The Cambridge Companion To Rorty by David Rondel

Cambridge University Press
978-1-108-49657-5 — The Cambridge Companion to Rorty

Edited by David Rondel
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the cambridge companion to

RORTY
This Companion provides a systematic introductory over-

view of Richard Rorty’s philosophy. With chapters from an
interdisciplinary group of leading scholars, the volume
addresses virtually every aspect of Rorty’s thought, from
his philosophical views on truth and representation and
his youthful obsession with wild orchids to his ruminations
on the contemporary American Left and his prescient
warning about the election of Donald Trump. Other topics
covered include his various assessments of classical Ameri-
can pragmatism, feminism, liberalism, religion, literature,
and philosophy itself. Sympathetic in some cases, in others
sharply critical, the essays will provide readers with a deep
and illuminating portrait of Rorty’s exciting brand of
neopragmatism.
david rondel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the

University of Nevada. He is author of Pragmatist Egalitar-
ianism (2018) and co-editor of Pragmatism and Justice
(2017) and Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the
Will: The Political Philosophy of Kai Nielsen (2012).
© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

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ADORNO Edited by thomas huhn
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The Cambridge Companion to
RORTY
Edited by
David Rondel
University of Nevada, Reno

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Contents
List of Contributors page vii

List of Abbreviations of Works by Rorty xi
Introduction: The Unity of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy 1

dav i d ro n d e l
1 Rorty’s Metaphilosophy: A Pluralistic Corridor 19

c o l i n ko o p m a n
2 After Metaphysics: Eliminativism and the Protreptic

Dilemma 42
neil gascoigne
3 Rorty and Classical Pragmatism 67

c h r i s t o p h e r vo pa r i l
4 A Pragmatism More Ironic Than Pragmatic 88

b a r ry a l l e n
5 Rorty and Semantic Minimalism 110

s i m o n b l ac k b u r n
6 Returning to the Particular: Morality and the Self

after Rorty 129
a l a n m a l ac h ow s k i
7 Rorty’s Political Philosophy 155

m i c h a e l b ac o n a n d a l e x i s d i a n da
8 Tinkering with Truth, Tinkering with Difference:

Rorty and (Liberal) Feminism 179
susan dieleman

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vi contents
9 Rorty’s Insouciant Social Thought 201

james t. kloppenberg
10 Rorty and National Pride 222

g e o r g i a wa r n k e
11 Rorty on Religion 243

stephen s. bush
12 Rorty: Reading Continental Philosophy 261

pau l pat t o n
13 Rorty’s Literary Culture: Reading, Redemption, and

The Heart’s Invisible Furies 284
á i n e m a h o n a n d e l i z a b e t h o ’ b r i e n
14 Wild Orchids 303

ro b e r t w e s t b ro o k
Bibliography 323
Index 345

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Contributors
Barry Allen is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at

McMaster University. His publications include Empiricisms: Experi-
ence and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene (2020).
Michael Bacon is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Royal Hollo-

way, University of London. He has published widely in the areas of
pragmatism, pluralism and democratic theory.
Simon Blackburn retired from the Bertrand Russell Chair of philoso-

phy in the University of Cambridge in 2011. His books
include Spreading the Word (1984), Ruling Passions (1998), Truth:
A Guide for the Perplexed (2006), and The Oxford Dictionary of
Philosophy (2016).
Stephen S. Bush is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown

University. His publications include Visions of Religion: Experi-
ence, Meaning, and Power (2014) and William James on Demo-
cratic Individuality (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Alexis Dianda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier Univer-

sity. In addition to a number of journal articles and book chapters,
she is author of a forthcoming book on the concept of experience in
the work of William James.
Susan Dieleman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern

Illinois University, Edwardsville. She is coeditor of Pragmatism
and Justice (2017), and the author of several essays on Richard
Rorty’s thought, epistemic injustice, and deliberative democracy.
Neil Gascoigne is Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, Univer-

sity of London. He is the author of Richard Rorty: Liberalism, Irony
vii

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viii list of contributors
and the Ends of Philosophy (2008) and Rorty, Liberal Democracy,

and Religious Certainty (2019).
James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American

History at Harvard University. He is the author of Uncertain Vic-
tory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and Ameri-
can Thought, 1870–1920 (1986), The Virtues of Liberalism (1998),
Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Trad-
ition (2011), and Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in
European and American Thought (2016).
Colin Koopman is Professor of Philosophy and Director of New Media

and Culture at the University of Oregon. His publications
include Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James,
Dewey, and Rorty (2009), Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the
Problems of Modernity (2013), and How We Became Our Data:
A Genealogy of the Informational Person (2019).
Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Education at

University College Dublin. She is the author of The Ironist and
the Romantic: Reading Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell (2014),
and the coeditor of Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of
America (2013).
Alan Malachowski is a research fellow in the Centre for Applied

Ethics at Stellenbosch University. He is the author of Richard
Rorty (2002) and The New Pragmatism (2006). His edited
works include Reading Rorty (1990) and The Cambridge Compan-
ion to Pragmatism (2013).
Elizabeth O’Brien is a second- and third-level educator in Ireland. She

has published and presented on the educative potential of reading
literature, care as a capability of concern in Higher Education, and
the role of relationship, particularly mentorship, in the develop-
ment of the educator’s voice.

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list of contributors ix
Paul Patton is Hongyi Chair Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan Uni-

versity and Professor of Philosophy at Flinders University, Adel-
aide. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (2000) and
Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (2010).
David Rondel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University

of Nevada, Reno. He is the author of Pragmatist Egalitarianism
(2018) and coeditor of Pragmatism and Justice (2017) and Pessim-
ism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: The Political Philosophy
of Kai Nielsen (2012).
Christopher Voparil teaches philosophy and political theory at Union

Institute & University’s Graduate College, Cincinnati. He is the
author of Richard Rorty: Politics and Vision (2006), and the coedi-
tor of The Rorty Reader (2010), Pragmatism and Justice (2017), and
a new volume of Rorty’s writings, On Philosophy and Philoso-
phers: Unpublished Papers, 1960–2000 (Cambridge University
Press, 2020).
Georgia Warnke teaches in the Department of Political Science at the

University of California, Riverside. She works in the areas of
hermeneutics, critical theory, and feminist philosophy and is the
author of five books, including After Identity (2008). She is also the
editor of the volume Inheriting Gadamer (2016).
Robert Westbrook is the Joseph F. Cunningham Professor of History

at the University of Rochester. His publications include John
Dewey and American Democracy (1991) and Democratic Hope:
Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth (2005).

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Abbreviations of Works
by Rorty
AOC Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-

Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1998.
CIS Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.
CP Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1982.
EHO Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers,
Vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
MLM Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical
Papers. Edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
ORT Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers,
PCP Philosophy as Cultural Politics: Philosophical Papers,
PMN Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1979.
PSH Philosophy and Social Hope. New York: Penguin
Books, 1999.
TP Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
xi

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Introduction: The Unity of
Richard Rorty’s Philosophy
David Rondel
Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was perhaps the unique philosopher of his

generation. Admired in some intellectual circles, reviled in others, he
was unique for the sheer breadth of his interests and expertise. In an
era when philosophy was becoming increasingly hyper-specialized,
Rorty seemed more to resemble the great polymaths of the early
modern period, writing on a dazzling variety of topics – both the
recondite topics of specialist philosophers and, more frequently as
he grew older, public-facing contributions on politics, literature, and
culture. He drew from an equally dazzlingly diverse group of thinkers,
from Darwin and Dewey to Derrida and Davidson, from Freud,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger, to Nabokov, Orwell, and Harold Bloom.
It puts the point mildly to say that Rorty’s litany of intellectual
heroes was an eclectic and idiosyncratic one. Writing on figures
within the so-called analytic and continental traditions with (or so
it seemed) equal familiarity and facility, it is no embellishment to say
that Richard Rorty had a range of interests simply not found among
his philosophical contemporaries.
Rorty’s uniqueness as a philosopher is also partially
accounted for by the fact that, throughout his long and distin-
guished career, he wore different professional hats. Early on he
was a “thrusting young analytic philosopher” (TP, 10n5), a highly
professionalized Princeton professor, and the author of tightly
argued essays on specialist topics in the philosophy of mind bear-
ing titles like “In Defense of Eliminative Materialism,”
“Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental,” and “Functionalism,
Machines, and Incorrigibility.”1 Later on he was a world-famous
man of letters whose books and essays were cited tens of thou-
sands of times, a MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient whose
1
2 david rondel
reputation and influence were felt far outside the narrow confines
of professional analytic philosophy.
Yet Rorty’s uniqueness as a philosopher owed most to the aston-
ishing constellation of views he held. He was simultaneously a “post-
modernist” in his repudiation of “representationalism” and the
correspondence theory of truth, and a “bourgeois liberal” in his polit-
ics. A man of the Left who also believed in the value and importance of
American patriotism. A “raucously secular” atheist who seemed, at
times anyway, to express his humanistic and democratic hopes in a
quasi-religious vocabulary (PSH, 12–13).2 A devoted follower of
America’s greatest theorist of democracy, John Dewey, who also took
inspiration from decidedly antidemocratic thinkers like Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Rorty was both a “non-reductive physicalist” – a naturalist
through and through – and someone who believed that poetry (in his
expansive sense of that term) was at the apex of human accomplish-
ment. Rorty showed reverence for what he called “Wordsworthian
moments” in which one feels “touched by something numinous,
something of ineffable importance” (PSH, 7–8), while simultaneously
concurring with Wilfrid Sellars that, “all awareness is a linguistic
affair” (Sellars 1997, 63).
In different moods he was philosophical gadfly, literary critic,
cleaner of Augean stables, “syncretist hack,” skeptic, political com-
mentator, “ironist,” and practitioner of “cultural politics” (TP, 10n5).
Sometimes Rorty was a debunker of philosophy itself: he seemed to
take a certain pleasure in asking impolite questions about the grandi-
ose pretensions of professional philosophers. At other times he main-
tained, in a more buoyant tone, that “changes of opinion among
philosophical professors sometimes do, after a time, make a differ-
ence to the hopes and fears of non-philosophers” (TP, 45).
One could be forgiven for thinking, given the imposing range of
his thought and the diversity of his interests, that Rorty’s philosophy
was ultimately scattershot and lacking in unity. I believe that the
chapters in this volume, considered as a group, help dispel that
thought. Together they address virtually every aspect of Rorty’s
the unity of rorty’s philosophy 3
oeuvre – from his youthful obsession with wild orchids to his philo-
sophical views on truth and representation; from his ruminations on
the contemporary American Left to his various assessments of clas-
sical American pragmatism, feminism, liberalism, religion, literature,
and philosophy itself. Sympathetic in some cases, in others sharply
critical, the essays can and will speak for themselves. Together they
will provide readers with a deep and illuminating portrait of Rorty’s
exciting brand of neopragmatism.
In this Introduction, I offer a sketch of some major themes in
Rorty’s thought and try to indicate how they hang together in a
coherent (albeit controversial) whole.
darwinism, anti-authoritarianism,
and pragmatism
A loosely “Darwinian” outlook was central to Rorty’s philosophy,
much as it was to Dewey’s.3 Like Dewey, Rorty denied that human
beings are in possession of an “extra added ingredient” which other
creatures lack (TP, 186). All life – from the paramecia to the penguins;
from the hummingbirds to the Homo Sapiens – is related and continu-
ous. Rorty would often claim that the only interesting difference
between human beings and other animals is that we have “extra
neurons” which make us capable of becoming language users. This
is a difference that turns out to make an important difference. It
suggests that, unlike other creatures, we can change ourselves – our
self-image and our hopes – in part by changing the words that we use.
As Rorty narrated the story, Darwin helped make possible a
new way for humans to think of themselves and their relation to the
rest of the cosmos. His hunch was that coming to see ourselves in
broadly Darwinian terms – as “slightly-more-complicated-animals”
(TP, 48); “clever beasts” in Nietzsche’s memorable phrase – would
help liberate us from “the notion that there are nonhuman forces to
which human beings should be responsible” (CIS, 45). The belief that
there are such forces, Rorty argued, represents the least common
denominator between a belief in God and realist metaphysics. Both
4 david rondel
are symptoms of what Rorty would call “authoritarianism,” the idea

that there is a nonhuman authority to which our respect and defer-
ence is owed. Rorty labored long and hard to repudiate the spell that
this “authoritarian” idea (in all its various incarnations) has cast on
our intellectual life. His great synoptic hope was that we might “try
to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we
treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat everything – our
language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and
chance” (CIS, 22).
To see ourselves as just one more contingent product of evolu-
tion, as having only “(although to a much greater degree) the same
sorts of abilities as the squids and the amoebas will make us receptive
to the possibility that our descendants may transcend us, just as we
have transcended the squids and the apes” (Rorty 1992a, 590). Just as
evolution is “blind” and lacks a telos – just as “nature is not leading
up to anything” (PSH, 266) – so is there no set of beliefs and practices
that would provide a conclusive answer to Socrates’s famous question
about the nature of a good human life. After all, it is hard to fathom
that there might be a way of life or a set of beliefs and practices upon
which it would be impossible to improve, even if only slightly.
Thanks in large part to the legacy of Darwin and the Romantic poets,
Rorty’s story goes, Western intellectuals have increasingly come to
accept that we ourselves “have to dream up the point of human life”
and that we “cannot appeal to a nonhuman standard” to determine
whether we have chosen wisely (PSH, 266):
[H]uman beings (in the richer and more powerful parts of the world)
have shown an increasing ability to put aside the question What is
the meaning of human life? and to substitute the question What
meaning shall we give to our lives? Men and women in the last two
hundred years have become increasingly able to get along without
the thought that there must be a deep truth about themselves, a
truth that it is their job to discover. This has produced an increased
ability to brush aside the suspicion that we are under the authority
of something not ourselves: that there is a narrator (roughly, God or

