Philosophy as Poetry

Page-Barbour Lectures

by Richard Rorty, Mary Varney Rorty (Afterword), Michael Bérubé (Introduction)

Undeniably iconoclastic, and doggedly practical where others were abstract, the late Richard Rorty was described by some as a philosopher with no philosophy. Rorty was skeptical of systems claiming to have answers, seeing scientific and aesthetic schools as vocabularies rather than as indispensable paths to truth. But his work displays a profound awareness of philosophical tradition and an urgent concern for how we create a society. As Michael Bérubé writes in his introduction to this new volume, Rorty looked upon philosophy as "a creative enterprise of dreaming up new and more humane ways to live." Drawn from Rorty’s acclaimed 2004 Page-Barbour lectures, Philosophy as Poetry distills many of the central ideas in his work. Rorty begins by addressing poetry and philosophy, which are often seen as contradictory pursuits. He offers a view of philosophy as a poem, beginning with the ancient Greeks and rewritten by succeeding generations of philosophers seeking to improve it. He goes on to examine analytic philosophy and the rejection by some philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, of the notion of philosophical problems that have solutions. The book concludes with an invigorating suspension of intellectual borders as Rorty focuses on the romantic tradition and relates it to philosophic thought. This book makes an ideal starting place for anyone looking for an introduction to Rorty’s thought and his contribution to our sense of an American pragmatism, as well as an understanding of his influence and the controversy that attended his work. Page-Barbour Lectures

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2016

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

[Arianne X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reductio ad absomthing

I agree with Rorty, and the general pragmatic frame of mind, that philosophy is about keeping a civil conversation going. Rorty offers a cure for the philosophical infatuation with the eternal, the true and the numinous by refocusing our attention on our existence in the world we actually occupy, Earth, not heaven or hell. In this, philosophy is a method by which we create more humane ways to live. This is why Rorty was so interested in, optimistic about, and saw the importance of, the routine workings of liberal secular democracy. In this regard, I highly recommend his book, ‘Achieving Our Country’, 1998.

My Disagreement:

Where I part company with Rorty is in the claim that all human thought, including science, is nothing more than an alternative sets of descriptive vocabularies or narrative explanations. That is, science is just a different vocabulary rather than an independent path to truth or human enlightenment. In this, ethical principles of human conduct are also nothing more than an alternative description of the human condition or different vocabulary. To me, this is a highly reductionist explanation of human efforts to achieve progress. With this, we run the risk of doubting whether or not there really are any such things as human dignity or human rights. For Rorty, human dignity or human rights are reduced to mere social practices. Rorty himself was a secular liberal pragmatist who valued human dignity and human rights, but he does not offer us a path for achieving a more secular humane liberal pragmatic society. Rorty tells us that we should stop thinking (describing with our vocabulary) that some parts of our culture are more in touch with reality than other parts. If this is the case, how are we to achieve a more secular humane liberal pragmatic society? Am I supposed to believe that working scientists and practicing doctors have no more of a grip on reality than do religious fundamentalists and faith healers? This I cannot do. Are conspiracy theories, cults, and secret societies to be treated as alternative vocabularies or legitimate redescriptions? Where does the pragmatic reduction end? We can believe the scientists and doctors and dismiss the religious believes and faith healers without making any claims about ultimate or final Reality. The judgements of science and medicine are based on more than alternative descriptions. We can only question past scientific and medical findings by accepting a world in which the method of science and the practice of medicine are welded to reality and treated as true. Scientific achievements provide more that a description of reality. They are of course subject to revision, but they are far more than mere descriptions or redescriptions existing only in and because of language. For example, to claim that Newton’s laws of gravity are the equal of any given set of civil/criminal laws is to draw a profound false equivalency fallacy. The rule of reason is not just an equivalent alternative to the will of God as Rorty would have us believe. Reason is not the surrogate God of the Enlightenment. Rorty’s claim that the origin of, or route to, political and social concepts is the same for science is again a false equivalency. Rorty tells us that there is no way of knowing if humanity is headed in the right direction. This I dispute. For example, the abolition of slavery is a move in the right direction. I believe that scientific principles are in a category of knowledge apart from social practices. It is nice to say that philosophy is the creative approach by which we dream up more humane ways of living, but the risk is in offering no outline for how to achieve this outcome and allowing the dream becomes a nightmare. I agree that there is no extra-human reality or non-human truth, or anything more real than our social human embodiment in material reality by which to create this outline, but there is still more to this outline than an alternative vocabulary or new description. Rorty’s position is that it is possible to contemplate forms of human social organization that are better or worse than others, but this cannot be done by appealing to some preexisting standard. I agree, but more is needed. The human social order is set by more than a comparison of the relative advantages and disadvantages of alternative descriptions of things.

