Richard Rorty’s legacy

Roger Scruton, 12 June 2007

Subjects:

The American philosopher typified and even perfected a form of exclusionary postmodern argument that depended on burying truth, says Roger Scruton.

Richard Rorty, who died on 8 June 2007, was a philosopher whose high reputation was bestowed on him, not by fellow philosophers, but by the many literary scholars who took comfort and inspiration from his writings. In this he resembled the contemporary philosopher whom he most admired, Jacques Derrida. Like Derrida, Rorty had a mind that ranged widely over philosophy, literature and the history of ideas; and like Derrida he was less concerned to present valid arguments than to offer a subversive perspective, in which the distinctions between valid and invalid, true and false, real and imaginary, would disappear or at any rate lose their former importance. Unlike Derrida, however, Rorty wrote in a clear and unaffected style, presenting his ambitious claims with disarming modesty, and leaning at every point on authorities to whom he accorded a higher distinction than he claimed for himself.

Rorty began his career as an exponent of the analytical philosophy which was, and to a great extent remains, the principal school in the Anglophone academy. His early papers on subjectivity, consciousness and the first-person case were rightly admired and, in the small way which is the way of real advances, were taken up and added to by other writers. At a certain point, however, Rorty suffered a conversion experience, rebelling against analytical philosophy not, primarily, because of its finicky irrelevancies, but because of its entirely erroneous vision - as Rorty saw it - of the nature of human thinking, and of the relation between thought and the world.

Richard Rorty exchanged letters with the Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo in openDemocracy's
"Letters to Americans" series in 2004:

"America's dreaming" (11 June 2004)

In his letter, Richard Rorty wrote:

"The acclaim with which (Walt) Whitman's poems were greeted in many different countries showed how widespread was the need to believe that the human future can be made very different from the human past. Reminding the world of what the United States managed to accomplish is still a good way to encourage hope that every adult human will, some day, be a free citizen of a democratic, global, political community."A journey through pragmatism

The result was Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), a schizophrenic book, the first half of which repackaged Rorty's work as an analytic philosopher of mind, the second half of which argued that there is no such thing as an analytic philosophy of mind, since philosophy does not hold a mirror up to nature, but moves forward with the logic of history, constantly seeking new conceptions for which there is no standard outside philosophy itself. His painstaking refutation of the Cartesian theory of the mind in his early papers was thereby eclipsed by a far from painstaking dismissal of Descartes and all who thought like him. Such thinkers, according to Rorty, make the mistake of believing that a God's eye perspective on the world is attainable and that it is the task of philosophy to ascend to it.

Rorty tried to make sense of his new position by espousing a version of "pragmatism" - the school associated with CS Peirce, William James and John Dewey, which holds that the concept of truth is to be understood through that of utility. Pragmatism is controversial, but its more recent followers have, on the whole, managed to avoid its more paradoxical implications - such as that the core doctrines of feminism must be true since it is useful (at least in an American university) to assent to them, but that they must certainly be false, given the disaster that would come from espousing them in rural Iran.

It is uncertain to what extent Rorty succeeded in escaping that kind of paradox. For, unlike fellow pragmatists like CI Lewis or WV Quine, he adopted pragmatism as a revisionary theory, one that changes the aspect of the world, and opens the way to moral, social and political possibilities that have been blocked by the rigid truth-directedness of traditional philosophical thought. In a series of papers, therefore, Rorty experimented with highly politicised applications of the pragmatist idea, arguing that "pragmatists view truth as... what is good for us to believe. So they do not need an account of a relation between beliefs and objects called ‘correspondence', nor an account of human cognitive abilities which ensures that our species is capable of entering into that relation. They see the gap between truth and justification not as something to be bridged, but simply as the gap between the actual good and the possible better. From a pragmatist point of view, to say that what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea..." (Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, 1991).

That quotation would prompt a quick response from any philosopher suspicious of the pragmatist tendency, namely: "When is one idea better than another? When it is more useful? Or when it is more true? Are we not going round in a circle here?" However, Rorty had become convinced that such questions are irrelevant: they presuppose the very language that he was trying to put in question, the language which makes "truth" the central aim of discourse, and which represents all our utterances as attempts to approximate to a reality independent of our perspective.