Nature) of our lives other than ourselves, a narrator whose
description of us must necessarily be superior to any that we dream
up on our own. (Rorty 1995a, 71)
These are all positive developments on Rorty’s view. They should be

celebrated and encouraged.
An anti-authoritarian perspective was at the very heart of Rorty’s
philosophy, central not only to his more professionally abstruse views
on truth, justification, knowledge, and rationality but also – and much
more dramatically – to his histrionic retelling of Western philosophy’s
recent trajectory. John McDowell provides a helpful overview of the
anti-authoritarianism that runs through Rorty’s work and is worth
quoting here at length:
The sense of sin from which Dewey freed himself was a reflection of a
religious outlook according to which human beings were called on to
humble themselves before a non-human authority. Such a posture is
infantile in its submissiveness to something other than ourselves. If
human beings are to achieve maturity, they need to follow Dewey in
liberating themselves from this sort of religion of abasement before
the divine Other. But a humanism that goes no further than that is
still incomplete. We need a counterpart secular emancipation as well.
In the period in the development of Western culture during which the
God who figures in that sort of religion was stricken, so to speak, with
his mortal illness, the illness that was going to lead to the demise
famously announced by Nietzsche, some European intellectuals
found themselves conceiving the secular world, the putative object of
everyday and scientific knowledge, in ways that paralleled that
humanly immature conception of the divine. This is a secular analog
to a religion of abasement, and human maturity requires that we
liberate ourselves from it as well as from its religious counterpart . . .
Full human maturity would require us to acknowledge authority only
if the acknowledgement does not involve abasing ourselves before
something non-human. (McDowell 2000, 109–10)
6 david rondel
This was Rorty’s big “hedgehog” idea. “I think of my work,” he

confessed in an interview, “as trying to move people away from the
notion of being in touch with something big and powerful and non-
human” (Mendieta 2006, 49). The claim was not that an anti-
authoritarian future of this kind would be more rational or more in
touch with the intrinsic nature of reality. It was simply a promising
long-term cultural experiment, a trajectory along which Western
intellectuals might, with encouragement and luck, continue to travel.
antirepresentationalism, truth,
and metaphilosophy
Rorty spent much of his time debunking the grand, self-congratulatory
aspirations of traditional philosophy (with a capital ‘P’), arguing, as
did Dewey and James before him, that philosophers should dedicate
their energy not to the “problems of philosophers” per se, but to
problems that matter to everyday people. 4 The debunking effort for
which he is most well-known among philosophers is his attack on
the correspondence theory of truth, and, more broadly, on the idea
that language or mind has the capacity to “mirror” nature – the
capacity to “represent” the way the world really is. Since truth is a
property of our descriptions of the world, and since we lack the
ability to get in between our descriptions of the world and the world
itself to make a judgment about the “fit” between the two, he
argued that the correspondence theory of truth – the ancient, intui-
tively banal idea that truth consists in the accurate representation
of reality – should be jettisoned. In Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity he put the argument pithily:
Truth cannot be out there – cannot exist independently of the

human mind – because sentences cannot so exist, or be out there.
The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not. Only
descriptions of the world can be true or false. The world on its
own – unaided by the describing activities of human beings –
cannot . . . The world does not speak. Only we do. (CIS, 5–6)
Rorty would often suggest that in order to make sense of the

idea of truth as correspondence to reality we need an account of how
bits of language (viz., our descriptions) might stand in a mysterious
relation called “corresponding” or “accurately representing” with
bits of non-language (viz., “the world on its own, unaided by the
describing activities of human beings”). What would that even mean?
And how might this mysterious “correspondence” relation be under-
stood? He would also frequently summon the familiar verificationist
idea according to which, even if we could somehow explicate the
notion of “correspondence,” we would remain utterly in the dark
about when or if it had been achieved. “We do not know what it
would mean for Nature to feel that our conventions of representa-
tions are becoming more like her own,” Rorty wrote in Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature, “and thus that she is nowadays being
represented more adequately than in the past” (PMN, 299). This was
ultimately no cause for despair on Rorty’s view. After all, he
shrugged, “We should not regret our inability to perform a feat which
no one has any idea how to perform” (PMN, 340).
If we cannot parse better and worse descriptions according to
whether or not they correspond to the intrinsic nature of reality, then
we should distinguish them in terms of what they do for us, in terms
of how well they facilitate our multifarious needs for “coping.” Rorty
believed that coping, and trying to find new ways to cope better still,
is all we clever mammals ever do. There is no point in our develop-
ment at which we cease merely “coping” with our environment in
various ways and begin doing something magnificently different,
namely, “representing” it. “Coping” goes all the way down on this
view. Our most elegant theories, our best literature, and our most
sophisticated science are just more complex varieties of coping. There
is no higher kind of activity that “coping” might contrast with.
On this Darwinian, antirepresentationalist view, one descrip-
tion of the world can be judged superior to other rival descriptions if it
serves us in ways that its rivals cannot. The “useful–useless distinc-
tion,” Rorty urged, “can take the place of the old appearance–reality
8 david rondel
distinction” (TP, 1). No description enjoys an intrinsic superiority

over another, for once the notions of “correspondence to reality”
and “accurate representation” go, so too does the idea of “the world
itself” or “reality” adjudicating between competing descriptions. All
of this makes it pointless to ask, for example: “Is the carpenter’s or
the particle physicist’s account of tables the true one”? (PSH, 153) If
neither account gets any closer to the intrinsic nature of tables (Rorty
would have stoutly denied, incidentally, that tables enjoy any “intrin-
sic nature” which might be more or less closely approximated), then
we must only ask which of the two accounts would better serve
certain purposes in certain contexts. Words and descriptions on this
view are like tools: some of them are better than others in virtue of
their usefulness for the accomplishment of certain tasks.
Rorty wrote at great length about truth and representationalism
throughout his career, saying many deflationary (and sometimes irre-
sponsible) things about them along the way. The brief sketch offered
here obviously does not do justice either to the sophistication of
Rorty’s views in this area, or to the tidal wave of equally sophisticated
criticism he would receive for those views.5 But I think it is important
to see how Rorty’s repudiation of the “mirror of nature” idea connects
with, and springs from, the Darwinism and anti-authoritarianism that
were so central in his thinking. I have argued elsewhere that, despite
his grouchiness about the idea that truth is an interesting concept for
which a philosophical theory is urgently needed, Rorty “was no less
cognizant of the importance of holding true beliefs than any other
intellectually responsible person.” He did not think that truth was
“dispensable or unimportant,” and he knew perfectly well that “a
world in which we lack any true beliefs is a world in which we are
all dead.” What he fundamentally opposed – and this brings the con-
nection with his Darwinism and anti-authoritarianism into sharper
focus – was the “hypostatization of truth as some kind of nonhuman
power to which our allegiance is owed.” What he fundamentally
rejected was “the worship of truth: the kind of (Platonic) outlook
which makes truth divine, the paramount end at which humanity
can take aim, and the corresponding faith that grasping it will some-
how make us free” (Rondel 2018, 5–6). In the end, then, the focal point
of Rorty’s attack was not truth per se. Rather, it was the “authoritar-
ian” idea that there is something great and nonhuman before which we
should humble ourselves, and simultaneously a rejection of the widely
held assumption that truth is a “profitable topic” to which philoso-
phers should devote their energy. As Rorty put the point, “To say that
we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is
not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth. It
is to say that our purposes would be best served by ceasing to see truth
as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term
which repays ‘analysis’” (CIS, 8).
between irony and liberalism

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty offered a portrait of a
certain kind of post-Philosophical intellectual: the liberal ironist.
The liberal ironist describes someone who has come to embrace
many of Rorty’s central philosophical theses, someone who has fully
adopted the Darwinian and “anti-authoritarian” self-image that was
so predominant in Rorty’s thought. With Rorty, the liberal ironist
denies that our words and sentences stand in relations of “fitting”
with or “corresponding” to a nonlinguistic reality. After all, if words
are among the tools we clever animals have developed to enjoy more
pleasure and less pain, then it makes little sense to say that some of
these tools are more or less in touch with reality than others (PSH,
xxiii). The liberal ironist denies that our beliefs can be given “foun-
dations” and that the various things in which the world is replete
(quarks, human beings, liberal democracies, consciousness, aca-
demic disciplines, and much more) can be tidily explicated with
necessary and sufficient conditions. Crucially, liberal ironists are
prepared to affirm the deep contingency of things – of their language,
their self, and the various groups and causes with which they happen
to be in solidarity. They concede that things might have easily been
otherwise and that in rather nearby possible worlds they would be
10 david rondel
radically different people than they presently are. The liberal ironist,
Rorty says, “faces up to the contingency of his or her most central
beliefs and desires . . . [and] abandons the idea that those central
beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time
and chance” (CIS, xv).
Rorty would frequently claim that what is distinctive about
human beings is a capacity for language, and that this capacity is a
prerequisite for projects of self-creation, for attempts to forge for
oneself a unique and interesting identity:
All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to
justify their actions, their beliefs, and their lives. These are the
words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt for
our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and
our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell, sometimes
prospectively and sometimes retrospectively, the story of our lives.
I shall call these words a person’s ‘final vocabulary.’ It is ‘final’ in
the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their
user has no non-circular argumentative recourse. Those words are
as far as he can go with language; beyond them there is only
helpless passivity and resort to force. (CIS, 73)
The liberal ironist, Rorty tells us, has “continuing and radical doubts
about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been
impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people
or books she has encountered” (CIS, 73). The liberal ironist would
regret it if Socrates turned out to be right – if there really was a final,
universal ordering of worthy human ends – because she delights in
expanding her ethical horizons by learning about different goods,
interesting modes of life, and new ways of being human. Above all,
she is consumed by the prospect of making things new, rather than
discovering what has been there all along. She is forever trying to
enlarge her sympathies, extend her loyalties, and seek out new modes
of life with which to experiment. The liberal ironist is perpetually
struggling for what Heidegger called “the hope for authenticity” – the
attempt, as Rorty explains it, “to become one’s own person rather
than merely the creation of one’s education and environment” (PCP,
90). Rorty’s ironist is inflamed by the Romantic impulse summed up
in William Blake’s couplet: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by
another Mans / I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to
Create” (Blake 1977, 651).
To this end, ironists are constantly in search of better, more
useful redescriptions of themselves. Their hope is to make the
best selves for themselves that they can (CIS, 80). The seemingly
obvious rejoinder, Best selves in light of what? is, I think, one that
Rorty would have regarded as misplaced. As he noted in a 2006
interview, “Irony isn’t a spiritual path you might pursue. It’s just
a matter of sitting loose to one’s present self and hoping that one’s
next self will be a little more interesting” (Rorty 2006, 56). There
are no neutral, noncircular criteria to which we can appeal to sort
out our more and less interesting selves (any such criteria, after
all, will themselves be embedded in a particular final vocabulary
and so cannot be used to adjudicate conflicts between different
final vocabularies). Apodictic certainty is simply not in the cards.
Imagination and courage, not some set of epistemic virtues, are
the relevant considerations here.6
Rorty discusses a handful of “ironic” figures in Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity, but unlike Nietzsche and Heidegger, say
(both of whom were illiberal to the core) Rorty’s ideal intellectual
was a liberal ironist, someone who, in addition to adopting an
ironic stance about attempts at self-creation, also happens to agree
with Judith Shklar that “cruelty is the worst thing we do” (CIS,
74). This may seem like an odd way to gloss what it means to
count as a “liberal” (it indicates nothing about a commitment to
individual rights or principled limits on the coercive authority of
the state, or any number of other core liberal ideas), but I think
the invocation of Shklar here is ultimately intended to bolster the
secularism and anti-authoritarianism that would be ascendant in
Rorty’s ideal liberal culture. “To put cruelty first,” writes Shklar
12 david rondel
in Ordinary Vices, “is to disregard the idea of sin as it is under-

