What Happened to Philosophy?
 (with a Jan. 22, 2005 addendum: page down)
 

 

                            Rorty’s Consequences of Pragmatism   

 

       

I've always had an interest in philosophy, as I define it, but not really in analytic philosophy. A couple of decades ago Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979) and several other books coming out about that time made it seem that philosophy might become more interesting.[1] Rorty proposed a richer and more ambitious (but less technical) “abnormal” or “edifying” philosophy defined by pragmatist criteria which he found in Dewey, the late Wittgenstein, and even Heidegger, and proposed to abandon the attempt to define a rigorous positivist ontology, epistemology, and theory of truth. Things looked good.

 

However, all these books are at least 16 years old by now, and from eavesdropping on philosophy blogs and browsing in libraries it seems clear that nothing much has changed. Philosophy seems to be continuing on its positivist, formalizing, supposedly-rigorous path. So what happened?

I think that the answer is in Rorty’s next book (Consequences of Pragmatism, Minnesota, 1982;  “CP” below), which seems to be a climbdown from his earlier position. Rorty agrees to let philosophy go its way without him, while attempting to situate himself as a post-modernist. Since my dissatisfaction with analytic philosophy was somewhat different in origin than Rorty’s, it’s not surprising that his resolution of the problem is not satisfying to me.

 

I agree with Rorty that the problem is professionalization and the attempt to make philosophy into a systematic science, as successfully advocated in the profession by Arthur Lovejoy, in opposition to William James (and later John Dewey):

 

“James…. was dubious about the growing professionalization of the discipline.  Arthur Lovejoy, the great opponent of pragmatism, saw professionalization as an unmixed blessing. Echoing what was being said simultaneously by Russell in England and by Husserl in Germany, Lovejoy urged the sixteenth annual meeting of the APA to aim at making philosophy into a science…. On the Lovejoyan account, the gap between philosophers and the rest of high culture is of the same sort as the gap between physicists and laymen….”  (CP, pp. 169-70).


The professionalization of philosophy on the scientific model, aimed at a quasi-scientific or quasi-mathematical universality and rigor at the cost of scope, required relinquishing philosophy’s ‘attempt to see how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term’, (Sellars, quoted by Rorty, CP, p. xiv.) The question then arose as to what the specific subject-matter of philosophy was, and it was a hard one to answer. Providing philosophical foundations for science was one proposal, but scientists, almost by definition,  don’t feel a need for philosophical grounding. Eventually, as it seems, philosophers became technicians of argumentation, like the old sophists and like the scholastics of the early modern Sorbonne, capable of making elaborate, technically-sound arguments for or against any position, without ever being able to come to a final conclusion about anything.

 

I skipped the technical part of Rorty’s Mirror of Nature, which claimed that after four decades of abstruse argument, analytic philosophy had ended up about where Dewey had been in the beginning. If this was true, I was glad, because it meant that philosophy might become interesting for me again. If it wasn’t true, it would just mean that I would continue what I was doing without calling it philosophy. What seems clear, however, is that Rorty’s critique, however valid it may  have been, was rejected by philosophy as a discipline. Likewise, his proposal for an “abnormal, edifying, post-philosophical, post-ontological” philosophical discourse didn't come to much, at least not within philosophy.[2]

 

And Rorty apparently surrendered, accepting professional philosophy's right to define itself any way it wishes: 

 

“Philosophy”, in the narrow and professional sense, is just whatever philosophers do. Having a common style, and a niche in the ordinary table of organization of academic departments, is quite enough to make our discipline as identifiable and respectable as any other. Indeed, where the style is the kind of argumentative skill I have described, it is enough to make it socially valuable. A nation can count itself lucky to have several thousand relatively leisured and relatively unspecialized intellectuals who are exceptionally good at putting together arguments and pulling them apart. Such a group is a precious cultural resource. As we keep saying on our grant applications, the nation would do well to have analytic philosophers advise on public projects. We shall kibitz at least as well as any other professional group, and perhaps better than most.[3] (CP, pp. 220-1)


