>Date: Thu, 26 Oct 1995 08:45:17 -0500 (CDT) >From: Tibor R Machan [The essay below is forthcoming in THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR] A Sign of the Times: Richard Rorty's Radical Pragmatism Tibor Machan Not many people from academic philosophy manage to break through the walls of Ivy and connect with those beyond in their own lifetime. Bertrand Russell did so in the mid-20th century and Jean-Paul Sartre had some success at it through his literary works. Richard Rorty, Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, formerly a prominent member of the Princeton University Department of Philosophy, is an exceptionhe came by his prominence through philosophical essay writing alone. It is his message that appears to have attracted some popular, non-academic attention. Rorty reached fame, if not outright notoriety, in part because he denounced academic philosophy, the discipline in which he made his name and where he still writes and is very respectfully discussed by most members of the community. Rorty's main complaint is that philosophy is too professionalized. Its avowed purpose of attaining a specialized or expert transcendent understanding of the nature of things is out of the question, so what has it to offer? We should take a radically different view of philosophy, one that views philosophy as a sort of educated conversation everyone can take part in. Rorty believes that contrary to those who champion the vital role of philosophy, "we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have what [Thomas] Nagel calls 'an ambition of transcendence.' ... [A] culture without this ambition(a Deweyan culture(would be preferable to the culture of what Heidegger calls 'the onto-theological tradition,'"1 which welcomes philosophical understanding that plays no significant role. For Rorty the best kind of philosophy appears in the pages of magazines such as The New York Review of Books, The American Scholar, The New Republic, etc., not in academic journals. The sort of topics taken up in philosophy journals and books, such as whether the mind is part of the natural world or something alien to it, whether ideas may be shown to have universal meaning or gain what they mean from their use in the language of a given community, whether free will or determinism is truejust has no valid place in the discipline. These issues have been taken over by one or another of the special sciences. Accordingly, Rorty is calling, as have such prominent figures of the discipline in the past as Hegel and Wittgenstein, for the end of philosophy, at least as an academic field. Rorty takes it that philosophy plays or ought to play a subservient role to such other concerns as politics and art rather than fancy itself as having some kind of determining influence on them, let alone serve as the ultimate criteria for their intelligibility as aspects of human life and culture. He arrives at these notions from a variety of directions, mostly what has come to be lumped together as the critical stance, one that takes no determinate systematic stand on philosophical issues but expresses dismay with the failure of philosophy to have reached consensus about its various topics. Actually, there is a philosophical position lurking in the back of nearly all of Rorty's ideas, one that has been a vital part of the philosophical work of all of human history. It seems, when we consider some of his key ideas, that Rorty is utterly skeptical about human beings ever gaining a good understanding of the world in which they live, of attaining wisdom, of learning about the nature of important things, of importance itself and especially about the nature of reality itself. A broad, overarching understanding seems to be out of our reach for him, which turns out to be the crucial feature of his general understanding and why it has very wide appeal. However we come out on the question of how to assess the merits of our own era(and I confess to being skeptical about such grand intellectual challenges ever being met(it may be helpful to explore a bit just what Rorty represents in our own time. What is Richard Rorty's place in our disjointed intellectual era? To be sure, his criticism of much of modern and 20th century philosophy fits well within the current climate of so called post-modernism, characterized mainly by a distrust of human reason. Never mind for now that actually there is very little in this intellectual development that's objectively new, innovative, "post" in some substantive sense(the gist of it has been around, advancing its thesis with greater or lesser success, in various periods of recorded intellectual history since the time of Lao Tzo, Heraclitus and Pyrrho to our own. In any case, though, where does Rorty's outlook gain its intellectual power, how did it evolve? Is it anything more than the usual skepticism that lurks around the corner in every epoch, urging caution against complacency, inducing apprehension about grand schemes aiming to depict reality, finding fault with hubris? The position that has brought Rorty to the forefront of academic philosophy is largely one that demeans academic philosophy itself. And one can hardly argue with the claim that academic philosophy in the United States and England, indeed, through the English speaking academic community, has been without major deficiencies. To begin with, most prominent academic philosophers in this tradition have demonstrated nearly total disdain for the tasks that