stood by revealed religion.” Regarding cruelty as the summum
malum is therefore
a judgment made from within the world in which cruelty occurs as

part of our normal private life and daily public practices. By putting
it unconditionally first, with nothing above us to excuse or to
forgive acts of cruelty, one closes off any appeal to any order other
than that of actuality. To hate cruelty with utmost intensity is
perfectly compatible with Biblical religiosity, but to put it first does
place one irrevocably outside the sphere of revealed religion. For it
is a purely human verdict upon human conduct and so puts religion
at a certain distance. (Shklar 1984, 8–9)
Ultimately, the contrast between “liberal” and “illiberal” in Rorty’s

usage is intended to distinguish between those who take themselves
to have obligations to others and those who do not – between people
who take the suffering and humiliation of others seriously and those
who more or less shrug it off. On Rorty’s Shklarian definition then,
“liberal” is simply a convenient shorthand for the kind of person who
recognizes a set of ends not entirely subsumed by private attempts at
self-creation.
Irony and liberalism are wholly separable on Rorty’s view, the
former answering to a private proclivity, the latter to a public one.
Commitment to the one does not impel a commitment to the other,
and conversely. Rorty knew well that history has produced many
“ironists” who were non-liberals and many liberals who were non-
ironists.7 The more important point for Rorty, however, is that the
kind of project to which an ironic orientation answers (self-creation)
and the kind of project to which a liberal orientation answers (the
reduction of cruelty) may turn out in practice to have little or nothing
to do with one another. A person can strive to make her private life
beautiful and her public life humane without worrying about how (or
if ) these different strivings can be consolidated at the level of theory.
We should eschew the thought that, somehow, these different kinds
of projects must be brought together philosophically in a “single

vision” (PSH, 7):
[O]ne should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one’s moral

responsibilities to other people with one’s relation to whatever
idiosyncratic things or persons one loves one loves with all one’s
heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is
obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide – as they do
in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other
human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by
nothing save the thought of social justice. But they need not
coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so.
(PSH, 13)
And similarly:
It is one thing to say that, for most of us, our sense of what makes
our life worth living is bound up with our sense of responsibility
towards others. It is another thing to say that no human being can
succeed in separating his project of individual self-realization from
such responsibilities. Some people, not all of them sociopaths, have
succeeded in doing so. Maybe such separation usually produces
pretty nasty selves, but that is another question. (Rorty 2001, 221)
redescription and cultural politics

“Cultural politics” is a phrase that Rorty introduced to cover argu-
ments about what words to use, as well as “projects for getting rid of
whole topics of discourse” (PCP, 3). Cultural politics stands in con-
trast to ontology and epistemology. Whereas ontology and epistemol-
ogy pose the questions “What is the fundamental nature of reality?”
and “How can we know anything about it?” cultural politics instead
asks “What categories and descriptions should we deploy in order to
best pursue our long-term cultural goals and hopes?” Whereas the
former involves “claims to knowledge and appeals to self-evidence”
the latter involves appraising our norms and practices in overtly
14 david rondel
political-cultural terms and “suggestions about what we should try”

(TP, 57). The dispute about whether we should search for descriptions
which aim to “get things right” (ontology/epistemology) or descrip-
tions that promote our long-term social and culture hopes (cultural
politics) is itself a question to be settled by cultural politics. Cultural
politics “should replace ontology,” Rorty says, “and . . . whether it
should or not is itself a matter of cultural politics” (PCP, 5). The
activities of philosophers and other intellectuals on this view should
become explicitly and self-consciously politicized: they should be
carried out in the name of the kind of cultural shifts we want to see
enacted, the kind of social world we want to see made.
Rorty notoriously claimed that, “anything could be made to
look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by
being redescribed” (CIS, 7). This is because, on Rorty’s view, descrip-
tive choice mediates social meaning. Describing X in one way rather
than another influences the way that X is seen, experienced, and
interpreted. Describing a 1948 Middle East war as “a glorious
moment of national independence” or as “the Nakba” will greatly
influence how one construes certain conflicts and events. To
describe being gay as “a wicked lifestyle choice” rather than “a
harmless and naturally occurring feature of the human condition”
will make an important difference to whether or not gays and les-
bians will be accepted as full-fledged members of society. From a
cultural-political point of view, then, descriptive choice matters a
great deal. “When we say that Frenchman should stop referring to
Germans as ‘Boches,’ or that white people should stop referring to
black people as ‘niggers,’” Rorty says, “[we are suggesting that] our
“sociopolitical goals – increasing the degree of tolerance that certain
groups of people have for one another – will be promoted by aban-
doning these linguistic practices” (PCP, 3).
Rorty would frequently take a “cultural-political” perspective
toward philosophy itself. Philosophy is not a natural kind, he
thought. It has no essence which it is the business of experts to
uncover. Philosophy on this view is neither a Fach nor a strenge
Wissenschaft. Philosophy is (and will be) whatever philosophers

make of it. Rorty urged that philosophers give up their time-honored
pretensions to timelessness, purity, and a supposedly unique meth-
odological “rigor” that no one else really knows how to deploy. They
should instead try to steer their discipline in more public-facing
directions, with an eye to broader cultural relevance. “The more
philosophy interacts with other human activities – not just natural
science, but art, literature, religion and politics as well – the more
relevant to cultural politics it becomes, and thus the more useful. The
more it strives for autonomy, the less attention it deserves” (PCP, x).
To this end, Rorty suggested that “we look at relatively specialized
and technical debates between contemporary philosophers in the
light of our hopes for cultural change” (PCP, x).
But aren’t some descriptions more faithful to their objects
than others? And wouldn’t “philosophy as cultural politics” only
be plausible if one denied that this were so? Paradoxical though it
may seem, Rorty would occasionally deny that this was so. Such a
denial seems less paradoxical, however, when we consider not dis-
crete sentences but whole vocabularies – when we move from the
level of “criterion-governed sentences within language games to
language games as wholes” (CIS, 5):
When we consider examples of alternative language games – the

vocabulary of ancient Athenian politics versus Jefferson’s, the
moral vocabulary of Saint Paul versus Freud’s, the jargon of
Newton versus that of Aristotle, the idiom of Blake versus that
of Dryden – it is difficult to think of the world as making one of
these better than another, of the world as deciding
between them. (CIS, 5)
If the world itself does not decide between alternative language

games, the decision must in some sense or another belong to us.
Decisions like these are obviously never straightforward or uncom-
plicated, but they are invariably political. They are political because
every descriptive choice has consequences. Every language game will
16 david rondel
place cultural valence somewhere; it will malign or commend some-

one; it will create, critique or conserve social meanings of some kind.
Contests between rival language games are, then, at bottom, disputes
about the kind of social world we want to inhabit. And since there is
no way to opt out of language games altogether – since we will never
find ourselves outside all language games – these contests implicate
and impact everyone.
All of this helps clarify why Rorty believed that arguments
about what words to use are a crucial element in campaigns for social
progress, why he believed that “redescription” names an important
political activity. After all, popularizing alternative descriptions in
accordance with long-term cultural and political hopes is what “cul-
tural politics” is all about:
Something traditionally regarded as a moral abomination can

become an object of general satisfaction, or conversely, as a result
of the increased popularity of an alternative description of what is
happening. Such popularity extends logical space by making
descriptions of situations that used to seem crazy seem sane. Once,
for example, it would have sounded crazy to describe homosexual
sodomy as a touching expression of devotion or to describe a
woman manipulating the elements of the Eucharist as a figuration
of the relation of the Virgin to her Son. But such descriptions are
now acquiring popularity. At most times, it sounds crazy to
describe the degradation and extirpation of helpless minorities as a
purification of the moral and spiritual life of Europe. But at certain
periods and places – under the Inquisition, during the Wars of
Religion, under the Nazis – it did not. (TP, 204)
Philosophy as “cultural politics” does not follow as a matter of

course from Rorty’s repudiation of representationalism and his cele-
bration of irony. But once again, the radical anti-authoritarianism
that runs through Rorty’s thinking provides the glue that holds these
various ideas together. For cultural politics is more or less what
“irony” looks like in public (Rondel 2018, 168). Whereas irony is
meant to be private and idiosyncratic, cultural politics is public and

operates in the arena of shared language and culture. Yet their motiv-
ating impulse is more or less the same. Both represent attempts to
give up on metaphysics and epistemology, to follow through on the
anti-authoritarianism that was at the heart of Rorty’s intellectual
vision. Both are attempts to replace objectivity with solidarity, find-
ing with making, to replace knowledge with hope. Both are attempts,
in short, to undermine the idea that there is a nonhuman authority
(Truth, Reality, History, Human Nature, or something else) to which
respect and obedience is owed.
People may reasonably disagree about whether the anti-
authoritarian future Rorty envisaged would be as inspiring and attract-
ive as he believed it would be. But it should be clear that articulation of
and advocacy for such a future was at the very core of Rorty’s thought.
Viewed through the lens of such advocacy, Rorty’s philosophy can be
appreciated as a coherent and largely unified whole.8
notes
1 See Rorty 1970a, 1970b, and 1972. These papers are all reprinted in MLM.
Daniel Dennett notes in his brief forward to MLM that these and other
papers from the same period “shaped the field [of “analytic philosophy of
mind”] for . . . decades” (MLM, vii).
2 Consider as one example this striking passage: “My sense of the holy,
insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any
millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization
in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society,
communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be
unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic
convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free
agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate” (Rorty 2005, 40).
3 See Rondel 2011a.
4 Rorty used “Philosophy” with a capital ‘P’ to signify “following Plato’s
and Kant’s lead, [the practice of] asking questions about the nature of
certain normative notions (e.g., ‘truth,’ ‘rationality,’ ‘goodness’) in the
hope of better obeying such norms” (CP, xv). The aim of (small ‘p’)
18 david rondel
philosophy by contrast, which Rorty approved of, is (quoting Wilfrid

