“I’ve Never Been Modern? Why, that Changes Everything…”

1. We have never been modern — What we thought was modernity wasn’t; 2. Social Darwinism, primitivism, pyrrhonism — Fear vs. lack of imagination; 3. I've always never been modern — The metaphysics of modernity; 4. Does doing require thinking? — Entangled lives; 5. Application: I've always never been human — Conceptual reform; 6. Intellectuals and technical vocabularies — Theoretical decongestants for stuffed up practices

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1.      Latour finds himself in a very awkward position in We Have Never Been Modern: while emphasizing, at the close of his second chapter, the point of his title, he nevertheless wants to historically chart the birth of the modern. The two claims strike me as perfectly commensurable if one sorts out what one is doing and claiming properly (in order to avoid your own paradoxes in your own philosophical Constitution). “Constitution” is, of course, Latour’s idiom for developing his account of modernity. This is the gist:

The hypothesis of this essay is the word “modern” designates two sets of entirely different practices which must remain distinct if they are to remain effective, but have recently begun to be confused. The first set of practices, by “translation,” creates mixtures between entirely new types of being, hybrids of nature and culture. The second, by “purification,” creates two entirely distinct ontological zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other. Without the first set, the practices of purification would be fruitless or pointless. Without the second, the work of translation would be slowed down, limited, or even ruled out. The first set corresponds to what I have called networks; the second to what I shall call the modern critical stance. The first, for example, would link in one continuous chain the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, scientific and industrial strategies, the preoccupations of heads of state, the anxieties of ecologists; the second would establish a partition between a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society. (11)

Latour’s selection, in 1991, of climate change as a network to be studied is a good indication of why people have found Latour’s work in the philosophy of science increasingly useful. Latour’s formulations, however, strike me as still too paradoxical by half, as in this early formulation (admittedly rhetorical for his dramatic narrative): “And what if we had never been modern? Comparative anthropology would then be possible. The networks would have a place of their own” (10). If modernity is what disallowed a space for networks, and we’ve never been modern, then networks have always had a place of their own. That’s the central paradox Latour awkwardly confronts. He wants to say (rightly, I think) that modernity never existed and to say (also rightly) that realizing this will enable us to do something new, thus ushering in a new moment in our history. But at the close of Latour’s second chapter, he goes to some lengths to say that he is not claiming “that we are entering a new era” (47). Latour’s probably right: “era” would be too strong. Latour, however, is trying to usher something new in, but because of the state of philosophy and politics at the time, he finds it difficult to say so out loud. Latour’s formulation should be: “what we thought was modernity was never actually the case, and realizing this will enable us to do better things we’ve already been doing, and perhaps for some of us something new.”

2.      In order to isolate the context Latour finds himself awkwardly in, we might look at the four-part schematic in its opening pages. After contextually defining the two modern desires as ending humanity’s exploitation of itself and increasing humanity’s control over nature, Latour lists the two different “antimodern” reactions: “We must no longer try to put an end to man’s domination of man, say some; we must no longer try to dominate nature, say others” (9). These are still two recognizable responses, and we might accord them the status of being the radical right and radical left, respectively. However, I think Latour is smart in not so doing. These responses should not be reduced to political orientation (like conservative/liberal, right/left) because political orientations are linked too directly to choices in political action—a “political orientation” can only manifest itself within some local politico-power grid (like the Beltway, or the Democratic Party, or the Arizona 2_nd District, or the Printer Icon Department at Microsoft). So what we need are labels that express a guiding motive, or orienting principle, that can then be transformed into a political orientation (and thence action) given a planting in some local institutional context. [1] The two antimodern reactions might be described fairly easily as, respectively, “social Darwinism” and “primitivism.” [2]

The first two then quite easily slide into a right/left manifestation in most current “Western” political landscapes. But Latour’s second two responses are harder to place, both in their attitude and their potential political manifestation. The third possibility Latour calls “postmodernism” and says it is an “incomplete scepticism” that causes people to “remain suspended between belief and doubt, waiting for the end of the millennium” (9). We might call this “pyrrhonism,” after the ancient form of skepticism about the possibility of making knowledge claims (and thus the problem of basing action on them). But while some (certainly not all) postmodernist theorists behave like millennialists (there were probably more during the ‘70s and ‘80s, the context Latour was confronting), it’s certainly no requirement for a pyrrhonism to so compose itself. This makes Latour’s theoretical art less useful, for its utility is based on the sense of his having placed his finger on the pulse of the times—and so better able to manifest a good alternative. This becomes worse, it seems to me, in his last option: those who double down on modernity and “carry on as if nothing had changed” (9). Latour shapes this option as those who put their head in the sand, willfully plugging their ears to their better angels. But this seems terribly ill-suited as a description for any responsible intellectual. And this also seems to be the only option available for those who, while hearing the angels, don’t have any better ideas than striving for political emancipation and better technological control in order to improve man’s estate (in the Baconian phrase). But sticking your head in the sand seems a very different quality from being out of ideas. The first manifests fear; the other lack of imagination. What I think Latour’s schematic in the last instance hinges on is his implicit definition of modernity as unmitigated, Chicago-style anarchic-market economic expansionism—the “clever trick” (9) the West hopes to export. But this must be considered a narrow definition of the modern, for what do you do if you do think there is some interesting difference between “the West and the Rest” that you yet have an imperfect faith in?

3.      The difficulty here seems to be in denying a plausible position for those who are already behaving as if we’ve never been modern, but just didn’t realize it. Because we should ask ourselves of Latour’s schematic—who is he talking about? Theorists? Intellectuals? Politicians? Educated people? Car mechanics who don’t read newspapers? This is the conundrum for the intellectual—how do I attribute motivations to people who wouldn’t understand what I’m attributing to them? What I’m pointing at, I think, is just a matter of Latour’s rhetoric getting in the way of his real point—he’s staging himself as a revolutionary in a field (which he is) while at the same time saying that everyone is hooked up to this field where he is a revolutionary. But they are and are not—everyone’s hooked into networks, but not everyone is in Latour’s disciplinary field (studying networks). It seems like we must make a distinction between intellectual and plebeian, for this seems a corollary of denying we’ve ever been modern, which was after all an intellectual’s fiction—say, of Boyle and Hobbes (his primary emblem). [4] The “modern Constitution” Latour draws up fills a role in inferential patterns that not everyone might ever stumble down. We have to say this to deny the Platonism of principles ruling practices, rather than practices being summarized by principles: the former idea helps to produce the tripartite structure of separation in Latour’s Constitution (principles rule practices, meaning realms are separate and playing by their own rules, hence all you need to do is isolate a practice and formulate its rules, rather than studying the jumble of practices), and the latter helps to show how discourse, the social, and the real (one of Latour’s several formulations) are wrapped up into each other.

Latour’s graphical representation helps see what the paradox amounts to:

The trick to seeing the paradox is asking what is being translated in the hybrid networks. In the Modern Constitution, it is Nature and Culture. But that means the Work of Translation requires the dichotomy of Nature and Culture. That’s why Latour marks it as “the first” (though if you look at his summarizing paragraph above he calls “purification” “the second”), but where does the dichotomy come from? The Work of Purification—that means all those hybrid networks conceptually require the work we’ve become suspicious of. So what, in the end, does it in fact mean to reject the Modern Constitution?

4.      The way through, I think, is to distinguish the metaphysics of modernity from the practices we are surrounded by. We might think of metaphysics as a kind of conceptual explanation of our practices and how they work. What Latour is saying is that the Metaphysics of Modernity is incoherent, and in fact needs to be to get on with the work the Metaphysics in part is designed to explain. But we shouldn’t go that far—what we shouldn’t do is think that the work requires the metaphysics. It is an explanation and perhaps a justification, but nuclear bombs do not require any particular metaphysics to work. They only require that you do a certain thing, not think a certain thing.

The reason it appears that nuclear power also requires us to think a certain thing is that it seems absurd to think that hunters and gatherers could perform the requisite tasks to create a nuclear weapon without having, for example, learned that e=mc₂. Our ability to do certain things does require us to be able to think or say certain things—we shouldn’t deny that. But what certain things? That is the open question. Latour and many others wish to argue that there is something irrevocably paradoxical about modern life (and sometimes, just human life in general—like Camus). However, this claim requires that the only way to get on with some practice (say, the Work of Translation) is via this other particular practice that actually contradicts the first. But this claim will only ever be justified based on experiment—trying out other ways of getting the good practice to work. In other words, I see no reason to think that the bad metaphysical dualism between Nature and Culture is required to get the Work of Translation done. Much good philosophical work that goes under the banner of “pragmatism” has been trying to work out alternative idioms for understanding the entangled lives we find ourselves thrown into without trying to erase the entanglement. For what pragmatists have learned over the course of philosophical history—a history marked by attempts to purify our categories of understanding—is that some categories are entangled in each other, but that isn’t itself a paradox. Entanglement is okay. It’s only the ghost of Plato that would tell us otherwise.

5.      One way of applying the lesson above is to debates about humanism and posthumanism, especially as Latour has been picked up by many who consider themselves as working out posthumanistic idioms. From a Latourian point of view, I would think the theoretical lesson is that we’ve never been human(istic)—“humanism” never existed in the way it thought itself to. The trouble here, however, seems to be that some posthumanism composes itself as, from this vantage, distinctly anti-humanistic—it doesn’t just wish for the erroneous self-conceptions of humanism to disappear, but for vast tracts of practices that “gave rise to humanism.”

My scare quotes denote the problem of identification that is at issue. For if practices proceed conceptions of practices, then what we are talking about when we want to get rid of humanism is an expulsion of practices—but which are the practices that are at issue? The trouble of cultural evolution is that we are complex to a degree we sometimes forget in analysis. Our conceptions, built out of practices, are only a problem if they double back into bad practices. The problem of institutional reform, as Latour points out, is that if you uproot a practice without uprooting the real cause of the practice—which is another practice—then you will create a “return of the repressed” situation (see 8). [5] So the problem of conceptual reform is the same: identifying correctly a conceptual practice that really does enable a particular bad practice. The trouble of conceptual reform is that a lot of different premises can lead you to the same bad action. Conceptual reform is about disabling the premises in our practical syllogisms that lead us to perform some unwanted action. On this model, there’s a certain slipperiness in conceptual reform. Not only do we sometimes misidentify the culprit, but people have a tendency to replace other premises in their syllogisms if they don’t agree that the object-action is unwanted (the problem we’ve been facing in reforming out of existence racism).

6.      This means the real question for intellectuals is—how much time should we really be spending on haggling over conceptual reform? The stance of both Latour and Shapin is that practices come first, then concepts. [6] So how much dog should we have in the fight over concepts? Who, in fact, are we fighting? Intellectuals have a habit of attributing beliefs and concepts to people who have no idea what they are talking about. This is effectively the same maneuver that physicists perform—do rocks understand the laws of gravity? (If you want to say yes, then you’re simply using a slightly different notion of “understanding”—and how much should we really haggle over this definitional asymmetry?) The real problem is not exactly, it seems to me, bridging back and forth between science, politics, and discourse (which is something like how Latour pictures the problem). The problem is bridging back and forth between experts and non-experts. This isn’t simply a problem of non-experts not understanding technical vocabularies, it is more especially the problem of convincing non-experts that the technical vocabulary should be given authority over our conceptualization of problems (and the experts trusted to be working through the correct inferential consequences—after all, how could a non-expert provide a peer review, or as we used to say in math class, “check your work”?). Latour’s battle is with other experts in his field (which we might label as, in this particular book, philosophers). So how much time should Latour spend in convincing laypersons—scientists, sociologists, literary theorists, politicians, car mechanics—that if they take his perspective, the world will become a little better (i.e., we’ll be able to handle better some of our pressing problems, like climate change)? Because just so long as there are experts resisting Latour, these on-looking laypersons will feel uneasy about giving their trust (this being the very obvious strategy in the debate about climate change). And if there are more direct paths of arguing about these pressing problems, more direct than arguing in a technical field before arguing about the bridge between that field and the public, then this makes Latour look like a detour to action.

So what is the point of all this for debates like those about posthumanism? In turns out not much, because if it is really true that all these systems and practices and networks (or whatever other name one wants to give to the layered and shifting sediment of nature-culture) have always been there, then it doesn’t exactly devalue what the technicians are doing in their respective spheres (even if it is from one vantage seamless). After all, as a layperson, I do tend to think Latour is right in nearly every way as a philosopher of science. If the above is right, then a Latourian revolution in conception just might make the world a little better. Likewise, whatever one thinks of as a “posthuman revolution” just might. But the farther one gets from actuating premises in practical syllogisms—the premise that then kicks out the requisite action—the more nebulous the possible effects changing those farther back premises will have on the object-action one’s eye is really on. All that this suggests is that as scholar-intellectuals, we make a short-term/long-term distinction between the different practices we might take our time up with: practices that will have an immediate effect on the world (voting, teaching), practices a little more distant (writing for newspapers, rabble-rousing), and practices that may only have an effect on the world in the distant future (having babies, writing treatises about conceptual change). As a plea, it is simply about orientation, or about what to remind oneself occasionally while obsessing over one’s area of interest. But it may affect our work as well, for it is possible that a practical orientation like an engulfing messianic fervor might be an actuating principle behind some of our worst practical syllogisms—that our ism-work often looks like silver-bulletism, turning our theoretical work into a practical problem. We have to remain aware of when our theory stuffs up our practical syllogisms, which then requires a theoretical decongestant like Latour.

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Endnotes

[1] These labels are at a remove from this “local” context, but no less contextual for that. I think our theoretical discourse has still not yet come to terms with how to formulate the abstract/concrete distinction across the global/local distinction—for we still too often feel moved to call abstraction a “decontextualization,” when we should rather think of it as moving from one context to another. To think of abstraction as a process of decontextualization is to be modern—and we’ve never been modern.

[2] For a brevity I will already fail at, I won’t elaborate why these two labels. But suffice it to say that at other moments in history, these attitudes might have transformed into different orientations. For example, our great modern primitivist is Rousseau, and he mobilized his in order to emancipate humanity, not to not dominate nature. Rousseau’s screeds against modern luxury and the like had as their priority his project of political emancipation, not the ecological project of nature emancipation.

[3] The “unmitigated” plays an important role here, for the American non-Marxist, Reformist Left’s hope is that European “social democracies” provide a model for how to have market economies whose tendencies for imperialistic expansion are curbed.

[4] Latour uses Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s groundbreaking 1985 book, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, to discuss the theoretical implications of the historical digging done in that book: that Boyle, to create the material-scientific “object,” had to deny the framework of thought that allowed Hobbes to create the moral-political “subject,” and vice versa for Hobbes. I do something similar to Shapin’s later The Scientific Revolution in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

[5] What’s a “real cause,” especially in this complex game of interlocking practices? The same thing it is in the physical sciences—the condition that produces the effect. The great problem of cultural reform is that there are a multitude of conditions—in fact, given the problem of redescription in object-conceptualization (e.g., are you talking about the same object if you describe it differently?), there are an infinite number of conditions potentially. This makes our practices of description (i.e., “theory”) terribly important for picking out practices to be reformed, but it also means that a deep theoretical skepticism necessarily abides in all of our attempts at cultural reform—even if we successfully extirpate an unwanted effect (say poor people or greed) by reforming or removing an isolated and defined practice, we will not ever know whether or not that removed practice was really the cause of the bad effect—unless, and only unless, the bad effect returns. Only when we are wrong do we attain certain knowledge (the Hegelian via negativa crossed with Popperian falsifiability—an amusing cross-fertilization). This form of (Cartesian) epistemological skepticism is only debilitating if one hasn’t previously put one’s faith in the “experimental method”—the defining quality of which is the belief that it is only by trial-and-error that we shall apprehend causes, i.e. a real cause can never be found by theoretical fiat (though it will only appear under a theoretical edifice). The trick for making sure this faith in experiment doesn’t turn back into the Platonism that dogmatically, and by fiat, declares it really has found the real cause, and we can therefore cease inquiry, is to combine Baconian experimentalism with fallibilism—the idea that inquiry will never end because we’d never know it if we’d reached it. The trouble, here again, for this sort of orientation toward cultural reform, rather than physics reform, is that when you reform physics, the only losers are physics professors (until a physical discovery blips our universe out of existence—a real fear attaching to the activities at CERN for some). But for cultural reform, more lives are at stake, and hence “inquiry” into real causes of cultural problems has effects we might not always wish to risk. This, and only this, is what provides the intellectual justification for political conservatism, the attitude that a given change will put at risk things we wish to keep.

[6] Following Robert Brandom, I call this Shapin’s “fundamental pragmatism” in “A Lesson between the Lines: Teleology and Writing History.”

Foucault's Rhetoric and Posthumanism

1. Can't we say “we”? — Philosophical presuppositions; 2. Foucault’s rhetorical questioning — We are only a recent invention; 3. Philosophical presumption — Attitudes, Words, Theses

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“I am afraid that we have not got rid of God because we still have faith in grammar . . .”
          —Nietzsche [1]

1.      At the beginning of his introduction to the anthology Posthumanism, Neil Badmington makes a rhetorical maneuver that is more common than it should be. While saying “‘We’ cannot live with [-isms] (why else would ‘we’ need to keep inventing new ones?), but neither can ‘we’ live without them (why else would ‘we’ need to keep inventing new ones?),” [2] he adds a footnote to the first “we” that reads, “I place this term in quotation marks because, as William V. Spanos has pointed out, the ‘naturalised “we”’ is one of the hallmarks of humanism.” The implication of this footnote, I want to suggest, is that our language comes not only with philosophical presuppositions, but distasteful ones. For we (“we”?) should distinguish this case from the case of the philosopher of language who wishes to offer an account of how particular linguistic phenomena work. For example, Robert Brandom, in his large treatise Making It Explicit, attempts to give a reasonably comprehensive account of how language has to function for it to function the way it does. Given the problem of rhetorical presentation, Brandom’s book is filled with IOUs for lumber he hasn’t paid for yet, but will in some other section. This kind of theorist’s project is to only build out of conceptual resources one has justified warrant for. Badmington, however, appears to think there is not ever warrant for this kind of “we,” yet feels helpless to use it. So what is going on here?

Structurally, there is a similarity between the conceptual demands implied by Badmington’s footnote and Brandom’s IOUs which goes something like this: “my use of X presupposes Y.” In Badmington’s case, it is that “we” presupposes humanism. If Brandom had written that footnote, on the other hand, it would have been, “my use of ‘we’ requires an account of how the first-person plural works.” What is strange about Badmington’s footnote is that it suggests that humanism is the only account that validates that use of “we,” but that account is bunk. Someone like Brandom would be moved to offer an account that works, but Badmington isn’t so moved. Why not?

The short answer is that he feels licensed for the idea that some philosophical presuppositions are both inescapable and bad, in this case humanism (and thus the bad “we” he must use). [3] However, one of the specifically philosophical theses Brandom would wish to advance is that not all linguistic phenomena have philosophical presuppositions. [4] To display more easily the dialectical ground, we might take an extreme rendering of what Badmington might mean: he is suggesting that the first-person plural becomes suspicious once one finds humanism suspicious. For many, this is just plain absurd. Why on earth should “We are driving down the street towards the mall” become suspicious once I’ve begun thinking that the seemingly natural ethical priority of humans to non-human phenomena (animals, plants, ecosystems, etc.) should perhaps be rethought? This rebuke by a commonsensical attitude, however, is sometimes just taken to be evidence of the depth at which the presupposed phenomena in question is embedded. And so it is, but any careful interlocutor will be quick to point out that while incredulity tells you about depth, it still doesn’t tell you what kind of deeply embedded phenomena you’re facing—in this case, grammatical or philosophical.

2.      Since, as Thomas Kuhn taught us, part of what it is to work in a discipline is to use precursors as models of how to do your work, [5] I think Foucault licenses, in a manner, this rhetorical pattern in post-Foucauldian theorists. Foucault, of course, is far more circumspect than his less careful followers. His forward to the English language edition is a model of rhetorical deflation and intellectual modesty. A good example for my purposes is:

Can a valid history of science be attempted that would retrace from beginning to end the whole spontaneous movement of an anonymous body of knowledge? Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . .’? But this is not exactly what I set out to do. I do not wish to deny the validity of intellectual biographies, or the possibility of a history of theories, concepts, or themes. It is simply that I wonder whether such descriptions are themselves enough, whether they do justice to the immense density of scientific discourse, whether there do not exist, outside their customary boundaries, systems of regularities that have a decisive role in the history of the sciences. (The Order of Things xiii-xiv)

For my purposes, it does not matter whether Foucault had something very precise and exact in mind by “systems of regularities” and how that role hooks into all the other roles (played by people, theories, concepts, and themes). His rhetorical presentation is one of open-minded questioning—he is simply wondering whether there might not be another character being played in the background that our current researches are leaving untouched in their account of the drama of life (or perhaps more specifically, the history of the sciences). This gesture, made by the rhetorical questions, the wondering, the not-exactly, and the not-wishing-to-deny, creates the appearance of simply opening up a grayspace in which many may come and experiment in. And in this, I think Foucault was very sincere and very successful. Foucault’s boldness of imagination combined with his hope for, if not a joint inquiry, then a space in which many can all inquire and help each other with their varied inquiries—this made Foucault the towering intellectual father he has become for many. And one thing intellectual fathers do, as we all are quite aware after Derrida, is disseminate their intellectual DNA via their progeny. To make this quasi-metaphor more concrete, we might think of the kind of intellectual dissemination that figures like Foucault perform as casting off dimly understood hypotheses that require more work with to process and confirm. That Foucault must be a godfather for whatever is meant by “posthumanism” must be obvious for the person whose book became synonymous with “man is only a recent invention” (xxiii), “and perhaps nearing its end” (387).

The question must be for us progeny: how are we to understand that? The drive of this reflection is that Foucault’s work opens up a number of possibilities, and I do believe it is pointless to look back to Foucault for definitive guidance (that would be a form of intellectual biography). One of these possibilities is that Foucault is describing the birth and (hopeful) death of a certain self-image that humanity has of itself, a self-image that expresses itself in many different activities, only one of which is the activity of articulating a self-image (call that activity “philosophy”). One activity just might be the use of the first-person plural, for it is difficult for fans of Foucault to forget Nietzsche’s remark that we’ll believe in God as long as we believe in grammar. One can find nourishment from Foucault for this experiment by triangulating the spaciously ambiguous “man is a recent invention” with “an anonymous body of knowledge” and his transition from the first-person variable “X” to the pronominal third-person in “it was known that.”

3.      Would Foucault have thought that “we” should get rid of the first-person plural, “we”? I doubt it, but he was, on the other hand, the philosopher “who writes in order to have no face.” [6] More especially, however, I’m not sure Badmington even thinks we should get rid of the “we.” I suspect that the problem with “the naturalized we” is the presumptive homogenization that occurs by saying that such-and-such is our problem, when the drift of leftist theorizing in the last 50 years has been to try to not be so presumptive about what community, what “we,” people come from and therefore would have the same problems. But is this presumption really tied to the self-image of humanism, which is at the very least a cultural complex that includes philosophical theses? [7] But more importantly, is every use of “we” presumptive? For if this were true, that would make the very idea of community presumptive, or at least the attempt to communicate what you think “we” in your community think. It is the slide between an attitude (“presumption”), a linguistic usage (“we”), and a set of quasi-philosophical theses (“humanism”) that, I think, produces loose talk about a humanism that “forever rewrites itself as posthumanism,” [8] which suggests that the ostensible problem doesn’t in fact have a solution. And this should just suggest we rethink what the problem is.

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Endnotes

[1] Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” sec. 5

[2] Posthumanism, ed. Badmington, 1

[3] I suspect this idea has been disseminated most by Derrida in our literary theorists, but cannot develop the point here. Badmington evinces this idea when, after introducing Derrida, posthumanism ceases to be a historical phenomenon and instead becomes the necessary conceptual counterpart of humanism, which is forever rewriting itself.

[4] This is not the space to provide evidence for this claim about what Brandom thinks, for it only needs to be the case for my purposes that this is a coherent thing to think.

[5] This is part of what Kuhn meant by “paradigm” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. See Ian Hacking’s introduction to the 4_th edition for an excellent historical review of the reception of that very important book, including the incredibly misunderstood notion of a “paradigm.”

[6] The Archaeology of Knowledge, 17

[7] Richard Rorty has developed this point about philosophical presuppositions in regards to political liberalism in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (in Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth), which I’m coasting behind in all of this. The harder problem for Rorty was, after disentangling the philosophical presuppositions of “we,” if you will, dealing with other attendant problems in using “we,” especially the presumption. See my “Two Uses of ‘We.’”

[8] Posthumanism, ed. Badmington, 9

Better and the Best

1. Practical stance against the Best – Platonic prophecy as theory – Romantic prophecy as poetry; 2. Theoretical stance against the Best – Evaluative platonism and robustness – Possible betters vs. actual best; 3. The Village Champion argument – Truth and justification; 4. Sloughing off the relativist with self-referential arguments – Contradiction is a practical infelicity; 5. Practical attitudes should be allowed to trump theory – Absolutes are parasitic, not autonomous – Sellars’ parasitism argument about ‘looks’-talk on ‘is’-talk; 6. Is ‘best’-talk parasitic on ‘better’-talk? 7. You can’t say what’s best without saying what’s worse – Self-justifiers as platonism – Closing aperçu

1.      In an interview toward the end of his life, Richard Rorty was asked if he thought that advocates of black reparations had valid and serious arguments. Rorty responded that:

There are valid and serious arguments, but there are also valid and serious arguments for taxing the citizens of the First World down to the standard of living of the average inhabitant of the Third World, and distributing the proceeds of this taxation to the latter. But since neither set of arguments will lead to any such action being taken, I am not sure how much time we should spend thinking about them, as opposed to thinking about measures that have some chance of actually being carried out. It would be better to think about what might actually be done than to think about what an absolutely perfect world would be like. The best can be an enemy of the better. [1]

The stance Rorty is here taking is a practical stance against the Best. Rorty is not against thinking about what the world should be like, as utopic and prophetic thinking is central to how Rorty conceives of the intellectual’s role in democratic culture. But what he is suggesting here is that we cannot spend the day in imagination. Rorty’s conception of prophecy is romantic, not platonic. A platonic conception of prophecy got off the ground when Plato began using metaphors of sight to articulate his sense of philosophy—“theory” derives from theoros, or “onlooker,” “spectator.” Plato’s transformation of the common Greek word for an audience member of a festival is what produced Dewey’s attack on the “spectatorial account of knowledge,” and when theoria was Latinized by contemplatio, it became invested with our derived word “speculation” from speculum, or mirror. Hence Rorty’s devastating attack on platonism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

The romantic conception of prophecy, however, is different—it gains its sense, not from theoria, but from poiēsis, “making,” which we get “poetry” from. Rather than seeing something already there, the romantic conception of prophecy rests more on the Renaissance trope of building “castles in the air.” While the platonic conception gains a sense of urgency from its positing of a Best behind a veil that, if only we could just see it, we’d have our blueprint from how to order the world—the romantic conception loses that urgency, but in compensation we get a picture of how toying with castles too far off in the sky can distract us from the reality around us.

2.      What undergirds Rorty’s practical stance toward the Best is his theoretical stance against the Best, which is to say against platonism. For Rorty’s stance at the level of theory is that the Best is a mirage because it is circumscribed by our fallibility and our lack of method—for any X said to be the Best, we have to admit something better might come along. Such an admission of fallibility is what then produces the search for a method with which one could know certainly that one has in fact found the Best. Dewey and Rorty thought that this Quest for Certainty showed a lack of maturity, and that we should rather face up to the contingency of our assertions of what is the best.

The problem for this line of thought is that a new form of platonist has come along that suggests that you can’t have a notion of what’s better if you don’t have a robust notion of the Best. Rorty wants to deny needing one. This new version is a particular species of the more general form of what I will call evaluative platonism. There are many species, but the basic form is that if you don’t have the Best in mind as a sort of ideal to shoot for, you won’t progress toward anything. The industrial strength version is a full-blooded Platonism, which posits an Absolute Good that can be reached (at least in theory—you can see the Sun outside the Cave, even if you can’t reach it). There are, however, important knock-off brands, the most important of which for my purposes are Peircian end-of-inquiry notions which suggest that one needs a robust focus imaginarius to make sense of inquiry—these are important precisely because of the range of agreement Rorty shares with these other pragmatists. Rorty’s romantic notion isn’t robust enough because it simply expands our repertoire of possible betters without narrowing one of them as the actual best. Since the traditional enemy of the platonist is the relativist, it should be no surprise that that is the epithet pragmatists like Hilary Putnam wield at Rorty for continuing to resist attempts at robustness. [2]

3.      To get a sense of how Rorty responds, we might turn to his Village Champion Argument against Jürgen Habermas, another pragmatist admirer of Peirce. Rorty sets the stage by contrasting the Peircian strategy with what I’ve called “full-blooded Platonism”:

Instead of arguing that because reality is One, and truth correspondence to that One Reality, Peircians argue that the idea of convergence is built into the presuppositions of discourse. They all agree that the principal reason why reason cannot be naturalized is that reason is normative and norms cannot be naturalized. But, they say, we can make room for the normative without going back to the traditional idea of a duty to correspond to the intrinsic nature of One Reality. We do this by attending to the universalistic character of the idealizing presuppositions of discourse. [3]

To “naturalize reason” in this context is to reject the utility of the concept of truth when attempting to figure out what is and is not knowledge—instead, naturalizers argue, justification is all that does any real work. Rorty does not want to collapse the distinction between the two, however, only argue that the T in the JTB conception of knowledge, exactly like the B, does not play an operative role in the determination of what people know. [4] Peircians think that the T does play an operative role, a transcending moment in which more than justification is had. Without the ability to transcend the moment of justification, they think, everything would be relative to a particular audience. Rorty continues:

Habermas’ doctrine of a “transcendent moment” seems to me to run together a commendable willingness to try something new with an empty boast. To say “I’ll try to defend this against all comers” is often, depending upon the circumstances, a commendable attitude. But to say “I can successfully defend this against all comers” is silly. Maybe you can, but you are no more in a position to claim that you can than the village champion is to claim that he can beat the world champion. [5]

Rorty later glosses this argument:

When we have finished justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant (perhaps our own intellectual conscience, or our fellow-citizens, or the relevant experts) we need not, and typically do not, make any further claims, much less universal ones. After rehearsing justification, we may say either “That is why I think my assertion true” or “That is why my assertion is true,” or both. Going from the former assertion to the latter is not a philosophically pregnant transition from particularity to universality, or from context-dependence to context-independence. It is merely a stylistic difference. [6]

I hope it is apparent how the Village Champion Argument, and therefore the relationship between justification and truth, bears on the relationship between the better and the Best. To claim that X is “the best,” you are asserting the truth of the claim “X is the best.” Rorty’s point is that these assertions are necessarily always in front of some particular audience, and therefore the pragmatic power of any particular claim is relative to an audience.

4.      I think we can be a little more precise than Rorty’s usual mode of sloughing off the relativist as something he needs not be concerned with. The Village Champion Argument carries a lot of force, but there is more in the area than just a stylistic difference. The pattern of Rorty’s mode is set in his infamous APA presidential address, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism.” There he says, succinctly and some might say too perfunctorily, “‘Relativism’ is the view that every belief on a certain topic, or perhaps any topic, is as good as every other. No one holds this view. Except for the occasional cooperative freshman, one cannot find anybody who says that two incompatible opinion on an important topic are equally good.” [7] The reason he wishes to dispose of the relativist quickly is because he thinks, rightly, that it hides the real issues at work behind the conflict between pragmatists and platonists. So he says that “if there were any relativists, they would, of course, be easy to refute. One would merely use some variant of the self-referential arguments Socrates used against Protagoras.” [8] The argument is like this:

Protagoras: Every view is as good as any other!
Socrates: Does that include yours?
Protagoras [sensing already the end]: Er, well, yes, it must, then hunh?
Socrates: Okay, so if your view that “every view is as good as any other” is as good as the view that “not every view is as good as any other,” why should we adopt your view over the ones that say yours is shit?
Protagoras: Because…it’s true?
Socrates: Yah, okay, but what grip do you have on truth that is independent of your relativism about goodness? Isn’t goodness in the way of views just truth? How can you have a view that is itself true where others are false, but the false views are just as good? Doesn’t that just make truth an idle curiosity, and therefore your own view idle as well? Can you give me no reason for adopting your view?
Protagoras: I…will…get back to you on that one…
Socrates: Yes, Miss Palin, please do.

Since pragmatism is heir to a discernible Protagorean tradition, we are, in fact, better positioned to get back to Plato on this issue. The first step is recognizing what underpins self-referential contradiction arguments. The invalidity of contradiction is the foul incurred when you say both “X” and “not X.” But this is just to say that in the practice of saying thou shalt not incur such violations of the rules of that practice. Following Wittgenstein, one has to think, here, of practices on the analogy of games. You don’t get to count as playing the game of football, as practicing football, if—as many turd to third football comedies have underscored—you jumpkick the quarterback. In some definable Practice of Saying, it is against the rules to hold contradictory claims. (This isn’t to say that there are other practices that involve words in which it is okay to do this. Poetry and lying are the most obvious examples, which is why Plato thought poetry was a form of lying.)

This first step gets us onto pragmatist ground: there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying X and not-X. There are many contexts in which it is fine, like when you say the latter with your fingers crossed or in the context of saying the sentence before this one. Contradiction is, then, a practical infelicity of a special kind. And once this has been identified, we can see the point in Habermas’ notion of a “performative contradiction.” This is part of the idea that you can’t say one thing and do another. And this displays the larger genus that the species of self-refutation falls under with regards to relativism, for it has often been accepted as a refutation of relativism (and nihilism, for that matter) that when someone says “peeing standing up is as good as sitting down” and they then pee sitting down, to say, “if they are both just as good, then on what grounds did you make the choice?” For giving any grounds at all is grounds enough for identifying criteria being used to adjudicate truth from falsity, good from bad. And having done something is ipso facto having made a choice. So the doing contradicts the saying.

5.      So what underlies Rorty’s blithe rejection of relativism as a real concern is the pragmatic understanding that to behave at all is to refute the very idea that grounds of choice are all made equal. And while this is true, that our everyday practice refutes every day the theoretical thesis of relativism, it does not refute it at the level of theory. Rorty’s attitude tells us that we shouldn’t care about that, that we cannot, as Emerson says, “spend the day in explanation.” [9] And I think this is true as well, that our practical attitude toward the world should be allowed to trump pressures at the level of theory. [10] However, at the level of theory, it should be possible to show how relativism and platonism go the wrong way at things.

Robert Brandom, I believe, has shown how we might go at this. The charge of relativism leveled by platonists is motivated by the idea that you cannot talk about “betterness” without the Best, whereas heirs to Protagoras think all claims are of the form “X is better than …” with the ellipsis being filled in by specific claims. Brandom, in his notion of the pragmatically mediated semantic relation, has shown us how charges of relativism leveled at the pragmatist can be refuted by showing how Absolutes, like the Best, are parasitic, and not autonomous.

To understand this argument we need to understand the basic form of Wilfrid Sellars’ master argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” against the Myth of the Given and elsewhere. [11] For one example, one project in what Brandom calls the “empiricist core program of the classical analytic project” is to establish phenomenalism. Think of phenomenalism on the model of Berkelyan idealism, whose commitment to empiricism was so powerful that unlike Locke who thought our knowledge starts with our individual experience, he thought all we could know was our individual experience. This gets transposed into the analytic idiom as a reductionist program—the attempt to reduce talk about how things are to talk about how things seem or look. If that reduction can be shown to be successful without remainder, then we’ve shown how we don’t need to talk about how things are, but only about how things seem. (Consider the analogous materialisms about supernatural entities—we can do without talk about witchcraft because we can get along fine in explaining what happens by talking about bad mushrooms. [12]) Reductionism in the analytic idiom is a semantic relation—when you explain what you mean, you are relating your first misunderstood statement with a second, hopefully better understood statement. So when you suggest that when you talk about tables what you are really talking about are clouds of electrons at particular spatialtemporal vectors, you are suggesting a special form of paraphrase. “When you say ‘table,’ you really mean ‘cloud of electrons.’” [13]

So this is what “autonomy” means in this context—if you attempt to explain away a particular vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things are”), you are suggesting that all the work can be done by a different vocabulary (e.g., the vocabulary for saying “how things seem”). For this reduction to work, the alternative vocabulary must be independent of the target vocabulary you are reducing into nothingness. If it isn’t, if you need the target vocabulary to use the alternative, then the reduction was misguided because you have a remainder (that being something you need but now can’t explain the existence of or how you do it, etc.). So if you can show that a marked for demolition vocabulary is needed to use the alternative, then you can combat the reductionism. Brandom says that Sellars’ argument “turns on the assertion of the pragmatic dependence of one set of vocabulary-deploying practices-or-abilities on another” [14]:

Because he thinks part of what one is doing in saying how things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually being that way, and because one cannot be understood as withholding a commitment that one cannot undertake, Sellars concludes that one cannot have the ability to say or think how things seem or appear unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things actually are. [15]

Sellars argues that ‘is’-talk is pragmatically dependent on ‘looks’-talk because you wouldn’t be able to do (i.e. deploy) the latter without being able to deploy the former. So while you might not be actually deploying ‘is’-talk when you say, “There seems to be water over there,” you are implicitly relying on your grasp of the difference between “there is water over there” and “oh, there only seemed to be water over there—it’s actually a mirage…too bad we’re gonna’ die now.” If you didn’t have a grip on this implicit distinction, and all you had was ‘seems’-talk, then you’d have to say that “there seems to be water over there” was false when it turned out to be a mirage. This would impoverish our ability to say true things, though, for with the distinction in hand I can say two potentially true statements (“there is…” and “there seems…”) while without I can only say one. Now, what that one statement is is a good question, for the way ‘seems’ is being used appears to be the way ‘is’ is normally used—after all, the cases of falsification are exactly the same between “there is…” in our current modes of speech and “there seems…” within the reduced language-game (where “there is…” isn’t used).

To review: a reductive semantic relation can be refuted if it can be shown that the target vocabulary to be reduced is needed to use correctly the alternative vocabulary. If so shown, we will see that the alternative vocabulary is parasitic upon the target vocabulary and so the latter not a suitable candidate for reduction. And what we will have shown is that the semantic relation between the two vocabularies is pragmatically mediated. The relationship between saying “seems” and saying “is” is that saying “seems” is mediated by your ability to say “is.”

6.      It is beyond my powers to show that what I called evaluative platonism can be so refuted, so the best I can do is suggest the path to be taken. The problem here is that it is beyond my ability to show that the reconstructed versions of platonists that follow Peirce are suggesting a reduction of ‘better’-talk to ‘Best’-talk. That is, roughly, what Plato was after when he set up his divided line between the parasitic world of shadows and the autonomous Realm of Forms, with the Good (i.e., the Best) being most autonomousest of them all (being the sun that produced all the shadows). But we need to acknowledge that Habermas and Putnam need not be suggesting this when they level their criticisms at Rorty for not having a robust enough notion of betterness to make inquiry function right. All they need to say is that ‘better’-talk is intertwined with ‘best’-talk, and Rorty seems to be suggesting that ‘best’-talk can be reduced away without remainder to ‘better’-talk. In other words, the arguments I’ve just elaborated could be the ones used against Rorty to hit back against the Village Champion Argument.

I don’t think this will end up being the case. My suspicion is that the only way to get the robustness criticism to stick is to reconfigure in such a way that one would ipso facto fall within the bounds of the reductive form of platonism. (That was the form of Rorty’s criticism of Putnam’s labeling of him as a relativist: if I am, so are you!) Further, it is also my suspicion that ‘best’-talk is in fact parasitic upon ‘better’-talk, though I cannot see how to refute the idea that ‘better’-talk is also parasitic upon ‘best’-talk. If they are both parasitic, then they are intertwined, neither being autonomous of the other. So the best I can do is suggest that you can’t get rid of ‘better’-talk.

7.      For saying something is “the best” is pragmatically mediated by your ability to say what is better. The Best is parasitic on the better because you can’t specify what is best without specifying what is worse. This is the effect of having to answer “how do you know?” by justifying yourself. And since everyone agrees that the ability to justify is parasitic on the selection of a community, ‘best’-talk is as relative as ‘better’-talk, as much as you may wish that your claim about what is the Best transcends the community it is directed at. For it is simply not the case that your claim “X is the best!” is ipso facto better than “X is better than Y.” Perhaps you mean it more, but then by the same token you’re being less cautious and perhaps more dogmatic. But either way, when did caution or dogmatism tell us anything about the truth of the statements? People can have a terrible attitude and still be right.

Say we back up, though, and say that you won’t specify worse things in justifying the Best. We will concede that justification happens in front of communities, but we’ll avoid the implication of relativism by confining ourselves to an interlocking set of self-justifying things (principles, forms, whatever)—in other words, the community the justification is happening in front of is itself (and we just happen to be onlookers). This is the form of those fuller platonisms. If your justification for the Best, however, is another Best, then you generate a regress, for given the form of the Best, I will want to know what it is better than. “You say ‘the best’—the best of what?” What set does the Best reign supreme over? (Itself? Now it seems like a useless phrase.) So an interlocking set of Bests will generate an infinite regress, and so hence the easy, unanswerable skepticism we can apply to any claim about what is the Best. “How do you know that’s the best? Are you able to survey all possible counterclaims and pronounce upon them beforehand?” To say you can is to pronounce yourself Village Champion, and we all know how quickly such hubris can make you look like the Village Idiot.

The only way to stop the regress is to accept the relative justification as sufficient, and this amounts to rejecting platonism and taking “the best” as expressive of “that I know of”—we might call that a transcendental fallibilism. The warrant for this redescription of what “the best” expresses is the pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the best and the better. You can’t do the best without doing better, but you might be able to do better without doing the best.

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Endnotes

[1] Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself, 105

[2] See, e.g., Putnam’s “Realism with a Human Face” in his collection of that name and Rorty’s response, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” in Truth and Progress. Rorty’s reaction in that essay boils down to: “We seem, both to me and to philosophers who find the view of both of us absurd, to be in much the same line of business. But Putnam sees us as doing something quite different, and I do not know why” (59). I suspect Putnam’s long-standing use of Rorty as a punching bag has more to do with Rorty standing too close to Derrida and the events of the 1979 Eastern Division APA meeting than any thesis he’s ever promulgated. That’s my suspicion, at least, though I have no particular evidence for judging Putnam’s attitude in the latter case. (His remarks about the French littering his corpus I consider enough for the former.) The best description I’ve come across of what actually happened at the infamous APA meeting is Neil Gross’s description in Richard Rorty, 216-227.

[3] “Universality and Truth,” Rorty and His Critics, 5

[4] The JTB—“justified true belief”—conception of knowledge derives from Plato’s Theaetetus, and most epistemologists have accepted it as the beginning, though not the end, of wisdom in regards to knowledge. For a somewhat embroidered discussion of the relationship of pragmatism to the distinction between truth and justification, see my "Rhetorical Universalism." I say that belief doesn’t play a role in the determination of knowledge because all the belief concept tells you is that it is a claim being held by some person. And if you test that claim by wondering whether a claim being held doesn’t tell you something about its plausibility—like a show of hands, one being better than none—then you need to consider the fact that authority is a structure built into the nature of justification, and so a claim being actually held lending it therefore credence already has the conceptual shape of justification.

[5] Ibid., 6. Rorty is discussing Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms. Though Robert Brandom, who I will be discussing shortly, tells us the title of Between Saying and Doing comes from an old Italian proverb ("between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out"), I think there’s a felicitous ratio with Habermas recorded there—for though Habermas considers himself an heir to American pragmatism, the difference between Habermas’ objects and Brandom’s gerunds suggests a greater commitment to the priority of pragmatics over semantics.

[6] Ibid., 56

[7] Consequences of Pragmatism, 166

[8] Ibid., 167

[9] Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

[10] Every person tired of an interminable conversation with a deaf and dogged interlocutor knows this to be true, but again, only at the level of practice. By this I mean that when the deaf dog retorts that you’re being dogmatic because you haven’t answered their objections, the rules of open inquiry we’ve venerated (explicitly) at least since the Enlightenment demand that we grant their point. However, only recently might we be able to work out the theoretical entitlement for allowing attitude to trump reason-giving, and the overarching reason is why Brandom says that in pragmatist philosophy of language, semantics must answer to pragmatics. Something of this orientation is elaborated in what follows, but on this particular point, at the beginning of Making It Explicit, Brandom justifies it via Wittgenstein’s regress argument about rules, which is roughly that if every statement needs rules to regulate correct interpretation, and those rules need to be stated, then the rules need to have rules—and then those rules need rules, etc. (see 20-23). What stops this regress from being infinite? Nothing, not at least if you haven’t fixed things so that normative attitude precedes normative rule/reason-giving. The trick here is seeing that we do, obviously, have the power to stop regressing. Platonism, in this area, is a form of intellectualism that says that rules precede attitudes, and thus nothing should stop the regress (except for something rule-like, which is where the idea of self-evident principles comes from). So one way to think about pragmatism is as the orientation that accepts our power to stop the regress as not in itself illegitimate, but rather seeks to investigate when it should and should not be. For example, notice how much leeway is in Rorty’s notion of “justifying our belief to the audience we think relevant”—who determines relevancy? That’s a question that would keep platonists up at night, though pragmatists understand that such relevancy is hashed out in the course of inquiry as people determine their attitudes to various communities. Is every attitude that determines our relationship to a community kosher? No, as every angry parent knows. But what about the black separatist, or black radical demanding reparations? That’s justifiably more complex in America. On that particular complexity, of being African-American in America, still the best negotiations are Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. For Rorty’s interesting discussion of Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad, see 11-13 of Achieving Our Country (whose title comes from Baldwin’s book).

[11] Brandom elaborates this master argument in “A Kantian Rationalist Pragmatism” in Perspectives on Pragmatism. This particular argument about phenomenalism is the one Sellars forwards in his essay “Phenomenalism,” written around the same time as the more famous attack on the Myth of the Given.

[12] This was, of course, Rorty’s first famous argument in the philosophy of mind, striking an analogy between talk about the mind and talk about demons. Brandom suggests in “Vocabularies of Pragmatism” (in PP) that that argument hinged on the social pragmatism that he would later become famous for, there isolated on a social practice account of minds.

[13] If you noticed a wobble in my vocabulary in this last passage, you’re probably smarter than I am. And hopefully the wobble isn’t pernicious. Given the precision with which analytic reductions have been deployed, I technically slid between the semantic relation between what two things mean and an ontological relation between what two things are. Sloppy, I know, but when you work in the analytic idiom—where “how things are” is, because of the linguistic turn, always paraphrased as “talk about how things are”—it’s easy to do. However, the larger philosophical commitment pragmatists like Rorty and Brandom (if not Peirce, James, and Dewey) are in favor of keeping might be thought of as specifying that the category of “ontological relations” be reduced to another idiom, which is in part semantic. (This would take me too far afoot, but they are not committed to reducing everything to language, the linguistic idealism critics keep foisting on Rorty and Brandom. Brandom thinks they are only committed to what he calls “the entanglement thesis,” which in this context I understand to be the entanglement of pragmatic relations of nonlinguistic bodies with semantic relations of linguistic bodies.) For a recent discussion of Rorty's relationship to anti-analytic pragmatists, see "Some Notes on Rorty and Retropragmatism." For a discussion of the relationship of language to experience after Quine and Sellars, see "Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn."

[14] In Between Saying and Doing, Brandom develops a very sophisticated apparatus for talking about talking. One area of underdeveloped territory he takes on is beginning to talk about the practices necessary or sufficient for deploying a vocabulary and, conversely, the vocabularies necessary or sufficient for deploying a practice. However, while Brandom favors talk of social practices, his aim in the book is to abstract away from that particular commitment, and so he speaks of (social) practices or (individual) abilities.

[15] BSD 12; this first chapter of his Locke Lectures also appears by itself in Perspectives on Pragmatism, this passage at 169.

Rorty's Metaphilosophy

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Rorty was hounded for the last half of his career with a reputation for having given up on arguments. It began when Richard Bernstein, one of Rorty’s more perceptive critics, noted that “although [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature] is filled with arguments, many of which are brilliant and ingenious, Rorty at several points warns against the love of argument that has characterized one strand in philosophy ever since Plato. What is unsettling and disturbing about Rorty’s argumentative style is that he refuses to play the game…, he doesn’t seem to be primarily concerned with carefully stating issues in such a manner so that one can proceed to develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct ‘position.’”[fn.1] “Style” is a good word here, as is Bernstein’s notion that Rorty has an overall “strategy” that argues at one point, but not at another. This strategy transformed itself into Consequences of Pragmatism’s suggestion that “the really exasperating thing about literary intellectuals, from the point of view of those inclined to science or to Philosophy, is their inability to engage in such argumentation—to agree on what would count as resolving disputes, on the criteria to which all sides must appeal. In a post-Philosophical culture, this exasperation would not be felt.”[fn.2] As this stands, it is slightly misleading to Rorty’s point, for it is not the case that literary intellectuals have an inability to engage in argumentation—it’s just that such argumentation is usually out of point when the main activity is “the inconclusive comparison and contrast of vocabularies” (xli). For, as Rorty goes on but eventually ignores the better wisdom of occasionally in his rhetorical flourishes, “in such a [post-Philosophical] culture, criteria would be seen as the pragmatist sees them—as temporary resting-places constructed for specific utilitarian ends. On the pragmatist account, a criterion (what follows from the axioms, what the needle points to, what the statute says) is a criterion because some particular social practice needs to block the road of inquiry, halt the regress of interpretations, in order to get something done” (xli, second emphasis mine).

“In order to get something done”—this is what ultimately explains a lot of Rorty’s wishy-washiness about philosophy, the activity he was trained to do and continued to do through-out his life, before and after his supposed Kehre in PMN. For Rorty never could become completely convinced that there was something pressing to be done by philosophy. So he couldn’t himself be bothered long enough to work out some of the criteria for “carefully stating issues” in order to “develop the strongest arguments in support of a correct position.” Why would you work hard at developing stronger and stronger arguments for a position that will be aufgehoben tomorrow because (and this is important) the “specific utilitarian ends” to which the position served have passed away? And so, as Rorty felt more and more alienated from his former colleagues at Princeton and more and more welcomed by “literary intellectuals,” this plausible stopping-point turned into his most infamous passage on argumentation: “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality.’ … Conforming to my own precepts, I am not going to try to make arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace.”[fn.3] A few perceptive (and apparently kind, though for simply being more clear-sighted) commentators have noticed that there are, like in PMN, more than a few arguments, and good ones to boot. Rorty’s disaffection got the better of him, but his procedure was still the same as it was to remain throughout his career. Berstein calls this “a two-stage strategy” in which the first stage is to offer familiar kinds of dialectical arguments, which are as Rorty points out “parasitic upon” (CIS 9) the entrenched vocabulary you wish to displace,[fn.4] in order to “soften up” (Bernstein’s phrase) the reader for the second stage, which is to account for the historical origins of the entrenched vocabulary.

The controlling motif that underlay Rorty’s philosophy from beginning to end was the sense of philosophy as an on-going conversation. Rather than Whitehead’s metaphor of “footnotes to Plato,” for Rorty philosophy—all inquiry and writing for that matter—is more like a game of telephone: Parmenides said something to Plato who told Aristotle something it turns out is not quite what Parmenides meant. A “science” that has criteria and can argue, then, is something that can only arise if you can get everyone on the same page—say, if Plato had gotten Parmenides right before passing it along to Aristotle. But—why should Plato be required to get Parmenides right? What if Plato’s accidental mishearing and misreporting works better for what Aristotle wants to do? The idea of philosophers wanting to do different things is why Rorty once said that “philosophy is the greatest game of all precisely because it is the game of ‘changing the rules.’”[fn.5] If you don’t want to play Parmenides’ Sorry anymore, you change the rules so you’re now playing Aristotle’s Monopoly (a game which lasted quite a while). Philosophy for Rorty is a game of Calvinball in which the philosopher of the present is Calvin and the future is Hobbes. Calvin could never win against Hobbes because Hobbes was always better at making up rules than Calvin, keeping one step ahead of him.[fn.6] If you view philosophy like this, why would you want to play? This feeling comes out of Wittgenstein, too, and has recently come to be called various kinds of “quietism.”[fn.7]

Given this kind of abuse one gets from actually participating in the game of philosophy, always risking becoming outmoded by the next generation, Rorty pulled further and further back from the game. Pulling back from philosophy to make it your object of analysis used to be called “metaphilosophy.” The trouble with metaphilosophy is that it is still philosophy: metaphilosophy, like aesthetics and metaphysics, is just one more venerable subactivity in the larger form. So there’s a sense in which Rorty has continued to play the game. The question is: by what rules has he been playing by? Rorty’s bad reputation largely comes from the idea that he really did give up on arguments and that arguments are essential components of good philosophical activity. After all, so goes this line, if philosophy really is a conversation, isn’t the right thing to oppose to an asserted claim a counterclaim backed by a justifying argument? Isn’t there something pernicious about not meeting arguments with another argument, something that amounts to plugging your ears and squawking “la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” Rorty has struck some philosophers as wanting his cake and eating, too: remaining in the game without playing by the rules. “But whose rules?” replies Rorty. However, that being said, if Rorty is to commend his own philosophy, there does need to be some sort of explicatable standard according to which he can be shown to not be violating. This is the hard thing to do.

“Philosophy is a conversation” was the first metaphor introduced so let us tangle with its implications first. The notion of a “conversation” gives off a sense of dynamism that’s missing when you read one article or book, but gets re-introduced once you start putting articles and books side by side, “in conversation with each other,” as we say. However—these are still all just theories in a certain sense, a sense James gives when he says: “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”[fn.8] Instruments for what? It is paramount that we answer: both for problems outside of philosophy and problems within philosophy. It is hard to keep these two things in view at the same time, and James, Dewey, and Rorty struggled their entire careers to articulate a conception of philosophy that balanced both in a single vision. James and Dewey—because this was against the understanding of the times—typically overemphasized problems outside of philosophy. This was Dewey’s sense of philosophy arising from our contact with the world, in all of its manifestations, for example the story he tells in The Quest for Certainty. Philosophy cut off from the world’s problems, then, is what creates scholasticism, the pointless counting of angels on pinheads. But since all responses are responses to the world in some fashion—even that terribly narrow portion of reality called “philosophy books and the conundrums you’ll find therein”—philosophers cut themselves off from the work of other philosophers at the cost of seeming to play a game by themselves.

This can be fruitful—what, after all, is a philosophical treatise other than, on our first metaphor, a monologue? As I said before, there’s something static about just one vision being articulated, but as Michael Walzer once said, “there are times when we need to listen to a sustained argument, a linear discourse.”[fn.9] This is what Rorty’s detractors feel is missing from Rorty’s later work: there’s no sustained argument. Rorty’s student, Brandom, spent nearly 700 pages articulating a philosophy of language. That’s a long time by yourself, but the game Brandom wanted to set up was intricate and he needed a lot of space, a lot of time alone. So Brandom spent a long time by himself, cut off from other philosophers (in a fashion), and set up his own game to play. What’s Rorty doing? He doesn’t want to set up his own game, he says, but he continues to spend time with other people’s games. What kind of game is this if you do spend some time by yourself (in essays), but it’s primarily with other people’s larger, more intricate games?

Rorty, like his predecessors James and Dewey, wanted philosophy to be a response to life. The principal slice of life Rorty spent his life responding to was philosophy. Uncertain about what was worth standing behind that was philosophical, what was worth pouring energy into creating and strengthening that wouldn’t look like wasted effort tomorrow (when Hobbes the Future changes the rules), Rorty…quit Princeton and moved to Montana to ride horses? No, he spent his life writing about and defending pragmatism, a big fat something if there ever was. So what kind of game is pragmatism and how does one play it?

Rorty’s answer was always that it wasn’t, properly speaking, a game at all, not like say Brandom’s systematic philosophy of language. This is his emphasis that pragmatism—under whose banner he gathered a large number of his favorite philosophers, from Gadamer and Derrida to Dennett and Arthur Fine—only makes negative points against positive programs.[fn.10] But if pragmatism is to be a coherent object at all—something that deserves a single name, even if it is more like a family name than it is a single individual’s—there must be a central vision around which can be identified rules that can come under violation: you need to be able to know whether you are a pragmatist or not outside of the fact that Rorty says you are. Rorty has run the range of derision to teasing about his lists, appropriations, and self-conscious ignorings of his “heroes.”[fn.11] But there is a central vision—why can’t this be the game, the system, the positive program?

“What kind of game is a list of negatives?” Rorty might say. What kind of game is a list of “don’ts” rather than a list of “shoulds or cans”? Every game comes not only with a list of things to prepare for the game (where to sit, what to have like dice, etc.) and a list of rules for how play proceeds (“if you land on a Chance space, draw a card and follow its instructions”), but also the all-important “Getting Started” section. Pragmatism is like a game with a list of things you can’t do, but nowhere does it tell you how to even get started with the game. And that is a horrible way to teach people how to be philosophers, for it tells you nothing about what to philosophize about. In fact, the answer is something like “anything you want,” but what if you philosophize about stuff nobody cares about? Playing solitaire gets kind of boring after a while.

But “anything you want” is the entire impetus behind pragmatism being a movement for putting philosophy back into the flow of life—you set your own agenda so that you can respond to the currents and corrugations of life. There is still this nagging problem for Rorty, though: his particular slice of life he’s chosen to focus on is still philosophy. This is like saying that his agenda is the management of “don’ts.” What are these “don’ts” and why should someone like Rorty be in charge of them? The core of Rorty’s answer emerged fully in his 1979 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the APA: “Pragmatists follow Hegel in saying that ‘philosophy is its time grasped in thought.’ Anti-pragmatists follow Plato in striving for an escape from conversation to something atemporal which lies in the background of all possible conversations. I do not think one can decide between Hegel and Plato save by meditating on the past efforts of the philosophical tradition to escape from time and history” (CP 174). Rorty is in charge of the list of “don’ts” because it is a list built out of an experience playing with and looking-on over the games played by others. When a game breaks down or is superseded by another, there stands Rorty trying to figure out why. This “why” is then trotted out as an explanation for other breakdowns—if it works, then it is added as a “don’t”: a warning that if you try and set up your game in such-and-such a fashion, it will breakdown when it reaches such-and-such a point under such-and-such a pressure. One of the easiest examples is the Cartesian skeptic: he will always reply, when you think you know something, “how do you know?” To every response, he simply adds another, “So how do you know that?” The Cartesian game needs a reply to the skeptic that will get him to shut up. No reply, so thinks Rorty and a growing cadre of like-minded philosophers (e.g., Michael Williams), will shut the skeptic up because the criteria for shutting him up are impossible to fulfill. Once you allow the Matrix response as a serious, legitimate response—“what if I were to tell you that this is all a dream?”—to any particular phenomenological experience, then you’ve effectively made it appropriate and relevant to every experience. This is what the Cartesian problematic of beginning with methodological doubt does, so Rorty—following Peirce—says don’t start there.

One of the curious things about pragmatism, then of course, is that it is as much an experimental inquiry as any other. The list of “don’t’s” is grown out of watching experimentations in “shoulds.” The “don’ts” themselves, though, must be experimented on—fiat is not a good reason. “Don’t take things simply by authoritative fiat” we’ve learned through the course of history. Yet—sometimes you need to, like the parents who want to shut up their kid who’s doing his best impersonation of a Cartesian skeptic: “Why? Why? Why? Why?” We don’t have all the answers all the time, so sometimes we have to stop, to block the road of inquiry so we can go on to do something else, and one does that by fiat—one gains legitimate authority for such measures by wielding them only when appropriate. So pragmatism’s list of “don’ts” come with an elaboration of circumstances for appropriateness. As Fish has said, the pragmatist’s principles are “rules of thumb.”

I’d like to go back now to Rorty’s argumentative strategies and the rules of the game he plays and why it’s legitimate. The game of pragmatism, so far stated, consists in a freescape impinged only by a list of “don’ts.” This, on its face, doesn’t seem right, unless “don’t kill people” is suddenly a specifically pragmatist principle. So, the game of pragmatism is first and foremost a philosophical game. As a philosophical game, it doesn’t need to have explicitly rules from other games, it only needs to be able to account for their possibility (recurring to Sellars’ definition in [fn.2]). So there’s a weird sense in which philosophical games are one among many, and yet contain the others within it. The game of pragmatism’s mantra is something like: “get back to life!” which is all those other games. However, this isn’t a disparagement of philosophy, merely the principle that if you can’t make your philosophical game relevant to other games, then you’re doing it wrong. So the philosopher who wants to be a pragmatist has one of two choices: they can either fiddle around with other games in relationship to their philosophical game (i.e. the game of seeing how things hang together) or they can fiddle around with other philosophical games in relationship to their philosophical game. It is this latter practice which is the game of managing the list of “don’ts” by which other hopeful pragmatists keep an eye on in their freescaping. Since philosophical games are both responses to life and tools for improving life, one set of philosophical tools should consist in improving your philosophical tools so they don’t make your life worse. Pragmatism is the game of making sure your philosophical tools are working properly by making sure you can get back to other games with them. (For example, if you can’t shut the skeptic up, you may never have enough confidence that there is an external world out there, and never make it to the In-N-Out you're dying for.)

This doesn’t yet get to Rorty’s own form of list-management. The model I want to suggest for understanding the distinction between philosophy-as-freescaping and metaphilosophy-as-list-management is of war. This is an old metaphor certainly, but what needs to be highlighted is the difference between articulating a strategy and enacting a strategy. On this model, philosophy is what happens when battle is joined between real, live opponents. Metaphilosophy is the devising of strategies for what you would do if a particular kind of opponent appeared before you. Outside of actual war, of course, is peace and all the other kinds of activities one could be doing if one weren’t in the middle of a war. We might say that Rorty’s career, on this model, went something like this: a grunt fighting in the trenches (60s and 70s—e.g., “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” and “Incorrigibility as a Mark of the Mental”) to a captain managing a squadron (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature) to a general on the field (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) to a Professor of Tactics at West Point, teaching the grunts, captains, and generals what they should probably do if they get caught in certain kinds of situations (I’m thinking particularly of the series called “Hope in Place of Knowledge” in Philosophy and Social Hope).

Saying that, however, skews the point of making philosophy a freescape that anyone can do because philosophy is a response and tool for life and we are all living. What we should rather say is that the grunts are all of us in our daily lives, dealing with live, flesh and blood people, and all of us dealing with problems (some of which arise from dealing with each other). The captains we might call “intellectuals,” the kind of person that has gained a reputation—for whatever reason: town elder, supernerd, academic, journalist, therapist, parent—for being able to help with other people’s problems. The generals, on this model, are philosophy professors (I should just say “readers,” but nearly the only people who concentrate hard on books from the philosophy shelves are professional philosophers). They are this because of what Rorty said: they deal almost entirely with the people who keep changing the rules of the game. The difference between clarifying a problem and changing it so you can deal with it better is negligible when you reach this height, overlooking the game of life. And then there’s Rorty: the Tactics Professor, retired and not even on the playing field anymore. What rubs people the wrong way is that Rorty seems to want to tell people how to play the game without anymore playing the game.

“Playing the game” in this sense is giving arguments. The trouble for this prima facie criticism of Rorty is that he does give arguments. What he doesn’t do is sustain them for very long, giving off a sense of being more and more distant from the feeling of being involved in philosophical controversy. And this because of the sweep with which Rorty wishes to encompass, a sweep built less out of an ambitious philosophical gaze (like Brandom’s) and more out of impatience for getting back to things that are probably more important. I say “probably” because I don’t think Rorty ever did shake the sense that meeting philosophical opponents wasn’t a good thing to do. Rorty was glad that Brandom did the things he was able to see him do. He didn’t keep doing philosophy because he needed to pay bills or had nothing better to do (though I imagine some days it felt like it), he did it because he wanted pragmatism to win. He wanted his game to triumph. He did have a horse on the battlefield (to mix metaphors even more quickly than I have so far).

So how, finally, do you manage a negative system? Rorty’s rhetorical pattern—from nearly beginning to end—was to talk about something bigger than himself: whatever ism he was promoting that day. What this allowed him to do was forward arguments that were depersonalized: like generals moving pieces on a Risk board. Rorty wanted to win, but you’re able to relax a little bit more and learn more when you take a little of your pride out of it by such a depersonalizing maneuver. You are not your theories, though there isn’t much more to you than that (at least once you expand the notion of a “theory” to the size that James used). We make growing easier through such an attitude. The second pattern that attached itself to the first was to talk of strategies: the strategy strategy. For pragmatists, beliefs are habits of action. Philosophy is the refinement of belief, not through experimental action to see its consequence, but through projection based on similarity of past cases of action. When you philosophize, you tinker with your habits, which themselves are in place to guide your action when the moment arrives. And when you think about philosophy as first and foremost a dialectical encounter with other philosophers, then you’ll talk about what you would do and say should you meet another philosopher. This is the form that system-building takes for a series of negatives: a list of hypotheticals. If such-and-such a condition is met, then I would do such-and-such.

Rorty’s later writings, when they were philosophical, had the simplifying and unsustained quality they did because he was thinking of the future: his goal was to teach the dialectical techniques and gambits that are, while not being themselves sophisticated (because a sophisticated technique spells several pages), in relatively good working order as first responses. I don’t think Rorty ever expected his shorter and shorter arguments to end argument. He wanted, rather, to display some of the tactics that come in handy and chart what, if an actual encounter should find you victorious, the consequences are having used such gambits. If you doubt the veracity of someone’s claim, you might say, “How do you know?” What Rorty wanted to make sure people knew is when pressing that claim turns into a monster and how you might avoid creating that monster, or believing that the monster really exists whether you created him or not. Is such a mode of philosophizing frivolous and disingenuous? Only if introductory manuals are. Only if kindergarten is. People have to start somewhere, and Rorty made the ambitious, courageous, and unenviable attempt to try and write for people who weren’t philosophy professors. It’s much easier to talk to people in your clique, where you don’t need to explain why you do the things you do. What made philosophers peeved at Rorty was that his simplifying maneuvers ended the argument before they wanted to see it closed. So it always must if you wish to move on to something else—Rorty’s mistake, if you will, was to continue to read, appreciate, and haggle with the top guns in the field and try and make them too-quickly-relevant to the other problems Rorty wished to discuss. I’m not sure this is irresponsible. It would only be irresponsible if people thought that a philosopher’s duty was to foreclose on argument—to end the argument. But Rorty only wished to move it further. The trick to understanding Rorty’s accomplishment in his later phase might be in considering them as advanced introductions—or rather, introductions for advanced thinkers. The sophisticated can become stale tramping around in their tired patterns and circumlocutions, and understanding Rorty’s thought might be to understand Emerson’s notion of self-reliance as a mature youth.

Endnotes

[1] Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind” in Philosophical Profiles, 23. I cannot quite figure why Bernstein has quotes around “position” and not “correct.” The standard ironic handling of, from their point of view, philosophically circumspect notions that Bernstein and Rorty share would suggest this was a mistake, but it is in the original printing of the article, too. The only real suggestion I can give about the semantic alteration if they are scare-quotes is that Bernstein is suggesting that Rorty finds the notion of a philosophical position as suspect as (and/or part and parcel with) argument. This is plausible, though out of joint with where Bernstein is in his elaboration and, I think, ultimately misleading about Rorty. To suggest that Rorty’s attempting to conceive of a positionless position is absurd on its face, but the difficulty of finding a comfortable position in a given array of positions that all look uncomfortable is a real motif that came out of PMN.

[2] Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, xli. The capitalization in “Philosophy” is due to Rorty’s distinction earlier between a nonprofessional “philosophy,” which at best is captured by Wilfrid Sellars’ definition “an attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term” (xiv), and professional “Philosophy,” which centers around “interlocking Platonic notions” whose conceptual shape is taken from the impetus to ask “questions about the nature of certain normative notions (e.g., ‘truth,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘goodness’) in the hope of better obeying such norms” (xv, emphasis mine).

[3] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8-9

[4] The claim of “parasitism” has a submerged history in Rorty’s argumentative arc that is too much to excavate here. However, it would trace itself through Rorty’s peculiar understanding of Kant’s transcendental argument, in which Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” eventually becomes cast as the “transcendental argument to end all arguments” (in “Transcendental Argument, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism” in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Bieri et al., 1979, 78), to his notion of irony in CIS which is first experimented with in “Is There a Problem about Fictional Discourse?” (in CP). The two aforementioned papers were written about the same time, when PMN was in its final stages of composition.

[5] Rorty, “Recent Metaphilosophy” in Review of Metaphysics Dec. 1961, 301

[6] There’s actually quite a lot to be made of Calvinball as an analogy to life, particularly insofar as one focuses on Calvin’s need to follow the rules as Hobbes makes them up and compares that to Kant and Hegel on the bindingness of norms, particularly as Robert Brandom explicates them.

[7] Quietism is essentially an outgrowth of the idea of philosophy as therapy that Wittgenstein pioneered. For some of Rorty’s thoughts about recent terminology and the struggle over Wittgenstein, see “Naturalism and Quietism” and “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn” in Philosophy as Cultural Politics. While siding with quietists in the former, he makes a distinction between “Wittgensteinian therapists,” the quietists, and “pragmatic Wittgensteinians,” and sides with the pragmatists against the quietists. This is an interesting move that would pay for more thought, especially given the movement between his appeal to Davidson’s “passing theory” argument in CIS (14) and his later criticism of that same section of Davidson’s “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”: “In the case at hand, they wonder whether the ability to cope with Mrs. Malaprop need be described as the ability to converge with her on any sort of theory, any more than the ability of two bicyclists to avoid collision is an ability to agree on a passing theory of passing” (“Response to Donald Davidson” in Rorty and His Critics, ed. Robert Brandom, 75). The “they” opposed to Davidson in that passage are “Wittgensteinians,” and specifically “therapeutic Wittgensteinians.” Given Rorty’s career-long loyalty to Wittgenstein and Davidson as philosophical heroes, ferreting out the ratios of difference given shifted terrain in these instances would give us a good picture of Rorty’s philosophical instincts.

[8] James, “What Pragmatism Means” in Pragmatism

[9] Walzer, “A Critique of Philosophical Conversation” in Thinking Politically, 30. This is a fascinating article, principally about various kinds of ideal-speech theories wielded for political purposes (in particular Habermas). Walzer is that exemplary kind of political philosopher who keeps very well before him the distinction between theory and the real world, the unquestioned need for both, and the unquestioned primacy of the problems of the real world.

[10] For example, after block-quoting Peirce, Derrida, Sellars, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault, and Heidegger all in a row on the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy, Rorty says, “This chorus should not, however, lead us to think that something new and exciting has recently been discovered about Language—e.g., that it is more prevalent than had previously been thought. The authors cited are making only negative points” (CP xx).

[11] I’m thinking of, in particular, Deweyans who point out that Rorty violates a significant portion of Dewey’s corpus. See the exchanges in Rorty and Pragmatism, ed. Herman J. Saatkamp, as a representative selection of criticism and how he responds to it. On the teasing end, there’s my favorite from Dennett: “Since I, as an irremediably narrow-minded and unhistorical analytic philosopher, am always looking for a good excuse not to have read Hegel or Heidegger or Derrida or those other chaps who don’t have the decency to think in English, I am tempted by Rorty’s performance on this occasion to enunciate a useful hermeneutical principle, the Rorty Factor: Take whatever Rorty says about anyone’s views and multiply it by .742. After all, if Rorty can find so much more in my own writing than I put there, he’s probably done the same or better for Heidegger – which means I can save myself the trouble of reading Heidegger; I can just read Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and come out about 40% ahead” (“Comments on Rorty” in Synthese 53 (1982), 349-50). Dennett, like Rorty, is his own kind of bizarre philosophical character, and this short piece has some very interesting insights into Rorty’s procedure, all the more so because of their disagreements about how to express themselves metaphilosophically.