 

Rorty shares the dubiousness of analytic philosophers about philosophers and scholars who claim to have found a scientifically-grounded Truth in their researches, and who make prophetic appeals to their readers and students. He objects not so much to the appeals themselves, as to their claim to be able to join scientific Truth and deep meaning: 

 

"What people do believe is that it would be good to hook up our own views about democracy, mathematics, physics, God, and everything else, into a coherent story about how everything hangs together. Getting such a synoptic view often does require us to change radically our views on particular subjects. But this holistic process of readjustment is just muddling through on a large scale." (CP, p. 168)

 “[This] is, rather, the question of whether we can give up what Stanley Cavell calls the ‘possibility that one among the endless true descriptions of me tells me who I am.’ The hope that one of them will do just that is the impulse which, in our present culture, drives the youth to read their way through libraries, cranks to claim that the have found The Secret that makes all things plain, and sound scientists and scholars, toward the end of their lives, to hope that their work has “philosophical implications’ and “universal human significance”. In a post-philosophical culture, some other hope would drive us to read through the libraries. (PI, pp, xxxix-xl).


What he proposed for philosophy, and what was rejected, was that philosophy move in a more inclusive direction which makes fewer scientific claims  -- i.e., to sacrifice claims to Truth and universality (attained by strict criteria as to which kinds of questions are permissible), for the sake of  comprehensiveness and versatility: 

 

“[Philosophy] looks, in short, much like what is sometimes called “culture criticism” – a term which has come to  name the literary-historical-anthropological-political merry-go-round I spoke of earlier.  The “culture critic” feels free to comment on anything at all. He is a pre-figuration of the all-purpose intellectual of a post-philosophical culture, the philosopher who has abandoned pretensions to Philosophy.” (PI, p. xl).



The outcome of all this is that I am doing something like what Rorty proposed, but that it isn’t philosophy as defined by the philosophy profession. Rorty is quite comfortably tenured and doesn't need to worry about this kind of thing. He seems to think that edifying philosophy is doable somewhere in the university, but it’s not clear to me where that place is. I’ve heard several times during my academic non-career, and not always about philosophy, something like “I’m not sure what it is you’re trying to do, John, but it isn’t [fill in the blank]”. There's usually a suggestion that I look elsewhere, but that place is usually unspecified and I ultimately came to conclude that it was not within the university. (In my more self-serving moments I am sometimes reminded of the question asked by the Soviet judge who sentenced Joseph Brodsky on charges of social parasitism: “How can you be a poet, Mr. Brodsky, if you’re not a member of the Writers’ Union?”)

 

So my question is: "Why should analytic philosophy monopolize American  philosophy the way it does?" This is not to say that analytic philosophy should be rooted out and crushed, but only that this dominance is not a good thing. In particular, to an interested outsider (me), disciplinary philosophy has many of the aspects of a self-perpetuating closed corporation or franchised monopoly, and is problematic the way any other monopoly is. This kind of problem is pervasive in the university, where professionalization and methodologization are running amok, and is equally well exemplified by English and other disciplines which have been colonized by postmodernism.

 

My definition of what I’m doing is not quite Rorty’s. My models for my own work are the early modern humanists -- especially Montaigne, Erasmus, and Rabelais, who stood in about the same relationship to the hairsplitting scholastics at the Sorbonne as I do to the analytic philosophers and to the postmodernists. (To these might be added political pamphleteers of the various periods.)  For Rorty, edifying philosophy seems to involve relaxed criteria or freedom from criteria, whereas what I have in mind is discourse governed by different criteria.  It should be no surprise that disciplinary academics who are ferociously rigorous in terms of their own criteria are lax and self-indulgent when judged by other criteria – for example, mine. 

 

At some later date I will write about my disagreement with Rorty. The short version is that I think that the activities of "muddling through" and "finding out who you are" are more significant and less worthy of dismissal than Rorty appears to feel.