Sellars) “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the
term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (Sellars
1962, 35).
5 The essays by Jürgen Habermas, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam,
Daniel Dennett, John McDowell, and Akeel Bilgrami (and Rorty’s
responses) in Brandom 2000 provide a taste of some of this sophistication.
6 Rorty was adamant that “ironism” not be confused with “relativism.” If
relativism names the doctrine that any belief or moral identity is just as
good or bad as any other, then Rorty thought that no one – save for the
occasional college freshman, perhaps – honestly subscribes to it (CP,
166 and TP, 43–62). For people who have gotten beyond the hankering for
metaphysical objectivity, the impulse to glimpse things from what Hilary
Putnam memorably dubbed a “God’s-Eye View,” “there is no such thing
as the ‘relativist predicament,’ just as for someone who thinks that there
is no God there will be no such thing as blasphemy” (CIS, 50).
7 While the relationship between self-creation and liberalism is symbiotic
on Rorty’s view, self-creation is afforded a certain normative primacy.
The point of a liberal social order, Rorty has it, is to facilitate
opportunities for self-creation. Yet self-creation does not necessarily owe
anything back to liberalism in turn. After all, there is a space in Rorty’s
utopia for illiberal self-creators like Nietzsche and Heidegger. “The point
of a liberal society,” Rorty maintained, “is not to create or invent
anything, but simply to make it as easy as possible for people to achieve
their wildly different private ends without hurting each other” (EHO,
196). In Rorty’s ideal liberal society, then, “discussion of public affairs
will revolve around (1) how to balance the needs of peace, wealth, and
freedom when conditions require that one of these goals be sacrificed to
one of the others and (2) how to equalize opportunities for self-creation
and then leave people alone to use, or neglect, their opportunities” (CIS,
84–5). I take up some of these issues in Rondel 2009.
8 Portions of this introduction make use of material from my Pragmatist
Egalitarianism (Rondel 2018) and a forthcoming essay, “Rortyan Ethics as
Radical Pluralism,” in Handbuch Richard Rorty, ed. Martin
Müller, Springer.
1 Rorty’s Metaphilosophy:
A Pluralistic Corridor
Colin Koopman
“unabashedly metaphilosophical”
One of the most remarkable aspects of Richard Rorty’s legacy is the
sheer variety of the philosophical imprint from which his thought
was formed. The breadth of Rorty’s philosophical acquaintance is
staggering. How many other philosophers of his generation wrote
intelligently and imaginatively about figures as diverse as Davidson,
Derrida, and Dewey? Of those, how many also discussed Darwin and
Dickens? I can think of no other philosopher of Rorty’s generation
whose writings delve into just those five giants whose last name
starts with the letter D. There may be today, among the generations
following Rorty’s, an increasing number of philosophical writers
who seek a similar range in their work. The aspirations of these
philosophers are in many instances a testament to the way in which
Rorty approached philosophy as a kind of labyrinthine hotel whose
many rooms were occupied by all kinds of fascinating figures
working away on all manner of astonishing ideas.
Rorty’s command of such a wide range of philosophies, and
even more so his generous engagements across them, are expressive
of a kind of metaphilosophical pluralism that was largely missing in
his own philosophical milieu and which, despite increasing accept-
ance over the last two decades, continues to be sorely missed today.
Looking forward, Rorty’s pluralistic metaphilosophy will be of enor-
mous value just so long as philosophy remains unsettled about how
to account for its disagreements, which is to say just so long as
philosophy generates needs for addressing metaphilosophical ques-
tions, which is effectively to say just so long as there is such a thing
as philosophy.
19
20 colin koopman
The importance of metaphilosophy to Rorty was clear from the

first moment at which his work emerged as a major philosophical
influence, namely the publication in 1979 of his Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature. Many of that book’s most significant contributions
were developed on “the ethereal plane of metaphilosophy,” to borrow
a phrase of Rorty’s from an obscure early essay that preceded his
splash-hit book by almost twenty years (MLM, 43). If Part I of Mirror
is about philosophy of mind, and Part II about epistemology, then Part
III (as well as the Introduction) is about metaphilosophy, for instance
in its contrast between “systematic philosophy and edifying philoso-
phy” (PMN, 365).
The centrality of metaphilosophy in Mirror was noted in an
early symposium on the book at the American Philosophical
Association meeting in December of 1980 and later published (with-
out Rorty’s presented rejoinders) in The Journal of Philosophy.1 Ian
Hacking opened his remarks with a characteristically straightfor-
ward and correct assertion: “Richard Rorty’s book is unabashedly
metaphilosophical” (Hacking 1980, 579).2 The other panelist,
Jaegwon Kim, noted in his first paragraph why it matters so much
that Mirror is so metaphilosophical: “In the past two decades or
so . . . philosophers have shown little concern for metaphilosophical
issues, and have blithely gone about the business of ‘doing philoso-
phy’” (Kim 1980, 588).3 Part of the splash, or crash, that was Mirror
was its having raised discomforting metaphilosophical questions in
a philosophical milieu that was pleased to just do its business with-
out bothering to question what that business was for. Rorty’s wide-
spread reputation as a Socratic gadfly was earned in large part
because he did not refrain from asking sharp questions of the discip-
line that most of his colleagues at the time, and many of our col-
leagues still today, would decline to take up.
Mirror elaborated a philosophical perspective that developed
themes which Rorty found common across the work of, in his words,
“the three most important philosophers of our century – Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, and Dewey” (PMN, 5). Numerous of Rorty’s philosophical
rorty’s metaphilosophy 21
interventions have been traced back to influences originating in these

three thinkers. Yet one crucial aspect of Rorty’s thought has not been
traced to any of the three, and I believe could not be so traced. Though
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey all explain something about
Rorty’s philosophy, they each also explain almost nothing about his
provocative combination of their three philosophical perspectives at a
metaphilosophical level. Despite the voluminous scholarship on
Rorty’s work, the specifically pluralistic quality of the metaphilosophy
that informs nearly all of his philosophical interventions remains
incompletely surveyed. In particular, there is little understanding of
the sources from which Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism flows.
In what follows I characterize and assess Rorty’s metaphiloso-
phical pluralism. I begin in the first section with an excavation of
Rorty’s metaphilosophy, its meaning, and its merits. I offer a char-
acterization of Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism in terms of his
signature idea of vocabularies. In the second section, I turn to
developing an argument concerning a neglected source of Rorty’s
metaphilosophy. I locate this source in an unexpected branch within
the philosophical perspective with which Rorty most frequently
identified his own views, namely pragmatism. In the final section,
I turn to the consequences of Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism
for philosophy itself. This concluding discussion needs be very brief.
For if my arguments in the first two sections are correct, then a
detailed exposition of the consequences of Rorty’s metaphilosophi-
cal pluralism would require careful engagements with nearly every
aspect of his work. I leave those engagements to the other fine
contributions to this volume, hoping here only to provide them with
a kind of metaphilosophical preface.
understanding rorty’s metaphilosophical

pluralism
Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism was the response of a philoso-
pher deeply impressed by the sheer variety of orientations and
options available to any philosopher. Anyone who takes this variety
22 colin koopman
very seriously, Rorty thought, will be inclined to give up on the

quest to find the one true philosophy that would put all the others
into their proper place according to terms they reasonably ought to
accept. As such, Rorty was deeply critical of the classical stance of
metaphilosophical monism: “The attempt to state the nature or the
task or the mission of philosophy is usually just an attempt to build
one’s philosophical preferences into a definition of ‘philosophy’”
(TP, 9). Debunker that he was, there was also in Rorty a more
important, and certainly more positive, impulse to blend, combine,
and recompose philosophies in pluralistic fashion.
Rorty sometimes denied the originality of his pluralism, but
even his denials belie the dazzling range of his philosophical
acquaintance: “I have sometimes been mistakenly commended for
originality, simply because I often put apparently dissimilar figures –
for example, Nietzsche and James, Davidson and Derrida – in the
same box . . . I get restless, look for new heroes while remaining
reasonably loyal to old ones, and so have wound up a syncretist”
(TP, 10). Rorty elsewhere described his syncretism as seeking “a
beautiful mosaic” within which one could “admire both Blake and
Arnold, both Nietzsche and Mill, both Marx and Baudelaire, both
Trotsky and Eliot, both Nabokov and Orwell” (CIS, 81). As this list
makes clear, Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism was also meta-
literary, or better yet, to employ one of Rorty’s own terms, metavo-
cabulary. Indeed, Rorty’s signature idea of vocabularies is crucial for
grasping the very terms of his metaphilosophical pluralism.
Rorty’s onetime student Robert Brandom has observed that the
concept of a vocabulary “plays a pivotal role in the philosophical
world-view . . . that Rorty has been developing over the past three
decades” (Brandom 2000, 156). I am not sure Rorty’s work is helpfully
described as seeking “philosophical world-views,”4 but certainly it is
the case that the vocabulary concept was crucial to both Rorty’s
philosophical and metaphilosophical itineraries. Nearly twenty years
on from Brandom’s observation, Clayton Chin reiterates the point
that, “The idiom of vocabularies . . . is the central device of Rorty’s
metaphilosophical project” (Chin 2018, 35). Taking up Brandom’s and

Chin’s leads, I offer in this section, first, an explication of Rorty’s
conceptual tool of vocabularies and, then, an exposition showing how
that concept is central to an argument that Rorty employed on many
occasions to motivate metaphilosophical pluralism.
Despite employing the concept of vocabulary frequently through-
out his works, Rorty never really offers a straightforward definition of the
term. In many of his usages, Rorty employs “vocabulary” in a sense that
is meant to be analogous to Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games.”5
A Wittgensteinian language game for Rorty is “a set of agreements about
what is possible and important” (CIS, 48). Presumably, such agreements
in language are, for Rorty, correlative with, as Wittgenstein himself held,
agreements in forms of life or practice.6 Seen in light of Wittgensteinian
language games, Rortyan vocabularies are the linguistic dimension of
shared and interrelated practices.
Rorty at one point describes vocabularies as the “set of words
which [people] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs, and their
lives” (CIS, 73). This and other passages make clear that Rorty’s
vocabularies are indeed primarily linguistic. Despite his having
repudiated the “linguistic turn” as a philosophical methodology,7
linguistic categories were nevertheless quite central to Rorty’s
approach to philosophy.8 Rorty’s central of idea of vocabularies exem-
plifies his lingualism about philosophy.
With Rorty’s concept of vocabularies in view, I turn now to
detailing its place in one of his signature arguments: that the choice
between rival vocabularies cannot be adjudicated by any single meta-
philosophical vocabulary. This argument is at the heart of Rorty’s
rejection of the classic philosophical quest to “fit everything – every
thing, person, event, idea, and poem – into a single context, a context
that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and unique”
(PCP, 90). In numerous writings, Rorty develops his argument against
this quest by way of making a distinction between two levels at
which we might philosophize: the level of sentences and the level of
vocabularies. I shall consider two examples.9
24 colin koopman
In his 1979 presidential address to the American Philosophical

Association, Rorty allows that a correspondence theory of truth looks
plausible when pitched at the level of “short categorical sentences”
(CP, 162). But, he argues, if we shift attention from assertions like “this
is red” to the wider vocabularies within which any such assertion must
be nested, the correspondence theory begins to look hopeless. Debates
at the level of a sentence, say about whether a bread-box-sized object is
really red, are usually very easy to resolve. But when debates open up at
the vocabulary level, say between a physicist and a painter quarreling
over how to best describe some patch of redness, we are unable to
settle matters. For when such debates open up, we cannot simply adopt
the one best, or one most correct, vocabulary. For that, which vocabu-
lary would be best, is precisely what is at issue.
Rorty’s most interesting employment of his sentence–
vocabulary contrast came ten years later, in the opening pages of
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. To set the scene, it helps to
recall that the general project of that book is a historicist affirmation
of contingency, or more specifically an affirmation of the limitless
supply of transformations that the contingencies of history afford
(CIS, xiii). No matter how impressive are the philosophical castles of
one generation, they are always susceptible to being floated up into
the air by later generations who will marvel at their vapory dissipa-
tion. The historicism central to Contingency is related to the central
argument of Mirror, namely the rejection of conflating the fact of
being caused to believe something with the status of being justified
in believing it. Chapter IV of Mirror deftly combined insights from
Quine and Sellars to wreck this conflation beyond repair (PMN,
165–212). The world may cause me to believe that the sun is rising.
But despite being so caused I may nonetheless be unjustified in
holding that belief (perhaps my conversational peers show me that
I am hallucinating or that I slept a very long time to rise only just
before sunset, or perhaps I live in a culture where religious reasons
prevent devotees from holding beliefs about the sun on particular
days of the month).
Furthering this central argument from Mirror, Rorty argued in