My Argument:

My argument is that alternative descriptions and new vocabularies are the only tools offered by Rorty for those of us who think that cruelty is the worst form of human conduct and who see the need to condemn the criminal regimes of the Nazis and the Communists based on a set of objective, real and true standards. These regimes confronted us with ethical realities and moral choices, not alternative descriptions, or different vocabularies. What Rorty offers is not strong enough to avoid such hideous crimes. Ethics is a human invention, but it is not an arbitrary one. It emerges out of our social conditions and human needs; it is a social technology whose progress has been fitful but steady but more than the result of simple redescriptions. I think we can tell the difference between ethical reality and ideological blindness and that this difference matters. On Rorty’s own account of social evolution and pragmatic progress, we should be able to understand that there are indeed grounds, neutral or otherwise, upon which to stand and argue that kindness is preferable to torture, objective standards of truth and final vocabularies, notwithstanding. My concern is that if there is no reality or truth that we come to understand, and only social practice, then we are always at risk for a relapse into cruelty and barbarism. Perhaps this is Rorty’s point, we have nothing more than social practice so let’s get it ‘right’ so to speak. But under Rorty’s pragmatic conception, there is no getting it ‘right’, there are just alternative vocabularies for describing conditions and setting standards. In the course of natural social development, it has been found that empathy and compassion work better for advancing the human condition than do brutality and torture. This means that improving social practices must be grounded on reality if they are to be meaningful and useful. This is just what makes them meaningful and useful. That is, Rorty has it backwards, social practices are adopted because they are closer to reality, they are not closer to reality because they are first adopted and found to be useful. They are useful because they are real, they are not real because they are useful. It is true that things are only real (only defined or described) in relation other things, but it is this very finding that constitutes reality, it is not a refutation of reality. This just is how realty reveals itself to us, in relations. We do not have to pose the separate question of, “what is really Real?” Objective criteria, values, and standards are not provided from outside of human experience, they are result of historical development but once developed they can be treated as permeant and thus operative as true such as empathy, humanitarian concern, and humanistic care. We can settle on objective standards of behavior based on experience and relations as true without claiming knowledge to any transcendent reality or transhistorical truth. Brutality is inferior to empathy as an objective standard, or dare I say it, as an objective truth arrived at through the pragmatic process without discovering a human inner essence or essential being. Empathy is more than a socially useful novelty. I admit, the world can swerve out of control and the future is fully contingent, but it is still difficult to imagine a world in which we cannot see as true that kindness is preferable to torture, final vocabularies and alternative notwithstanding. This just is Reality.

[Timothy · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have not yet read Rorty, you could do a lot worse than beginning with Philosophy as Poetry. These lectures are generally accessible. Originally prepared as lectures, they move at a walking pace presenting Rorty's grand narrative of philosophy. Offering a story and vision of this scope is, I think, what Rorty likes to do best.

Michael Bérubé's introduction does many things well too. Personally, I like the way that it captures some of Rorty's mannerisms (his never dismissive now-what-am-I-to-do-with-that shrugs), but I like best that it captures something of the fraught and exciting Charlottesville scene in the 80's, which Rorty contributed to, in, of all places, a graduate English department. Bérubé tells one anecdote about the Hirsch / Rorty debate which was pretty much par for the course: high drama minus any of the ultimate resolution that many were seeking.

In Rorty's graduate seminar on Freud and Philosophy which Michael mentions, a professor from the English Department sitting in on the seminar declared that Rorty's philosophy had the rigor of what he referred to as a "California beach philosophy." (My own memory is a bit fuzzy, but Rorty's response amounted to a few words that were the equivalent of a shrug. What does one say to a criticism that reduces years of writing and work to a single, flip phrase?)

In that same seminar, after great provocation, Rorty confronted another professor who insisted, almost from the first class, on hijacking the conversation. Rorty finally warned him that he would no longer be welcome if he did not behave--a warning offered in a direct but gentle way. Civil conversation was restored. The professor chose not to return.

In what was for me the most interesting moment of that seminar, another fellow professor from the English department explained to 'Dick' near the beginning of a session why he thought he was misreading one of the books assigned for that week. Rorty considered for a few moments and agreed. He moved his seminar notes to the side and basically spun out a new line of argument on the fly for the rest of the class, following the thread suggested in the criticism. Rorty always fulfilled his role as a listener in the conversational contract with colleagues and students. Someone spoke. He listened. He actually responded to what they had said, not to what he wanted to say next. If he could not parse what they said, or if he perceived that the gap between his words and theirs could not be bridged in a reasonable number of sentences, but required a lot of unavailable conversational time, or that they were merely taking a public ride on their favorite hobbyhorse--shrug.

I can't recall the commentator who, upon seeing/hearing Rorty for the first time referred to his presence and presentation as that of Eeyore of Pooh fame. It is a deft observation. When those who have only read him finally see/hear him for the first time, they might still disagree with the argument, but they have grudgingly to admire its presentation. Rorty very much cared about the way insights were offered. Style and tone matter for professors, philosophers, and poets.

Philosophy and Poetry, like almost everything Rorty writes, captures his respect for other voices and opposing intellects. His argument is interesting and useful as well. And for some, that is enough.

[Sara Mehri · Rating 5 out of 5]

Would have given it 10000 stars if I could have.

