I.
Richard Rorty is one of the most influential contemporary American philosophers. He is read and quoted by many intellectuals working in the humanities and employed in academia as well as by theoretically-minded persons in law and government. He has been invited to the White House, a rare privilege for a philosopher who has spoken publicly and bravely on controversial issues, such as the debate concerning “political correctness” in our schools. He writes for popular magazines and scholarly journals, having now achieved the ultimate success for a philosopher in the contemporary world – pop icon status. He is often misquoted by scruffy young men in Bohemian coffee houses, for instance – often located in the proximity of New York University (NYU) – who insist that Rorty proves that all values are relative, “so nothing is, like, really right or wrong, dude – which makes it O.K. to smoke that joint later.”
Professor Rorty is routinely mentioned in the same breath with the Left Bank “Masters of Thought” deemed fashionable at any given time. When I was a graduate student in the eighties, the phrase was “Derrida, Foucault and Rorty”; these days it may be “Derrida, Lacan and Rorty”; or a more politically correct combination of names that, say, features a gay woman, preferably a French psychoanalyst; or perhaps some other bespectacled hero who is this week’s glitzy Parisian genius. I read in Paul Berman’s book that a popular slogan in Paris during May, 1968 was: “Marx, Marcuse and Mao.” Maybe some day it will be “Jefferson, Lincoln and Rorty.”
To the extent that such a thing is possible at all in the U.S., Richard Rorty and Cornel West are the “cool” philosophers on campus. Both are well on their way to being pictured on t-shirts.
Although there are ways in which my positions may be characterized as quite radical too, I disagree with many of Rorty’s philosophical arguments, which seem deeply flawed to me, and reject many of his conclusions.
I wish to examine one brief essay by Rorty, which is fairly typical of his work, and yet is sufficiently concise to serve as a target for an Internet comment and critique. I should note at the outset that Rorty has made his patriotism and commitment to America very clear. That is something on which we do agree. My criticisms should not be regarded as in any way a denial of the richness in Rorty’s work, which is always well-written, scholarly, provocative, elegant, learned and well-worth studying – especially by those of us who disagree with him.
My fundamental disagreement concerns Rorty’s position on epistemology and his metaethical stance. There is very little disagreement between us, I suspect, concerning the resolution of specific issues in politics and applied ethics, since both of us will probably arrive at results in keeping with the liberal positions on most of these controversies. The exception may be the terrorism issue. I am probably more of a Hawk than Rorty is likely to be, but maybe this results from my proximity the tragedy in New York on 9/11, and from other biographical factors that are not amenable to philosophical analysis. For present purposes, anyway, I will leave all “applied” ethics aside.
I try to keep citations down to a minimum, since this is the Internet and my readers are likely to be those same scruffy young men in search of material to rip off for their term papers. (Help yourselves, boys.) Finally, most of what I say has been said by others, sometimes at excrutiating length in the unending quest for publications leading to tenure. I make no claims to originality nor to being “on the same level” with Rorty, except that we are both human beings interested in very difficult abstract questions.
II.
I now turn to the essay entitled “Ethics Without Principles,” in Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 72. I favor an ethics of principles, a deontological ethics; Rorty does not. The philosophers whose work has meant the most (to me) in thinking about ethics and ethical dilemmas are, first of all, Immanuel Kant; and also the more recent American thinkers developing Kant’s insights, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Ronald Dworkin. Although these men have been influenced by many more philosophers than Kant and there are great differences between them, my views would be placed in the same category with theirs by most philosophers.
No one accepts all of Kant’s writings as “dogmatic” or some such nonsense. I certainly don’t. The absurd caricature of Kant as a sort-of philosophical Torquemada is nowhere to be found in Rorty’s highly sophisticated work. I doubt that many philosophers, including Kant’s critics, would wish to deny the unique importance of Kant’s Critical philosophy for the modern world and his great influence in contemporary ethical theory. I am sure that Rorty would be the first to admit this. In fact, it is precisely this that he is reacting against.
Rorty opens his essay by reminding us of his general view of truth: “Pragmatists, in contrast, treat inquiry – in both physics and ethics – as the SEARCH FOR ADJUSTMENT [emphasis added] and in particular for that sort of adjustment to our fellow humans which we call the search for acceptable justification and eventual AGREEMENT [emphasis added]: I have argued that we should substitute this latter search for the traditional descriptions of the quest for truth.” (p. 72.)
For most of us, truth is NOT a search for “acceptable justification and eventual agreement.” For instance, Susan Haack writes:
" ‘True’ IS a word we apply to statements about which we agree; but that is because, if we agree that things are thus and so, we agree that it is true that things are thus and so. But we may agree that things are thus and so when it is NOT true that things are thus and so. … So true is not a word that truly applies to all or only statements about which we agree; and neither, of course, does calling a statement true mean that it is a statement we agree about."