Contingency that the common conflation of being caused to believe
something and being justified in believing it “is facilitated by confin-
ing attention to single sentences as opposed to vocabularies.” At the
level of the sentence, Rorty noted, “it is easy to run together the fact
that the world contains the causes of our being justified in holding a
belief with the claim that some nonlinguistic state of the world is
itself an example of truth.” But at the level of the vocabulary, or the
language game, such conflation begins to look ridiculous. For at this
level, “the idea that the world decides which descriptions are true can
no longer be given a clear sense.” At this level, “It becomes hard to
think that the vocabulary is somehow already out there in the world,
waiting for us to discover it” (CIS, 5).
According to Rorty’s argument, it is not the world that wants
to be described in any particular way, that is, according to the words
comprising any particular vocabulary. It is always we who do the
wanting. The world does not care if we affirm the germ theory of
disease or a predestination theory of sickness. It does not matter to
the world if we employ descriptions that lead to our illness or even
our death. The world does not care if we live through a battle to raise
a flag in glory or if we die fighting for a worthless cause. But pre-
sumably these things matter much to us. The world is indifferent.
We are not.
Now, at this point a kind of realist rejoinder might be entered
by the metaphysician. If we are not indifferent to what our descrip-
tions yield, then surely we ought to adopt those descriptions that
give us from the world just what we want from it. We ought to be
willing to admit, for example, that the world itself compels us to
affirm the germ theory of disease. For if we do not, so the objection
goes, then the world will cause our illness, perhaps even our death.
And who would want to die for having believed the wrong thing?
Powerful as this objection seems, however, it misses its target. For
the objection is targeted at a general claim of Rorty’s regarding the
indifference of the world to any vocabulary we might wield, whereas
26 colin koopman
the force of the objection stems only from its applicability to some of
the vocabularies we might wield. The silent shift in scope can be
registered by noting that it simply cannot be assumed about all
purposes and contexts that there is something like a default interest
in any specific thing, including one’s own continued survival. To
assume as much is to remain willfully ignorant of cases where
people choose to forgo that supposed interest, for example cases
where people choose to die (be it because of tragic suicide, heroic
sacrifice for a just cause, or dignity in the face of future suffering).
Rorty’s point is that the world itself does not care if we live or die.
On his view, someone who dies because their belief in a valiant
cause outweighed the scientific evidence at hand is not for that
reason wrong in the sense that they failed to be in touch with the
world itself. They were just in touch with a different part of it than
were those who survived. There is no perspective we could adopt
whereby we would put ourselves in a position to say, for all possible
cases, that some particular vocabulary, such as that of medical
science, gets to override all the others. Thus, that someone dies
out of adherence to a vocabulary cannot be taken as disproving their
vocabulary. That we sometimes want to think that it is a disproof is
only a mark of the distance between their vocabulary and ours,
which is why it would never occur to us to take it as a disproof
when someone dies heroically for commitments we share.
Rorty’s argument shows that people can of course be wrong to
hold a particular belief within a given vocabulary and yet cannot be
wrong to adopt a particular vocabulary. His way of putting these
points is to say things like “the world does not provide us with any
criterion of choice between alternative metaphors” (CIS, 20). The
world itself does not want us to live (or die) in any particular way.
That is our business. It is a massively important business, perhaps the
most important that there is. But the world cannot settle such
matters for us. Yet Rorty also of course thought that some
vocabularies are better than others. His point, then, is that the rela-
tive worth of vocabularies is determined contingently as a function of
sociohistorical practice, rather than being a function of necessity as

adjudicated by an august philosophical tribunal.
With all this in view, the step from Rorty’s argument about
vocabularies to his metaphilosophical pluralism is but a small one.
All it requires is the idea that philosophical traditions or perspectives
are one species of vocabulary. Rorty’s point at a metaphilosophical
level, then, is just that the world itself does not care which philosoph-
ical vocabularies we make use of. Some philosophies are surely better
than others, but their relative worth is not set by the world itself so
much as by our interests, pursuits, and the histories within which all
our strivings and sufferings are entrenched.
Rorty’s historicism helps clarify these matters, at least insofar
as the application of historicism to the history of philosophy yields
consequences for metaphilosophy. Those who think that the world
itself tells us which philosophy is right must be deeply inattentive to
the philosophical variety that constitutes the history of philosophy
itself. What that history teaches, Rorty suggests, is that no matter
how right we think we (or our heroes) are today, “nobody is so passé
as the intellectual czar of the previous generation” (CP, xl). One of the
most interesting illustrations of the connection between Rorty’s
metaphilosophy and his attention to the history of philosophy is
found in an unpublished typescript dated from January of 1974 that
appears to have been at some point a draft of an introduction to
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.10 This piece is one of many
early writings by Rorty in which he is searching through the meta-
philosophical thickets in quest of a reasonable account of the notion
of progress in philosophy.11 In this typescript, Rorty considers the
possibility that the history of philosophy might function as a kind of
metaphilosophical arbiter for discerning the true course of philosoph-
ical progress. The hope that it might would seem reasonable in light
of the idea that “whatever genuine controversy there is about philo-
sophical progress usually takes the form of repositioning historical
figures.”12 Yet such retrospective repositioning, Rorty argues, cannot
avoid being just as “controversial as any other philosophical
28 colin koopman
subject.”13 Not even the history of philosophy can succeed in settling

what counts as philosophical progress. Quite the contrary, this type-
script suggests, what it furnishes us with is something like an induct-
ive case for how unlikely it would be that this kind of question would
ever get settled.
Impressed with what we learn from being historicist about the
history of philosophy, Rorty held of philosophical redescriptions
what he held of all vocabularies, namely that “it is never very hard
to redescribe anything,” and that “anything could be made to look
good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being
redescribed” (EHO, 4 and CIS, 7). Only someone blithely ignorant of
the redescriptions furnished by the history of philosophy could hope
to deny this. Rorty concluded that the world itself does not tell us
which philosophical vocabulary we must adopt. Certainly not a
relativist about philosophy, Rorty was a metaphilosophical plural-
ist. We start where we are and reach out toward other philosophies
by engaging them, arguing with them, and understanding them.
Rorty’s metaphilosophy remains important just insofar as contem-
porary philosophy has yet to adequately internalize this idea into its
implicit practice and explicit conception of itself.
sources of rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism

Having digested its intellectual justifications and motivations, I now
move on to considering how Rorty arrived at his metaphilosophical
pluralism. Recall that Rorty’s Mirror boldly proclaimed Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, and Dewey as its heroes (PMN, 5, 368). Indeed each of
these three is a source for crucial components of Rorty’s thinking.
The linguistic perspective central to Rorty’s vocabulary idea clearly
owes something to Wittgenstein. The historicism central to his rec-
ognition of the transience of all philosophies perhaps owes much to
Heidegger. And the affirmation of contingency as at the heart of us
linguistico-historical creatures sounds a decidedly Deweyan tone. But
the writings of none of these thinkers can easily explain Rorty’s
provocative combination of ideas central to all three (not to mention
the additional fusion of a host of other philosophers in Analytic,

Continental, and Pragmatist philosophy).
If any of these three would have an intellectual claim as the
source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism, it would seem to be
Dewey, at least insofar as neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein seemed
all that interested in developing philosophical perspectives that
might be thought to be forged by a combination of other philosophers.
Dewey is also the most likely source for biographical reasons.
Engaging Analytic thought beginning in the 1960s and Continental
thought from the 1980s on, Rorty’s immersion in pragmatism came
much earlier, beginning as early as his undergraduate and graduate
studies and appearing in his very first article in 1961, “Pragmatism,
Categories, and Language,” the first sentence of which claims,
“Pragmatism is getting respectable again” (MLM, 16). From the early
1980s on, it was also pragmatism with which he most often self-
identified, noting once that Dewey began to occupy more of his
imagination than Wittgenstein and Heidegger (ORT, 16). Both biog-
raphy and philosophy, then, suggest a source for Rorty’s pluralism in
his pragmatism. This much I affirm, at least at a general level. The
precise connection here is, however, somewhat more unexpected.
The particular source within pragmatism from which Rorty’s plural-
ism can be shown to stem is one Rorty himself remained largely
silent about throughout his career.
Before excavating this unacknowledged point of connection
between Rorty’s pragmatism and pluralism, I want to consider a
potential objection against the very coherence of a connection
between metaphilosophical pluralism and any particular philosoph-
ical position. Does Rorty’s getting to metaphilosophical pluralism
by way of philosophical pragmatism mean that he held pragmatism
to be the one true philosophy from which he, as it were, deduced a
metaphilosophical pluralism? This objection, obvious as it seems,
misses the point of pluralism. Rorty’s claim cannot be that any and
all metaphilosophical pluralists must, in their hearts, really be
pragmatists. The whole point of pluralism is to engender suspicion
30 colin koopman
of such inferences insofar as they rely on the necessary universal-

ization of one’s own philosophical perspective. Rorty developed his
pragmatism in a manner consistent with metaphilosophical plural-
ism, as evidenced by frequent claims that “there is no way in which
the issue between the pragmatist and his opponent can be tightened
up and resolved according to criteria agreed to by both sides” (CP,
xliii).14 Accordingly, all that can be claimed on this matter, and all
that I here do claim, is that philosophical pragmatism is one way
of moving into metaphilosophical pluralism. In Rorty’s case it
was pragmatism, among all the philosophical sources from which
his work drew sustenance, that most significantly led him to
metaphilosophical pluralism.
One could, however, push the objection a step further. Can one
actually be a metaphilosophical pluralist and also at the same time
affirm any single philosophical position, such as pragmatism? This
fuller objection also misses much of the point of pluralism. For if
metaphilosophical pluralism means anything, it must mean holding
one’s philosophical positions with an avid interest in other philosoph-
ical positions. That is, it would be nonsensical for metaphilosophical
pluralism to forbid the holding of any and all philosophical positions.
A requirement to forswear philosophy would be not so much pluralism
as rather something else, like committed nihilism, or perhaps, in some
situations, total indifference. But Rorty was anything but indifferent
about philosophy. His metaphilosophical pluralism involves not indif-
ference about, but engagement across, multiple philosophies. Rorty’s
contributions across and between multiple philosophies embody what
Richard Bernstein, a longtime interlocutor of Rorty’s and a fellow
undergraduate at the University of Chicago, called “engaged plural-
ism” in his 1988 presidential address to the American Philosophical
Association (Bernstein 1991, 336). Bernstein’s call was for a form of
serious, studied, and sympathetic philosophical engagement across
rival philosophical traditions and perspectives. That form of pluralism
can only be tonic in the context of contemporary professional congre-
gations where philosophical insularity is groomed in the graduate
students and celebrated by the tenured faculty. Rorty on occasion

mocked the kind of philosophical clubbishness that his pluralism
worked against: “Most analytic philosophers feel a vague contempt
for continental philosophy without ever having read much of it. Many
continental philosophers sneer at analytic philosophy without trying
to figure out what the analytic philosophers think they are doing”
(PCP, 121). Anyone who feels the pull of both philosophical styles
knows exactly what he here means.
Having dispensed with an objection to the very idea of a
pluralistic metaphilosophy, I want to now move on to ask what it
is about pragmatism that draws it toward metaphilosophical
pluralism. One potential answer, already foreshadowed above, is
that pragmatism’s historicism leads us to pluralism, especially to
those above-discussed aspects of pluralism that are motivated by the
historicist recognition of the changing philosophical currents. But
there are no doubt numerous other features of pragmatism that also
incline it toward metaphilosophical pluralism: for instance, anti-
foundationalism and anti-authoritarianism. In Rorty’s case, perhaps
what stands out most is the antirepresentationalism that he did
more than any other pragmatist to articulate.15 Yet we would do
well to note that not all self-described pragmatists would endorse
this suite of commitments. These are the commitments of a
neopragmatism whose classical influences stem mainly from the
work of William James and John Dewey.
James’s writings offer some of the most memorable pictures of
pragmatism’s metaphilosophical pluralism. Perhaps the most impres-
sive is his vivid image of a corridor pragmatism:
[Pragmatism] lies in the midst of our theories, like a corridor in a

