Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980

by Richard Rorty

Rorty seeks to tie philosophy’s past to its future by connecting what he sees as the positive (and neglected) contributions of the American pragmatic philosophers to contemporary European developments. What emerges from his explorations is a revivified version of pragmatism that offers new hope for the future of philosophy.“Rorty’s dazzling tour through the history of modern philosophy, and his critical account of its present state (the best general introduction in print), is actually an argument that what we consider perennial problems--mind and body, consciousness and objects, the foundations of knowledge, the fact/value distinction--are merely the dead-ends this picture leads us into.” Los Angeles Times Book Review“It can immediately be said that Consequences of Pragmatism must be read by both those who believe that they agree and those who believe that they disagree with Richard Rorty. [He] is far and away the most provocative philosophical writer working in North America today, and Consequences of Pragmatism should make this claim even stronger.”The Review of Metaphysics“Philosophy, for Rorty, is a form of writing, a literary genre, closer to literary criticism than anything else, a criticism which takes for one of its major concerns the texts of the past recognized as philosophical: it interprets interpretations. If anyone doubts the continued vigor and continuing relevance of American pragmatism, the doubts can be laid to rest by reading this book.” Religious Studies Review

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) developed a distinctive and controversial brand of pragmatism that expressed itself along two main axes. One is negative—a critical diagnosis of what Rorty takes to be defining projects of modern philosophy. The other is positive—an attempt to show what intellectual culture might look like, once we free ourselves from the governing metaphors of mind and knowledge in which the traditional problems of epistemology and metaphysics (and indeed, in Rorty's view, the self-conception of modern philosophy) are rooted. The centerpiece of Rorty's critique is the provocative account offered in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979, hereafter PMN). In this book, and in the closely related essays collected in Consequences of Pragmatism (1982, hereafter CP), Rorty's principal target is the philosophical idea of knowledge as representation, as a mental mirroring of a mind-external world. Providing a contrasting image of philosophy, Rorty has sought to integrate and apply the milestone achievements of Dewey, Hegel and Darwin in a pragmatist synthesis of historicism and naturalism. Characterizations and illustrations of a post-epistemological intellectual culture, present in both PMN (part III) and CP (xxxvii-xliv), are more richly developed in later works, such as Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, hereafter CIS), in the popular essays and articles collected in Philosophy and Social Hope (1999), and in the four volumes of philosophical papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991, hereafter ORT); Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991, hereafter EHO); Truth and Progress (1998, hereafter TP); and Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007, hereafter PCP). In these writings, ranging over an unusually wide intellectual territory, Rorty offers a highly integrated, multifaceted view of thought, culture, and politics, a view that has made him one of the most widely discussed philosophers in our time.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

One the best books that argues for the continuation of American Pragamatism in the face of current Philosophy. A good primer, as well as for the advanced thinker. One of the more apt titles if you are interested in Pragmatism beyond Pierce and Dewey.

[saml · Rating 4 out of 5]

rorty's clever because he advocates for the academic permissibility of precisely his thing, a happy pluralism for nontechnical namedroppers. what's more, he basically makes a virtue of being a good writer, which is good for him, as he is a good writer. you have to respect the hustle. this wore a little thin and repetitious: rorty basically asserts that we don't do Philosophy any more, and then spends a long time pondering what to do instead. the answer, it turns out, is something else

[Michael A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5. This is my first engagement of any kind with Rorty (or pragmatism). I am unsure about Rorty's reasons for believing the things that he does, but I generally agree with his conclusions. I think Rorty is pretty firmly on the Analytic side of philosophy, just one that engages with Heidegger and Derrida and doesn't seem to engage much in symbolic logic. But of course as he points out in his last essay, the split doesn't (or shouldn't) matter - the divide can exist without hostility, professors and students should know both about foucault and about kripke, for example. Hard to argue with that.

The best place to start, I think, is the introduction then essay 9 "Pragmatism, Relativism, Irrationalism". I do have some critiques of Rorty, mostly that I feel like his theory of truth is so deflationary that it nearly becomes a pointless concept. Maybe that's the point. But if his version of truth is correct, then he pretty much presupposes a kind of Wittgensteinian language-game (and well, pragmatic) view of language that he can't ever justify - but he'd probably be okay with that.

