Philosophical Papers, Volume 2: Essays on Heidegger and Others

Philosophical Papers

by Richard Rorty

The second volume pursues the themes of the first volume in the context of discussions of recent European philosophy focusing on the work of Heidegger and Derrida. His four essays on Heidegger include "Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor and as Politics" and "Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens;" three essays on Derrida (including "Deconstruction and Circumvention" and "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?") are followed by a discussion of the uses to which Paul de Man and his followers have put certain Derridean ideas. Rorty's concluding essays broaden outward with an essay on "Freud and Moral Deliberation" and essays discussing the social theories and political attitudes of various contemporary figures--Foucault, Lyotard, Habermas, Unger, and Castoriadis.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Criticism, Nonfiction, Theory

212 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 1991

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

[Joni · Rating 4 out of 5]

admirably lucid and easy-going. he wields juxtaposition and contrast superbly as explicative means and always walks as the implied third amongst those paired in thought, suggesting the topics. it effectively consumed all my post-its. read

[TL]

I really like Rorty—there's a certain sense in which this is extremely crazy, in that it strips everything away until we're nearly naked and left with nothing but the 'world' in front of us, but we're banded by a belt full of flawlessly sharpened (and 'sharpening' and changing) tools. It is fastened under our belly buttons. Yet this is the sort of craziness that horseshoes into the utmost sanity. Utterly lucid, simple, peaceful, and workable. But, to be clear, standing above an endless, hyperpuzzling abyss. [Maybe that abyss could actually feel great though: warm winds blowing out of the blackness and rustling your hair? Feelings of flowers? Tantric buddhism?] It makes total sense.

I definitely do not think philosophy should end here, but I think that maybe it should start here or circle back here and return sometimes when our wild forays take us a bit too far towards Something too dangerous for us, 'Things' that we can't handle. You just bring it back here when things get too unhinged, and you take a breather, and rest, and snooze...zzz... And 'save your game', and then wake up again and adventure all over again—but this time it's different. Don't you remember?: you overwrote your save file.


'The context in which my essays put post-Nietzschean philosophy is, predictably enough, pragmatism. I see Nietzsche as the figure who did most to convince European intellectuals of the doctrines which were purveyed to Americans by James and Dewey.'

'Nietzsche's version of pragmatism had, to be sure, little to do with the social hopes characteristic of James and Dewey. His perspectivalism, his refusal to admit the notion of a truth disconnected from interests and needs, was part of a striving for private perfection, for what he thought of as spiritual cleanliness. Nietzsche disliked both his country and his century, so the Emersonian combination of self-reliance and patriotism found in James and Dewey is alien to him. All he took from Emerson, so to speak, was the self-reliance; there is no analogue in his writings to Emerson's American sense of a new kind of social freedom...

Despite this difference, Nietzsche was as good an anti-Cartesian, antirepresentationalist, and antiessentialist as Dewey. He was as devoted to the question "what difference will this belief make to our conduct?" as Peirce or James.'

'...sentences are the only thing that can be true or false...our repertoire of sentences grows as history goes along, and...this growth is largely a matter of the literalization of novel metaphors. Thinking of truth in this way helps us switch over from a Cartesian-Kantian picture of intellectual progress (as a better and better fit between mind and world) to a Darwinian picture (as an increasing ability to shape the tools needed to help the species survive, multiply, and transform itself).'

'...language is a set of tools—tools which, because of what Dewey called the "means-end continuum", change their users and the products of their use. Abandoning the notion of representation means getting rid of the cluster of problems around realism and antirealism...'

'...Heidegger and Derrida share a tendency to think of language as something more than just a set of tools. The latter Heidegger persistently, and Derrida occasionally, treat Language as if it were a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that stands over and against human beings...I see both men as still, to a certain extent, under the influence of the Diltheyan distinction between Geist and Natur which I criticized in Part I of Volume I...I criticize the later Heidegger for succumbing to the urge to treat language as a quasi-divinity.'

'The trouble with making a big deal out of language, meaning, intentionality, the play of signifiers, or différance is that one risks losing the advantages gained from appropriating Darwin, Nietzsche, and Dewey. Once one starts reifying language, one begins to see gaps opening between the sorts of things Newton and Darwin describe and the sorts Freud and Derrida describe, instead of seeing convenient divisions within a toolbox—divisions between batches of linguistic tools useful for various different tasks.'

'...a pragmatist must insist that both redescribability and irreducibility are cheap. It is never very hard to redescribe anything one likes in terms that are irreducible to, indefinable in the terms of, a previous description of that thing. A pragmatist must also insist with (with Goodman, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Heidegger) that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it. The advantage of insisting on these points is that any dualism one comes across, any divide which one finds a philosopher trying to bridge or fill in, can be made to look like a mere difference between two sets of descriptions of the same batch of things.