hotel. Innumerable chambers open out of it. In one you may find a
man writing an atheistic volume; in the next some one on his
knees praying for faith and strength; in a third a chemist
investigating a body’s properties. In a fourth a system of idealistic
metaphysics is being excogitated; in a fifth the impossibility of
32 colin koopman
metaphysics is being shown. But they all own the corridor, and all
must pass through it if they want a practicable way of getting into
or out of their respective rooms. (James 1987, 510)16
One does not live or sleep or dwell in a corridor, at least not in the
way that you would in any of the chambers attached to it.
A corridor, rather, is primarily a place of passage. James’s metaphor
thus captures the processual dimensions of pragmatism that stand
in contrast to the typical philosophical aspiration for unmoving
positions. James’s corridor offers a metaphilosophy of transit that
leads between and among philosophies in the plural. Rorty’s work,
moving deftly between differing philosophical vistas, expresses
something of that transitional style. Clarifying as James’s metaphor
is, there is however no particular evidence that Rorty arrived at his
pluralistic metaphilosophy, let alone his pragmatist philosophy, by
way of this particular image.17
Rorty did develop more extended engagements with other
aspects of James’s work, in particular his moral pluralism, in which
Rorty found a spirit of generous philosophical tolerance that reson-
ated with his own metaphilosophical pluralism. For example, writing
on James’s presentation of pragmatism as mediating between hard-
nosed scientism and soul-soothing religiosity, Rorty endorses the
quintessential pragmatist strategy of interpreting seemingly contra-
dictory vocabularies so that they “need not compete for the role of
What Is There Anyway” (PSH, 156). We can have both religiosity and
science, both idealism and empiricism, Rorty follows James in saying,
so long as we do not buy into philosophical foundationalism as
underwriting either.
James’s potential influence on Rorty noted, surely the most obvi-
ous source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism among the pragma-
tists would be Dewey. It was Dewey who, for at least three decades, was
Rorty’s chief spokesman for pragmatism, and therefore for himself.
It was also Dewey who, on Rorty’s account, did the most to articulate
pragmatism’s contribution to the pluralism internal to liberal
democracy. Rorty saw in Dewey a champion of the idea that “philoso-

phers were never going to be able to see things under the aspect of
eternity; they should instead try to contribute to humanity’s ongoing
conversation about what to do with itself” (PCP, ix). That conversation
cannot but be pluralistic insofar as it “has engendered new social prac-
tices, and changes in the vocabularies deployed in moral and political
deliberation” (PCP, ix). Pluralism, in other words, is for Rorty the most
likely outgrowth of “the connection which Dewey saw between anti-
representationalism and democracy” (PCP, ix).
The passages I have been quoting are only a few of dozens of
potential examples of Rorty’s invocations of Dewey as sources of a
moral, social, and political pluralism. Yet for a source that leads to
Rorty’s pluralism at the specifically metaphilosophical level we
would do well to turn elsewhere.18 For Dewey never really reached
the metaphilosophical heights of Rorty’s level of rigorous reflexive-
ness. And though he came much closer than Dewey, neither did
James. However, at least one other pragmatist clearly did.
The most important source for Rorty’s metaphilosophical
pluralism is the underappreciated mid-century pragmatist Richard
McKeon, a student of Dewey’s at Columbia University and later
one of Rorty’s teachers at the University of Chicago. Peter
Simonson has recently noted that, “McKeon occupies a key position
between Dewey and Rorty” (Simonson 2019, 45).19 If that is right, and
I think it is, then McKeon’s pragmatism has something to offer to our
understanding of Rorty’s metaphilosophy that cannot be wholly
accounted for through Dewey’s pragmatism.20 This holds even des-
pite Rorty’s own proclivity for amplifying the Deweyan influence on
his thinking and leaving its McKeonite motivations understated.
Even the most self-reflective of philosophers are prone to become
exempla of the cliché that the scholar fastidiously tracks their debts
to the grandparents’ generation whilst they rigorously disavow their
debts to the parents’ generation.
McKeon may not loom large in the letter of Rorty’s writings,
but he is nevertheless a deep even if mostly silent influence in their
34 colin koopman
metaphilosophical background. Evidence is found in those few

moments where Rorty did pierce his silence about McKeon.
One prominent instance is on the first page of Mirror. Though
the book’s announced heroes are Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger
and its central argument most clearly relies on Quine, Sellars, and
Davidson,21 the very first name that appears in the text of the book is
actually McKeon’s, where it can be found in the second sentence of
the Preface (PMN, xiii). From McKeon, and other of his teachers,
Rorty claims to have learned that philosophical problems are “a
product of the unconscious adoption of assumptions built into the
vocabulary in which the problem was stated – assumptions which
were to be questioned before the problem itself was taken seriously”
(PMN, xiii). This is Rortyan metaphilosophy par excellence, explicitly
attributed to McKeon.
A second example can be located through an early 1961 review
essay on metaphilosophy. Rorty there canvasses a view that he attri-
butes to “the metaphilosophers’ metaphilosophers” (Rorty 1961,
301). These metaphilosophers see philosophy as a game of unending
“communication” whose primary duty is to “keep the series [of
arguments] going, lest communication cease” (Rorty 1961, 301–2).
Rorty does not name McKeon in this piece, but he refers to the view,
which he clearly favors, as “metaphilosophical pragmatism” and
associates it with Dewey (Rorty 1961, 302). Though one would be
hard-pressed to find this exact view in Dewey, it is in fact abundantly
available in McKeon. Consider that Rorty here attributes the “prag-
matic approach” to a book on metaphilosophy by Henry Johnstone,
and that in an essay published the next year he establishes a parallel
between McKeon’s work on “the history of philosophical contro-
versy” and Johnstone’s “metaphilosophical studies,” namely that
both show how the “choice of terms in which to discuss philosoph-
ical issues can, and usually will, irretrievably prejudice the outcome
of the discussion” (MLM, 60). The implication is Rorty’s mature view
that there is no “one grand unified super-vocabulary” that can unite
and order all philosophical vocabularies (MLM, 60).
A third piece, a posthumously published autobiographical

essay, offers further insight. Describing his studies toward his under-
graduate degree and then his master’s degree, both at the University
of Chicago, Rorty notes that it was McKeon who “dominated the
philosophy department at Chicago in those days” (Rorty 2010a, 5).
Describing his doctoral studies at Yale, he noted that his disserta-
tion “owed less” to the influence of his adviser “than to McKeon’s”
in the way it developed “comparisons and contrasts between phil-
osophers of different epochs” (Rorty 2010a, 8). The dissertation itself
offers evidence for this retroactive self-interpretation – its first foot-
note states plainly that McKeon “has influenced the method
followed in this dissertation” (Rorty 1956, xi, n1). Rorty’s autobio-
graphical essay summarized this period in his career with the
thought that his graduate training instilled in him a “McKeon-
taught ability to show how any philosophical position could be
rendered impregnable to criticism by redefining terms and adopting
alternative first principles” (Rorty 2010a, 8).22
Despite a handful of such references, almost all of them very
early or very late, Rorty did remain silent about McKeon for most of
his career. His autobiographical essay even suggests that by the 1960s
he had sought to abandon the metaphilosophical pluralism of his
early graduate training in favor of “some more constructive way of
doing philosophy,” specifically analytic philosophy (Rorty 2010a, 8).
Even if this retrospective self-description were accurate, Rorty’s
immersion in analytic philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s nonetheless
culminated in a return to a recognizably McKeonite metaphilosophy
in Mirror.23 That book, and nearly all of Rorty’s work over the next
few decades, expresses a metaphilosophical pluralism that resembles
McKeon’s own historiography of philosophy.
There are at least four ways in which Rorty’s metaphilosophical
pluralism resonates with McKeon’s: acceptance of the impossibility of
philosophical consensus, navigation of this impossibility by turning to
metaphilosophy, affirmation of the potential positive value of philo-
sophical plurality, and emphasizing communication as a means for
36 colin koopman
engaging philosophical plurality. On the first point, consider how much

McKeon’s 1956 essay “Dialogue and Controversy in Philosophy”
sounds like Rorty avant la lettre: “It is improbable that invitations to
dialogue will lead to philosophic agreement or cultural uniformity, and
it is doubtful whether such agreement or uniformity would be desirable
if they were possible” (McKeon 1956, 123). Second, McKeon also antici-
pated Rorty in finding a way out from this broken dream of the phil-
osophers by way of moving to metaphilosophy – if Rorty was
unabashedly metaphilosophical, then McKeon in almost all of his work
was unabashedly unceasingly metaphilosophical.24 Third, on that
metareflective plane, both also sought a pluralism, such that Rorty
can be seen as taking up McKeon’s invitations to “a pluralistic philoso-
phy which establishes a creative interplay of philosophies” (McKeon
1973, 207).25 Lastly, in their work of developing these pluralistic inter-
plays, both aspired toward metaphilosophical dialogue. Rorty’s famous
proposal for seeing philosophy as a “conversation” (PMN, 389), and his
much earlier claim for “the function of philosophy as making commu-
nication possible” (Rorty 1961, 301), is strikingly reminiscent of
McKeon’s metaphilosophical pleas for “a means of communication
among philosophies” (McKeon 1952, 181).
This last point of resonance is particularly important, given how
central was the notion, as well as the practice, of inter-philosophical
conversation to Rorty’s work. Back in the 1920s Dewey may have
emphasized communication as the best means for reconstructing our
social problems in his claim that “communication can alone create a
great community,” (Dewey 1927, 324) and indeed he may even have
gone so far as to claim that, “of all affairs, communication is the most
wonderful” (Dewey 1925, 132). But it really fell to McKeon in the
1950s to elaborate communication as a specifically metaphilosophical
perspective. Rorty’s later development, in the 1970s and beyond, of a
vision of philosophy as “continuing the conversation” owes much
more to McKeonite metaphilosophical pluralism than it does to
Deweyan deliberative democracy, even if it resonates with both
(PMN, 394).
consequences of rorty’s metaphilosophical

pluralism
I have quite liberally employed the term “pluralism” to describe
Rorty’s metaphilosophy. But this is not a term that he himself ever
employed in this sense.26 The word he himself most frequently
averred for this purpose was “ironism.” Beautiful stylist that Rorty
was, that particular contrivance was ill-fated, as Rorty himself con-
ceded on at least one occasion (Rorty 1996a, 74). Although “ironism”
is unlikely to stick as a philosophical term, the label matters little if
I am right that what Rorty sought with that word is in fact what
I have been describing as metaphilosophical pluralism.27
Rorty defines his ironist as someone who “has radical and
continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she uses” whilst realiz-
ing that “her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve
these doubts” (CIS, 73). The ironist sees “the choice between
vocabularies” as something that cannot be adjudicated by “a neutral
and universal metavocabulary” (CIS, 73). Insofar as philosophies are
paradigmatic instances of vocabularies, the ironist is in an excellent
position to realize that there is no single best way of resolving the
impasses that arise between clashing philosophies. Some such
impasses may come to be surmounted, but this will be a contingent
matter of piecemeal adjustment, accommodation, or accident. There
is no metaphilosophical system that could correctly confront and
overcome all such stalemates, not only those of the well-studied
philosophical past, but also those of the ever-unpredictable philo-
sophical future. The ironist, deeply impressed with philosophical
variety, cannot but be a metaphilosophical pluralist.
In its strongest forms, which is how Rorty himself often
expressed it, this pluralism carries as its consequence a recognition
of the importance of engaging with as many philosophies (that is,
philosophical thinkers, traditions, arguments, styles) as we can: “the
liberal ironist needs as much imaginative acquaintance with alterna-
tive final vocabularies as possible” (CIS, 92). This is exactly what
38 colin koopman
Rorty himself did. Thus did his writings roam over an exceptionally
expansive range of philosophical vocabularies.
It is therefore nothing but puzzling that so many of Rorty’s
readers have balked at what they regard as an antiphilosophical thrust
in his writings. Rorty was never opposed to philosophy.28 All he
opposed were metaphilosophical conceptions that give credence to
the blustery idea that one’s own philosophy forever breathes the final
word. It is actually the metaphilosophical monists, those foundation-
alists and metaphysicians against whom Rorty so eloquently argued,
who seek to bring philosophy, understood as a tradition of discussion
and debate, to a close. Rorty, as much a metaphilosophical pluralist as
anyone, wanted philosophical conversation to continue. Indeed he
may have done more than any other thinker in the past half-century
to foster philosophy’s perseverance.
notes
For comments on previous drafts of this material I am grateful to Clayton
Chin, Wojciech Małecki, Peter Simonson, and Christopher Voparil. I am
also grateful to Susan Dieleman, Tracy Llanera, and David Rondel for
discussion at a presentation at the Pacific APA.
1 Rorty’s unpublished reply is focused in part on the metaphilosophical
issue of whether philosophy itself can be taken as a natural kind (RRP,
B13F12, p. 1). Richard Rorty Papers, Special Collections and Archives,
The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine, California (abbreviated as RRP).
2 Recent commentators concur, for example David Rondel in his claim that
Rorty had “an unusually avid interest in metaphilosophy” (2011b, 150),
and James Tartaglia in his that “Rorty’s work is distinctive in being
primarily metaphilosophical rather than philosophical” (2007, 3).
3 Rorty’s book itself also noted “the present lack of metaphilosophical
reflection” (PMN, 172).
4 As evidenced by claims of Rorty’s like “We do not need a synoptic view of
something called ‘the world’” (PCP, 150).
5 For instances analogizing “vocabularies” to “language games” see CIS, 5,
48, 74; for a different analogy to Kuhn’s “paradigms” see CIS, 6.
6 Wittgenstein 1998, §23, §241 (pp. 11 and 88).
7 In a 1985 address Rorty jokingly described his 1967 anthology The