[Gnost · Rating 5 out of 5]

wtf i hate analytic philosophy now

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

These three lectures provide Rorty with the chance to give us an overview of his thoughts on the role of philosophy, both academic and in the “real world,” and the binds that tie philosophy and poetry together. It adds up to a non-traditional but very positive view of philosophy, the same view that got Rorty equal amounts of praise and derision during his career.

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty had separated himself from the traditional view of philosophy (and science as well) as determining ultimate truths and ultimate values. The reaction from traditional philosophers was remarkably strident, especially given that that view had been in doubt, really, from Hume forward. Even the language and logic bound philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century were skeptical if not disdainful of metaphysical claims about ultimate realities.

Here Rorty strategically assigns that hyper traditional view to Platonism. Certainly Plato’s theory of forms epitomizes that metaphysically hardline distinction between appearance and reality (or as Rorty calls it “the really real”).

On the other side, Rorty identifies a tradition of its own, one that he aligns with poetry rather than Plato. That counter-tradition includes, in keeping with Rorty’s influences in American philosophy, Emerson and the later pragmatists, especially William James, as well as other, primarily continental thinkers.

Emerson’s essay, Circles, provides a poignant image to distinguish the two traditions. As theories and interpretations grow, circle upon circles, away from (in Emerson’s original formulation) the eye of the observer, according to the Platonic tradition, those circles of theory and interpretation approach a limit — ultimate reality, the “really real.” In Emerson’s, the pragmatists’, and the thinking of others contributing to the counter-tradition, the circles just grow one upon the other, with, in Emerson’s words, “no inclosing wall.” No “really real” bounds the imagination and poetic creativity of theorists and interpreters. History is an ever-expanding, unlimited series of these circles.

The link between philosophy and poetry here is the act of imagination, or the act of creativity. Philosophy, like poetry, is an activity of the creative imagination, not dry description. It is the role of philosophy to enable imagination to invent new and ever expanding ways of talking about, reasoning about, thinking about, and understanding. Even the object we feel necessary at the end of those verbs needs to be left off — there is no “world” that we talk about, reason about, and think about that isn’t itself part of each of those ways of talking, reasoning, and thinking.

In fact, if there is a candidate object for those verbs, it is not the “world” — it is ourselves, the human experience, without an object of its own to limit and enclose it. In a Nietzschean spirit, an infinity of ways of experiencing.

Hegel stands at a a crossroads between the Platonic tradition and the counter-tradition. I have always thought of Hegel and his predecessor Kant as answering the same question: how is it that the world is intelligible to us? Kant’s answer was transcendental idealism. Hegel’s was historicity — the historical path of knowledge’s conceptualization and realization captured in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

But what Rorty makes clear is that when Hegel asks how the world is intelligible to us, “world” is itself subject to the movement of historicity, that in making the “world” intelligible, what the “world” is must change, as must “intelligibility.” So whereas Kant actually answers the question with a solution, Hegel tells a story, in Rorty’s phrase. A story of the history of “world” and “intelligible.”

But if Rorty is right, where does that leave us?

Doesn’t this make nothing true and nothing right or wrong? A nihilistic razing of all that is true, right, and beautiful? This was the brunt of the reaction of traditional philosophers to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

Well it does if you hang on to the “truly True”, “the goodly Good”, and the “beautifully Beautiful” that Rorty is urging us to reject. What we have after that rejection is what he refers to as “social practices” — I suppose this should really be “sociohistorical practices”. We do after all have ways of determining what is a good reason for saying or doing something, we do have ways of judging right and wrong. (I’ll leave beauty out, as maybe a more complicated story). And those practices (I think Rorty may actually underemphasize) are compelling for us although both historically contingent and historically volatile — this refers to what Heidegger called “thrownness.” They are us, because after all, we are ourselves sociohistorial, and we cannot be other than those sociohistorical practices.

The corollary threat of nihilism is that “anything goes”, that is, that lacking the “really Real”, etc., anything can count as real by virtue of our proclaiming that it is real. But . . . sociohistorical practices. No, proclaiming that the earth is flat will not make the earth flat. We have sociohistorical practices, we ARE sociohistorical practices, that preclude things that count as irrational, unjustified, etc.

If we are so apparently bound by sociohistorical practices, how does historical change happen? Historical change happens when sociohistorical practices change, when imagination, as Rorty calls it, throws a wrench into the practices, and the resulting change takes hold and has the richness to evolve new, sustainable sociohistorical practices (or maybe modified ones, to be less grandiose).

That is the positive role of philosophy as poetry.

One additional element is critical to Rorty’s view of philosophy’s place. And that’s that it does in fact have a role in the “real world” beyond the analytical and descriptive. That poetic activity is, for him, a pragmatic one — one that serves, if we do it well, not just to change human experience but to improve it, where “improvement” is of course to be itself judged in sociohistorical terms. That’s the pragmatic core of Rorty’s thinking.

I’ll stop with a couple of questions, not necessarily objections, just questions to think about.

