledge. Such attempts at trying to undergird science or our human rights culture simply end in drained out principles that are no more universal than the details of life they were culled from. Life is increasingly complex and we can search for wisdom and guidance. It would make it all a lot easier if there was a book with the Meaning of Life inscribed in its pages that would tell us exactly what to do in which circumstances. This book is what Plato was after, but all the attempts to find it have failed because life keeps changing. Heraclitus was right, reality is flux. But it is exactly this flux and complexity that gives all the color and joy in life. If you knew everything that was going to happen, would life really be worth living, would it really be all that fun? The Platonic flight from complexity to simplicity, from surprise to knowingness, is the philosophical flight from the exorbitant richness of life to the austere metaphysical foundations of life, from the details of one's own life to the cloistered search for ascetic purity away from all the hubbub going on around you. Kierkegaard first made that connection between asceticism and the Greeks and Nietzsche rejected it in favor of effusive self-creation. Likewise, pragmatism rejects all those dualisms which naturally direct our attention towards ascetic purity and suggests that you just get on with life and do what you can and what you may. Asceticism can be useful, but it is no truer or better a life than any other.


Common book acronyms for Rorty
----------------

PMN -- Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
CP -- Consequences of Pragmatism
CIS -- Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
ORT -- Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
EHO -- Essays on Heidegger and Others
AOC -- Acheiving Our Country
TP -- Truth and Progress
PSH -- Philosophy and Social Hope

Introduction to Pirsig

A little belatedly, but I thought I might provide an introduction to the namesake of my little blogthingy I got going on here. I'm simply going to present what I take to be Pirsig's main philosophical suggestions.

Pirsig's first book, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance, presents his "Quality thesis". This thesis has many sides, but it comes out of a reaction to the dominant subject/object distinction in post-Cartesian modern philosophy. Pirsig sees quite rightly that if we dissolve the dichotomy between the knowing subject and the known object that we end up with a play of values. Pirsig's way of getting there is to attack the Greek idea that our primary relationship to reality is one of knowing. Pirsig asserts, rather, that our primary relationship is one of valuing, and that everything else falls from there.

What this thesis ends up meaning from "there," however, is disputed to a certain extent. Some people are content to follow Pirsig in offering a broad, general onto-cosmological view of reality centered around the undefinable "Quality." I consider such views to be occasional poems with a determinate subject matter that are potentially beautiful, but generally shouldn't be taken too seriously. Because if they are taken seriously (as Pirsig and most of those who do write and enjoy such poetry), they turn back into the Platonic philosophy of knowing that Pirsig was trying to get rid of. When it comes to philosophical theses (of the kind that get bandied about in professional circles), Pirsig should be seen as only offering negative ones against a predominate image of philosophy--Subject-Object Metaphysics.

One of the theses that Pirsig presciently sides up with in ZMM and continues in Lila is that of historicism. Pirsig suggests that we are situated in history, in a continuing conversation with "ghosts of history" that produces what we call knowledge: "the building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues". In the cosmological poem to reality that Pirsig offers us in Lila, he adds an important nuance--the distinction between static and Dynamic. Our static patterns of value are broken by Dynamic Quality, those crazy new things that we sometimes just instinctively feel are better. If these crazy new things end up being better, then they leave behind in their wake new static patterns, which eventually become the new crust of convention that Pirsig, like Dewey before him, suggested we should always be ready to break through.

The importance of the connection between Pirsig's Quality thesis and his historicism is that the move from knowing to valuing moves us from essentialism to relationalism. No longer do we have objects with an essence that we can know. Instead, we have "objects" that are constituted by the layerings of value placed upon them. And since any "subject" doing the valuing is also a collection of these layers of placed value, we invite a kind of panrelationalism in which any "object," or "subject," or more generally, any "thing" we differentiate from any other "thing" is defined by its relations to every "thing" it's being differentiated from (including what's doing the differentiating).

This is why the static/Dynamic distinction becomes very helpful in Pirsig's later philosophy. All objects are static patterns of value of some kind. A static pattern of value is a repetitive way of valuing some "object," but since all there is to this "object" are those repetitive valuings, we call the locus of those valuings the "object" and name it, e.g., a "rock" or a "molecule" or an "electron." However, the relations between things change over time. Sex changed biology. The Greeks changed politics. The Romantics changed the way we create ourselves. All of those things changed the way things were previously done and are retrospectively viewed as progressive (namely because they allowed the other things after them to occur). But more importantly, we must become historicists after renouncing essentialism because essentialism held up the ideal of being rational by correctly identifying objects with particular amounts of intrinsic value. By rejecting essentialism, we reject the idea of intrinsic value and so reconstitute the process of valuing (and the rationality of it) as an historical process of advancing betterness. A break in the old patterns of valuing is defended, sometimes only retrospectively, by the betterness accrued in the new patterns, and betterness can only assessed by other old patterns being left in place. Eventually, it is theoretically possible that we may tear down so many of these old patterns that there are none left that we could identify with, essentially making us a new form of life. But as long as we can tell a story of progressive betterness, of how we got from there to here, we can be rational and avoid the charge of nihilism often attributed to those who deny essentialism.

There are a lot more facets to Pirsig's philosophy, and even more to his writings. But I take the above to be basic to the position in philosophical space that Pirsig occupies. While I don't think a whole lot cosmologically follows from the above, I do think think that it breaks down Plato as Pirsig wished to do.