 

NOTES

 

[1]  For example, Alisdair MacIntire's After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1981), Post-Analytic Philosophy (ed. Rajchman and West, Columbia, 1985), and Beyond Analytic Philosophy (Hao Wang, MIT, 1988), My own point of view is most like Stephen Toulmin's in Cosmopolis and Michel Meyer's in Rhetoric, Language, Reason,

Wang  is an especially interesting case. He began his philosophical studies in WWII Chungking (Chongching), the capital of Nationalist China -- I have written about that  interesting period in “Parmenides in Chungking”: http://www.johnjemerson.com/phil.parmenides.htm. Wang’s other books include Logical Journey: From Gödel To Philosophy (MIT, 1996) and From Mathematics to Philosophy (Humanities Press, 1974). Wang was close to Kurt Gödel and (reading between the lines) seems to have been one of the few people able to communicate with the insane logician. To me it is significant that, though he was one of the people who taught an early generation of philosophers about mathematical logic, he did not share their fundamentalist belief in formalization. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in economics and Alfred North Whitehead in philosophy are two other mathematicians who had their doubts about the specific ways that mathematics had been appropriated by other fields.

[2] In the two books I’ve read Rorty seems to be toying with postmodernism, though I doubt that he continued with that when postmodernism (which has in any case been excluded almost entirely from American philosophy departments) came under the hegemony of euphuism and Gongorismo.

 [3] This seems like a ludicrous idea to me.  If analytic philosophers were involved, say, in Social Security reform, the only contribution they could possibly make would be to raise a number of difficult technical questions (about the other minds question, perhaps, or brains in bottles, or deontic vs. consequentialist ethics) thus deferring any resolution of the major question for decades or centuries. This is not a frivolous objection on my part, because global-warming skeptics, creationists, and tobacco-company defenders trying to muddy the waters often do rely on demands for impossibly rigorous standards of proof from their adversaries.

 

 

 

 

More Rorty

 

 

This piece of Rorty's in a recent London Review of Books picks up some of the things I discussed here in my own Rorty piece (and to a degree, what I have to say here). Rorty was as amiable as ever, expressing his doubts about analytic philosophy without getting heated the way I would have.

 

Rorty cites an advocate of analytic philosophy who says that "philosophy done in the analytic tradition aims at truth and knowledge, as opposed to moral or spiritual improvement . . . the goal in philosophy is to discover what is true, not to provide a useful recipe for living one’s life." The spokesman does not say where the old  philosophical questions were to be sent, but my understanding is that they were simply to be driven from the university, and that analytic philosophers believe that the old  "normative" questions are basically undiscussible and that attempts at discussion are futile and probably harmful. He also does not mention that analytical philosophy, normativity and preaching aside, scarcely has anything to say at all about society, history, politics, or any other human activities of any complexity or thickness.

 

Without pushing his point very far, Rorty also alludes to the biggest problem with analytic philosophy, which is that it is an inland drainage like the Great Salt Lake or the Dead Sea. No matter what goes in, nothing ever comes out. Like physics, linguistics, biology, mathematics, etc., analytic philosophy is an autonomous professional discipline with its own goals and its own standards. Unlike all the others, however, analytic philosophy has no power, but only truth. Every other professional or scientific discipline, however autonomous, has important effects on other disciplines -- but not analytic philosophy. And if you bring this up, you'll be accused of trying to force them to go all feely-touchy, or to ideologize, or to mumble cliches for the rabble.

 

My opinion, as I've said, is that analytic philosophers are analogous to the hairsplitting scholastics of the old Sorbonne,  and are propping up a feeble form of positivist liberal secularism the way the scholastics propped up their moribund and almost contentless Catholicism. Their primary function is as placeholders making sure that other, better philosophers don't get a foothold in the university.  They control the hiring and all have nice jobs, and the rest of us will just have to continue listening to them saying "Philosophy is what philosophers do".

 

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Soames' reply to Rorty

Discussion of Rorty and Soames 
Me on analytic philosophy and ethics
Me on relativism

 

 

All original material copyright John J. Emerson

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