(from the
The
Truth About Truth
Review
by
Philosophy and Social Hope
Richard
Rorty
Penguin
Books
288
pp. $13.95 paperback
Sometimes
you wake in the night with an idea so brilliant, so deeply insightful, that it
promises a radical re-visioning of everything you had previously thought. And the next morning all that remains is a
fragment -- nonsense, usually -- or just the feeling, the half-remembered
excitement with no clue of what you were excited about. For me, this is what reading Richard Rorty is
like. You don't take him in an insight
at a time; you have to grasp the whole vision.
And the vision, no matter how vivid, is also evanescent; before long it
dissolves into perplexity and confusion.
(This is not necessarily a criticism -- after all, I feel somewhat the
same way about Wittgenstein and Wallace Stevens.)
Philosophy
and Social Hope, a collection of relatively non-technical articles and
lectures, is a fair representation of Rorty's recent thought. In addition to philosophy, these writings
address society and culture, religion and literature, politics, education, and
law. The broadness and diversity of
Rorty's interests is one of his chief virtues.
As for vices, two are particularly relevant here. The first is Rorty's tendency to resist clear
interpretation, his refusal to avoid vague, ambiguous statements, or to resolve
apparent inconsistencies. (This is
undoubtedly related to his view that there is no one true interpretation of any
given text. But it is sometimes a
mistake to let theory influence practice.)
The second is his tendency to conflate philosophical claims which, while
historically related, are logically distinct.
Rorty's history of philosophy reduces the discipline to two competing
theories: Pragmatism (or antidualism, or antifoundationalism), which Rorty
defends, and Bad Metaphysics (my name, not Rorty's), whose proponents include
Plato and Kant.
Bad Metaphysics sees truth --
understood as correspondence to the way the world really is -- as the essential
aim of all inquiry. Philosophy, then,
attempts to pierce the misleading veil of appearances in order to depict
reality in itself. But Rorty rejects the
very idea of 'reality in itself,' arguing that
knowledge, belief, and truth are only possible in the context of specific human
purposes and needs. (That is, our
fundamental conceptual structures are determined by their usefulness, not by
how well they represent reality. We
speak of -- and see -- 'a dozen eggs' rather than 'two dozen half-eggs' not
because the former is true, but because it is convenient.)
'True', then, is simply the word we
apply to beliefs we have found useful.
But, we might ask, useful for what?
For our projects, Rorty answers -- in particular, for the project of
promoting human happiness. Pragmatism
frees us from the drudgery of Bad Metaphysics, and allows us to devote our
energy to what matters: making human beings happier.
[W]e
pragmatists cannot make sense of the idea that we should pursue truth for its
own sake. We cannot regard truth as a
goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry
is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do [...] All areas of culture are parts of the same endeavor to make
life better.
Thus,
Rorty's aim is, as he puts it, to replace truth with hope.
Part of what's puzzling about
Rorty's allegedly radical position is how many of its constitutive claims are
fairly common-sensical. Who would deny
that inquiry aims at consensus, that there are other worthy goals besides
attaining truth, or that perhaps the most important of these is increasing
human well-being? Yet Rorty often
proceeds to draw radical conclusions from his apparently benign starting
points. Indeed, Rorty's vision sometimes
seems composed of two elements: a core of true, uncontroversial claims,
surrounded by a fringe of surprising claims which are entirely unsupported by
the core.
Start with the claim that our
conceptual framework is largely shaped by needs and interests. This I am happy to grant. But why does it threaten our commitment to
pursuing truth for its own sake? Even if
our true beliefs are not reflections of Platonic Forms, they are still worth
having -- not only because they can be put to good use, but also because we
regard knowledge as valuable.
Understanding the truth about truth does not taint its pedigree to the
point where it becomes undesirable. In
assuming that it does, Rorty presupposes the view of his arch-foe, Plato: that
knowledge, to be worth anything at all, must be somehow supernatural.
Of course, truth is not the only
worthy goal; human happiness is indeed another.