Rorty's conversion experience therefore led him away from academic philosophy, which he believed to have got stuck in an untenable (because profoundly unhistorical) vision of the relation between human beings and their world. He gave up his prestigious position as a tenured professor in the Princeton philosophy department (then, as now, the foremost philosophy department in the United States) and took up a chair in comparative literature at the University of Virginia. His love of literature was one cause for the move; but he was also struck by the fact that his thinking was going in the very same direction as the literary theories of the time - in particular those associated with Derrida, Paul de Man and "deconstruction". Like them Rorty was attracted by the thought that il n'y a pas de hors texte - that there is no independent reality against which our utterances can be measured for their accuracy or truth, and that all human thinking occurs within language. Intellectual discoveries are a matter of replacing one form of discourse with another. To justify this replacement is to justify a way of life, a social condition, a posture towards others that requires just this new discourse as its authenticating discipline.

Roger Scruton is a philosopher, writer, political activist and businessman. His most recent books are Gentle Regrets: Thoughts From a Life (Continuum, 2005) and News from Somewhere: On SettlingContinuum, 2006)

Also by Roger Scruton in openDemocracy: "Tony Blair and the wrong America"
(29 April 2004)

"The hunting debate: a question of democracy" (17 September 2004)

"Maurice Cowling's achievement"
(26 August 2005)

"Jane Jacobs (1916-2006): cities for life" (2 May 2006)

"Power inquiry, public debate" (6 March 2006)

"The great hole of history"
(11 September 2006)

"England: an identity in question" (1 May 2007)The turn to irony

It is easy to see the political appeal of that idea, though the philosophical arguments given for it were, in my view, no better than those given by Hegel for the coherence theory of truth - indeed they were the same arguments. However, Rorty added an interesting twist of his own, presenting in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (1989) what he thought to be a fundamental contrast between those thinkers (among whom Plato is the paradigm) who look for an independent, objective and necessary foundation for their world, and who identify that foundation as God or as truth (which is simply God's successor in the procession of illusions), and those who look for no such independent foundation, who recognise the contingency of everything, themselves included, and who live and think, as a result, in a spirit of irony. Foremost among this second class of thinkers was Nietzsche, who typified, for Rorty, a kind of creative and poetical subversiveness that he also found in Freud.

From his new-found adoption of irony, as the counter to the Platonic realism which history has in any case swept away, Rorty went on to defend a kind of political liberalism. Solidarity - the recognition of the other as your equal and as entitled to your sympathy - is the natural companion of irony, and becomes, for Rorty, the true basis of political life. This venture into political theory took Rorty in new and unforeseeable directions, as he tried to reconcile his view that some versions of political order are superior to others, with his belief that there is no trans-historical perspective from which any such judgment can be made. It is a testimony to his literary skills that he was able repeatedly to stare refutation in the face, and to go on staring.

How should we assess Rorty's legacy? Undoubtedly he was the most lucid of the postmodernist philosophers - though that is, given the competition, no great achievement. And undoubtedly he added, in his thoughts about contingency and irony, a real insight into a peculiarly postmodern way of thinking. However I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth. I therefore cannot go along with what seems to me, whenever I encounter it, to be a wholly specious and even cheap way of arguing, which Rorty typified and indeed perfected. Rorty was paramount among those thinkers who advance their own opinion as immune to criticism, by pretending that it is not truth but consensus that counts, while defining the consensus in terms of people like themselves.

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Comments

mwilliams_1

12 June 2007 - 9:42pm

Roger's claims about Rorty's repudiation of truth ignore an important distinction: between the generally epistemic theories of truth advanced by the original pragmatists and the deflationary or "minimalist" accounts of the semantics of the truth-predicate preferred by contemporary neo-Pragmatists like Brandom. (Without getting technical, such views are sophisticated descendants of Ramsey's Redundancy Theory, according to which saying that it is true that snow is white is equivalent to saying that snow is white.) Though briefly attracted to a Piercean view of truth as "what would be believed at the end of inquiry", Rorty later came to see that deflationism about truth suitedhis purposes much better. Rorty's opposition to "truth" is better seen as opposition to two things that often go under that name: certainty (putative truths that can't be revised) and Truth (the idea that the various vocabularies we develop in coping with the world ought to fit together in a neat package). In other words, Rorty was a fallibilist and a conceptual pluralist, or anti-reductionist. Incidentally, though Rorty placed himself firmly on the poltical left, it woudn't be that hard to give his epistemological ideas a conservative spin. He himself took the word "conversation", his preferred metaphor for inquiry, from Oakeshott. The affinities between Rorty and Oakeshott are by no means superficial, as Rorty recognized. (See his allusion to Oakeshott in his Foreward to Brandom's edition of Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind".)