It just sort of raises the question for me that, following his own theories, what compels Rorty to even write? Perhaps to add his own redescription to the prestigious literary genre known as philosophy. Or perhaps he has not actually moved into any sort of post-philosophical territory as he ostensibly wanted.

[Marcus Vinicius · Rating 5 out of 5]

The pragmatism, as Rorty conceived it, is a challenge for everyone whose epistemology embraces metaphysical concepts. In this book, Richard Rorty tries to describe his conception of pragmatism, based in a peculiar reading of Pierce, Dewey and James.

[VII · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rorty is always great, but this is simply a collection of papers so it is inevitably, way too academic for non-philosophers. Start with Contingency, Irony, Solidarity even though his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is his most important one, since it’s also kind of difficult.

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched the film "Children of Men" (so now I have to read the book). That got me thinking about the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks and their political use/utility. The value of "science fiction" in its many forms is that it gets us thinking about conceptual frameworks different - slightly or grandly - from what we know. While we might not think there are real people who become Spiderman or Batman, we do have heroes who sacrifice much for the many. One wonders why, or why not. Slavoj Zizek said in a video interview about "Children of Men", "World means when you have a meaningful experience of what reality is, which is rooted in your community, in its language, and it is clear that the true, most radical impact of global capitalism is that we lack this basic, literally, world view. A meaningful experience of totality. Because of this, today, the main mode of politics is fear. The motive – how you mobilize people – it’s fear. Political groups today are bands of people who are afraid, who are mobilized by fear – fear of immigrants, even leftists, fear of too-strong state, fear of taxation. This is the definition of infertility, when your mobilizing principle is just pleasure and fear. This, again, I think, it’s the very sad indiciation of where we stand today." Tzvetan Todorov suggests something similar: that the paradigm functioning today is a dichotomy between humiliation and fear. Fear is just as powerful a source of violence. We are so afraid of what will happen, we accept torture, and if you are really frightened, you get accustomed to different transgressions of the rule of normal life between human beings. I'm interested in the utility of utopianism even while I firmly believe in its danger. I am reading Rorty because of his focus on pragmatism. As a historian, or maybe it's the reason I became historically trained, I must consider Hegel's historicism. It gives more hope than fear. Though I have yet to read John Keegan's work on the experience of war.

[Shane Wagoner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard Rorty has managed to assess and attack the weaknesses underpinning analytic philosophy more effectively than almost any other intellectual. He writes from the perspective of an outsider with suspicious ties to the continental tradition, yet his analytic heritage prevent him from being ignored or avoided by his colleagues.

Rorty starts with the critiques of Quine and Sellars upon the fact/value and analytic/synthetic distinctions and moves to deconstruct the illusion of representational truth that has held so much sway in the west. What results is a world of eternally morphing vocabularies and utter indifference towards any kind of "grounding" for our beliefs and practices. This leads Rorty to emphasize use over knowledge (in the style of Dewey), thus placing science and philosophy on equal footing with the humanities. Indeed, for Rorty philosophy is nothing more than its own kind of literary criticism.

This book serves as an excellent introduction to Rorty's controversial ideas and will keep its audience captive long after the final page is turned.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

SOME OF RORTY'S MOST INTERESTING ESSAYS

Richard McKay Rorty (1931-2007) was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, Stanford University, etc. He wrote many other books such as 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,' 'Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,' 'Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth,' 'Essays on Heidegger and Others,' etc.

He wrote in the Preface to this 1982 collection, "This volume contains essays written during the period 1972-1980... I no longer agree with everything said in these essays... nor are they entirely consistent with each one another. I reprint them nevertheless because... the general drift of what they say still seems right."