- Why do our sociohistorical practices have the hold that they have on us? Why can’t we just decide to re-imagine ourselves, as if it were simply a matter of free choice? Why do we take our practices so seriously? We can say, and I think this is at least partly right, that the “socio” part of the “sociohistorical” is powerful — I can’t alone decide to re-imagine who or what we are. A solo practice lacks social engagement. It remains more of a fantasy than a reality, maybe not a “practice” at all. But even such a move, a revision or a rejection or a rethinking of our practices, is an uphill battle in itself, regardless of social acceptance. Those practices ARE us, not just things we participate in. I do think this is something that Heidegger had a bead on with his notion of “thrownness” — that is, that we always find ourselves already in such practices and cannot exist otherwise. We cannot just toss ourselves into limbo.

- What bounds sociohistorical practices? On one hand, history itself and current practices are resistant to change. But there’s another consideration — not just anything works. We cannot re-imagine ourselves in just any old way. We can’t for example re-imagine ourselves as omnipotent gods (try though some of us might). It doesn’t work. How do we characterize that kind of bounding without recalling the “really real” into the picture?

[m · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short book (26,000 words) consist of three fine lectures that Rorty delivered in 2004. The ideas reprinted herein aren't new, but they are nicely & succinctly conveyed.

The originally published version of Chapter 1 (available here) includes 9 meaningful footnotes that do NOT appear in this University of Virginia Press edition — for reasons unexplained & unfathomable to me.

The 900-word Afterword by Mary Varney Rorty, which provides a glimpse into their shared domestic life, is a pleasure to read and much too brief for my liking. I wish dearly that she would pen a much longer essay about the life & work she shared with her husband, well aware that a 8600-word interview with her is available online here. I want more.

Michael Berube's 7000-word Preface to these lectures, which includes two plugs for his own recently published book, raised my hackles.

Dec. 31, 2016

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, stunning, incredibly serious.

[Andrew Carr · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always had an admiration for Rorty. Few write so clearly about topics so complex. That he combines this with uncommon good sense and a judicious scepticism towards the pretences of his profession is all the more appealing.

Rorty, if I can attempt to butcher his lucid prose in a retelling, sees the mental capabilities of humankind (reason, faith, imagination etc) as simply social practices we have evolved in order to survive and get along. And thus they are only understandable and judgeworthy as social practices.

Rorty thus argues for a vision of intellectual life that does away with impossible 'wholesale ideas' such as searching for reality, claiming universal validity or insisting on a single 'actual' definition of a notion such as 'true happiness'. Instead he argues we should focus on 'retail ideas' such as how we may imagine and work towards a better standard of living for us all (a judgement we can only achieve by experimentation and arguments, rather than hoping an external foundation can be found).

As a weekday argument, I buy Rorty's approach. I have little time for the castles in the sky that make up most methodology, nor the pretences of the sciences (mathematical, physical or political) which claim a certainty they are not entitled to, waste vast resources in their misguided pursuit of that claim, and matter only insofar as they are useful (which they often are). We have neither access to, nor the ability to detail an objective basis for our claims. We must therefore argue and debate in generous good humor with each other while fundamentally accepting the limits and essential ignorance of each and everyone one of us. That does not demean intellectual life, it just changes it in a more pragmatic, everyday manner.

And yet, on the weekend over a glass of red wine, I can't help but feel there is something noble and worthwhile about the desire to go beyond the shadows on the cave wall, beyond the phenomenal, beyond paradigms, to wonder about the 'really real'. If we could therefore move 90% of our intellectual culture in Rorty's direction - and all of societies' perception of what intellectuals do - while leaving a happy few to inquire and write big interesting books about what they think they've found, I would see that as ideal.

[Håvard Bamle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rortys prosjekt går ut på å få filosofien til å legge bak seg sitt ontologiske/metafysiske grunnlag: virkeligheten "i seg selv" er ikke verdt å snakke om, for det første fordi vi ikke har noen sannheter som hever seg over det menneskelige språkfellesskapet, og for det andre fordi ingenting vi kan spekulere om dette som vi uansett ikke kan ha kunnskap om vil føre menneskeheten fremover/tjene menneskelige formål.

Jeg er helt uenig i dette prosjektet, både fordi jeg mener det er feilslått (spekulasjoner om sannheten med stor S har stor praktisk verdi for menneskelige samfunn og den individuelle psyken. Religion er et eksempel på dette) og basert på humanistisk arroganse (naturen har altså ingen sannhet utover menneskets språk - og derfor heller ingen virkelighet som filosofien kan si noe om - i følge Rorty.)

Rorty er verdt å ta med seg fordi han kritiserer både den rådende (greske) filosofiske tradisjonen og nye retninger innenfor den analytiske (britiske) og kontinentale (tyske) filosofien. Han trekker frem Emerson, Hegel og Nietzsche (og Wittgenstein) og bruker dem til å vise at det er når noen bryter med den ufravikelige jakten på den alltid udelelige sannheten i filosofien at vi kommer fremover. Pragmatismen kan således bli et nødvendig kontrollorgan for de øvrige filosofiske retningene.

