Wish this was facebook. Then I could give you a like. Always a pleasure, Jerkey. Thanks for participating. Look forward to further input. I’m not being sarcastic. I encourage you to keep doing so. If nothing else, you can explain your point here further as if I were a 7 year old.
Regardless of age, we can all learn something, g63.
Thanks for responding. However,I was implying for a response, rather then offering one.
It is equally a pleasure to occasionally involve in your work.
“Rorty sympathizes with those -like Thomas Kuhn, to take a prominent example- who have pleaded with him not to characterize their work in ways they find distorting or misleading.”It’s a natural reaction,” he says. “They think of themselves as having made a quite specific point, and with a wave of my hand I seem to subsume their specific point as part of great cultural, or something like that. They think that it’s a way of putting them in bad company and ignoring the really interesting thing they said, which my net is too gross to capture.” Still, Rorty defends this tendency: “I don’t see anything wrong with doing that. Regardless of how they feel about it, if you think there’s a common denominator or a trend, then why not say so?” –from James Ryerson’s “The Quest for Uncertainty: Richard Rorty’s Pilgrimage” in Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty….
At the risk of doing to Rorty what Rorty is accused of doing to Kuhn, here we see Rorty taking on a perspective similar to that of Roland Barthes “writerly text” in which the text is (either inherently or purposely (there for the reader to, more or less, extract their own meaning from. Now this is not to say that it is license for the reader to just read whatever they want into it –although that is what they will naturally do. It is always a matter of the reader continuing to play their interpretation against the reality of the text itself until their meaning more approximately (and that is all we can expect (coordinates with that of the writer’s. But people will always steal what they can use. And I would “buttress (a word Rorty liked to use)” my connection with a point made in a later interview:
“Just as there were sixteen different ways of reacting to Hegel in his day, there were sixteen different ways of reacting to Heidegger; and I think it pointless to ask what was the “true” message of either Hegel or Heidegger –they were just people to bounce one’s thoughts off of.”
And I would further buttress Rorty’s point with the answer Hegel gave to questions about what The Phenomenology of Spirit meant (and I am paraphrasing here:
“When I wrote that book, only God and I knew what I meant. Now, I’m sad to say, only God knows.”
We can further read into this an overlap with Deleuze & Guatarri’s machinic production in which the various systems of the text interact with the various systems of the reader.
“A book does not mirror the world. It forms a rhizome with it.”
So I would argue that Rorty had every right to be cavalier about how he used the writings of others. It’s just the way it works. As we all learn in writing classes, what we write must mainly serve as a kind of screenplay for the reader’s imagination. It’s why we’re discouraged from over-description such as too many adjectives or adverbs. So if Kuhn had a problem with Rorty’s use of his thought, it was up to Kuhn to keep writing or speaking to correct the problem he saw.
Plus that, it seems to me that Kuhn’s main problem with Rorty’s interpretation was a suspicion that Rorty had twisted Kuhn’s point into anti-scientism. The thing is that all indications from the interviews I have read show that Rorty was anything but. His only concern was the idea of the scientific discourse dominating the discourse. The only thing that Rorty did was take Kuhn’s distinction between revolutionary and normal science (and the cultural rhythm’s they followed) and apply it to general intellectual inquiry. Plus that, he was a philosopher that understood and appreciated how we tend to work in the overlaps between various thinkers and movements.
I agree. Thanks again. I really need to take some time out and come back to my old stomping grounds.
“I think that attempts to get a political message out of Heidegger, Derrida, or Nietzsche are ill-fated. We’ve seen what these attempts look like, and they don’t succeed very well. Hitler tried to get a message out of Nietzsche, and Nietzsche would have been appalled by it. And people who try to get a political message out of Derrida produce something perfectly banal. I suspect it isn’t worth bothering.
But that’s not to say these figures will always be publically useless. Having a great imagination and altering the imagination in insensible ways is going to make a difference in public affairs somewhere down the line. We just don’t know how.” –Rorty in an interview from Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself….
Here, again, we see the disconnect between theory and the day to day, but with possible trickle down effects. And as has also been said: theory tends to follow praxis. And to add my own little slant:
Theory is a form of play with some perhaps serious consequences.
Rorty’s description of the political is lot like my experience with writing fiction or poetry while having read philosophy: I always had to forget I knew anything about it in order to not interfere with the creative process. At best, it came in as a commentator on the scenarios and lines (in the case of poetry) after the fact. As Joyce advised writers: avoid the didactic. Pound warned poets to go in fear of the abstract. And we can see the same dynamic at work with the political. The political is a matter of looking at real problems and coming up with real solutions for them. A good example here is Roosevelt’s New Deal and its actual relationship to the theories of Keynes. It did actually affect it. But Roosevelt had no patience for theory. All he got out of Keynes was the idea of government spending in order to stimulate the economy. And it worked. Even when WW2 took over (contrary to neo-liberalism’s argument (and created a strong economy, it was still a practice of Keynesian economics.
From, once again: Take Care of Freedom and the Truth Will Care of Itself (Conversations w/ Rorty :
“Q: After the collapse of communism, do you see any new trend emerging, something that would constitute a political basis for the coming century?
RR: Just ordinary liberal democracy is all the ideology anybody needs. Yet, liberal democracy works in times of economic prosperity and doesn’t in times of economic insecurity and, since I think we’re entering a time of economic insecurity, I don’t have much faith that we can keep liberal democracy going. But that’s not for lack of ideas, that’s for lack of money. When there is prosperity, there is not that much distance between the people and the intellectuals –the liberal democratic liberals. When things are bad, then you get cults, fundamentalists, churches, fascist movements, all kinds of weird things.”
Now I would first note how prescient this is, given that the interview occurred in 1997. But what I mainly want to note here is the validation and promise I take for myself in this, being self taught as concerns philosophy. And this is not to blow my own horn or engage in the reverse snobbery of acting as if being self taught somehow gives me an advantage over formally trained pursuants of understanding. And I’ve thought a lot about this. My conclusion was that both have advantages. And keep in mind that, once I realized I had an interest in knowledge, not being formally trained was not a choice on my part. Being self taught tends to be more efficient as concerns the task at hand in that the individual is free to pursue knowledge relevant to their personal goal. Think here of Einstein’s relationship to mathematics in that he posed certain problems to himself and sought out the mathematics that were directly relevant –that is as compared to a university curriculum which forces you to learn a lot of mathematics that may or may not be relevant to what an individual wants do. But the other side of this is that you never know what knowledge you will need. And in this sense, a formal education has a decided advantage.
Plus that, things like philosophy, art, poetry, etc., are basically industries with corporate hierarchies that you have to work your way up like any other pursuit you might go into. It’s why most people you see getting published or finding success tend to have some kind of degree behind them. This is why, for instance, I have had to consolidate myself with the possibility that I will, for all my commitment to what I am doing (I’ve basically turned it into a religious practice), I will not likely achieve anything through the mainstream mechanisms.
But here’s where the coin flips back to me. As the mechanisms that Rorty describes kick in (as intellectuals distance themselves from the people via the corporate owned universities( it may well come down to self taught guys (and gals (like me to (through the resonance and seduction that cosmopolitan intellects can’t offer (to articulate the experiences of and mobilize those who feel alienated by all this. And I would note here the parallel with the possibility that as corporate funding and the tyranny of functional drives the humanities out of the universities, the humanities may well have to turn to workshops which will create access to our cultural pool for those of lesser means. We may well see the irony of the corporate culture creating its own worst enemy: an underground.