ordinary people associate with philosophy. Rorty's view is that as far as different communities are concerned, they may at any moment find themselves in congruence about how they see this world or how they have constructed this world, but there isn't an underlying reality on which you may be founded, and in terms of which, some may be declared to be superior to others and more accurate than others, and so on. And when there is no congruence among communities(which is clearly the norm regarding religious and ideological matters(no community's understanding can be superior to that of another, in the sense of having grasped reality better. This is especially true in matters of ethics and politics. As Rorty put it in his comment on the demise of the Soviet Union: Non-metaphysicians [of whom Rorty and, by his account, all other wise men are members] cannot say that democratic institutions reflect a moral reality and that tyrannical regimes do not reflect one, that tyrannies get something wrong that democratic societies get right.2 This is the rankest kind of moral and political subjectivism, leaving all human actions, institutions, policies, and beliefs morally equivalent and thus wiping out morality from the ground up. But this is not confined to ethics(metaphysics, religion, politics, and aesthetics are branches of philosophy positivists also lopped off as inaccessible to rational thought and discourse. For Rorty, too, every sphere of human interest is cut off from such rational discourse(or, put more generously, what counts as rational itself becomes a matter of determination by different communities. What thus drops out from consideration is the possibility of general, fundamental critical assessment of anything at all, the critical assessment that counts as decisive for human life as such. Whether we are considering politics or science(is the one kind of practice quackery, another bona fide medicine, is one kind of advice regarding the value of vitamins or lyposuction sound, another silly or a scam cannot be decided(it is all supposed to be a matter that can only be approached form the perspective of a given community. The scope of this approach is tremendous: ethics or art, the treatment of blacks, children, women or the depiction of Nazis, racists or rapists in drama or the novel, each of these concerns escapes the possibility of rational, decisive criticism. In every case the court of last resort is not something stable and firm, something every individual may apprehend if he or she will but consult reason, but some community to which one belongs. And, of course, we belong simultaneously to innumerable communities, among which at times we must select those more worthy of our membership than others. But no such selection has a chance. All dissidents are placed into the same class, basically as men and women who just don't get with the program. Predictably, Rorty explicitly rejects the idea of individual human or natural rights, for example, that rest on human nature, since there is no hope to be held out for apprehending the nature of things such that we could affirm, confidently, that someone is being treated inhumanely, in violation of basic, fundamental rights. There is no way to judge someone a quack, provided he or she has a large enough community of believers providing a kind of support group. And the examples could go on endlessly. Richard Rorty started publishing in the late 50s. By the time I was a graduate student at UC. Santa Barbara, from 1966 to 1971, he became prominent enough to earn a visiting professorship there. For years he was professor of philosophy at Princeton, where he remained until being appointed a few years ago as Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia. Rorty has written numerous books, most of them widely translated(into German, French, Japanese, Italian and other languages(of which the most well known is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 1979). This is the work that debunks much of modern philosophy for being too ambitious, for attempting to paint the philosophical(in particular, the epistemological and scientific(enterprise as aiming to reflect reality as it actually is. This work of his made Rorty a formidable figure in contemporary philosophy, following, as is commonly the case, a very active participation in the ongoing dialogue within the broad philosophical community not only in Anglo-American but also European academic and intellectual circles.. His other work, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, 1989) was nearly as popular among intellectuals. Later on the first volume of his collected papers, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge University Press, 1991), has also shaken up some of the ground around the philosophical community, as has the second installation of this collection, Essays on Heidegger and Others. Essentially, Rorty may be considered as a very serious and active "player" within the post-modernist-hermeneutical-deconstructionist- anti-foundationalist community of intellectuals. One difference between Rorty and other major players is that he also contributes to the more popular forums such as the Op-Ed pages of major dailies in America and England, as well as prominent intellectual periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, Dissent, The New Republic, etc.. Rorty's career is interesting in part because given Rorty's education and active participation in the discussions surrounding