Linguistic Turn as “obsolete almost before it was printed” (1986c, 750);
see also Rorty’s later afterword to a reprint of this anthology (1992c, 371)
and his discussion of what not to take from the linguistic turn in a late
essay titled “Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn” (PCP, 171).
8 There have been numerous superficial criticisms of Rorty’s lingualism –
for a detailed discussion of why this perspective matters much see my
arguments in Koopman 2011.
9 In addition to the two instances discussed below, see for other examples
ORT, 5, 80 (vis-à-vis pragmatism); EHO, 38 (vis-à-vis Heidegger); TP, 74
(vis-à-vis Searle); and PSH, xxvi as a later example of how to be a
pragmatist about the word ‘giraffe.’
10 RRP, B9F4. This piece, dated 1/28/1974 on the final page, is titled
“Chapter 8: Metaphilosophy” with the handwritten comment “Corrected
Copy” at the top. Despite its labelling as an eighth chapter, it appears to
have been written more as an early draft of an introduction to the project
that would become PMN (in particular in its last few pages). In Rorty’s
handwritten corrections, the original typewritten title of “Introduction”
is crossed out and replaced with the new title of “Chapter 8: Philosophy,”
but then in the same ink the word “Philosophy” is crossed out and
replaced with “Metaphilosophy.”
11 See Rorty 1961; the two essays “The Limits of Reductionism” and
“Realism, Categories and the ‘Linguistic Turn’” in MLM; the
posthumously published “The Philosopher as Expert” printed as an
appendix to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of PMN; and the
unpublished “Philosophy as Ethics” (RRP, B44F12; undated draft material
probably from the late 1950s or early 1960s).
12 RRP, B9F4, p. 4.
13 RRP, B9F4, p. 7.
14 See also CIS, 9.
15 Antirepresentationalism remains today perhaps the most influential
philosophical impulse in Rorty’s oeuvre, as evidenced for instance by the
deeply Rortyan cast of the important antirepresentationalist expressivism
of Huw Price (2013).
16 The metaphor was not originally James’s – he borrowed it from “the
young Italian pragmatist Papini” (James 1987, 510) who wrote of “una
teoria corridoio” in a 1905 essay titled “Il pragmatismo messo in ordine”
40 colin koopman
(“Pragmatism Tied Up”) which has never been translated into English.
My thanks to Sarin Marchetti for discussion of the origins of
this metaphor.
17 There are a few occasions on which Rorty referred to James’s corridor, but
none approach a sustained discussion; the three instances I am aware of
are 1991, 75; 1992b, 720; and 1999, 11.
18 There is, of course, a connection between metaphilosophical pluralism
and moral-political pluralism. For discussion of this connection see
Christopher Voparil (2014b), who notes that we cannot read Rorty’s
metaphilosophy off of his moral-political thought.
19 For biographical details on McKeon’s place in Rorty’s thought see Neil
Gross (2008, 106–11). To my knowledge, there are no full articles or
chapters on the Rorty–McKeon relation, but only a handful of studies like
Gross’s (2008), Simonson’s (2019), and mine (here) discussing this
connection in passing.
20 My argument depends on affirming the strongly pragmatist dimensions of
McKeon’s thought, a point on which not all commentators agree. I follow
the account of McKeon’s pragmatism by Danisch (2015, 121–8). Given the
contrary view that McKeon was not primarily a pragmatist in his
approach to the history of philosophy, my argument would have to be
adjusted to claim that Rorty’s metaphilosophical pluralism is informed by
the pluralistic approach to the history of philosophy endorsed by McKeon.
Such an argument would still need to address the place of pragmatism in
the historiography of philosophy developed by Rorty in light of McKeon’s
work on the same.
21 On the former trio, see PMN, 5, 368; on the latter trio, see PMN, xiii, 7,
317 and ORT, 1.
22 Rorty is, however, on the whole not very favorable toward McKeon in this
piece; he is even more reticent in an earlier 1993 autobiographical essay
(PSH, 8).
23 Rorty himself affirmed this in an interview where he described Mirror as
playing “the old McKeonite trick of taking the larger historical view”
(Mendieta 2006, 19).
24 McKeon’s metaphilosophy is at its highest pitch in his projects of historical
semantics and philosophical semantics (see 1952, 170–92). Historical and
philosophical semantics are also the two McKeonite methods that Rorty
named as influencing his dissertation (Rorty 1956, xi, note 1).
25 McKeon’s pluralism inflects nearly all of his work; see the essays in
Garver and Buchanan 2000.
26 He does, however, come close in his discussion of “philosophical
pluralism” in relation to pragmatism in PSH, 268–76.
27 For an alternative interpretation of Rorty’s ironism as “skepticism by
another name” see Michael Williams (2000, 210).
28 Asked by an interlocutor if philosophy would come to an end, Rorty
casually replied, “Certainly not . . . Philosophy will last as long cultural
change does” (2000a, 218). For an argument that Rorty sought to
transform, rather than terminate, philosophy see my discussion in
Koopman 2013.
2 After Metaphysics:
Eliminativism and the
Protreptic Dilemma
Neil Gascoigne
The reductive and eliminative versions of the identity theory are

both merely awkward attempts to throw into current philosoph-
ical jargon our natural reaction to an encounter with the
Antipodeans . . . they should both be abandoned, and with them
the notion of the mind–body identity.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
If as I was assuming people really could see someone else’s

nervous system working, and adjust their behaviour toward
him accordingly, then, I believe, they wouldn’t have our concept
of pain (for instance) at all, although maybe a related one. Their
life would simply look quite different from ours.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, MS 169
naming, of necessity
An early review (Nehamas 1982) of works characteristic of “mid-
period” Rorty (PMN; CP) sets the latter’s opposition to the philosoph-
ical tradition against the backdrop of a most traditional response to
antiphilosophical sentiment. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s
Topics, Alexander of Aphrodisias attributes the following argument
to the Protrepticus:
if someone should say that one should not do philosophy, then,

since “to do philosophy” means to investigate this very thing,
whether one should do philosophy or not, and it also means to
42
after metaphysics 43
pursue philosophical study, by showing each of these to be

appropriate for a human, we will entirely eliminate the proposal.
(Wallies 1891, 149, in Hutchinson and Johnson 2017, 4)1
The question Nehamas goes on to pose is “whether Pragmatism can

avoid the Protreptic Dilemma” in its attacks on traditional
epistemology and metaphysics (Nehamas 1982, 401). More specific-
ally, he asks if Rorty is successful in his attempt to bring about a
“shift” from “Philosophy” with a big “P” to “philosophy” with a small
“p”: from a genre named for “the study of certain definite and perman-
ent problems” (CP, 31) to one that attempts to “see how things, in the
broadest possible sense of the term, hang together in the broadest
possible sense of the term” (Sellars quoted at CP, xiv, 29, 226). While
acknowledging that Rorty takes these self-referential challenges “ser-
iously,” Nehamas announces himself “rather pessimistic about the
chances of . . . pragmatism escaping from . . . Philosophy,” albeit “quite
optimistic about its place within it” (Nehamas 1982, 408).
The influence of Rorty’s “late-period” works outside philoso-
phy departments and their relative neglect inside them is evidence
perhaps for the converse of Nehamas’s prophesy. In part this is
because Rorty has empowered those located outside the discipline
narrowly construed to simply ignore the sort of “big” technical issues
that still serve to orientate many working within it. If, in response,
the latter are inclined to judge the practices of these other intellec-
tuals unworthy of the name of even a decapitalized version of
“Philosophy,” a natural response might be: “Who cares? What’s in a
name?!” This chapter is motivated by the conviction that the name is
worth preserving because the work of Philosophers is important,
albeit understood as contributions to philosophy. Correlatively, its
claim is that Rorty’s “place” within Philosophy should be understood
in terms not of someone who strived and failed to “avoid” the
Dilemma but of someone who endeavored successfully to mount a
proleptic vindication of its practice by redescribing it as part of that
larger intellectual enterprise, “philosophy.”
44 neil gascoigne
Before proceeding, there are two further points about

Nehamas’s appraisal. Firstly, Nehamas is not drawing attention to
the likely failure of Rorty’s attempt to change the conversation
within – as it were – his own lifetime. Initially, his pessimism takes
the form of an observation that Rorty’s use of terms like “scientific
vocabulary,” “abnormal discourse,” “social practices,” and the
related tendency to treat discursive activities as genre-variants of
something univocal called “literature,” invite essentializing ques-
tions because they are themselves expressive of “a residual meta-
physical commitment on his own part.” But it transpires that the
inescapability of metaphysical thinking has a more elusive cause: “a
very profound need indeed.” Nehamas doesn’t dilate on the nature of
this “need,” nor on its relation to the compulsion to generalize
expressed in metaphysical thinking, but it recalls Alexander’s formu-
lation of the Dilemma. Accordingly, it is not the formal matter of
Rorty’s purportedly “residual metaphysical commitments” that pro-
vokes pessimism but rather the diagnosis that the reflexive investi-
gation into “whether one should do philosophy” is expressive of an
imperative that is both “appropriate for a human” and which “is
constantly pushing us” towards the sorts of generalizing practices
that eventuate in such commitments (Nehamas 1982, 405, 408).
The second point relates to what Nehamas characterizes as a
“serious continuity in Rorty’s . . . intellectual development” between
the “eliminative materialism” of the late 1960s (“early-period” Rorty)
and the attempt to make the “shift” from Philosophy to philosophy
(Nehamas 1982, 402). That “serious continuity” has subsequently
been remarked upon by others. Robert Brandom thematizes Rorty’s
contributions to philosophy from the “early period” onwards as so
many iterations of the original insight that drives his eliminativism;
namely, that “any normative matter of epistemic authority or
privilege . . . is ultimately intelligible only in terms of social practices
that involve implicitly recognizing or acknowledging such authority”
(Brandom 2000, 159).2 Despite the “serious continuity,” however,
Nehamas discerns what we might call a “shift” in the understanding
of shifts in play here, for he sees the movement from “early” to “mid-
period” Rorty as one that discloses the contrast between seeing such
transitions in our patterns of linguistic usage as precipitating solu-
tions to traditional problems of Philosophy (like the Mind–Body prob-
lem) to one that issues in a refusal to take them seriously. If we regard
the latter refusal as expressive of the attempt to replace Philosophy
with philosophy, the unstated implication is that the shift in “shifts”
marks the track along which we see Rorty’s thought being “pushed”
into the sort of metaphysical thinking that we noted above.
Returning to our theme, Nehamas is correct to identify a shift
in Rorty’s thinking about “shifts.” Rather than being the key to his
failure to address the Dilemma, however, I will argue that the
reappraisal of his own “eliminativist” response to the Mind–Body
problem is crucial to understanding his vindication of the practice
of Philosophy (as philosophy). In other words, Rorty’s response to his
failed attempt to defend materialism highlights his awareness of the
very determinants that Nehamas raises against his “revisionary”
project for philosophy in the name of the Dilemma. From this per-
spective, the leveling that Brandom insists on in his retelling of the
story of the continuity in Rorty’s thinking deprives us of the oppor-
tunity to identify the considerations which led the latter to problem-
atize (what comes to be seen as) the “shift” from Philosophy to
philosophy. But those considerations are what leads to the the discip-
line’s exculpation, so their neglect lends support to the view that
Rorty’s post-Philosophical culture has no place for traditional prob-
lems. That is a mistake. Rorty’s “mid-period” works are important
because they allow us to think of the work of Philosophy as part of
something that is culturally significant. As such, they offer possibil-
ities for pragmatism that are not constrained by Rorty’s own “blind
impress” (CIS, 23).
With that unaccustomed plea for the relevance of Philosophy in
plain view, let us turn to the details of Rorty’s eliminativism, the
problems it gave rise to, and the change it brought about in his
thinking about the lure of metaphysical thinking.
46 neil gascoigne
the metaphilosophical significance

of eliminativism
According to Brandom, Rorty’s eliminative materialism was “the first
genuinely new response to the traditional mind–body problem that
anyone had seen in a long time” (Brandom 2000, 157). Rorty’s version
of the identity theory, and corresponding defense of materialism,
contrasts with the “translation” or “reductive” variety associated
with Smart, Armstrong, et al. A proponent of a (mind–body) identity
theory simpliciter maintains something like the following. It is “sens-
ible to assert that empirical inquiry will discover that
(I) Sensations . . . are identical with certain brain processes.”