Barry Stocker

12 June 2007 - 11:18pm

The comment already posted on Scruton does a good job of showing how things are a lot more complicated than Scruton claims. There is a lot more to be said on the topic. Scruton's approach is so polemical, sweeping and cliche ridden it can hardly be called an honest representation of Rorty or debates around 'post-modernism'. I'm more concerned with Derrida (in various publications) than Rorty myself, but I some points need to be made about Rorty, conrtra Scruton. Rorty's later work is much more influential in Analytic philosophy than Scruton acknowledges. For example, Donald Davidson (an extremely influential Analytic Philosopher) responded positively to Rorty's criticisms of his position on truth. John McDowell, who may be the more most important living Analytic philosopher, identifies Rorty's *Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature* as an inspiration for his own major work, *Mind and World*. The previous post mentions Robert Brandom, McDowell's colleague at Pittsburgh and the contributions Brandom and Rorty made to anew edition of Sellars' great book. Brandom is an Analytic philosopher who like Rorty got into Continental Philosophy, while remaining closer to an Analytic mode of argument. It is important to note that Jurgen Habermas made the same criticisms of Brandom, in a more polite and considered way, that Scruton makes of Rorty. By excluding Rorty's connection with the Pittsburgh Analytic tradition going back to Sellars, which combines Hegel, Wittgenstein and Pragmatism, Scruton achieves a polemical purpose of making Rorty seem completely isolated from mainstream philosophy. Discussion of Wittgenstein is very important in Rorty, and by overlooking this Scruton is following a polemical strategy. The whole strategy of making Rorty seem more isolated than he was is obviously an appeal to consensus as a supporting argument. However, it is precisely Rorty's reference to consensus that Scruton denounces as 'post modern' indifference to truth and reality. This indicates the essentially polemical and unreflective nature of Scruton's presentation. Derrida is a different case from Rorty, but since Scruton throws them together, it's necessary to respond. Firstly, Derrida never used the term 'post-modern', and Scruton's use of that label is again a polemical device. It is simply false to claim that Derrida had no identifiable positions, or claims, about what is true. Here are a few things Derrida claims, and argues for, the first one of which Scruton would have some sympathy with: Absolutist socialism is impossible because it rests on a intrinsically impossible communication and sympathy between individuals to a degree which would obliterate individuality; there is no experience of consciousness which can be isolated from the temporal flow of consciousness; there is no language which is absolutely private and secret, which could not be communicated (similar to Wittgenstein's arguments against Private Language); language should be studied from the point of view of written texts as much as spoken discourse; democracy is a worthy ideal which can never be achieved in a pure form; there is no limit on hospitality to strangers; consciousness cannot be isolated from neurology; all abstraction is metaphysical; the metaphysical should be opposed by radical empiricism. Those who have made genuine attempts to reconstruct Derrida's thought, rather than polemics and rhetoric of the type Scruton engages in, have noticed that his claims are no more Relativistic than many claims made by notable figures in Analytic Philosophy/Philosophy of Science, e.g. Quine and Putnam's emphasis on indecidability of reference; Kuhn's emphasis on the changing meaning of scientific concepts according to structural changes in science; Davidson and Putnam on the impossibility of defining mental contents with reference to inner states of mind; Graham Priest on the 'aletheism', that is contradiction as necessary to logic. Priest has discussed Derrida with sympathy as has Thomas Baldwin, the current editor of *Mind* one the great journals in Analytic philosophy over many years. On Derrida's style, yes it's challenging and his philosophy can't be easily separated from his argumentative strategies and the exact context of each argument, but exactly the same could be said of Hegel who Scruton recognises is a an important philosopher, and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger who have a rising influence in Analytic philosophy. I appreciate that *Open Democracy* felt the need to react quickly to Rorty's death, but Scruton's piece is a reheating of well worn polemics he has been churning out over many years and adds nothing. It would have been better to wait a bit longer and look for someone with a more rounded and objective appreciation.

john mccumber

13 June 2007 - 4:30am

John McCumber Roger Scruton writes: "the philosophical arguments given for [Rorty's supposed denial of objectivity] were, in my view, no better than those given by Hegel for the coherence theory of truth - indeed they were the same arguments." Indeed they were not the same, cannot have been--for Hegel never even mentions the coherence theory of truth, much less argues for it. Not once. To be Scrutonized, apparently, is neither to be seen nor understood.