analytic philosophy, albeit with a version of the pragmatic slant, he would not be very sympathetic to the mode of philosophizing that comes from the continent. Most analytic philosophers have resisted until recently the bent of mind evident in mid-20th century European philosophy(e.g., existentialism and phenomenology. They tended to view it the way the Vienna Circle members of the turn of the century viewed the neo-Hegelian approach exemplified by Bosanquet or Bradley. It has usually been the belief among educated persons that philosophy is an especially noble and pertinent discipline of learning, bearing on the lives of all human beings by attempting to seek wisdom, a general sense of what it means to be human and how one relates to the world as a human being instead of as some special class of human beings(as a student or dentist or parent or political leader. Americans did not differ greatly from this, although there has always been a bit of impatience in America with the heady philosophical system building prominent among European philosophers. Why this is so is a complex matter, perhaps related to the hurry with which American had to be assembled and with the absence of a stable, ongoing leisure class that could spawn philosophers who would do nothing else but build those systems. In any case, what philosophy addressed was thought to be universally important(what is reality, how do we know it, what are our moral responsibilities, what is a just system of community life, or what makes something beautiful or ugly. The dominant approach of much of academic philosophy during much of the 20th century had renounced such issues as the concerns of ideology and really, in the last analysis, meaningless, incapable of being made accessible to human inquiry. Although the seeds of this derisive attitude had been sown over several centuries, the most emphatic statements of it were advanced in ours. Logical positivists such as A. J. Ayer, in his slim but very influential book Language, Truth, and Logic (Dover, 1936), boldly declared metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, ethics and, at least by implication, politics disciplines that are cognitively unmanageable: no one could know the truths of them, so at best they could be consigned to mere expression of emotions, feelings, sentiments. Metaphysics and religion were woolly nonsense, while normative fields contained disguised expressions of "boos" or "hurrahs," no more. While there have always been dissenters, if we judge by the prominence of the academic positions of those who tended to agree with Ayer the dissidents did not fare well as leaders of the intellectual community. It is fair to say that much of academic economics, sociology, jurisprudence, and other humanistic or social disciplines still show the impact of the positivist era, one that philosophers have been considering since time immemorial but which gained considerable prominence at the hands of the British empiricists. The ensuing period of academic philosophy had been anything but a recovery of the old idea of philosophy, an idea that is still embodied in common sense when one's philosophy of life or someone's taking a catastrophe philosophically is considered. Philosophy is supposed to provide us with a glimpse of "the big picture," it is supposed to help us identify our place in the universe, and it is supposed to help us discover our purpose and the best, proper, right way to achieve it. It is to these sort of questions that we expect philosophy to address itself. The editor of one prominent journal in the discipline has actually remarked upon this, when noting the dismay of students who, anticipating the classical scope of philosophy, enroll in classes in which the topic turns out to be "adverbial" phrases. (I recall that back in graduate school many of my philosophy professors wrote papers entitled "Like" and "About" and scoffed at those sorry few who still thought philosophy dealt with the meaning of life or the nature of reality or what is moral goodness. This was at a time when some renown Oxbridge philosophers declared that none of those considered philosophers prior to Bertrand Russell did bona fide philosophy but were mostly ideologues, venting their opinions.) Ordinary language philosophy, which followed the positivist reign, didn't involve the kind of unified community that we saw among positivists but there remained the attitude that philosophy must make do with little more than clarification, helping us to find some consistency in how we use language, or, to use Wittgenstein's admittedly problematic yet still clearly thematic idea, "the help lead the fly out of the fly bottle" or rescue us from the "bewitchments of language." While J. L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein both saw that the logical positivist approach is not how philosophy must comport itself, they tended to reinforce the retreat of philosophy from the job of attempting to get some clear idea of the big picture. Even when the ordinary language approach began to experience setbacks, it was more from impatience than from a serious revitalization of the idea of philosophy as a discipline that addresses some crucial and basic problems of human living. The popular perception of philosophy never changed much but the public need for philosophical ideas tended to lead many in the direction of the Orient. Books such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, caught on and widespread dabbling