Philosophical Papers, Volume 4: Philosophy as Cultural Politics

Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

This volume presents a selection of the philosophical papers which Richard Rorty has written over the past decade, and complements three previous volumes of his papers: Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Essays on Heidegger and Others and Truth and Progress. Topics discussed include the changing role of philosophy in Western culture over the course of recent centuries, the role of the imagination in intellectual and moral progress, the notion of 'moral identity', the Wittgensteinian claim that the problems of philosophy are linguistic in nature, the irrelevance of cognitive science to philosophy, and the mistaken idea that philosophers should find the 'place' of such things as consciousness and moral value in a world of physical particles. The papers form a rich and distinctive collection which will appeal to anyone with a serious interest in philosophy and its relation to culture.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Cultural, Anthropology

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

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

[Stan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rorty writes in the Preface to this collection that

Readers of my previous books will find little new in this volume. It contains no novel ideas or arguments.

That's true enough, but I've been reading him for profit for nearly four decades and I still haven't tired of hearing him sing the same old songs that with which he began his blockbuster career in 1979 with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature up until his death in 2007: His constant refrain is up with non-representationalism, down with epistemological realism.

You can read two excellent chapters from this book free online.

Chapter 2, without footnotes, is available here:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/d/...

And Chapter 6, slightly altered, is available here:
http://mitp-content-server.mit.edu:18...

Literature is boring; high-level literary criticism applied to social life is where all the action's at.
I will definitely reread these essays again someday.

06/01/08
03/12/09
05/02/15

[TheTyee.ca]

The philosopher Richard Rorty, who would be 76 tomorrow, died on June 8 of this year of pancreatic cancer, in Palo Alto, California. All of his books, dog-eared, underlined, and well-thumbed, including his most recent one, Philosophy as Cultural Politics (2007), are on my shelves. Along with a lot of other people, I found Rorty just about the most interesting philosopher in America in the last quarter of the 20th century. I don't propose to tell the whole story here of what Rorty thought, but I want to refer to a couple of his ideas that got me (and others) excited about his thinking.

read more ...
http://thetyee.ca/Books/2007/10/03/Ri...

[Jens · Rating 5 out of 5]

8 stars. I am honestly rethinking my beliefs after this book. I maxed out on my kindle highlights, which is a first, so instead of copying quotes as I usually do, I will try to summarize. I read the following quote on Instagram and I was intrigued:

"From Dewey's point of view, the history of philosophy is best seen as a series of efforts to modify people's sense of who they are, what matters to them what is most important."

I liked that. I am mostly interested in moral philosophy, so the issues of "what is important" and "sense of who they are" are in the center of my thoughts.

I’d actually been reading mostly existentialism since the beginning of the year, as well as Nietzsche, because I was particularly drawn to the idea that there’s no “universal” solution for everyone. They make room for individuality; everyone chooses their own commitments and can find value in them. Of course, it raises the question why one commitment rather than the other. Nevertheless, such subjectivist philosophers also reject universal rules like Kant’s, because those assume that ultimately someone else will judge whether you’ve lived your life correctly according to those rules—and existentialists accept no authority other than yourself. So the idea of "One Truth” had already lost all its authority.

But now this book explains the pragmatic thinkers, and they go even further: they say there is indeed no universal Truth, but they argue that existentialists still set out on their own to get closer to their Own Truth—to something that is more important or greater than reality and worthy of their commitment. Faith, authentic self-development, poetic inspiration—for existentialists, these are like shortcuts to their Own Truth, to what they perceive as closer to true reality, and what rightly so inspires us today.

"Agreement is, for many of the romantics, as more recently for Foucault, simply a way of procuring conformity to current beliefs and institutions. Depth does not produce agreement, but for romantics it trumps agreement."

But pragmatists do not believe that anything exists outside of human beings; they break with the tradition of “representation”—the idea that all knowledge is supposed to bring us closer to a “reality”—and for them, all knowledge is merely an opinion, one way of making conversation. There is no objective reality. The thing Plato labelled as "really real", is another fiction: no universal rule or no transcending concept can give us direct access to whatever eternal structure we still believe in. There is nothing to be "gotten right" out there. They accuse the existentialists of creating a new fiction: instead of “rising higher” to come into contact with the One Truth, existentialists try to “go deeper” to come into contact with the “deepest self", their Own Truth. It is a kind of hidden religion. And Reality with a capital R is just such a fiction. Damn.