Jeg kan forestille meg at pragmatismen kan komme til sin rette i et fag som litteraturteori: her er man ikke opptatt av sannheter utover det menneskelige språkfellesskapet. Ontologien kan legges til side for å forstå den praktiske meningen med en tekst. Selv her kan imidlertid ikke pragmatismen bli mer enn en fruktbar metode, for litteraturen tar for seg ting som er av betydning for mennesker være det etiske eller ontologiske spørsmål.



Filosofi som Poesi tar for seg filosofiens historie som en serie konkurrerende beretninger og suksessive omfortolkninger av fortiden. Det er dette "sannhet" er i praktisk forstand: de beste forslagene våre på det som er viktig underveis. Sånn sett har filosofi og poesi mye til felles; begge er grunnlagt i forestillingsevnen og realisert i språket. Rorty henviser til Emersons sirkelmetafor for å beskrive det han kaller Narrativ filosofi, altså en filosofi som ikke lar seg begrense av søken etter den ontologiske "bunnen", men alltid forbedrer menneskets forståelse gjennom en stadig utvidende sirkel. (Paradigmer og hermeneutisk tolkning er ikke nevnt i boka, men Rorty har kanskje skrevet om dette andre steder. Bevegelsen til Rorty minner om Hegel, men uten at grunnlaget for bevegelsen ligger i noe transcendent/åndelig og uten det ultimate endemålet Hegel spår.)

[Henrik Maler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was ist der grundlegende Gedankengang von Rorty?
Traditionellerweise postulieren Philosophie und Poesie (der Romantik) eine universelle und zeitlose Wahrheit und beziehen sich auf eine Welt, die sich hinter den erfahrungsgemäß heterogenen Erscheinungen in Zeit und Raum befindet (“appearance-reality-distinction”). Die traditionelle Philosophie jedoch postulierte, dass sie mithilfe der Vernunft zu erlangen ist, die objektive Kriterien aufstellen kann, während die Poesie der Romantiker behauptete, man finde sie mithilfe der Fantasie (”imagination”), welche eine subjektive, private Fakultät ist. “The moral of the lectures taken together is that philosophy and poetry can coexist peaceably if both sides are willing to give up on the attempt to transcend human finitude.” Philosophie und Poesie könnten koexistieren, wenn sie eine Realität hinter den Erscheinungen aufgeben, weil sie sich dann nicht mehr gegenseitig dahingehend widersprächen, wie die Wahrheit zu finden ist: über die Vernunft oder über die Fantasie.

Rorty plädiert dafür, dass beide die Annahme einer Realität hinter den Erscheinungen überwinden sollten, weil die mehr als 2000 Jahre lange Geschichte der Philosophie zeigt, dass solch eine Wahrheit nicht zu finden ist oder zumindest dass, selbst wenn wir sie kennen, wir sie nicht als solche identifizieren können. “Just as the Church had justified certain social practices by saying that they were the will of God, so the Enlightenment had justified others by saying that they were dictated by reason. Both claims were equally empty.” Als Postmoderner der pragmatistischen Ausprägung a la William James und John Dewey findet Rorty, dass die Qualität einer Perspektive nicht mehr auf absolute Vernunft, die eine Korrespondenz zwischen Denken oder Gesagtem und Welt herstellt, beruht — Wissen dieser Korrespondenz ist nicht möglich —, sondern einzig und allein von seiner Nützlichkeit abhängt. Wenn er also sagt: “Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal [objektive Wahrheit] but of surpassing the past”, dann meint er, dass man hinter sich lassen sollte, was nicht mehr nützt. Dazu gehört die “appearance-reality-distinction”. Die Philosophen der Geschichte haben allenfalls Perspektiven aufgezeigt, welche sich richtig genug angehört haben, dass man sie für eine Weile lang glaubt und ausprobiert bis sie sich nicht mehr als nützlich erweisen und man mit neuen Perspektiven experimentiert. Im Effekt heißt das für ein neues Denken:

The old story was about how human beings might manage to get back in touch with something from which they had somehow become estranged—something that is not itself a human creation but stands over and against all such creations. The new story is about how human beings continually strive to overcome the human past in order to create a better human future.

[T]o call an intellectual ‘wise’ no longer means that she has got in touch with something that is more than just a product of the human imagination, something immune to redescription. It is coming to mean instead that she combines a desirable openness to novel proposals with familiarity with the fates that have overtaken many past proposals.

[Rationality] should not be thought of as increased access to the Real but as increased ability to do things—to take part in social practices that make possible richer and fuller human lives.

Rorty glaubt nicht, wir seien unserer Sprache oder dem Diskurs, wie wir ihn vorfinden, ausgeliefert; als hätten wir keine Macht darüber, auf neue Weisen zu sprechen und zu denken. Wir verfügen nämlich über Fantasie (”imagination”), welche nicht determiniert ist durch die Sprache, die wir sprechen, auch wenn diese die Fantasie beeinflussen mag. Fantasie geht der Sprache und Denken voraus. “[I]magination is the source of freedom because it is the source of language.” Wenn Sprache und Denken ein Gefängnis wären, dann könnten wir uns und die Welt nicht verändern. Die Historie zeigt aber, dass wir es können.