in the cults of the Maharasha Mahesh Yogi or Maher Baba followed, with the prominent academic philosophical community find itself more and more irrelevant to what had for all times been conceived by the general public as the province of philosophy proper. In the late 60s and early 70s, when much of the West saw an outcry for standards by which to defend or challenge existing institutions, prominent philosophy as practice in the universities and featured in the top academic journals simply had nothing to offer. John Rawls did manage to return the attention of many academic philosophers to ethics or, more precisely, politics, yet there was a clear rider in his work, namely, that we must remain very humble. Moral philosophy, Rawls argued, must be divorced from or made "independent of" the rest of philosophy such as epistemology or the philosophy of mind. We need to take as our prime data not some fundamental facts of nature, not metaphysical first principles, not, certainly, theological postulates, but intuitions or, as the idea got recycled, "our considered moral judgments." Heaven only knows whose intuitions or considered moral judgments were to count as decisive and why. The journals began filling with papers the starting points of which were stated as these moral intuitions, usually coming to nothing more than the biases and sentiments of the authors themselves, one in no need of theoretical support. Based on such conveniently unphilosophical thinking, academic philosophy managed to reinsert itself into public debate: business ethics, medical ethics, legal ethics, ethics consultation and the like mushroomed, although it is clear that the philosophical underpinnings of it all had a lot to be desired. To this development America's home grown philosophical school, namely, pragmatism, began to be quite comfortably wedded. Pragmatists have always found fault with the ancient desire to find foundations for our beliefs. Instead, they counseled, we need to see whether our beliefs worked well in the day to day living that confronted us, never mind the basis of the beliefs in reality, God or even sense-experience. Practice makes believable, and there is nowhere else to go in any case. There has, then, always been an element to pragmatism that has indicated or at least hinted in the direction that the post-modernists and deconstructionists have taken, that is, of a basic distrust of foundationalism, with the idea that our world view and our various answers to philosophical questions may be rested on a firm foundation either in some theological notion, or in reason or sensory experience. Charles Pierce didn't recommend abandoning realism but reading him in a certain way did appear to suggest that reality is a sort of collective postulate, one that we would arrive at by consulting an ideal community of scientists, one that, of course, will in fact allude us forever. William James is taken often to have had something along this in mind when some of what he wrote about the concept of truth suggested that such beliefs as those we have in God or free will or reason could be taken to be true if they gave us either individual or collective satisfaction, if they advanced our lives in measurable ways. Willard Van Orman Quine, the pragmatists who conversed most comfortably with the analytic school, began to move in the direction Rorty eventually took, when he suggested that although we need some basic beliefs on which to rest our system of ideas, it really makes no difference what we take to be basic to our system of beliefs. We could believe that at bottom reality is composed of atoms or processes or events or even Platonic ideas and as long as we remain consistent within the system, all will be equally rational. Still, Quine protested that "In ascribing to me that 'claim that there is no "matter of fact" involved in attributions of meaning to utterances, beliefs to people, and aspirations to cultures', Rorty overstates my negativity."3 So Richard Rorty goes his own way in his pragmatic turn, of course, as do most of those in this tradition of philosophical thinking. What his radical or, as some would have it, grotesque version of pragmatism comes it is the rejection of the prospect of coming to know the answers to the classical philosophical questions. Radical pragmatism is a kind of throwing up one's hands and discouragement with such tasks as learning what being qua being might be, of what it means to be a human being, what is the relationship between human thought or language and reality, etc. It shares with other contemporary philosophical trends a distrust of grand philosophizing, of philosophical ambitiousness. And it stresses the belief that what we think about the world cannot be constructed upon something stable, solid, lasting within the purview of the world around us. There are simply no "enduring constraints on what can count as knowledge, since we will see 'justification' as a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between 'the knowing subject' and 'reality'."4 Rorty's position may be appreciated by considering what he tells us about science and its ambition to give us an understanding of various areas of reality: "On [my] view, great scientists invent descriptions of the world which are useful for purposes of predicting and controlling what happens, just as poets and political thinkers invent other descriptions of it for other purposes. But there is no sense in which any of these descriptions is an accurate