It’s crazy to see someone articulate your exact ideas in a way that’s far better than you could ever have done, and at the same time see that person dismiss those ideas as incorrect, as irrational. Now I’m really in a state of cognitive dissonance: do I follow his rational, more boring but “more correct” theory, or do I follow my gut? “Right” for him, of course, isn’t “right” for me as a good existentialist, but I do get his point: if you prioritize an obscure connection with your “deepest self” as the highest good, then things like political philosophy become difficult, since you can’t debate your most central belief—you can’t build a community around it. Basically, this book has me right where I like to be: doubting a lot, rethinking even more.

Almost halfway, I was happy to understand more about pragmatism, but felt a little let down and then the chapter "grandeur, profundity and finitude" blew me out of the water. He made me feel as if my beliefs were primitive and obscure, he showed me how to doubt Reality and how I deny Reason. He showed how Hegel was a proto-Wittgenstein and how he still aimed at an absolute, a union of the divine and the human. I am curious to read "the roots of romanticism" of Isaiah Berlin, because I loved the idea that it is the opposition of Western tradition. The Westen tradition being the belief that all questions can be answered, taught and fit together.

"To think of reason as subject-centered is to believe that human beings possess a faculty that enables them to circumvent conversation - to side-step opinion and head straight for knowledge. To replace subiect- centered reason with communicative rationality is to see truth as what is likely to emerge from free and imaginative conversation. It is to think of knowledge as the achievement of consensus rather than as a mental state that enjoys a closer relation to reality than does opinion. So much for Habermas' first distinction. His second is between remaining loyal to rationality and seeking what he calls "an other to reason". Habermas uses the latter term to characterize such things as mystic insight, poetic inspiration, religious faith, imaginative power, and authentic self-expression sources of conviction that have been put forward as superior to reason. Like Descartes' clear and distinct ideas, each of these others to reason is put forward as a short cut arounc conversation, leading straight to truth. If you are in touch with such an other, you do not need to converse with other human beings. If you have some thing like what Kierkegaard called
"faith," or if you can engage in what Heidegger called "Denken." it will not matter to you whether or not other people can be persuaded to share your beliefs."

So the opening quote becomes:

The pragmatist response to the dialectic Habermas summarizes in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is to say that all of universal validity is simply a way of dramatizing the need for intersubjective agreement, while romantic ardor and romantic depth are simply ways of dramatizing the need for novelty, the need to be imaginative.
Neither need should be elevated over or allowed to exclude the other. So, instead of asking epistemological questions about sources of knowledge, or metaphysical questions about what there is to be known, philosophers might be content to do what Dewey tried to do: help their fellow-citizens balance the need for consensus and the need for
novelty."

I learned the difference between continental and analytic philosophy and why the word "inferentialism" is continental. Inferentialism has everything contingent, puts everything on the "plain of immanence": there is no representationalism, no "literal truth", no "objective-subjective" separation, nothing like scientific findings vs something more symbolic like "meaning of life" or "discovering the Good". There is no way to rise above the contingent, to transcend politics. There are no "essences" nor "objective nature", only human interactions. This he calls "the ontological priority of the social", and he uses Occam's razor to defend the position: if sociology can explain or decide: why look further to some symbolic notion? "Reality" has become an authority like "truth" that needs to justify itself as a useful concept. This came as a real surprise to me, as the book itself gave a possible criticism on this view: "you have to dull your senses of reality for it". So also our reasoning faculty has to be reinterpeted:

"Many of these philosophers [subject-centered] think of natural science as pre-Galilean intellectuals thought of religion - as the area of culture in which human beings are at their best, because most willing to acknowledge the claims of something that transcends the human. Hostility to science is, in their view, a form of spiritual degradation."

Inferentialism is like Nietzsche's perspectivism (against objective Reality- misleading Appaerance), only Nietzsche assumes self-interests behind every perspective so he asks whom enables this view? where inferentialism asks neutrally: to what enables us this view? Both need other values to decide afterwards whether the "enabled option" is better or worse than an alternative. Nietzsche uses life-affirming criteria, where pragmatist subscribe to a more utilitarian idea of happiness. Only, they do not seek to maximize one value only (happiness, pleasure) as does utilitarianism, but they seek to "enrich" life. They refuse to define "rich" or "full" life, because they do not want a rigid system. But rational open debate, communication and growth are their goals.

In "philosophy as a transitional genre" he goes on to define the "literary culture" which I found to be very very accurate. Moreover, after debunking Reality as holding any authority whatsoever, he showed me that it is really Agreement that is as beautiful as all transcending ideas. Even science has no special correspondence to "the way things are": it is just another, very effective and elaborate, way of conversing.