Do Analysts and Metaphysicians Disagree?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genres of Writing

One of the things that influenced me the most by Rorty were his redescriptions of philosophy as a kind of writing, particularly in "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing" (in Consequences of Pragmatism), which is a precursor to what he wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This became terribly important for me in opening up the gates of what kind of writing we call what. It makes things much more fluid. Once we get rid of natural kinds, essences given to us by reality itself, the placement of various kinds of writing is determined by tradition, by what other texts they hook up to, not by what kinds of reality they hook up to. This kind of switch is made easier by looking at poetry than physics. For when we look at physics, it would seem obvious that they're talking about something in reality, say, rocks, whereas it is much more difficult to get a handle on what in reality poetry is hooking up to.

There is, of course, a very commonsense way in which biology and physics are talking about things that aren't just texts. But Kuhn helped us realize that understanding the movement of disciplines like physics through history is nearly impossible without actually looking at the interplay of different physical theories, different texts of physics. And then there are all the ways in which Quine, Sellars, and Davidson have helped us see that we cannot just pull off a description from an object, that such-and-such object is partly constituted by its descriptions, i.e. texts.

The recourse to traditions of writing also makes us wary about defining the distinctions between different traditions or genres of writing too squarely. By seeing texts as relationally defined between themselves, we may begin to see new ways of relationally defining them. For instance, Rorty's way of defining philosophy as "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell . . . and that lot." (CP, 92) Rorty's little list is written in a way to invite us to put in all the great philosophers, all the great intellectuals we traditionally call philosophers. Rorty, however, suggests that such a definition is almost entirely useless to put to use. To get a tradition to mean something a little more, you need to be a little more selective in who you include in the list. (As an exercise, try and get Augustine and Frege to comment on each other.) Not everybody is doing to same thing, commenting on the same line of texts. What's more, sometimes people are doing more than one thing at a time, and so the shape of, say, Kant's texts will change depending on who you place them in relation to. But who you place them in relation to will depend a lot on what you want to do.

Take the example of Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought. Rorty's book delineates a tradition of texts that we might call "epistemology". They are a series of texts that are defined by recourse to a certain problematic and to certain kinds of metaphors, specifically ocular and architectural ones. What Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Russell, Carnap, Ryle, Quine, and Fodor all have in common are a running commentary on the ones before them. And because this sequence looks the way it does, so does the commentary that ends up with Fodor look the way it does. It means that things in Plato and Aristotle that don't hook up with Quine and Fodor are overlooked, not because they are unimportant, but only because they are currently besides the point, they are part of genres outside the one currently being discussed and taken part of.

Rorty's purpose in drawing up that lineage was to cast doubt on the way in which current (early 20th century) Anglophone philosophy was being performed. The three dominant fields of philosophy were philosophy of mind, language, and science. Rorty saw that it wouldn't be enough to simply say that these three subjects were just wrong-headed, or pointless, or boring. He had tell a large story about why these subjects, and not others, arose and took their place at the center of what it meant to be a modern philosopher.

Neiman subtitles her book "An Alternative History of Philosophy". That is very important in seeing what Neiman is up to. She is offering an alternative canon of philosophers in delimiting her subject matter, in seeing what modern philosophy is up to. Instead of Rorty's "Plato to Fodor" canon we get "Leibniz, Bayle, Rousseau, Kant, Sade, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Camus, Arendt". Kant is in both canons, but he almost looks like entirely two different philosophers in the two books because of the different relations of texts Rorty and Neiman put him in. Neiman says in her introduction that

the picture of modern philosophy as centered in epistemology and driven by the desire to ground our representations is so tenacious that some philosophers are prepared to bite the bullet and declare the effort simply wasted. Rorty, for example, finds it easier to reject modern philosophy altogether than to reject the standard accounts of its history. His narrative is more polemical than most, but it's a polemical version of the story told in most philosophy departments in the second half of the twentieth century. (6)

I think Neiman is being a little unfair to Rorty, but I can forgive her because she's essentially right, not that Rorty rejects modern philosophy, but that he's recounting the standard story that most anglophone philosophers tell themselves. He recounts it the way he does specifically to show them that it doesn't end well for them. What Rorty, by his own admission, hasn't done entirely well (or at least as well as some others) is tell an alternative story of philosophy that gives philosophers something else to do. I think it's unfair to criticize Rorty on this point, of not offering an alternative account, for the same reason it would be unfair to criticize the forensic body specialist on (insert your favorite cop show here) for not single-handedly capturing the perpetrator. He played his part, not everybody is suited to do everything. We in fact can catch Neiman at cross-purposes with Rorty by turning over the book to the back cover where, for the 2004 paperback release, we see Rorty adding his praise to other luminaries as Jonathan Ree and Michael Walzer (2004 edition) and Clifford Geertz and Jerome Schneewind (2002 edition): "We badly need alternative histories of philosophy. The story told (by me, among others) cries out for supplementation.... Neiman's snazzy prose makes this book a pleasure to read, as well as an immensely welcome change from the sort of history of philosophy to which we Anglophones have become accustomed."

My point in this detour in examples is about the fluid nature of philosophy, let alone the wider panorama of "the written word." Not all contexts produce something interesting, but putting books into strange relations to other books can sometimes create something fruitful. Not all pieces of writing implicitly comment on Plato, but most produce something we might call wisdom and so can be placed in other traditions of wisdom literature, philosophy, traditions that we can create by situating the books together. All that is needed is a context and a persuasive reason for creating the context, some interesting insight produced by the pattern of texts placed beside each other. Genres of writing are created and all texts sit implicitly aside other texts and sometimes the mere act of writing can create a new genre, a new tradition of commentary.