Was den Einwand der analytischen Philosophen über eine Gefahr von Irrationalismus anbelangt, verstanden als Willkürdenken (?), besteht zwar, seine Verwirklichung ist jedoch nicht zwangsläufig. Das mag wohl daran liegen, dass Rationalität, verstanden als das Fragen nach Geben von Gründen, nützlich ist.

[O]nce we become historicist enough to realize that the language game we play, and thus our notion of what counts as a good reason, is a result of past contingencies, we may become dubious about the whole idea of having to offer arguments for what we say. We will not make that mistake, however, if we distinguish between rationality as the practice of giving and asking for reasons and rationality as the employment of an innate truth-tracking faculty. To give up on discursive justification would be to give up debating whether to integrate a novelty into our practices. To give up on the notion of a truth-tracking faculty is merely to admit that what counts as discursive justification to one audience will not count as such to another.

There is […] no such thing as nondiscursive access to truth. The search for truth cannot be separated from the search for justification. There is no such thing as simply recognizing the truth when you see it—suddenly recollecting what you have always known, deep down inside. For we are not entitled to call our beliefs true unless we can give satisfactory reasons for them, satisfactory by the lights of those whom we accept as rational interlocutors. But to count as such an interlocutor is simply to be someone who plays the same language game we do.

Man wird zum Beispiel nicht die empirischen Tatsachen außer Acht lassen. “Outside of the natural sciences, reason works within the second world, following paths that the imagination has cleared. But inside those sciences, nature itself shows the way.”

Die Aufgabe der Suche nach objektiven Wahrheiten impliziert also nicht, dass man glauben und tun wird, was man will, so als wäre jede individuelle Perspektive eine Wahrheit mit Recht auf Umsetzung in der Gesellschaft. Man wird nicht jegliche Meinung für wahr halten, sondern nur die, auf die man sich rational einigt und die sich in der Praxis bewährt. Sich nicht mehr zu rechtfertigen ist keine logische Konsequenz des Aufgebens von absoluter Wahrheit, sondern eine des Aufgebens von Rationalität als soziale Praxis, mit der man nach Gründen fragt und Gründe gibt, um neue Perspektiven zu rechtfertigen. Sie wird dazu eingesetzt, um abzuschätzen, wie nützlich eine neue Perspektive ist und ob sie in das Zusammenleben integriert werden soll; was also praktischerweise als Wahrheit gelten sollte.

Inwiefern ist, wie der Titel der Vorlesungsreihe sagt, Philosophie wie Poesie?
Geben Philosophie und Poesie das Postulat einer Realität hinter den Erscheinungen auf, dann haben sie sogar noch mehr gemeinsam. Philosophie wird dann in dreifacher Hinsicht wie Poesie: Erstens ist sie dann einerseits genau so relativ zu Zeit und Ort, weil philosophische Perspektiven anstelle ihrer universellen und ewigen Geltung historisch geprägt sind. “[O]bjective criteria do not drop down from heaven but are themselves historical products. Romanticism suggested that what we call ‘rational standards’ for choosing beliefs and desires are as much up for imaginative grabs as are the vocabularies in which those beliefs and desires are formulated.” Anderseits ist Philosophie genau so wie Poesie relativ zum Subjekt, d.h. zu seiner individuellen Fantasie. “No imagination, no language. No linguistic change, no moral or intellectual progress. Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside the latest circle that imagination has drawn. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that imagination holds the primacy.” Zweitens ist Philosophie — gute Philosophie — dann gleichermaßen kreativ, insofern dass sie neue oder originelle Beschreibungen von Sachverhalten findet, die außerdem nützlich sind. Der Vergleich findet seine Grenze, wenn wir berücksichtigen, dass (gute) Philosophie nicht so viel Wert darauf legt, schön zu klingen. Neue und brauchbare Perspektiven zu finden, steht im Mittelpunkt.

Was sagt Rorty noch über das Wesen und die Aufgabe der Philosophie?
- Philosophie ist genau dann wichtig, wenn eine Kultur instabil wird und geliebte Glaubenssätze bedroht sind. Dann interpretiert sie die Vergangenheit in Bezug auf eine vorgestellte Zukunft neu und schlägt vor, was erhalten und was aufgegeben werden sollte.
- Philosophie ist bestenfalls der in Gedanken festgehaltene Zeitgeist einer Epoche (Hegel).
- Philosophie ist Geschichte: “a matter of understanding how present actualities emerged out of earlier actualities”, “why it took this particular form rather than that at a particular time and place”.

[Peter Wheelwright · Rating 5 out of 5]

the most concise intro to RR...

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

A provocative book, no doubt. Rorty calls for us to retire the appearance/reality dichotomy, and with it, Truth. Rationality is not about finding what reality is like, he argues, but is simply a linguistic and social practice. Over time, we discuss and debate questions, and the conclusions are always tentative, always revisable; it all comes down to consensus, as there is no external, objective standard by which we can ascertain reality.