Jeremy Bowman

15 June 2007 - 7:19pm

John McCumber writes of "Rorty's supposed denial of objectivity". The word 'supposed' suggests that Rorty did not in fact deny objectivity. So did he or didn't he? The "objectivity" of mere consensus doesn't count as objectivity in my book. The best words so far uttered about Rorty were those of Michael Williams (in the Washington Post): "he reveled in contingency". JB

willow28

16 June 2007 - 8:59am

For inclusion in the next edition of the OED? scrutony {n} Specious right-wing philosophical analysis; esp. re foxhunting scrutonize {v.t.} To subject to scrutony

tcp_1

13 June 2007 - 12:32pm

I really appreciate having Roger's assessment of Rorty here - I have always thought of them both as having made excellent and in some ways similar use of their analytic backgrounds in their philosophically informed commentary on politics, literature and the general gamut of topics that public intellectuals ought to cover. Roger writes, as what one feels is his real difficulty with Rorty, that: "I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth" The interesting thing here is that it suggests a remarkably instrumentalist conception of truth: Roger is not claiming the existence, or privileged access to truth; just that it is required (or that its reverence is required) --- almost sociologically required --- for a good society. As Roger acknowledges, he finds a certain Hegelian idealism attractive, just of the sort that flows naturally from Rorty's pragmatism. My sense - and I think a careful reading of this piece bears this out - that Roger does not have irreconcilable philosophical difficulties with Rorty, but only political ones. In this context, mwilliams' comments (above) about Rorty's attitude to Oakeshott are very interesting. What I really look forward to witnessing is the conversation - sadly, not now with Rorty - but the political conversation between the neo-Hegelians of the left and right. Tony

http://taghioff...

13 June 2007 - 11:10am

If Scruton believes that the CONCEPT of truth is fundamental to human discourse, he is not referring to truth in itself but our ideas of it. Thus he is seeing it as something discussed, and thus something plural in its interpretations. Niether I nor he mean what is referred to in a particular instance, but the general concept of truth. Since Scruton is stating, by implication, that the very concept of truth is a part and parcel of the plurality of discourse, he is necessarily supporting Rorty's ideas about truth being consensus oriented. Since how we conceive truth is so strongly linked to how we conceive of references to that which is external to discourse, the plurality that Roger admits extends to a plurality about how we concieve of such external references. Thus any stabilisation of such external reference is dependent on a consensus about 'truth as a concept' being held discursively. As such there is no way to place truth as more fundamental than consensus without turning to the issue of specific practical consequences and situated preferences. QED Rorty. Scruton argues against himself very effectively, which suggests he is a bit of a closet post-modern lefty. Or maybe it is just a phase he is going through...

pjk280

13 June 2007 - 3:09pm

I'm not terribly surprised by Roger Scruton's evaluation of Rorty here, but I am a little disappointed. I'm also not one to idealize people because they died and have no problem with people critiquing them, but the piece here feels a little closer to spray of insults at points than a critique. For example, why begin in such demeaning terms--he wasn't really valued by philosophers (untrue, as others have made clear) but only by literary critics (nice and loaded with assumptions) who "took comfort" in his writings. Really? And we could hardly call this a worthy effort to come to terms with Rorty's legacy. Indeed, this effort begins only in the last paragraph where we get the kernal of Rorty's legacy according to Scruton: a real insight into a peculiar postmodern way of thinking. One line. This is his contribution? Such comments would be demeaning if we were to take them seriously, but we shouldn't because this isn't about Rorty's legacy. If not that then, what is it about? When we consider what follows this assessment, "However, I believe..." we see that this serves merely as a platform to present Scruton's tired defense of truth stemming from an obviously politically oriented caricature of those who apparently don't believe in it (and therefore have no "real respect for other people.") In other words, this piece is not really about Rorty, but about Roger Scruton. One useful activity would be to make Scruton's plan explicit by substituting his name for Rorty's and rewrite accordingly. Although there would be many significant changes, one line might remain more or less the same: I therefore cannot go along with what seems to me, whenever I encounter it, to be a wholly specious and even cheap way of arguing, which ROGER SCRUTON typified and indeed perfected. Legacy, indeed. .

http://taghioff...

14 June 2007 - 10:56pm

I wonder if Open Democracy is still a meritocracy. It seems to me that Scruton got published here because he is a regular, and a name, rather than because he had something interesting to say. There have been better articles on Rorty out in the public domain for a long time. Take this one published in the prospect magazine in 2003. http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5545 It actually contains some philosophical arguments, argued on their own terms, rather than "I am Scruton and I believe in truth, therefore it must be true..."