We believe that truth has something to do with the way things are, that what makes some justifications acceptable and procuring agreement from others likely, is precisely that their experience of reality confirms our own, suggesting that something not merely about language or ourselves, but also about reality per se, is at the center of the concept of truth.
I was at a Barnes & Noble bookstore yesterday evening and found it necessary to visit the bathroom. I asked the salesperson, “Where is the bathroom?” I did not pose this question hoping that the response would be “true” only to the extent that the statement was “justifiable,” that is, to the extent that we might agree to call it “true.” If the salesperson had asked whether I wanted a “spiritual” bathroom or suggested that the section of the store devoted to psychology books might be appropriate, this would not have been a satisfactory answer. (On second thought, relieving myself in the psychology section of the store might be highly therapeutic.)
I walked to the section of the building to which I was directed and found the bathroom. Reality said “yes” to the salesperson’s statement, as did my bladder. Hence, there was a subsequent likely agreement between us on the accuracy of the following statement: “The bathroom is on the second floor in the back.” This accuracy was not merely the result of the meaning of words, but had a little something to do with the contents and distribution of the store itself, with the fact that there was indeed a bathroom where the person said that there would be one.
My scruffy friends in the coffee shop will object at this point and say (as I used to say, in my callow youth): “Hey, ‘bathroom’ is a concept, man, and it all depends on how you define it.” They might also object that I merely brought my pre-understood definition of the exact “words” in the salesperson’s statement to my “experience” of the actual bathroom, which I then “interpreted,” so as to adjust to my reality.
I am not convinced by this. My encounter with objective and empirical reality allowed me to determine the accuracy of a statement used by someone who understood the word “bathroom” pretty much as I did, in a way confirmed by our mutual acquaintance with the geography of the real world. We did not conjure the bathroom, the bookstore, or the world into existence by the use of words; but came to understand and navigate empirical reality better by our shared creation of linguistic realities linked to and measured against, that prior and brutally factual external reality.
Our statements were “coherent” in themselves because they “corresponded” with our experience of the world – or at least of the Barnes & Noble “Superstore” at Lincoln Center, where I made some “super” purchases after visiting the “super” bathroom.
In addition to empirical reality, we also inhabit social realities. This means, like it or not, moral realities too. Suppose the sales person had said: “I hope that you explode. I am not going to tell you where the bathroom is because you are an evil absolutist who believes that there is such a thing as evil.” I might ponder the ethics of the situation, refrain from violence or insults, and come to the conclusion that Professor Rorty’s theory may not be all that helpful. After all, Rorty claims: “… there is no distinction in kind between what is useful and what is right.” (p. 73.) Furthermore, moral obligation is strictly a matter of self-interest and convenience, so that the requirement to adjust one’s behavior to the needs of other human beings" is only a matter of self-interest. (p. 74.)
We Kantians think that this confuses duty with self-interest, a point which Rorty acknowledges. We think that there is such a thing as altruism and that it is sometimes rationally commanded or required of us to behave not simply in a neutral manner, but altruistically. In other words, we may sometimes have to behave in a disinterested fashion. We may have to sacrifice our desires to the requirements of duty. I may consider not self-interest but duty as the essential ethical criteria, thereby placing the interests of others ahead of my own.
What would Jesus or Kant do in this situation?
Perhaps both would counsel understanding of the unhelpful salesperson and a universal principle of concern and respect for a fellow human being obviously suffering from mental illness or from an unfortunate immersion in postmodernist discourse. Patience and compassion would be my response, together with a more diligent search for the men’s room, which attests to my pragmatist sympathies too.
But Professor Rorty says that “there was no point at which practical reasoning stopped being prudential and became specifically moral, no point at which it stopped being merely useful and started being authoritative.” (p. 74.) If someone were to offer the salesperson a fee for lying to me and saying that there was no bathroom, and if it were clear to this person that such a self-interested or prudential act would not be discovered, then I wonder whether the pragmatist would say that it is right and moral for the salesperson to lie to me – because there would be a selfish “gain” and no disadvantage in doing so.
When confronted with this scenario, the pragmatist will go into contortions seeking to define creatively “self-interest” to mean “selflessness,” or “long-term self-interest for the species,” or something else like that – which looks a lot like altruism in the first place. The Kantian says, “no.” Truth-telling is a duty which we must not, in principle, deviate from on the basis of self-interest, though many of us will often do so, myself among them.
