Richard Rorty, Objectivity, relativism, and truth: Philosophical papers, Volume I. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-521-35877-9. $11.95 (paper); 226 pp. (indexed), and Essays on Heidegger and others: Philosophical papers, Volume H. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-521-35878-7. $11.95 (paper); 202 pp. (indexed).
Book Review by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg Queens College of the City University of New York 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367-1597 USA
Richard Rorty is a thinker whose writings generate controversy. Reading these papers, which span the decade of the 1980s, is an unsettling ex- perience. It is virtually impossible to confront Rorty's arguments -epis-temological, historical, or political -without becoming engaged, without being provoked. Rorty produces this effect on his readers because he creates a tension which compels us to rethink old and established "truths"; his arguments disrupt the flow of the taken-for-granted.
To this ability to provoke, must be added a capacity to straddle the two traditions that dominate contemporary philosophy: the Anglo-American analytic and the Continental. Rorty is important to those who read Sellars, Quine, Davidson, and Putnam, as well as those who read Heidegger, Lyotard, Vattimo, and Habermas.
Finally, Rorty - like his intellectual progenitor, John Dewey - is as much at home in passionate debates over politics as he is with discussions of complex epistemological questions. Rorty's papers move effortlessly back and forth between issues that concern the philosopher and the citizen.
The papers in these volumes focus on three interrelated themes. First, Rorty offers an anti-representationalist account of knowledge, on the basis of which "knowledge is not a matter of getting reality right, but rather ... a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with reality" (Vol. I, p. 1). Second, Rorty argues that without the "skyhook" provided by etemal and ahistorical "truths," anti-representationalism necessarily leaves one en-meshed in "the ethnocentrism produced by acculturation" (ibid., p.2). For Rorty, the danger of such ethnocentrism is mitigated by the peculiar values of our ethnos, that of the West, "which prides itself on its suspicion of ethnocentrism -on its ability to increase the freedom and openness of encounters, rather than on its possession of truth" (ibid.). Third, on the basis of the cultural beliefs that he thinks shape the West, Rorty argues for political liberalism, for a Deweyan vision of radical democracy, as the best hope for our troubled times.
Rorty rejects all forms of representationalism on the grounds that there is no way to ever know that a formulation accurately represents reality. Not that Rorty believes that nothing is outside of ourselves, but with respect to the contents of our mind and our linguistic statements, it is not "explanatorily useful" to say that one or another "item 'corresponds to' or 'represents' the environment in a way that some other item does not" (ibid., p.5). For Rorty, we simply have no way to climb out of our mind and attain a God's-eye view of reality.
The core of Rorty's pragmatic view of knowledge and truth is that all knowledge and belief is context dependent, all truths contingent. Yet, Rorty, in his paper on "Solidarity or Objectivity," is at great pains to distinguish pragmatism from relativism. According to Rorty, relativism is self-refuting; moreover, it is a theory of knowledge which holds that one belief is as good as any other, that we cannot take a stand on any set of principles. As Barbara Hermstein Smith has shown in her Contingencies of Value (1991), Rorty has inexcusably bought into the traditional objectivist definition of relativism, and confronted with this straw doll he must find arguments to distinguish his pragmatism from the relativist specter. If Rorty dispensed with the objectivist's definition of relativism, and instead defined it as the view that all beliefs are context dependent, he could acknowledge his relativism with the same assurance as his pragmatism.
One result of Rorty's anti-representationalism is his challenge to modem science and its claim to "get reality right." In his paper on "Science as Solidarity," Rorty persuasively argues for a demythologizing of science. He argues for a new conception of rationality, in which a "weak rationality" conceived as a set of moral virtues based on solidarity replaces the "strong rationality" conceived as a method for accurately representing reality, which is typical of the worldview of modem science. This strong rationality is inseparable from representationalism and its correspondence theory of truth. In arguing that the natural sciences are no less context dependent than the humanities, for their historicization in the Kuhnian sense, Rorty makes a convincing case for the desacralization of science, and makes his contribu- tion to possibly new ways of relating to nature.
Yet that possibility is undercut by Rorty's clam that what separates the natural sciences from the humanities is not their supposed objectivity or accurate representation of reality, but their prediction and control of things. While acknowledging that such "prediction and control may not be what we want from our sociologists and literary critics" (ibid., p.40), Rorty in true Baconian fashion assumes that such prediction and control is exactly what we want from our natural scientists. Such a view may avoid precisely the hard questions about modem technology that need to be asked after Auschwitz, and in the face of human-made ecological disaster.