mwilliams_1

15 June 2007 - 10:08pm

Jeremy Bowman asks, did Rorty deny objectivity? Yes and No. If you associate objectivity with a substantive correspondence theory of truth, or with an overly rule-governed conception of scientific method, then Yes. This is the sense of "objectivity" in which he opposed objectivity to solidarity. But if you think of objectivity in terms of certain intellectual virtues--disinterestedness, respect for evidence (especially counter-evidence), a willingness to listen to criticism, and so on--then he was all for objectivity. As he says in Science as Solidarity, the secret of modern science is that it is built on institutions that encourage and reinforce just such virtues. In this way, scientific institutions give "concreteness and detail" to the idea of unforced agreement. Rorty saw no value in mere consensus: it's how we get there. Not that he thought of consensus, even unforced consensus, as an end in itself. Too much consensus indicates that inquiry has stagnated. Rorty had more than a little in common with Popper, though I don't think that he ever read much of him. Tony is quite right to say that Roger's differences with Rorty are more political than metaphysical, which is not to imply that they are less than serious. But something that he shared with Roger is the sense that the intellectual virtues embodied in such things as the institutions of modern scientific are a historical achievement, hence as fragile as those institutions themselves. My only caveat is that I wouldn't attribute an istrumentalist view of truth to Rorty. As I suggested in my first comment, Rorty's sympathies were with semantic minimalism, though admittedly this is a point for specialists.

Jeremy Bowman

16 June 2007 - 7:24pm

I wonder: Was Rorty a fallibilist in the following sense? I utter the words 'the highest mountain on the planet Venus is higher than Mount Everest'. The words I use clearly refer to real objects, but I have no idea whether the sentence is true or false. Would Rorty have said that if I happened to be lucky, the sentence I just uttered happened to be true?

jd.johnson

17 June 2007 - 5:16am

Scruton says this: "Pragmatism is controversial, but its more recent followers have, on the whole, managed to avoid its more paradoxical implications - such as that the core doctrines of feminism must be true since it is useful (at least in an American university) to assent to them, but that they must certainly be false, given the disaster that would come from espousing them in rural Iran." This seems plainly idiotic. Just to say that something is true in the pragmatist (or any other) sense does not mean that it always is safe or sensible to proclaim it. For instance, someone like Havel, walking the streets of Prague in the early 1908s knew the difference between truth and one's ability/willingness to articulate it publically. He wrote understandingly of those who either could or would not 'live in truth.' And Rorty clearly would argue that "the core doctrines of feminism" - namely that women are equal to men and ought to be treated accordingly - applies in "rural Iran" just as they do in rural western NY state where I live. Of course, social norms here are hardly enlightened, and they are reinforced by theological teachings too. It is simply the length to whcih people are wiilling go to snction those norms that differs. So, in other words, there is not paradoxical implication here.

Dr. Puck

18 June 2007 - 11:34pm

Because a dialog concerned with truth has occurred, and can in the future occur, at different times under BOTH given foundationalistic contingencies and Rorty-ian contingencies, the metaphilosophical regard of what is the "optimal belief in the genuine" with respect to truth cannot be discriminated by the categories Scruton has offered here. I suppose a problem of pragmaticism is simply that truth 'arrives' and it may not be recognized as such, yet, I'm in more sympathy with that shortfall than I am with statements such as this,

Quote:

"I believe that the concept of truth is fundamental to human discourse, that it is the precondition of any genuine dialogue, and that real respect for other people requires an even greater respect for truth."

This seems affect-laden, seems to express only a matter of taste, and, seems to me, to be a kind of religious sentiment about philosophy. A lot rides on legitimizing genuine under one circumstance and deligitimizing it under other circumstances. I note the sweep of philosophy has not yet eliminated the different strokes actuality! Still, I would be surprised to learn it proved that pragmatists are absolutely prevented from dialoguing genuinely about truth claims and other genuine and profound subjects. http://www.squareone-learning.com/blog

Not logged in

3 October 2008 - 8:35am

"Pragmatism is controversial, but its more recent followers have, on the whole, managed to avoid its more paradoxical implications - such as that the core doctrines of feminism must be true since it is useful (at least in an American university) to assent to them, but that they must certainly be false, given the disaster that would come from espousing them in rural Iran."

That is one of the most insulting interpretations of pragmatism I have heard. wow.

Not logged in

24 February 2009 - 4:22am

Much of what I wanted to say has already been said in previous comments, but I would just add that while Scruton openly derides Rorty's style, it's curious (if not absurd) that his own style is pedantic, dry and almost unreadable. If Rorty is guilty of a "cheap way of arguing," by appealing to like-minded thinkers, then Scruton is equally guilty of the same crime, as he appeals to a certain community as well; the only difference, of course, is that Scruton believes his community of analytic philosophers are absolutely right in everything they say. What I love about Rorty is that while we admirers defend him (because his ideas speak to us so much), he merely would have shrugged Scruton off. Still I think it's disgusting that Scruton posted an ad hominem attack like this just days after the man died.
See, if you have not already seen, Ramin Jahanbegloo's eloquent tribute to one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived.