Shattering philosophy' s mirror
Marino, Gordon D.
SHATTERING PHILOSOPHY'S MIRROR A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD RORTY GORDON D. MARINO ~ or all too long, the mainstream of American philosophers wanted nothing to do with their European...
...In addition to opening the American philosophical mind, Rorty has provoked and help sustain the debate over foundationalism in epistemology and ethics...
...Rorty reflected for a moment and then easily conceded the point, which might seem highly unremarkable to anyone inexperienced in grilling philosophers about their published positions...
...That is, he argues that "relativism" is a term in a vocabulary which he flatly rejects--a vocabulary that is intimately bound up with the fantastic project of providing rational foundations for our moral preferences...
...Nor is there any answer to the question "How do you decide when to struggle against injustice and when to devote yourself to private projects of self creation...
...Rorty may have an ironical, which is for him to say potentially skeptical, view of everything else, but he is downright devout about his pragmatism and this is reflected in his character...
...In the seventies, Rorty developed a keen interest in continental philosophy, especially in the writings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida...
...Ideas become true just so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience" (William James...
...In this waist-up snapshot Rorty is clad in a white coat and a blue oxford shirt, opened at the collar...
...I was," he comments, "uneasily aware that there was something a bit dubious about this esotericism--this interest in socially useless flowers...
...The doors...
...I rapped on Rorty's office door with a fear and trembling...
...Psychoanalysts teach that we can learn a lot about a person by keeping a third eye on the way he or she makes us feel...
...A colleague of Rorty' s offered a similar assessment, saying that she had met with him a number of times and found it very difficult to draw him into a dialogue...
...In a footnote to a recent essay, Rorty proclaimed that of the current generation of American intellectuals only Harold Bloom is certain to be read into the twenty-second century...
...He couldn't shut them...
...In a piquant autobiographical essay which appeared in the quarterly Common Knowledge, Rorty recalls: I grew up knowing that all decent people were if not Trotskyites at least socialists...
...He looks relaxed and satisfied...
...While Rorty denies that he is attempting to close the lid on philosophy, the calling of philosophy does not seem to have the same hold on him that it once did...
...In the process, he has become one of the most influential and controversial philosophers in the world...
...Nor is he dismissive...
...Thus for some time now, Rorty has been trying to talk philosophers out of their grandiose self-images...
...With the exception of Anglo-analytic thinkers, from whom most of us were trying to take our cues, European philosophers were regarded as pseudo-philosophers...
...In order to break the spell of this image, Rorty tries to convince his readers that the mirror image is just that--an image, that is, one description among many possible other descriptions, as opposed to a philosophical intuition with special claims to the truth...
...One of the walls of his quite humble office is packed with a post office of cubby holes, each of which contains a fresh manuscript...
...Rorty does not make a lot of eye contact...
...At a loss for colleagues with sympathetic interests, he put out feelers for another position, preferably one in a department other than philosophy...
...While critics on the left call Rorty "complacent," critics on the right chide him for being a relativist...
...The background is lush green sprinkled with pink impatiens...
...I suggested that he might be mistaken about the corrosive effects of the sacred...
...Rorty psychologizes that we can promote social justice only by expanding the circle of our community, by increasing the scope of our feeling of solidarity...
...The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of mind as a great mirror containing various representations-some accurate, some not--and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods...
...With this aim in mind, he offers a historical narrative explaining how and why this conception took such a tenacious hold upon the Western mind...
...Over the years, Rorty has tried to show the extent to which philosophical theories are driven by metaphors...
...I am convinced that this misconception derives from two sources--the elegance of his writing style and the color photo of him that appears on each of his last three books--twice on the back and once on the cover...
...As he leaned back in his chair and offered his monotonic life story, I had the distinct impulse to shout, "Cheer up, you've hit an intellectual gear that very few people reach, you've a wide and eager audience, and a great deal to say...
...Pluck out the ocular metaphors and they should all disappear...
...Contrary to all the sermons I have delivered in my Philosophy 101 class, Rorty proclaims that we do not need philosophy to underwrite our views of justice, knowledge, or almost anything else...
...And that is precisely how Rorty finds most social, moral, and political theory-useless and boring...
...Rorty is the kind of person that you would expect a pragmatist to be--democratic, tolerant, confident, and not one to dramatize either his life or his calling...
...We all guffawed as if to say, how could anyone be so thick as to take this metaphysical mumbo-jumbo for philosophy...
...How so...
...In a recent telephone interview, Robert Pipin, chairperson of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, told me that he believed this book would be read by students for the next fifty to one hundred years...
...But there are qualities about Rorty that speak above his reticence...
...That was it...
...I do not think there are any plain moral facts out there in the world, nor any truths independent of language, nor any neutral grounds on which to stand and argue that either torture or kindness are [sic] preferable to the other (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity...
...On my reckoning, it was an empirical question as to whether or not faith was salutary for a society...
...Academics reveal something important about themselves in the way they handle the often nebulous issue of intellectual debt...
...Rorty is dead wrong on that issue and he himself is evidence of it...
...Thanks in large part to therapeutic effects of the work of Richard Rorty, American philosophers have become less snobbish and more inclusive...
...He speaks in a voice that is somewhere between subdued and melancholic...
...Having taken both his bachelor's and master' s degrees at the University of Chicago, Rorty moved on to Yale to do his doctoral work in philosophy...
...Rorty is able and willing to draw from a wide variety of philosophical descriptions...
...As Rorty quite candidly puts it, "I wanted a way to be both an intellectual and spiritual snob and a friend of humanity--a nerdy recluse and a fighter for justice...
...If he finds it useless and boring that is all the more reason...
...Push with chest, arms, head...
...While Rorty may have dedivinized everything else, he has sacralized the idea of conversation...
...active enough to use their home in the hills of northwestern New Jersey as a safe haven for one of Stalin's assassination targets...
...For the last forty years or so, he has been reflecting on the question of the value of philosophy...
...And deservedly so---on both counts...
...Indeed, I can recall a graduate seminar that I was in only ten years ago in which the professor read a few lines from a random page of Heidegger's Being and Time...
...Rorty remarks, "The right's hostility is largely explained by the fact that the rightist thinkers don't think that it is enough just to prefer democratic societies...
...sition at the top of the hierarchy of disciplines, stop identifying our professional practices with "rational thought" or"clear thought" we shall be in a better position to grant Dewey's point that our discipline is no more able to set its own agenda than is engineering or jurisprudence...
...It is true that Rorty took a few knocks, but the vast majority of the philosophers whom I have talked with consider Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature a not-so-minor classic...
...Understandably, many philosophers have read Rorty' s work as a suicide of philosophy...
...It is clear that Rorty delights in the playful brilliance of Jacques Derrida...
...The philosopher Richard Bernstein called this work, "one of the most important and challenging books to be published by an American philosopher in the last few decades...
...For all his rhetoric to the effect that our public or moral interests do not hold any natural rank over our private projects (e.g., reading Proust or searching for wild orchids), Rorty's private and public interests seem to be in natural sync...
...Rorty deconstructs a number of these guiding images, the most important of which is the picture of the mind as a great mirror: It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions...
...More self-consciously than other members of his guild, Rorty has cast a few images of his own...
...His parents were both free-lance writers who published in such magazines as Harper's, Commonweal, and Commentary.They were also active Trotskyites...
...There is a gentleness about Rorty...
...Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant--getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror so to speak--would not Richard E. McMullen He Noticed The tops...
...Rorty is occasionally described as genteel...
...Attribute an idea to Rorty and he is more than likely to say that he got it from someone else...
...Rorty' s tastes are in witty, provocative, self-consciously aesthetic writing...
...That is, if philosophers could stop thinking of the mind as a mirror, they could excuse themselves from the impossible and unnecessary task of trying to go through the looking glass to establish that our images actually reflect the objects they purport to represent...
...But I also had private, weird, Commonweal snobbish, incommunicable interests...
...In 1961, the preeminent classicist Gregory Vlastos recruited Rorty to teach Aristotle at Princeton...
...What got Rorty into trouble with thinkers on the left, got him in trouble with the right as well...
...At the same time, he was circling back and becoming deeply absorbed in a study of John Dewey, the philosopher who was "always in the air" of his parents' home...
...This character sketch was a recipe for an interviewer's nightmare...
...Obviously the relativism of Rorty's view is alien to Thomism and the Catholic natural law tradition...
...One of the things that Rorty found chafing about analytic philosophy was the tendency of its practitioners to pass judgment upon certain voices and exclude them from the conversation of philosophy...
...Besides "brilliant," the terms most frequently used to describe Rorty are "shy," "urbane," and "introverted...
...Ask Rorty almost any question and he will begin, "a pragmatist would say...
...Rorty's head is tilted...
...He remained there for twenty-one years...
...For the first and only time in our conversation Rorty seemed somewhat uncomfortable...
...While I would not want to offend him by describing him as a moralist, Rorty the sexagenarian is fighting what the youngster Rorty would have taken to be the good fight, the best way he knows how--by writing gleaming essays on social issues and the curriculum of our sentimental education...
...Screw and screw them on...
...Before speaking with him, I was warned by an admiring quondam student that there is a certain irony about Rorty...
...All too tersely stated, pragmatism is the view that there is no absolute truth...
...If it is good for anything, it is for the rather marginal purpose of squaring apparently inconsistent theories...
...The target of many vitriolic attacks, he rarely responds in kind...
...Richard Rorty felt the bite of philosophy at a very tender age...
...At one point in our discussion Rorty mentioned that there was no one that he profited more from reading than the lit crit and wiseacre, Stanley Fish...
...L~ orty was born in 1931...
...But no matter what side you would be inclined to take in this debate, Rorty is essential reading for anyone eager to get a sense of philosophy in the present age...
...Rorty made me feel like shaking him...
...He does not get his back up when you press him with a question of potentially critical import...
...Rorty came to the University of Chicago looking for an absolute which would enable him to justify one side of himself to the other...
...He couldn't open them...
...Given the role of theory or general ideas in leftist critique, it is no wonder that Rorty' s apostasy of theory has irked critics on the left...
...Unscrew and unscrew them...
...Rorty was generous enough to place a stack of his thoughts in my hand...
...Amongst novelists, he scarcely ever mentions Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, but the names Proust and Nabokov are always on his pen...
...This debate, which, more than any other, defines philosophy today, is a debate as to whether or not philosophers ought to continue spending their time trying to construct presuppositionless arguments capable of justifying their views to any and all rational creatures...
...He never got done...
...I wanted to find some intellectual or aesthetic framework which would let me--in a thrilling phrase which I came across in Yeats--"hold reality and justice in a single vision...
...As a teen-ager, Rorty took great pride in being able to find and identify (by their Latin names) seventeen species of wild orchid...
...As an undergraduate, Rorty threw himself into the study of the great absolutists of Western culture, but he never found the overarching theory that he was looking for...
...Such an admission would help us to dispense with the idea that scientific and political developments require "philosophical foundations"--the idea that judgment must remain suspended on the legitimacy of cultural novelties until we philosophers have pronounced them authentically rational (Philosophy and the Future...
...There is no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible...
...His most recent essays bear titles such as, "Feminism and Pragmatism," "Love and Money," and "Tales of Two Disciplines...
...Before taking leave, I asked Professor Rorty if I could get a glimpse of some of his most recent work...
...The suggestion is that there is scarcely any connection between a philosopher's words and deeds, or his theory and character...
...And yet, warned his student, he is not a very good conversationalist--at least not until you get to know him for a few years...
...My fears were not entirely in vain...
...Again, Rorty confesses: ...there is no answer to the question "Why not be cruel...
...Arguing that such projects are both hopeless and needless, Richard Rorty is the doyen of antifoundationalism...
...After trying to rehearse some philosophical problems with him, and having thrice evoked a yawning response, I mentioned that he did not seem to find much of interest in the field today...
...The herd of Rorty' s colleagues come to discussions as though it were almost always a case of mortal ego combat...
...Not long ago, I traveled to the University of Virginia, where Commonweal 6 May 1994:11 Rorty is the University Professor of Humanities (N.B., not philosophy...
...And it ought to be, as it was instrumental in breaking the stranglehold that the analytic approach to philosophy had upon the discipline at that time...
...Pull with both hands, leaning back, heels dug in...
...L et us examine for a moment the list of scribblers that bring a smile to Rorty's face...
...An only child, he is the D maternal grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch-one of the initiators of the social gospel movement in America...
...Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy consists of "conceptual analysis" or "phenomenological analysis" or "explication of meanings" or examination of the "logic of our language" or of "the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness" would not have made sense (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature...
...Rorty doesn't...
...The image tells you that he must have a mint julep in his hand...
...Not Rorty...
...Insofar as I had any project in mind, it was to reconcile Trotsky and the orchids...
...The activities in quotes mark the dead-end obsessions that define analytic philosophy...
...Characteristically, Rorty rejects the charge of relativism by refusing to answer it...
...As they see it, Rorty would have a different opinion of the value of theory if he had his office among the Have-nots...
...For different reasons, similar judgments were passed upon American philosophers such as William James and John Dewey...
...One also has to believe that they are objectively Good...
...Rorty continues: At fifteen I escaped from the bullies who regularly beat me up on the playground of my high school (bullies who, I assumed, would somehow wither away once capitalism had been overcome) by going off to the so-called Hutchins College of the University of Chicago...
...I knew that the point of being human was to spend one's life fighting social injustice...
...He seems on the whole to be refreshingly insouciant about racking up philosophical patents...
...I knew that poor people would always be oppressed until capitalism was overcome...
...The Rorty that I met was a somewhat hunched and shuffling figure, dressed in drab colors...
...Such as an interest in wild orchids...
...After four years and a dissertation titled, "The Concept of Potentiality in Aristotle and the Seventeenth Century Rationalists," Dr...
...When quizzed about the reception of this book, which has already been translated into six languages, Rorty replied, "Though disliked by most of my fellow philosophy professors, this book had enough success among nonphilosophers to give me a selfconfidence I had previously lacked...
...Like the therapeutic discovered and so richly detailed by Philip Rieff, Rorty has a certain distrust of the yak yak yak of conscience...
...save in the sense that he would eventually conclude that overarching theories are both illusory and unnecessary...
...Rorty moved on to a two-year teaching stint at Wellesley...
...Rorty confesses: "I share Nabokov's suspicion of general ideas when it comes to philosophers' attempts to squeeze our moral sentiments into rules for deciding 14:6 May 1994 moral dilemmas" (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity...
...Unlike many of the masterminds who soon forget how quickly they will be forgotten, Rorty is devoid of pretensions...
...One of the metaphors that has stuck is the image of philosophy as a conversation...
...Rorty is of the deepseated conviction that it is possible to be a self-consistent Nazi...
...He has, of late, been publishing conclusions such as this: If we [philosophers] stop preening ourselves on our poIP GORDON D. MARINO is a philosopher at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy...
...Commonweal 6 May 1994:13 have made sense...
...Without the notion of the mind as mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself...
...There is a broad, warm smile upon his face--a smile that I never saw...
...Then I pressed him, "Is there any contemporary philosopher or philosophical problem that you do find interesting...
...He is, after all, trivializing a problem complex with which generations of philosophers have identified themselves...
...Ask him a question and he is likely to scrunch up for a moment, fold his hands on the table, look out the window, and respond...
...He was neverthrough...
...In both his conversations and his prefaces, Rorty is believably munificent...
...His fresh start began in 1982 when Rorty accepted the appointment he currently holds in the Department of the Humanities at the University of Virginia...
...If he finds something boring that is reason enough to disregard it...
...At one point in our discussion, I challenged him about his occasionally stated mis12:6 May 1994 sion to dedivinize everything he possibly could...
...In a famous, or if you prefer infamous, footnote addressing the fact that one of his heroes, the metaphysician Heidegger, was a Nazi, Rorty remarks: On the general question of the relation between Heidegger' s thought and his Nazism, I am not persuaded that there is much to be said except that one of the century's most original thinkers happened to be a pretty nasty character...but if one holds the view which I put forward...one will be prepared to find the relation between the intellectual and moral virtues, and the relation between a writer's books and other parts of his life, contingent (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity...
...Rorty came to prominence in the late seventies with the publication of his epiphanic Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature...
...What do all of these authors share in common...
...What the Nazi lacks is not a theory of morality, but rather a heart, or the right set of feelings...
...In his early adolescence he was already keeping company with Plato, Dewey, and others...
...In this regard, Rorty follows Hume and Schopenhauer...
...Commonweal...
...Still, Rorty's philosophical exploration of narrative and historical contingency should be of interest to adherents of biblical and revealed religion...
...He is also someone who is as obedient to his taste as some people are to their consciences...
...n Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argues that philosophers have been entranced by images and metaphors which much sooner than later became accepted as literal truths...
...In his greeting, he does not give you the sense that he is particularly glad to see you...
...Rorty, who has publicly stated, "I think our country--despite its past and present atrocities and vices...is a good example of the best kind of society so far invented," is regarded by certain leftist thinkers as an apologist for the Haves...
...The others, he noticed, made all their things so heavy, so tight...
...As Rorty recounts it, at this time the judgment at Princeton and 98 percent of the philosophy departments around the country was that these were not serious philosophers...
...SHATTERING PHILOSOPHY'S MIRROR A CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD RORTY GORDON D. MARINO ~ or all too long, the mainstream of American philosophers wanted nothing to do with their European counterparts...
...After a long pause, he replied that he found the work of the feminist legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, engaging...
Vol. 121 • May 1994 • No. 9