representation of the way the world is itself."5 What Rorty is saying is not altogether simple, despite appearances. In his own terms the concepts of "accuracy," "description," or "the world itself" are nearly impossible to render clear. Yet he needs to make use of them to give expression to his extreme nihilismeven those who vociferously deny have some implicit commitment to the meaningfulness of the terms they employ for this purpose. In Rorty's case, as in that of many others of the same bent of mind, it is difficult to see how those concepts can retain any stable meaning at all. Still, this negativity appears to be lapped up by many and Rorty may indeed be laughing all the way to the bank, when all is said and done. How did philosophy get to this kind of negativity? To answer, we need to trace some of the steps from a crucial point in Western philosophy. Rene Descartes' turn to subjectivity, in the 16th century, gave voice (for the first time in a pivotally influential way), to a fundamental skepticism or doubt about reality itself. The only thing Descartes thought could be ascertained without doubt was the certainty of the existence of the instrument or faculty of knowing, the mind of the inquirer, nothing else. As he put it, ...I noticed that while I was trying thus to think everything false, it was necessary that I, who was thinking this, was something. And observing this truth 'I am thinking, therefore I exit' was so firm and sure that all the most extravagant suppositions of the skeptics were incapable of shaking it, I decided that I could accept it without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy I was seeking.6 For Descartes "the soul by which I am what I am(is entirely distinct from the body."7 So the only certain proposition we can know is about that soul or mind, which is the faculty of knowing. To put it differently, the means of knowing (reality) thus came to be regarded as being more certain than that which was to be known, namely, reality itself. Descartes epistemology became the first branch of philosophy and metaphysics, which held that position for the ancient and mediaeval thinkers, fell into the background. For Aquinas, for example, the existence of consciousness had been secondary. As he put it, "The soul is known by its acts....No one perceives that he understands except through the fact that he understands something, for to understand something is prior to understanding that one understands. And so the soul comes to the actual realization of its existence though the fact that it understands and perceives."8 Before Descartes metaphysics (before physics) was largely taken to be the branch of philosophy which has priority. In other words, the first task of philosophy had been thought to be the identification of the nature of existence, what it is to be anything at all, to simply exist, the basic nature of what our mind "understands and perceives" before we study epistemology, the nature of our understanding. This was naturally thought to be important, if for no other reason that that when claims were made that such and such a being exists (God, angels, ghosts, atoms, minds, free will, sensations, feelings, moral virtues, political rights, the beauty of a poem or symphony) we needed to have some standard, something that could help us distinguish bugs from valid claims. Following Descartes radical concern with how certainty could be achieved, epistemology replaced metaphysics as first philosophy. From then on, most renown philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, et al.), focused first on the question of the nature of knowledge(of what it is to know and such. Even when they addressed metaphysical, ontological or cosmological topics, they all felt the need to begin with epistemology. The main question became, "Could human beings gain objective knowledge at all?" It is with Immanuel Kant that this trend came to full fruition, in a fundamental philosophical skepticism. Kant claims that while we may know reality, it is always in doubt whether we do. This is not the ordinary skepticism that maybe we don't know things or we can't know things, but rather that we cannot know that we know things. It's the potency, the capacity of the human mind, to gain access to what is really real, so to speak, that is ultimately attacked by Immanuel Kant. As Kant put it, "Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects....We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge."9 To gain truly objective or independent knowledge of reality is therefore rendered systematically, essentially dubious. Although we may very well have a correct understanding of reality, through the mediating innate categories of the human mind, there is no way ever to affirm or deny this. Whether we will have gotten it right is always up for question because we cannot move outside our minds so as to gain an independent stance from which to compare whether the thing that we know and the knowledge we have match up. We can't gain the independent stance, "climb out of our minds," to make sure the mind's contents match reality. That phrase, actually, is used by Rorty himself to affirm this skepticism about the potency of the human mind to know reality. As he states, we cannot "climb out of our minds"10 or find "a skyhook -- something which might lift us out of our beliefs"11 By reference to this impossibility of the human mind to get out of itself and check whether it has gotten things right, that