"Can be made to look like," in this context, does not contrast with "really is." It is not as if there were a procedure for finding out whether one is really dealing with two batches of things or one batch. Thinghood, identity, is itself description-relative. Nor is it the case that language is really just strings of marks and noises which organisms use as tools for getting what they want. That Nietzschean-Deweyan description of language is no more the real truth about language as Heidegger's description of it as "the house of Being" or Derrida's as "the play of signifying references." Each of these is only one more useful truth about language—one more of what Wittgenstein called "reminders for a particular purpose."'

'Unsurprisingly, I see the best parts of Heidegger and Derrida as the parts which help us to see how things look under nonrepresentationalist, nonlogocentrist descriptions—how they look when one begins to take the relativity of thinghood to choice of description for granted, and so starts asking how to be useful rather than how to be right. I see the worst parts of Heidegger and Derrida as the parts which suggest that they themselves have finally gotten language right, represented it accurately, as it really is. These are the parts which tempted Paul de Man to say things like "literature...is the only form of language free from the fallacy of unmediated expression"...'

'...one can modulate from Darwinian through Heideggerian to Derridean without much strain.'

'...what is important about both traditions...is not what they say but what they do not say, what they avoid rather than what they propound. Notice that neither tradition mentions the knowing subject nor the object of knowledge. Neither talks about a quasi-thing called language which functions as intermediary between subject and object. Neither allows for the formulation of problems about the nature or possibility of representation or intentionality. Neither tries to reduce anything to anything else. Neither, in short, gets us into the particular binds into which the Cartesian-Kantian, subject-object, representationalist tradition got us.

Is that all that both traditions are good for? Are all these eminent thinkers simply showing us the way out of a dusty fly-bottle, out of dilapidated house of Being? I am strongly tempted to say, "Sure. But this may sound reductive. So it would be, if I were denying that the works of these people are indefinitely recontextualizable, and so might turn out to be useful in an endless variety of presently unforeseen contexts."'

'Nobody can set any a priori limits to what change in philosophical opinion can do, any more than to what change in scientific or political opinion can do...Change in philosophical outlook is neither intrinsically central nor intrinsically marginal—its results are just as unpredictable as change in any other area of culture.'

[Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prachtig.

[m · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great — at times, even tremendous — collection of essays, hindered only by the fact that Cambridge University Press published the footnotes in my 1991 edition in an (almost) unreadably small font-size.

The table of contents does not number the essays, but this is what readers get:

Acknowledgments (700 words)
Introduction: Pragmatism and post-Nietzschean philosophy (2800 words)

Part I

Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics (1986) 9400 words
Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism (1984) 12,600 words
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the reification of language (1989) 8500 words
Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens (1989) 9,000 words

Part II

Deconstruction and circumvention [on Derrida] (1983) 11,500 words
Two meanings of “logocentrism”: A reply to Norris (1989) 6,600 words
Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher? (1989) 5400 words
De Man and the American Cultural Left (1989) 5400 words

Part III

Freud and moral reflection (1984) 11,900 words
Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity (1984) 6000 words
Unger, Castoriadis, and the romance of a national future (1988) 8,300 words
Moral identity and private autonomy: The case of Foucault (1988) 3100 words

Rorty writes in his Intro that most of this volume's 12 essays are about Heidegger and Derrida. The first 4 papers pertaining to Heidegger are "the fruits of an abortive, abandoned attempt to write about him."

Those four essays are, indeed, very fruitful, provocative, of which my current faves are "Philosophy as science, as metaphor, and as politics" & "Heidegger, contingency, and pragmatism."

In section two, my favorite two essays are "Deconstruction and circumvention [on Derrida]" & "Is Derrida a transcendental philosopher?".

Section three includes "Freud and moral reflection", which (like other Rortians) I think is one of the best essays he ever wrote. The essays "Unger, Castoriadis" and "The case of Foucault" should also be read.
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misc Rorty quotes from the Intro and Chapter 1 :

My essays should be read as examples of what a group of contemporary Italian philosophers have called “weak thought”—philosophical reflection which does not attempt a radical criticism of contemporary culture, does not attempt to refound or remotivate it, but simply assembles reminders and suggests some interesting possibilities.

. . . language is a set of tools rather than a set of representations—tools which, because of what Dewey called “the means-end continuum”, change their users and the products of their use.

Heidegger and Derrida share a tendency to think of language as something more than just a set of tools. The later Heidegger persistently, and Derrida occasionally, treat Language as if it were a quasi-agent, a brooding presence, something that stands over and against human beings.

[Rorty’s] criticisms [of Heidegger & Derrida] are protests against letting “Language” become the latest substitute for “God”.

A pragmatist [like Rorty himself] insist (with Goodman, Nietzsche, Putnam, and Heidegger) that there is no such thing as the way the thing is in itself, under no description, apart from any use to which human beings might want to put it.