He states in the Introduction, "the ONLY debating point which the realist has is his conviction that the raising of the good old metaphysical problems (are there REALLY universals?...) served some good purpose... was important. What the pragmatist wants to debate is just this point. He ... [wants] to discuss ...WHETHER the practice which hopes to find a Philosophical way of isolating the essence of Truth has, in fact, paid off... The real issue is about the place of Philosophy in Western philosophy, the place of... texts which raise the `deep' Philosophical problems which the realist wants to preserve." (Pg. xxix)

He suggests, "The modern Western `culture critic' feels free to comment on anything at all. He is a pre-figuration of the all-purpose intellectual of a post-Philosophical culture, the philosopher who has abandoned pretensions to Philosophy... He is a name-dropper... His specialty is seeing similarities and differences between great big pictures... But, since he does not tell you about how all POSSIBLE ways of making things hang together MUST hang together---since he has no extra-historical Archimedean point of this sort---he is doomed to become outdated." (Pg. xl)

He argues, "we encounter some of the same hard questions... such borderline cases as fetuses, prelinguistic infants, computers, and the insane---Do they have civil rights?... Are they thinking or acting on instinct?... Is that a word to which they assign a sense, or are they just sounding off on cue? I doubt that many philosophers believe any longer that procedures for answering such questions are built into `our language' waiting to be discovered by `conceptual analysis.'" (Pg. 11)

He observes, "no man can serve both Locke and Hegel. Nobody can claim to offer an `empirical' account of something called `the inclusive integrity of experience'... if he also agrees with Hegel that the starting point of philosophic thought is bound to be the dialectical situation in which one finds oneself caught in one's own historical period... Only someone who thought, with Locke, that we can free ourselves from the problems of the day and pursue a `plain, historical method' in examining the emergence of complex experiences out of simple ones..." (Pg. 81)

He points out, "philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not HAVE arguments or theses. They are connected with their predecessors... in the `family resemblance' way in which latecomers in a sequence of commentators are connected with older memories of the same sequence... The twentieth-century attempt to purify Kant's general theory ... by turning it into philosophy of language is, for Derrida, to be countered by making philosophy ever more impure---more unprofessional, funnier, more allusive, sexier, and above all, more `written.'" (Pg. 93)

Later, he adds, "Derrida does not want to comprehend Hegel's books; he wants to play with Hegel. He doesn't want to write a book about the nature of language; he wants to play with the texts which other people have thought they were writing about language." (Pg. 96) He continues, "Derrida... has no interest in bringing `his philosophy' into accord with common sense... He is... protesting against the notion that the philosophy of language ... is something more than one more little quaint little genre, that it is first philosophy." (Pg. 97)

He asserts, "If I am right in my historical account, philosophers will not regain their old position unless they can once again offer a view about the ultimate nature of reality to compete with that of science. Since idealism is the only interesting suggestion along these lines they have come up with, only if they can resurrect idealism will the rest of the culture take their pretensions seriously. The one event seems as unlikely as the other." (Pg. 148) In a later essay, he adds, "it has become more and more apparent to nonphilosophers that a really professional philosopher can supply a philosophical foundation for just about anything. This is one reason why philosophers have in the course of our century, become increasingly isolated from the rest of culture. Our proposals to guarantee this and clarify that have to strike our fellow-intellectuals as merely comic." (Pg. 169)

He says, "One such [factitious] question is, `Are these Continental philosophers really PHILOSOPHERS?' Analytic philosophers, because they identify philosophical ability with argumentative skill and notice that there isn't anything they would consider an ARGUMENT in a carload of Heidegger or Foucault, suggest that these must be people who tried to be philosophers and failed, incompetent philosophers. This is as silly as saying that Plato was an incompetent sophist..." (Pg. 224)

These (relatively) early essays contain some of Rorty's most interesting writing; they are "must reading" for anyone studying Rorty, and important reading for any student of contemporary philosophy.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

【Philosophy Journalism / Richard Rorty / Consequences of Pragmatism】

"Richard Rorty is unendurable! I can't like his works at all nor find him interesting! He's always boasting with critiquing others on every rapid ground! He's not a real philosopher!"