Rorty's position is a combination of romanticism and pragmatism. Interestingly, at the end, he highlights the inherent tension within such a cocktail: Whereas romanticism is imaginative and future-oriented, pragmatism is conservative, so to speak, and past-oriented. Rather than try to overcome this tension, Rorty simply leaves the question hang: How can an essentially hopeful and experimental attitude be maintained when all we have is past experience to consult and when we have no absolute standards? He says we must necessarily bear this uncertainty owing to our finitude as humans, which is certainly correct.

I'm no neo-pragmatist: I disagree with Rorty's philosophy as a whole, although I agree with him on certain points, e.g., the rejection of so-called "pure reason," philosophy conceived as an aesthetic practice, and the importance of history and interpretation.

But as a whole, Rorty's philosophical vision is utterly groundless. He would acknowledge this happily. I respect that his philosophy serves his politics and that he sets as philosophy's goal the welfare of humanity, happiness, "progress," etc., but there's nothing in his philosophy that could possibly justify this. In fact, he admits that if reason and language are simply tools, if there is no objective reality, and if all is convention, then there is nothing in fascism itself that makes it worse than, let alone different from, science or even "redness." That is, because reason is ultimately linguistic, and because language is, in his words, merely "noises and marks" (5), it follows that religion, art, science, politics, even descriptive universals like "roundness," etc. are equally the same: They are all conventions maintained in imagination, and nothing more.

Rorty is aware of the accusation of social/linguistic constructionism, and I found his defense pretty interesting: “Words like… ‘construction’… refer to causal relations… We can investigate causal relations once we have identified such objects, but there is no point in asking where the world that contains such objects comes from” (16). This is a good point, but it also strikes me as a clever attempt to dance around the actual charge. If "human rights" is just as imagined as the "solidity" of the bed upon which I'm lying, this seems rather troublesome, to put it lightly.

As with the rest of the postmodernists—and I would count Rorty as one—I don't think he should be discarded or rejected outright simply because one disagrees with him or views him as "dangerous," which may well be the case. I think he's worth grappling with.

[Aliosha Bielenberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, beautiful, and profound. Rorty elucidates his version of American pragmatism in three short lectures, delivered at the University of Virginia in 2004. The format shines through: Rorty's writing throughout is clear and compelling. The introduction by Michael Bérubé is interesting and tantalizing, and the afterword by Mary Rorty is wonderfully sweet (though all too brief).
So what does Rorty say? His first two lectures are taken up with the history of philosophy. He begins with a provocative challenge: to get rid of the distinction between appearance and reality, which he relates to the problem of imagination that differentiates poetry from philosophy. To elaborate on this, he eloquently and concisely traces the history of philosophy from Plato through Kant into two major branches: analytic and nonanalytic philosophy. The former tradition is invested in a search for "truth," while the latter is driven by telling better narratives about social practices. Rorty's intervention comes only in the last part of the book, where he highlights the alternative tradition of pragmatism. "James and Dewey," the ur-pragmatists, "asked us to give up the goal of achieving correspondence with the way things intrinsically are, and to settle for that of leading richer human lives" (46). As Rorty elucidates it, pragmatism is "a philosophy of finitude": it acknowledges that we have no real way of measuring progress except through experience. So what we need is to center "the accumulated experience of the race"; what we need is a philosophy that centers wisdom in the sense of "a desirable openness to novel proposals [along] with familiarity with the fates that have overtaken many past proposals" (61). If this project sounds attractive, read Philosophy of Poetry.

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Rorty was my first serious intellectual crush, from which I've never recovered. His writing converted me to pragmatism, which changed the course of my life. And reading him has been one of the great pleasures of my life. He also put me on the path of reading Dewey, which cemented my commitments to pragmatism, democracy, naturalism and Philosophy for Children.

"Intellectual and moral progress is not a matter of getting closer to an antecedent goal but of surpassing the past" (p. 5).

"Nietzsche gave a different answer than Plato's to the question about what makes human being special. He said it was our ability to transform ourselves into something new, rather than our ability to know what we ourselves really are or what the universe is really like. He mocked Plato's appearance-reality distinction, a distinction that most analytic philosophers take for granted" (p. 31).

"There is ... no such thing as nondiscursive access to truth. The search for truth cannot be separated from the search for justification. There is no such thing as simply recognizing the truth when you see it--suddenly recollecting what you have always known, deep down inside. For we are not entitled to call our beliefs true unless we can give satisfactory reasons for them, satisfactory by the lights of those whom we accept as rational interlocutors.... Romanticism becomes the enemy of progress when it elevates private insight over public justifiability ..." (p. 52).

[Bryan Heck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Similar to the way I felt when reading Notes from Underground (for a completely different reason) I feel like I walked away thinking "OH! That's what has been stuck in my head without the words to express it."

But the same time I had several of those moments, I was left asking "Yeah, but what about advances in our society? We can go to the moon now. What is not 'really real' about that?"

I know that I am getting Rorty wrong when I point this out, and that this instant thought is silly and probably severely misguided. But it also is a genuine confusion that is still puzzling to me. To really grasp his view of escaping the prison of Plato for a better union of Romantic and Pragmatist thought sounds beautiful. But I definitely need to read more to understand where I truly misunderstand Rorty's views as a whole.

