Contrary to previous issues I may have had with Rorty (the suggestion that it was the equivalent of going back to Ginsberg’s Howl in poetry (I find myself fumbling around at the edges of my comfort zone in his Essays on Heidegger and Others. The main thing to put in mind here is that these quotes are from the essay in which Rorty attempts to pinpoint the pragmatic aspect of Heidegger while Heidegger, himself, attempted to distance himself from pragmatism. At the same time, it has given me a glance into the deeper implications of pragmatism.
"We change them [the Kantian categories] (as, for example, we changed from an Aristotelian to a Newtonian understanding of space and time) whenever such a change enables us better to fulfill our desires by making things more readily manipulitable.
Once we take this final step, once human desires are admitted into the criterion of “truth”, the last remnants of the Platonic idea of knowledge as contact with an underlying nonhuman order disappear. We have become pragmatists."
Starting with the simple implications at work here, I would first note the suggestion that the revolutionary aspect of pragmatism lies in its willingness to accept the role that desire (what I like to call resonance and seduction (plays in our philosophical assertions: the fact (and may the wrath of Strunk rest in its grave (that, contrary to the highest hopes of scientism and the analytics, there is simply no way around it. The nuance and subtlety of it lies in connecting this with the recognition that language is not just a signifier/signified relationship, but more so (that is if we look at it in evolutionary terms (an act we engage in with other members of our species in order to achieve certain effects. And in this sense of it we can see the pragmatic overlap between Rorty’s pragmatism and the pragmatism of Deleuze.
At the same time, I would point out Rorty’s distance from Heidegger (that is as I understand it (in that Heidegger took this model as a kind of unavoidable downward escalator from Plato to Pragmatism. Heidegger saw it as a degradation to the technological frame of mind: that which saw everything around it as something to be utilized. Heidegger opposed to this technological frame of mind the import of Being. This is why he emphasized the import of the poetic approach to philosophy. The problem was, out of his ambition to touch history, he turned the poetic approach into a kind of mystical and esoteric hierarchy in which he would serve as the high priest.
In order to appreciate this, we only need look at the uses that such French writers like Deleuze, Foucault, and Lacan put obscurity in exposition to as compared to that of Heidegger’s. For the French, it was basically a matter of writing in the language they were comfortable in based on their own processes in the hope that their readers would extract (steal even (for the sake of what they could use for their own processes. As Barthes put it: writerly text. This would be the democratic approach. Heidegger, however, was more authoritarian and hierarchal in that he saw his obscure exposition as something you had to study hard in order to reach the level he was at. In other words: he clearly had a guru complex –much like Manson and Hitler did. This would be the authoritarian approach. And as Rorty described Heidegger: a swharzhaug hick.
And he should have known better as Rorty points out describing Heidegger:
“That is to say: Being, which Plato thought of as something larger and stronger than us, is there only as long as as we are here. The relation between it and us are not power relations.”
In other words, we cannot, as Heidegger recognized, separate our being from Being. Still, Heidegger, out of a mystical ambition, attempted to achieve guru status by recognizing it when, in fact, all talk of Being is little more than an act we engage in order to achieve a given end: guru status in the case of Heidegger.
I hope I haven’t totally fucked this up.