"Oh, he's not a philosopher"

I'm not critiquing his philosophy in this remark, but look at the fourth chapter of this book. "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture." It's probably belonging to a different discipline from pragmatism. In this essay, he even said that "Novels and poems are now the principal means by which bright youth gains a self-image." One of the most careless philosophical observations done by a seemingly first-rate philosopher. But...he wasn't a philosopher. He was an excellent journalist whose coverage was philosophy.

It's not a bad thing to keep him within the philosophical discourses as a great amateur, even if he's as dogmatic as calling Wittgenstein'd works "satire" or mix everyone he liked with John Dewey. Having some potential outsider within is good for a field.

Even though he distinguished "criticism of culture" from philosophy, he was exactly a person in the former field. For example, he was critical about Derrida and wrote an essay on him, which accuses him of how he contributed to the pursuit of endless crosstalk. It might work well on other subjects, but is it really a way out of the clutch? Wasn't it what those analytic philosophers such as GEM Anscombe had already shown?

However, I must thank this great amateur as well. He never ignored Russell the philosopher of logical atomism, not Russell the mathematician or Russell the essayist. Moreover, his criticism on textualist thinkers taking a lot of pages from idealists, like Emerson to modern American critics. I must add the line from Francois Mauriac and Andre Gide to Jacques Derrida, too.

[Jonny M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these essays were good, however a few are difficult to read (which can be skipped) if you’re unfamiliar with the individual works/ideas of the authors that discuss. For me the essays looking at the ideas of Heidegger and Dewey were quite interesting and it was notable that Rorty’s prefaced comment about some of his earlier ideas being different to later holds true in comparison to some of his later works. You can see his thoughts emerging towards the idea of irony that he introduces properly in his 1989 book.
If you’re relatively new to Rorty (like I am) this can be a bit of a difficult read and jumps over the place: I would recommend Philosophy and Social Hope as many of these essays require less understanding of many different philosophers.

[Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoogst-problematisch. Rorty is een Capo.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

The intro is a fantastic summary of pragmatism. I mostly skimmed the rest of the essays.

[Harry Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

8/10

[m · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of essays.

This collection, published after his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), provides readers with various papers/lectures that make-up the groundwork and working-out of ideas that constitute Mirror.

At this stage of his career, Rorty's style of argumentation seems to me a little more flamboyant, more close to the ground, and packing a slightly bigger wallop. He always works at a high level of abstraction, but in these essays it seems to me that he's more willing to fight in the trenches, to work at a lower altitude than Mt. Olympus.

These papers seem have more detail & punch that in later, very similar versions published in his four (or is it now five?) volumes of Collected Papers.

If one likes a particular rock band or author, one often finds that artists' early works to be richest in allusion, in wildness, in swinging-for-the-fences. If one likes new albums from Bruce Springsteen or U2, one will almost certainly love, and even prefer, their earlier releases, when the world was young & they were still finding their groove.

Chapter 8, "Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism" (9,300 words) is excellent, and available here:

https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Cour...

https://archive.org/details/consequen...

[Lauren Albert]

A little repetitious at times--although that is likely to happen in a collection of essays written for separate occasions. One thing I found extremely irritating was his use of Ancient Greek words without providing translations. It seems a form of snobbery--if you can't understand it, you don't deserve to know it anyway.

Despite these two things, i found it worth reading. He can explain things with great clarity when he tries and his writing can be good. That's what made his use of Greek surprising as well as annoying. "Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its." Pg. xliii 7/09

[Diego · Rating 4 out of 5]

en las consecuencias del pragmatismo Rorty trata de delinear las diferencias entre algunas de las tradiciones filosóficas y argumentativas más representativas dentro de la filosofía, la lógica y la ciencia, trata de crear una distinción particularmente entre los la filosofía "platonista" o trascendental y la positivista, en su argumento lleva al lector a tratar de entender la realidad del pragmatismo en el mundo moderno.

[jeremiah]

Philosophy, Rorty says here, is a kind of writing. I, however, prefer Cavell's vague definition: philosophy is education for grownups.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very insightful. Good discussion that steers off the beaten path to do not literary criticism, but philosophical criticism.