[Fernando Lopes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good intro to Rorty's thought, but not a lot of substance (I know, bad pun). Mostly an outline of what he thought philosophy's place in culture should be. Eloquent at points, but I feel like he fleshed out the same line of thought in CIS much more vividly and with a lot more in the way of justification.

[Dan Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these pages Rorty attempts to relieve us of some of the aches and pains of the analytic tradition. He does it beautifully, leaving us with a sense of hope as to where our imaginations may take us in the future.

[ger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great way to go through how Rorty proposed we choose to see the world. Thought provoking and very enjoyable.

[Federico Giovannini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best philosopher we've got eversince Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

[Andreas Bodemer · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites. I will re-read this soon.

[Charles Hebenstreit · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.71

[iain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy's quarrel with poetry goes a long way back. Plato thought that poets should be banished from the ideal republic, as they merely produced dangerous illusions. But what if imagination and illusion run all the way down? Is it possible that everything we talk about could have been talked about differently? How can we access Reality and Truth when we are inexorably constrained, not only by our personal perspectives, but also by the necessity of using the unstable, distorting medium of language in order to think and communicate?

First, the appearance/reality distinction comes under attack and is rejected. Everything is appearance, Rorty seems to contend (and so everything is poetry). Imagination is the source of language, and our language is our world. He even suggests that the concept of "redness" was as novel and remarkable as Newton's "gravity", because back then nothing was obvious. Moreover, "gravity" should not be taken to refer to some real entity, as common sense would indicate. Rather, it is simply the expression we use in a 'social practice' that helps us do things better.

I'll attempt to digress with an example. Science teaches that air is "in reality" composed of many invisible molecules. However, I think Rorty might argue that it only seems that way when examined through a scientific lens, a "vocabulary" which has no a priori privileged status in terms of its relation to reality. Nevertheless, Rorty simply wishes that we would stop questioning whether or not science tells us how things "really are". What we do know, at least, is that the scientist's vocabulary is useful, because it enables us to do more things to our surroundings. That is what matters.

I mean, it's fun to think about. And his anti-essentialist, naturalistic approach is very attractive for simply defusing difficult metaphysical problems. If humans are just a part of nature, subject to Darwinian evolutionary logic, it would be strange to suppose that our language connects us to Truth. It is likelier that it is merely a method of communication and persuasion. Rorty even goes to ask if logical argumentation is not merely one rhetorical technique among many. [** I still hold that analytical reasoning is clearer and less likely to cloud the reader's emotions; however, the obscurantist, historicist approaches common in the Continental tradition have their own advantages, particularly in their capacity to conjure up new lines of thought that ordinary language is unable to express.]

Some points were made about progress. It is habitually assumed that societal progress is about reaching an end goal. Intellectual progress is often thought to mean increased knowledge of Reality. Rorty rejects this, arguing that progress is about surpassing the past, not moving towards an end. No definite end exists. Similarly, in language, perfect descriptions do not exist, and imaginative redescription will go on forever, with poets always looking to surpass their predecessors. In any case, progress will require willingness to make dangerous experiments. Imagination is needed to come up with new ways of living . Time will tell us whether or not it is desirable. Human finitude means experience is likely to be our only teacher. A wise intellectual combines openness to experimentation with awareness of the fates that have befallen many past experiments throughout history.

A term used by Michael Bérubé in his introduction stood out to me: "intellectual insouciance". The arguments put forth in this book do seem to cultivate such an attitude. (Not that it is bad. In fact, it is somewhat liberating). Everything becomes a possible "vocabulary" and puzzling ontological/epistemological questions are set aside. Reason, narrative, and poetry are all acceptable persuasive techniques. Instead of trying to investigate the essentially true nature of things, the philosopher's task is to simply dream up new ways of living. All we have to do is to accept or reject social practices, and we typically may rely on history and experience to make our decision easier. Having accepted our human limitations, and having acknowledged that time, not rigor, is the best test of an argument, we may devote our efforts toward creating a better world, without getting lost in pointless questions.

[Yukinosita Yukino · Rating 3 out of 5]

How he went from a very radical departure point to arriving at a very conservative result was quite astounding

[Davis Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really concise and insightful collection of essays. Rorty's ideas on truth, progress, and the purpose of philosophy are as intriguing as they are deflationary, and I love him for that. Rorty dismantles the distinction between appearance and reality which has haunted philosophy since Plato, and proposes philosophy should stop attempting to get at this capital "R" Reality and capital "T" Truth which it has been so preoccupied with, and instead suggests that philosophy should concern itself with description and redescription, interpretation and reinterpretation, all while recognizing that there is no foundational Truth or Reality to which these descriptions and interpretations are attempting to be adequate.

Favorite quote: "Rationality is a matter of making allowed moves within language games. Imagination creates the games that reason proceeds to play. Then, exemplified by people such as Plato and Newton, it keeps modifying those games so that playing them is more interesting and profitable. Reason cannot get outside the latest circle that imagination has drawn."

[Mills College Library]

191 R787h 2016