Philosophy 3387 American Philosophy

Phil. 3387/American Philosophy

Freeland/Fall 1996

Unit V: Contemporary Pragmatism:

Cornel West on Richard Rorty

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Ch. 5 on Rorty (pp. 194-210)

I. Background: Rorty's development as a pragmatist

A. Early essays (starting 1961): forecasts a revival of pragmatism; critiques reductionism and intuitionism (see description, p. 195)

B. The Linguistic Turn (1967):

• i. describes a "revolution in philosophy", but asks, where will this go? What are the possibilities for a future philosophy?

• ii. heightens the tension between the pulls of art vs. science for philosophers

• iii. R. begins to rethink epistemological issues and to criticize the "spectatorial position"

C. "The World Well Lost" (1972): displays more of Rorty's matue style (see top of 197); argument is that appeals to the world, for settling disagreements about versions or theories, are viciously circular (see summary, bottom of 197)

D. Rorty continued to write more on Dewey but he misreads Dewey and overplays certain aspects, such as Dewey's antiprofessionalism (198)

II. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979)

A. This was a "landmark text" that presents a narrative history of North Atlantic philosophy describing certain impasses it has reached; R. says we need a "post-philosophical culture" which would involve a Wittgensteinian curing of the "disease" of philosophy.

B. Rorty describes three moves in philosophy (grounded in Quine/Sellars/Goodman):

• i. Antirealism in ontology (p. 201): Rejection of the correspondence theory of truth; but this is neither idealism nor Kantianism.

• ii. Antifoundationalism in epistemology (p. 201): there are no intuitions, no prelinguistic awareness; rejection of the "ocular metaphor" of seeing the basics.

• iii. Dismissing the mind as a sphere of philosophical inquiry (p. 202): there is no transcendental subject who holds up the "mirror" to nature.

C. Two noteworthy consequences of Rorty's historicist anti-reductionist pragmatism (=his neopragmatism):

• i. The distinction between "hard" (natural) and "soft" (human) sciences collapses; the mainly difference is just a matter of their functions.

• ii. Philosophy is not the tribunal of Pure Reason, but just one voice in a grand continuing cultural conversation (see Rorty quote, p. 203).

D. How Rorty's neopragmatism returns us to Emerson (see 203-4): continued emphasis on power, provocation, personality; also on poetic activity.

III. West's critique of Rorty (beginning on p. 205)

A. Rorty is ethnocentric: too comfortable with the North Atlantic European heritage of philosophy (see quote from Rorty, p. 205)

B. Rorty is bourgeois: he domesticates critiques of humanism from others, so tames them; he kicks the props out from bourgeois society but expects to maintain all the attitudes and comforts without changes in culture or politics.

C. Where Rorty is radical is in his antiprofessionalism: he diagnoses a crises in a particular specialized stratum of educational workers (=philosophers) (see p. 207). BUT even so, his view of philosophy is "barren"; he does not take philosophy far enough into the worlds of politics or culture. He does not really seem to question the nature and role of the academy itself.

D. Rorty's historicism is politically narrow and naive; he looks at philosophy historically in an abstract way without considering economic, political, racial, or gender issues that have affected this history and the use of its key concepts such as "objectivity" and "rationality". See important quotes on this on p. 208. For Rorty, philosophical discourse seems to occur in a vacuum, for no particular reason.

E. West's own preferred alternative is "heterogeneous genealogies" which will look at vocabularies of philosophy in relation to many more factors such as material modes of production, etc. (see p. 208).

G. Summary of two major shortcomings in Rorty:

• i. His distrust of theory: this limits him to not being able to use the tools of various current theories, as a "sophisticated neopragmatism" could--theories about the multileveled operations of power.

• ii. His preoccupation with transient vocabularies: West thinks we can use theories which we see as transient while still finding them helpful and seeing them as "only" tools, i.e., as revisable not fixed or certain (see 209).

H. A "sophisticated neopragmatism" (like West's) would do more to perpetuate Emerson's three basic concerns (power, provocation, personality) in relation to the goals of oppositional analyses and creative democracy.

cfreeland@uh.edu