Rorty's anti-representationalism also leads him to an original reinterpreta- tion of such thinkers as Heidegger, Derrida, and Freud. Rorty reads Heidegger and Derrida as heirs to an anti-Cartesian, anti-representationalist, and anti-essentialist tradition that includes Nietzsche and Dewey. Rorty's own anti-essentialism is based on a deconstruction of metaphysics, of that tradition that began with the Platonic distinction between episteme and doxa and which stretches to the contemporary distinction between fact and value. In his introductory paper to Volume II, "Pragmatism and Post-Nietzschean Philosophy," Rorty lays out the bases for his reading of Heidegger and Derrida:
I see the best parts of Heidegger and Derrida as the parts which help us to see how things look under nonrepresentationalist, nonlogocentrist descriptions -how they look when one begins to take the relativity of thinghood to choice of description for granted, and so starts asking how to be useful rather than how to be right. (Vol. II, pp. 4-5)
However, Rorty also finds in both Heidegger and Derrida residues of metaphysical thinking, tendencies to slip back into essentialism of one kind or another. This is the case with the later Heidegger's quest for the "essence of language" (ibid., pp. 62-63), or with the early Derrida's commitment to "the discourse of philosophy." As a result, Rorty sees "the worst parts of Heidegger and Derrida as the parts which suggest that they themselves have finally gotten language right, represented it accurately, as it really is" (ibid., p.5).
Rorty's novel reading of Freud is based on seeing him as one more seminal figure in the anti-essentialist tradition. According to Rorty, Freud helps us to see that we are "random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs rather than more or less adequate exemplifications of a common human essence ..." ("Freud and Moral Reflection," ibid., p. 155). For Rorty, the unconscious in Freudian terms is populated by a series of quasi-persons, and self-knowledge becomes a matter of "knowing" the selves that constitute us. There is no "true" or "real" self, no essence from which we have been alienated, but a multiplicity of selves, potentially in dialogue with one another.
Once we reject a correspondence theory of truth and an ahistorical human essence, as does Rorty, we are left with some kind of eth-nocentrism, inasmuch as our cultural matrix is the only possible source for our beliefs. According to Rorty, what makes the ethnocentrism of the West unique and non-vicious is precisely that complex of beliefs that is suspicious of all ethnocentrism, that has openness of encounter toward other cultures and pluralism as its pre-eminent values, that constantly questions its own cultural presuppositions. As Rorty points out in his paper on "Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens," the real legacy of the West is not its technological achievements, but its hope of freedom and equality.
Without disputing that this is indeed a component of the cultural heritage of the West, we must add that the West cannot be reduced to its hope of freedom and equality without falling victim to the very essentialism that Rorty seeks at all costs to avoid. The West includes other cultural values, such as control and mastery of nature and human beings, that run directly counter to that hope of freedom. Moreover, the West cannot simply be defined in terms of values and beliefs, in abstraction from the actual social and power relations that constitute the bases for its institutional structures. These other values and power relations are as much a part of the West as is the promise of freedom, and therefore a commitment to the ethnos of the West must not be lightly given or made as if the West were a homo- geneous entity.
On the basis of his non-vicious ethnocentrism Rorty asserts his belief in Deweyan democracy. Rorty justifies his commitment to liberalism based on the network of beliefs and values that we have inherited from our historical tradition. This local tradition and cultural heritage - not eternal truths or a human essence - serves as the basis for Rorty's liberalism and democratic politics. Yet in reading the political papers collected in these two volumes, we are troubled by lacunae in Rorty's argumentation. Not always sufficiently clear is whether Rorty means that Western democracy in its present form already provides the institutional bases for the radical democratic community he seeks or whether he is merely saying it provides the best prospects for such an eventual development. In these papers, when Rorty pushes the line of thought that the West already provides the bases for such a community it is usually with a polemical intent, directed at those post-modernists whose rejections of meta-narratives he shares, but whose absolute rejection of contemporary Western democracy is anathema to him.
Rorty's evaluation of the prospects for the Western democracies undergoes a change from an optimistic perspective, apparent in such essays as "Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism" and "The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy" written in 1983-1984, to a decidedly more pessimistic vision in "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future" (1988) and the introduction to Volume I, written after the end of the 1980s. In the Unger paper, Rorty acknowledges that the West may no longer have the politico-cultural resources for self-renewal, that liberal thinkers such as himself may be living in a new Alexandrian age bereft of hope of genuine reform, save from outside its cultural and institutional frontiers. Whatever we may think of a vision of renewal coming from Latin America, or even the view that Latin America is not itself part of the West culturally, we cannot deny the strong strain of cultural pessimism that pervades this paper. In the introduction to Volume I, Rorty admits that
if the barbarism typical of the Reagan years continues for much longer, "then it may become silly to hope for reform, and sensible to hope for revolution" (Vol. I, p.15). Even Rorty's assertion that the United States remains for now a functioning democracy in which change can come about as a result of persuasion rather than force cannot cover over the increasingly somber tones in which he sees contemporary politics. Social and political reality has compelled Rorty to add to the rosy hues of his Deweyan palette an ever larger smattering of the darker Heideggerian shades -though without the essentialism which speaks of the fate of the West.
This very transformation in his appraisal of the current political scene points up the strength of Richard Rorty as a thinker: his ability to con- stantly question his own beliefs and to rethink his culture's "truths." These qualities make Rorty's papers must reading for anyone who takes the life of the mind seriously.
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg Queens College of the City University of New York 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367-1597 USA
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