"The prestige of the scientific theorist is an unfortunate legacy of the Socratic idea that what we can all. as a result of rational debate, agree to be true is a reflection of something more than the fact of agreement - the idea that intersubjective agreement under ideal communicative conditions is a token of correspondence to the way things really are."

"For empiricists tell us that we can break out from under the authority of the local community by making unmediated contact with reality."

It makes empiricst some kind of protestant that wanted to skip the Church and go straight to the Scriptures. The lack of tradition made it a bad move, according to Arendt. Both appeals to "reason" and "experience" are a choice between alternative social practices and to judge desirability of a norm, one such know according to which social practice he is to judge.

I just finished MacIntyre "after virtue" and I see that when he called "modern politics" "a civil war by other means" Rorty simply sees it as "conversation" to arrive at "consensus". Rorty is not "reading books for self-transformation, to alter one's inner state, but to find better ways of helping us overcome the past in order to create a better human future."

Pragmatism advocates for a philosophy closer to what writers of classics do as well:
"This description of the history of philosophy should, I think, be replaced by an account on which philosophers, like other intellectuals, make imaginative suggestions for a redescription of the human situation; they offer new ways of talking about our hopes and fears, our ambitions and our prospects."

"The sort of person I am calling a “literary intellectual” thinks that a life that is not lived close to the present limits of the human imagination is not worth living. For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human. She thinks that the more books you read, the more ways of being human you have considered, the more human you become – the less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance."

"Berlin sums up the romantic reaction against the assumption that there is always one right answer to the question "what is to be done?" by saying that what Hegel called "the collision of good with good is "due not to error. but to some kind of conflict of an unavoid able kind, of loose elements wandering about the earth of values which cannot be reconciled. What matters is that people should dedicate them- selves to these values with all that is in them." Pragmatism differs from romanticism in taking ser iously the collision of good with good while remaining dubious about total dedication and passionate commitment. Pragmatists think that Danton and Robespierre should have tried harder to make some sort of deal."

If you do not like the term "pathos,"'the word "romance' would do as well. Or one might use Thomas Nagel's term: "the ambition of transcendence." The important point is simply that both sides in contemporary philosophy are trying to gratify one of the urges previously satisfied by religion. History suggests that we cannot decide which form of pathos is preferable by deploying arguments. Neither the realist nor her anti-representationalist opponent will ever have anything remotely like a knockdown argument, any more than Enlightenment secularism had such an argument against theists. One's choice of pathos will be settled, as Fine rightly suggests, by the reasons of one's heart."

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone unsure of what Rorty is all about, these essays are magnificent summations of his final thoughts on the many philosophical issues he addressed throughout his career. The volume is especially interesting due to its almost exclusively metaphilosophical orientation, and indeed, it is as a metaphilosopher that Rorty is truly brilliant.

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 3 out of 5]

【Philosophy as Cultural Politics / Richard Rorty / 2007, UP Cambridge】

Richard Rorty was a parody addict. Why shouldn't I do on behalf of the deceased giant?

--From a fictitious diary of a teenage Internet troll who happens to share his name with Richard Rorty.

4. 13. 2026.

Today I finished memorizing all the words from my German dictionary. I can hold edifying conversations with Germans online, and they always grimace at me. I think they're philosophy professors and care too much about pictorial theory, like me being extraordinary in German represents me as a person. I'm extraordinary, but that's what philosophy would make all of us if we didn't take it as a search for monotheistic truth.

I also started reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I think it's a poem but it's too difficult. It is romantic because it is also extraordinary, digressing from search for truth, like my pragmatism. Maybe that's because I'm yet to master the declensions of nouns, but I am pragmatist enough to discard such a thing as that grammar textbooks smelling Platonism and totalitarianism. But novels are more inclusive, so I will start reading Wilhelm Meister instead. Wilhelm Meister was written by a guy called Goethe, who was postmodern bourgeois liberal. I love it.

This is, of course, I bemoan his shift from metaphilosophy which he could show great mastery, to literature, in which he barely showed anything.

[Szabolcs Lőrik · Rating 3 out of 5]

im sorry but metaphysics is so back

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

Zdecydowanie dla zapalonych miłośników filozofii. Jedna z nielicznych nielubianych przez mnie pozycji z serii Nowy Sympozjon z wydawnictwa Czytelnik.