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When philosophers rejected religion in the twentieth century, they continued to locate the social and political in abstractions but found less of an audience in a culture still attuned to religion. Even in the political evaluations of those philosophers later guided by German organicism the St Louis Hegelians, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Herbert Marcuse, and Richard Rorty the priorities of speculative reason were substantial, although this group had claims to be considered as political theorists and not political philosophers.
More than most analysts, Rorty was interested in the history of philosophy and, even more, in philosophy’s diminished role in post-war culture. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature learnedly situated analytic philosophy in what Rorty called the epistemological project that had engaged philosophers since Kant. For Rorty the thrust of analysis had been to ground knowledge, usually to justify the labors of science and distinguish it from other endeavors that were less rational, more subjective. Rorty in his book, Achieving Our Country, supports expediency in the political activism. Rorty advises American intellectuals (Left) to take the fight for social justice out of the academia and back into the streets. For making meaningful political contributions, the Left should “kick its philosophy habit”.
Rorty thinks that more important, analytic philosophy had failed in its mission. Looking at the main positions, which we have just explored, Rorty seemed to adopt the view of a layperson who might ridicule philosophical experts unable to agree on how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Rorty’s effort was much criticized, and he later apologized for his ‘amateurish’ ignorance. His loosely written exhortations contrasted with the careful reasoning of his earlier essays and with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The didactic and simplistic account of the politics of the twentieth century bore little resemblance to what knowledgeable scholars believed, reflecting more his early memories and nostalgia, which he incorporated into the text of Achieving Our Country, than a grasp of American politics or history.
Like Chomsky, Rorty was idiosyncratic as an American philosopher in being self-consciously on the left, but more conventional in his failure in the political realm. His expository style had had a long career in American pragmatism, disappointing only to those who wished philosophers to have something to say about the world.
Richard Rorty is right in saying that the left is the party of hope. Without it there is no reasonable hope for justice here and now or ever or even for a decent society. But it also seems like there is no hope for the left and so, unless we can play religious tricks on ourselves.
Over the past century or so, cultural changes centering on the erosion of foundationalist metaphysics have called forth an ever more explicit effort to specify the contours of a post metaphysical culture. That effort has encompassed earlier thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and it has brought hermeneutics, deconstruction, and neo pragmatism to center stage in recent decades. All the strands in our culture, from philosophy and science to literature and politics, have been at issue in this discussion, but the place of “history” has been central-and especially elusive. Sometimes explicitly, often only implicitly, thinkers prominent in this cultural reassessment have thought anew about what is historical and about the role of historical inquiry and understanding. Taking for granted the waning of metaphysics, this study examines its implications for the place of history, as one competing cultural strand.
As Richard Rorty has emphasized, the foundationalist assumptions of our tradition have been gradually eroding for the last one hundred fifty years, as philosophers have chipped away at such notions as “self-validating truth, ” “transcendental argument, ” and “principle of the ultimate foundation of all possible knowledge.” After Nietzsche, Heidegger, John Dewey and Donald Davidson, there are few foundationalists to be found on either side of the notorious divide between Continental and Anglo-American philosophy. And because our whole philosophical tradition has been fundamentally metaphysical, what is apparently unraveling is not simply a delimited philosophical genre but also epistemology and any possibility of privileged methods or decision procedures affording access to certain, suprahistorical truth.
It is simply false to claim that Rorty is blithely optimistic about the prospects of America as a liberal society. Recent economic trends show that America is rapidly becoming a class and caste society, that the disparity between the small elite group of financially powerful superrich and the large group of poor is becoming more and more exacerbated. In the concluding remarks of Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty gives a number of good reasons why it is “abruptly improbable” that we will ever have a “global liberal utopia”–the type of liberal utopia that he envisions. There are even reasons “for believing that neither democratic freedom nor philosophical pluralism will survive the next century.” In a hundred years’ time, pragmatism, democratic freedom, and liberalism may only be a faint memory.
But this doesn’t mean that Rorty thinks there is anything wrong with these hopes–that we should abandon them. On the contrary, his warnings bring home what he has always emphasized. The emergence of liberal societies in the West is a historical contingency. Just as circumstances that brought about the existence of liberal societies and institutions were a “happy accident, ” there is no reason for thinking that liberal societies will continue to exist. There is no historical necessity, no destiny, no enduring human essence that ensures that the freedom of democratic liberal societies will prevail. Indeed, present economic trends suggest that there may be a collapse of liberalism and pragmatism in America.
Works Cited
- Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1998.
- Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. Philosophical Papers 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
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