fundamental skepticism has led to a lot of ways of attempting to circumvent the problem. Pragmatism was one of those ways. The pragmatic turn, as noted before, started with a frustration, a dismay with the failures of philosophical accounts to gain a clear understanding of just how the human mind(thought, language, words, ideas, images, memories(manages to relate to reality. Surely this ancient objective has great appeal, indeed at the most practical level, for one thing human beings are always hoping for is to reach agreement on matters that seem to divide so many of us(religion, ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc. If some method or way or system or whatever could be identified that gave us a clear and dependable road to understanding things as they are, really, then such agreement might be attainable and a great deal of frustration, chaos, disappointment and, indeed, acrimony and even warfare may turn out to be avoidable. No one can find such a hope silly, but the pragmatist turn pointed in just that direction: it's pretty useless to attempt to get this problems solved. The pragmatist said, actually, that the best we can do is find ideas, beliefs, theories, etc., which turn out to provide us with workable or satisfactory policies. No correct, dependable comprehensive understanding is, however, attainable. But, as to exactly what counts for working - how do we determine whether something works or whether the satisfaction that we gain is idiosyncratic or has something more universal going for it - pragmatism has never really reached a satisfactory resolution of that. And with Rorty we get an outright dismissal of such a task. It is not important, perhaps it is impossible, to answer such a demand. Thus, we ultimately reached the point where, for example with Quine, the frame of reference that we use to interpret the world is supposed to be optional(not in the sense that any moment we can just pick and choose as to whether we want to be process, substance, or event philosophers but in the sense that there isn't any basic commitment that is compelled by the nature of things that we need to follow that is necessitated. Rather, our adoption of a certain world view, a certain ontological perspective, is really conventional, gradually acquired, but not ever fundamentally anchored in anything that one can produce as decisive. This has been intimated in nearly every era. Early twentieth century already saw the promulgation of the view that, for example, logic is itself optional and we could chose between radically different "logical systems." Arguably the currently fashionable multicultural movement, according to which the Western way of thinking is simply one among several equally valid options, gained its main support in the alternative logic movement of the 1920s. Pragmatists such as C. I. Lewis proposed, in Mind and the World Order (1929), that logic is a matter of legislation. Ernest Nagel, a student of Dewey and admirer of Pierce, penned his famous article, "Logic Without Ontology" (1944), which reaffirmed this view, following it up with his book Logic Without Metaphysics (1956). Subsequently Quine made these same points about the indeterminacy of reality in esoteric and technical terms so that what he proposed was pretty much confined to philosophical scholarly discussions and journals. Quine very rarely went public the way Rorty has to become a omnipresent figure. The evidence of Rorty's prominence is difficult to miss. He is by now one of those rare philosophers included in volumes featuring interviews with the prominent members of the discipline and has books entitled Reading Rorty (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1990) published, featuring a long list of commentaries by other prominent philosophers and other academicians on his work. I know of only a few others, such as John Rawls and Robert Nozick, who have be so honored recently, although of course the classic figures - Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hobbes, Hume, Kant - are honored this way regularly, in nearly every era. With Rorty we come to a point in the development of pragmatism where there is a frank, unapologetic admission of a sort of community-bounded way of looking at the world. The world is to us, always, never an independent being we understand as it actually is. The world is not in any sense objectively knowable, so that in common sense terms, say, when I die, it will remain just as I might well have been capable of understanding it, that is, if I paid close attention and I did not indulge my prejudices or my preconceptions. Different communities or ages see a different world and if they don't, well that is simply an accident, not due to there being a world essentially the same throughout time and our capacity for grasping it as such. The way the world is (to me), is really a function of the community to which I belong - the language which I have learned to use that has configured the world for me, that has structured it for me. In sociology, it might me said the way it was constructed for me by my upbringing, by my history, by my social circumstances. There is nothing universally true that one can say. The words, for example, that we use do not really represent reality and that's a central point. Here's Rorty on this: "On an anti-representationalist view [which is his], it is one thing to say that a prehensile thumb, or an ability to use the word 'atom' as physicists do, is useful for coping