Like Husserl, Heidegger thought that “the European crisis has its roots in a misguided rationalism.” But he thought that a demand for foundations was itself a symptom of this misguided rationalism.

. . . cognition is not always recognition, ... the acquisition of truth is not always a matter of fitting data into a preestablished scheme. A metaphor is, so to speak, a voice from outside logical space....

. . . Heidegger [attacked] the [philosophical] tradition’s attempt to "mathematize" the world.... To think of metaphorical sentences as the forerunners of new uses of language, uses which may eclipse and erase old uses, is to think of metaphor as on a par with perception and inference, rather than thinking of it as having a merely "heuristic" or "ornamental" function. More specifically, [we ought] to think of truth as something which is not already within us. Rather, it is something which may only become available to us thanks to an idiosyncratic genius.

On [Heidegger's] account the aim of philosophical thought is to free us from the language we presently use by reminding us that this language is not that of "human reason" but is the creation of the thinkers of our historical past. These thinkers are the poets of Being, the transcribers of "Being’s poem—man."

On the pragmatist view ... a pseudo-problem is one which there is no point in discussing because, as William James put it, it turns upon a difference which “makes no difference.” It is a “merely verbal problem”—that is, one whose resolution would leave the rest of our beliefs unchanged. This is close to Heidegger’s own meaning....

The basic motive of pragmatism, like that of Hegelianism, was, I have argued elsewhere, a continuation of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment’s sanctification of natural science. ... both Hegelianism and pragmatism can be seen as attempts to clear the ground for the kind of society which the French Revolution hoped to build: one in which every human potentiality is given a fair chance.

. . . Heidegger was only accidentally a Nazi . . . .

The moral I wish to draw from the story I have been telling is that we should carry through on the rejection of metaphilosophical scientism.

The horrors peculiar to the end of our century—imminent nuclear holocaust, the permanent drug-riddled black underclass in the U.S., the impossibility of feeding countries like Haiti and Chad except by massive charity which the rich nations are too selfish to provide, the unbreakable grip of the rich or the military on the governments of most of the Third World, the unbreakable grip of the KGB on the Russian people and of the Soviet army on a third of Europe—are no better describable with the help of more recent philosophical vocabulary than with the vocabulary used by our grandfathers. Nobody has come up with any proposal for ending any of these horrors which draws on new conceptual resources. Our political imagination has not been enlarged by the philosophy of our century.

As the century has darkened, we find it less and less possible to imagine getting out of our present trap and into such a [better] future.

If we ever have the courage to drop the scientistic model of philosophy without falling back into a desire for holiness (as Heidegger did), then, no matter how dark the time, we shall no longer turn to the philosophers for rescue as our ancestors turned to the priests. We shall turn instead to the poets and the engineers, the people who produce startling new projects for achieving the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

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The above quotes are merely some of my underlinings from the first 26 pages of this 200-page collection. The other essays in this book, especially the essay on "Freud and moral reflection" also overflow with provocative insights.

This is a great book.

[Pavlogreen]

Ya no siento tanto entusiasmo por Rorty como hace unos meses y de hecho encuentro bastantes lagunas en su pensamiento, pero no hay duda de que es un gran filósofo. Me da la sensación de que en este volumen de artículos Rorty se muestra más sosegado y menos polémico que en su volumen de artículos mellizo (Objetividad, relativismo y verdad, que comenté hace tres meses), intuyo que porque aquí no se mide con sus colegas anglosajones analíticos de los que tanto quería distanciarse, sino con filósofos europeos (y con Unger, brasileño) con quienes puede manter más distancia.

El libro contiene reflexiones bien fundamentadas sobre las filosofías de Heidegger y Derrida y ofrece una lectura de los mismos que sin apartarse de lo esperable es original y edificante. También contiene argumentos más clásicos a favor de una política liberal y socialdemócrata que no dependa de fundamentos metafísicos sólidos, para lo que debate con pensadores de la talla de Habermas, Lyotard, Castoriadis o Unger. En definitiva, no sé si es una buena obra para introducirse a los filósofos a los que comenta, pero sí para conocer al propio Rorty y sus ideas, que siempre merecen ser tenidas en cuenta.

[Chant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Papers on Derrida and especially Heidegger, were interesting. If you're a person that can never cut through the dense new terms and vocabularies Derrida and Heidegger employ, I would suggest this collection of philosophy papers, which are never dealt within the analytic philosophy world.

[Nick Ramsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread. Still awesome.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

First review written from my iPhone so sorry if it's complete babble. After being impressed by the first volume of these essays I thought I'd try the second. Rorty respectfully delves into the nemeses of analytic philosophy- the unhelpfully and vaguely named continental or postmodern traditions- with the same ironic and incisive gaze as his work on Davidson and Quine. One can't help but be drawn in by his depth and breadth of references and his poetic yet pragmatic approach. A great voice in philosophy, a genuine open mind and anti-dogmatist. Sadly missed.