But why assume that these two goals are fundamentally opposed, so that
rejecting Bad Metaphysics becomes an emancipatory act, one which makes human
happiness more attainable? Why not think
that acquiring knowledge and increasing human happiness are generally
complementary goals? (Similarly, when
Rorty suggests that Darwinism shows that we must see language as a tool rather
than a medium of representation, my response is: why can't we see it as
both?) Perhaps Rorty would say that a
society committed not to eliminating suffering but to discovering truth might
come to regard certain terrible beliefs (that slaveholding is moral, for
instance) as true. But the mere
possibility of reaching false and even harmful beliefs is an insufficient
reason for abstaining from the truth-seeking game altogether. That would be like abstaining from food in
order to avoid consuming poison.
Moreover, it is only because we
think it true that happiness matters
that we are committed to increasing it.
(True, that is, rather than
merely useful -- for what could it be useful for?) Otherwise, the goal of promoting human
happiness could be exchanged for any other ultimate goal. Sometimes Rorty almost admits this:
[My
view] is not relativistic, if that means saying that every moral view is as
good as every other. Our moral view is, I firmly believe,
much better than any competing view, even though there are a lot of people whom
you will never be able to convert to it.
At
such moments Rorty is as much of a moral realist as any reasonable realist
could desire (and he is not less so for denying that moral knowledge consists
of eternal, humanity-independent truths; that it is accessible to everyone;
that it is a matter of deductive logical proof, or historical inevitability; or
that it is accessible only through revelation or Pure Reason.) But this is hard to square with such
statements as the following:
We
antiessentialists, however, cannot afford to sneer at this project. For we cannot afford to sneer at any human project, any chosen form of
human life.
Having
abandoned the appearance-reality distinction, Rorty here suggests, the
pragmatist is unable to favour any way of life over any other. Yet this seems deeply relativistic, and quite
incompatible with Rorty's belief that his moral view is superior to competing
views. There are various ways of
remedying this incompatibility, but it's hard to find one that leaves us with a
plausible, defensible position.
However, while I do find Rorty
perplexing, for these and other reasons, I do not feel that he should simply be
dismissed or ignored. Many of his
attacks on various metaphysical traditions are well motivated; and there is
much to be learned from a careful reading of his work, whether or not one
ultimately accepts his views. Moreover,
the metaphysical mistakes -- if they are mistakes -- do not spoil the rest of
what's here; many of his less traditionally philosophical essays, especially
those on politics and contemporary
My favorite piece is the
autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," in which
Rorty depicts his philosophical development as a prolonged attempt to
understand how a commitment to social justice is compatible with purely private
interests (such as his youthful passion for wild orchids). These passions and pleasures help give our lives
meaning, and cannot simply be dispensed with; yet political purity would seem
to demand precisely that. It reminded me
of the wonderful moment in Wallace Shawn's monologue The Fever, where the narrator, under the influence of a recently
awakened political conscience which he still does not know quite what to make
of, visits a revolutionary country:
I
stayed in an eccentric expensive hotel, and the ice cream there seemed to me
like a drug -- delicious, perfect, light and aromatic. I couldn't get enough of this amazing ice
cream. A journalist I met who was
staying at the hotel explained to me that it didn't make sense to admire a
revolution because of its ice cream, because it could really be considered an imperfection in the revolution that
resources would be devoted to making ice cream at all when some people still
didn't have enough to eat. His remark
was valid, but he missed the point: the ice cream was charming.
Ultimately
Rorty acknowledges the futility of the quest for an all-encompassing system of
thought -- a system which could somehow make the legitimacy of the revolution
and the excellence of the ice cream aspects of one transcendent phenomenon --
and urges that we abandon such philosophical ambitions. I think that Rorty is right to defend value
pluralism in the face of systematic philosophy's urge to simplify. It is ironic, though, and rather a shame,
that Rorty himself oversimplifies at so many points. His Manichaean version of the history of
philosophy obscures the fact that there are many ways to be a Platonist, a
Kantian, a moral realist, or even a pragmatist. Philosophy is no simple
matter. Rather, like the world it
attempts to be adequate to, it is complex, varied, and incorrigibly plural.