with the environment. It is another thing to attempt to explain this utility by reference to representationalist notions, such as the notion as the reality referred to by 'quark' was 'determinate' before the word 'quark' came along, whereas that referred to by, for example, 'foundation grant' only jelled once the relevant social practice emerged." The point is that the word "quark," as the word "foundation grant," is a social construct. The world is the world as it is for us. It is not at all clear, of course, that Rorty has even managed to capture the best rendition of pragmatism. Susan Haack focuses on this in her comments about what she takes to be the frequent caricature of pragmatism: "... it seems that [we] may have made the mistake of taking Rorty's word for what Pragmatism is. Like Rorty, [we] appear to be unaware of James's distinction between Abstract Truth and concrete truths, and thus misreads him, as British Pragmatist F. C. S. Schilling did, as if his account of concrete truths were intended as a complete theory of truth, He is also, evidently, unaware of Peirce's harsh comments about 'Mr. Schiller and the Pragmatists of today,' who had, as he complained in 1908, 'allow[ed] a philosophy instinct with life to become infected with the seeds of death in such notions as that of .. the mutability of truth.' Rorty blithely transmutes Peirce's definition of truth as that 'ultimate opinion' that would survive all possible experiential evidence and the fullest logical scrutiny, into the grotesque idea that the truth is nothing more than what can survive all conversational objections, that '"true" is a word which applies to those beliefs upon which we are able to agree."12 In Michael Crighton's story Disclosure one scene calls Rorty to mind for anyone familiar with his ideas. In discussing whether one of the characters had been sexually harassed, a computer company CEO tells one of his employees that, to paraphrase slightly, "Hadn't you heard, truth is irrelevant, it is only information that counts today." This is given as grounds for why the employee making the claim ought not to press the charge but settle out of court. The point is poignant in part because those who hold this view are often also the first to decry sexual harassment and other contemporary evils. How one can hold out hope for making such complaints stick is certainly puzzling, given this attitude toward truth. During the 1994 congressional election campaign Rorty penned an Op-Ed piece for The New York Times lamenting that Oliver North may gain entry into the United States Senate, given how shamelessly he lied to Congress. I am not sure myself how guilty we should hold North(had he served a left wing president with his services in support, say, of a rebel group fighting some racist or right wing dictatorship, he may have been seen a hero who managed to outwit the racist or right wing US Congress. In any case, Rorty's complaint was odd. How could he mount a good defense of his lamentations before a court of his own peers in the philosophical community? As a character on an episode of the critically acclaimed television program Homicide once observed, "What is a lie when every man has his own truth?" One more thing. Some philosophers in the Anglo-American academic community are anything but prophets of negativity and of human philosophical ineptitude. They are not, however, in the limelight. Mary Midgley in England and John Searle in the United States of America produce many superb works aiming to give us understanding (e.g., of the place of the human being in the natural world, how our freedom is consistent with the best science bearing on understanding ourselves, on the nature of consciousness, of language). Midgley writes beautifully, omits the jargon of the more technical works produced in academic philosophy, and by no means preaches philosophical nihilism. Searle, featured in some prominent forums such as TNRB, writes with grace and passion on some of the most intriguing topics of philosophy and evidently retains great respect for its study. Rorty, however, is the one who is now given major billing. What does this mean? Perhaps it that our culture is inclined toward mindlessness. It honors those, in the field where mindfulness is at a professional premium, who cheat us out of what we should get from that corner of the culture. Rorty, a very bright alchemist, is picked, while what is needed is a superb chemist. Never mind the truth of his views. He represents some of the awful trends in our society. Our leadership, in politics, academics, the arts, and the rest, may be less indicative of what is true than of what is fashionable among too many among us. Endnotes: 1 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 12. 2 Richard Rorty, "The Seer of Prague," The New Republic, July 1, 1991, pp. 35-40. 3 Willard Van Orman Quine, "Let me Accentuate the Positive," in Alan Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 117. 4 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 9. 5 Quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb, Looking into the Abyss (New York: Random House, 1993). 6 Discourse, I, p. 127. 7 Ibid. 8 De Veritate, 10, 8. 9 Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx. 10 Ibid., p. 7. 11 Ibid., p. 9. 12 Susan Haack, "Multiculturalism and Objectivity: Some Not-Particularly-Nice Distinctions," delivered at the Ayn Rand Society meeting, American Philosophical Association Meetings, Boston, MA, December 1994.