I would not go as far as Kant does on this point, but I agree that something more than self-interest will determine the rare occasions on which it may be morally permissible and even altruistic to lie. For instance, when the KGB enters my home asking for my loved-ones who are hiding in the closet, it may be O.K. to lie (despite Kant), but not necessarily for self-interested reasons. Out of love or compassion, perhaps, and at great personal risk – for reasons that are the opposite of self-interested.
I am suggesting that there is a kind of “moral reality” like empirical reality, that exists “out there,” objectively, that tells us when our moral statements are true. Not so, says Professor Rorty: “… the temporal circumstances of life are difficult enough without sadomasochistically adding immutable, unconditional obligations.” (p. 76.) Yet we do not “add” those obligations; rather, they are simply “there” in our lives as a matter of being human, whether we want them to be there or not. We often would love for morality to go away, but it is still there, pointing a finger (and I will not say which one) at us, shaking her head, not amused at our lapses from goodness.
Death is also “there” for us whether or not we wish it to be. We cannot decide that, because things are “difficult enough,” we should not have to die. Morality does not exist or fail to exist because it is “easy”; nor because it is “difficult” for that matter. To use Rorty’s own analogy, humans cannot avoid developing and using “language” in order to live socially, so too they will develop and use morality as part of the rationality of sociability, which implies that morality possesses an inherent objectivity. And right action remains “right,” of course, whether it is difficult or easy.
III.
Rorty has a tendency to introduce value terms into his analysis without justifying their use or providing a basis for them. Thus, he says: “We would not wish to be well-fed while our children [or our parents] go hungry; that would be unnatural.” (p. 78.) But why not be “unnatural”? How is this word understood? Is there such a thing as “unnatural”? Does “nature” tell us what is unnatural? If so, how does this fit with Rorty’s claim that we decide such things on our own?
If it turns out that reality or nature says yes or no to our descriptions, to our language constructions, and that what “works” has as much to do with “the way things are” as with the ways we use language, then as Simon Blackburn suggests, Rorty’s position is undermined.
Many of the same doubts can be expressed when Rorty speaks of “better justificatory ability” (p. 82.) What makes it “better”? This is not clear. If the answer is that it helps us to “cope,” then the question becomes: Why does it help us to cope? Surely what helps us cope is what comports with the requirements of an independent and objective world that is stubbornly resistant to our efforts to tame and control it.
At the deepest level of his analysis, Rorty is concerned to challenge “the picture of the self which philosophers have expressed in terms of the division between ‘reason’ and the ‘passions’ … Ever since Plato, the West has construed the reason-passion distinction as paralleling the distinction between the universal and individual, as well as between unselfish and selfish actions.” (p. 77.)
At least in the contemporary re-workings of the Kantian-Hegelian tradition, as transformed by Freudian psychoanalysis, it seems possible to speak of a coincidence of passion and reason, conscious and unconscious in the single self – which exists both “inside” and “outside” of the subject – as Rorty wishes. It is one, and only one, self that feels and thinks. Granted, there is no split between the two aspects of the self. Yet our worldly existence is not all there is to us. There is some life yet in those ancient metaphors derived from the Hebrew Bible and Plato by way of Kant. And if Rorty is correct to say that no, “metaphor” is all there is; then you pick your metaphor and I will stay with mine. I will continue to think of an objective external world that contains such things as bathrooms. I will also think in terms of a valid and independent moral order that tells me when things are right or wrong, that lets me know quickly enough when I have screwed-up, sometimes quite painfully too.
To admit that our reasoning is always only “ours,” is not necessarily to deny that some reasonings are better than others; some maps are better than others; some interpretations of a text are better than others, whether the text in question is a traffic signal or a clock or the U.S. Constitution, and this is only partly a matter of how language is used, but mostly it is the result of “how things are.” There is more than agreement to the concept of truth. The same applies when it comes to moral truth: Reality will say “yes” or “no” to us.
Finally, Rorty raises doubts about the plausibility of a generalized or universal moral concern for humanity, as opposed to loved-ones or those who are close to us. Why should we care about the bum on the corner? Why indeed. The best answer that our civilization has given, and it is derived from the Hebrew Bible too and later from Plato by way of Christianity and Kant, is that the bum on the corner IS YOU. He is Christ crucified, just as you are, made of the same star-stuff, burdened with the same sorts of guilt, pain, joy, fear of death, and potential capacity for love and achievement. “Whatsoever you do,” a philosopher once said, “to the least of my brothers, that you do on to me.” It is not all that great a distance from this to: “From each according to his ability to each according to his need.” Or “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all [persons] are endowed by their creator with” … inalienable rights.
If this is naive or foolish or gullible, then I will choose to be those things too. My guess is that I will have lots of company.