(MBIPC; MLM, 106)3
According to the “disappearance” or “eliminative” theorist, the iden-

tity in question is not one whereby specific properties of sensations are
redeemed as properties of brain processes; rather, the very existence of
sensations is impugned, as when we identify unicorn horns with nar-
whal horns in order to eliminate any genuinely referring use of “uni-
corn” from our vocabulary. Writing two decades before Brandom, Rorty
is less encomiastic about his achievement. Both versions of the identity
theory are, he notes, “merely awkward attempts to throw into current
philosophical jargon our natural reaction to an encounter with the
Antipodeans . . . they should both be abandoned, and with them the
notion of the mind–body identity” (PMN, 119).4 The moral Rorty
appears to draw from his earlier work, then, is that in striving to
“vindicate materialism” he was being “pushed” along a particular track
by the “current philosophical jargon” (IMM; MLM, 169). This reflection
is enlightening because MBIPC is presented as a “case study” in remov-
ing objections to (broadly) reductionist theories like materialism, the
diagnosis being that these are motivated by categorical distinctions that
appear inviolable only because our ordinary ways of speaking are as
they are; that is to say, they do not reflect (how could they?) how we
might talk in the light of future empirical discoveries (MLM, 106). The
“shift” implied by Rorty’s retrospection suggests that his attempt to
present such distinctions in a more contingent light was itself framed in

a vocabulary that was insufficiently alert to its provisional status and
therefore prone to being construed metaphysically (or Philosophically).
To appreciate the broader significance of that “shift” is our
task, so the first thing to note is that (I) is not a prediction that science
will one day succeed in this endeavor; rather, the aim is to show that
such a prediction “makes sense,” which involves removing the sali-
ent obstacle to such a view: the linguistic philosopher’s conviction
that any “identification” of mental entities, properties, or predicates
with physical entities etc. involves conceptual confusion. Since that
in turn requires that one is able to distinguish changes in meaning
from changes in belief, the argument for eliminativism offered in
MBIPC is that a proposal like (I) appears to lack sense only because
it is being judged from the perspective of a (current) vocabulary that
could be changed by empirical inquiry. But if the current vocabulary
enshrines the categorical distinctions that render expressions of (I)
senseless, how in the absence of the actual discovery that would
shape it can we conceive of that (future) vocabulary from the stand-
point of which (I) is truth-apt?
To get a better grip on the challenge here, recall the perceived
shortcomings of the “reductive” version of the identity theory. When
Smart asserts that “Sensations are nothing over and above brain
processes,” the thought is that, although the identity in question is
“strict,” since it is (or would be) an empirical discovery (like the
water/H2O and material objects/clouds of molecules identities), it is
nevertheless contingent – unlike purportedly synonymy-based iden-
tities (Smart 1962, 56–7). Now, in order to make the sort of empirical
discovery required, one must have, as it were, distinct and non-
synonymous routes to the thing identified, as when one infers that:
(II) Scott is the author of Waverley.
However, if identity is indeed “strict,” then it would conform to

Leibniz’s principle, according to which if two objects are identical
then any property ascribed to one must be ascribable to the other. The
48 neil gascoigne
concern is that in (I) the first-person (“reporting”) and third-person

routes to the referent are in terms of properties that seem ill-suited to
apply to each other. The putative conceptual confusion arises, then,
because if my sensation can be nagging or dull or acute then the brain
state with which it is identical must also be describable in those
terms; and if a brain state can be located spatiotemporally and speci-
fied in terms of its neural complexity then so can the corresponding
mental state. But as Cornman notes, in describing a brain state as
dull, “we have predicated predicates, appropriate to one logical
category, of expressions that belong to a different [one]. This is surely
a conceptual mistake” (Cornman 1962, 77). Despite suggestions that
specifications of the reporting/“mental” side could be given in “topic-
neutral” terms (Smart 1962, 61), variations on what is sometimes
referred to as the “irreducible-properties objection” (IMM; MLM,
147) are generally regarded as “decisive against” “reductive” identity
(Rosenthal 2000, 10).
It is worth noting that the sort of theoretical identifications that
Smart has in mind are not obviously in conformity to Leibniz’s principle:
(III) Tables are clouds of molecules.
(IV) Water is H2O.
It seems “sensible” to maintain that while water is wet, slakes the

thirst, and can look inviting, and material objects can be dropped
from great heights, cut in two, and sat upon, these properties are
inaptly applied to their complements. If asymmetries of this sort
don’t undermine the intelligibility of the identity, then what the
identity theorist needs to provide are not “topic-neutral” translations
but some assurance that the property asymmetries that characterize
mind–brain reductions are of this (metaphysically) benign form. Now,
compare (II) with the identity that defines the theory (I). If the latter is
taken as “strict,” we confront the “irreducible-properties objection.”
But if we understand the identity in (III) and (IV) as “loose” rather
than “strict,” we might then argue that, since a variant of the same
“objection” could have been raised against them in the past, they
should be the model for giving sense to (I).
As we will see, there is a connection here with Rorty’s
approach; but on the face of it at least, he proposes a more radical
alternative to the “translation” form of the identity theory. Compare:
(V) Unicorn horns are narwhal horns.
Echoing Quine (1960, 241), Rorty suggests that in these cases the
identity in question designates “the sort of relation which obtains
between . . . existent entities and non-existent entities when reference
to the latter once served (some of ) the purposes presently served by
some of the former” (MBIPC; MLM, 108).
The identities are elucidated accordingly:
(I’) What people used to call “sensations” are certain brain processes.
(V’) What people used to call “unicorn horns” are narwhal horns.
On this form of explication, the relata of what are strict identities can
belong to different “logical categories” without engendering the need
for “topic-neutral” translations. Whilst first-order unicorn-talk
involves the ascription of properties (purifying water, curing diseases,
etc.) we wouldn’t ascribe to narwhals, the semantically ascendant
version makes no such commitments. Similarly, the experiential
properties reported in first-order sensation-talk will be the ones that
disappear. And since these just are evidence of the mental on this
account, the mind will disappear along with them and with it any
opposition to Materialism. To return to the question that precipitated
this philosophical flashback, the suggestion is that (I) appears non-
sensical only if we insist on evaluating it from within our current
practices. To propose a future use is to affiliate the associated stand-
point with the retrospective evaluation (I’), much as we now regard
unicorn-talk.
Now, the very form of the explication
What people used to call “Xs” = Ys

50 neil gascoigne
is used to signify an in-principle elimination of X-talk in favor of Y-talk

that would “leave our ability to describe and predict undiminished”
(MBIPC; MLM, 114). As it stands, then, the argument in MBIPC turns
on the intelligibility of explanatory equivalence. If in the future we
could account for behavior at least as well by referring to brain states as
by referring to putatively mental items, then reference to the latter
might disappear from the language and we would conclude that – like
demons and unicorn horns – there never were such things. However,
the whole point of (V’) is to impugn the existence of unicorns and the
legitimacy of corresponding beliefs. But if the referring use of “sensa-
tions” disappears, the obvious consequence – contrasting with our
“loose” sense of identity – is that “people who have reported sensa-
tions in the past have (necessarily) . . . empirically disconfirmed beliefs”
(MBIPC; MLM, 113). What distinguishes Rorty’s eliminativism from
Quine’s (1960, 264) and Feyerabend’s, then, is his rejection of this
implication: “people are not wrong about sensations in the way in
which they were wrong about ‘unicorn horns’” (MLM, 113).
Although contemporary critics commended this line for its
relative subtlety (cf. Cornman 1968, 17), Rorty emphasizes its prov-
enance: “all my new line amounts to is the suggestion that the
reporting role of sensation-discourse could be taken over by a neuro-
logical vocabulary” (MLM, 203, n13). In this respect, what differen-
tiates the argument in MBIPC from the competition is that it
extends explanatory equivalence beyond the sort of description-
prediction associated with the third person to incorporate first-
person uses of sensation terms. Accordingly, his proposal is that,
under the empirical change envisaged, the referring use of “sensa-
tion” will in the future be taken over by the associated brain-talk.
The “association” in question connotes the continuity of function:
the brain-talk does all the describing and predicting that sensation-
talk once did, but sensations qua sensations are eliminated.
However, if sensation-talk does not commit us to necessarily false
beliefs because we were unknowingly using it to refer to brain
processes; and if narwhal-horn-talk fulfills some of the purposes
now served by unicorn-horn-talk; why not conclude that folk had

some true beliefs about narwhal horns even if they were using the
term “unicorn horn”? That is to say, rather than risk vitiating the
cognitive status of sensation-talk, isn’t the (relativistic) concern here
that we render unicorn-talk respectable? Consider a further example:
(III’) What people used to call “tables” are clouds of molecules.
Although no one would conclude on this basis that tables don’t exist,
let alone that beliefs about tables are false, the only difference that
makes a difference between (I0 ) and (III’) and (V0 ) is one of degree. To
account for the different elaborations of the basic eliminativist for-
mula, then, Rorty offers a six-step schema (MLM, 116) by which
linguistic practices might shift in such a way that an observation
term might cease to have a referring use. Applied to (I’) and (III’), the
key steps are from:
(I’-2) Sensations are identical with certain brain processes
to
(I’-6) There are no sensations
and from
(III’-2) Tables are clouds of molecules
to
(III’-6) There are no tables.
In the schema for (III’), “table” retains its referring function because
no transition from (2) to (6) takes place. The “explanations formulated
in terms of” tables are so good, “on the ground which they were
originally intended to cover,” that we “feel no temptation to stop
talking about them . . . it would be monstrously inconvenient to do
so” (MLM, 117). And since “table” maintains its (inferential and
noninferential) referential use, talk of tables remains true. This con-
trasts with (V’), wherein as narwhal-talk diverges from unicorn-talk,
52 neil gascoigne
it becomes increasingly inconvenient to think of them as the same

thing; so, while our linguistic practices might temporarily have sus-
tained something like Donnellan’s (1966) referential use of “the uni-
corn horn” (reply: “it’s not a unicorn horn but I can see what you’re
talking about”), that too will eventually disappear (reply: “sorry, but
I’ve no idea what you’re talking about!”). Here the loss of the referen-
tial usage means there were no true beliefs about unicorns. What,
then, of (I’)? Rorty offers as the explicit reason we don’t move from (2)
in (I’) the same sort of pragmatic considerations as for (III’). But if
“table” retains its referring function at stage (2) despite the “in-
principle” nature of the elimination outlined in the six-step schema,
then why does “sensation” lose its referring use? Or conversely, if the
in-principle nature of the elimination is all that counts, why doesn’t
“table” lose its referring function?
We’ll return to these concerns below, but let us reflect briefly
on why they arise. As noted, the originality of Rorty’s eliminativism
is to affirm a reporting role for sensation terms, albeit as unwitting
reports of brain processes. But the intuition that drives the “irredu-
cible-properties objection” is that the reporting role of sensation
terms has uses supplemental to any explanatory role. Now, if it is
to vindicate materialism, eliminativism must make sense of (I’) by
pinning down each side of the strict identity. In MBIPC, the identity
itself is asserted on the grounds of explanatory equivalence, but that
doesn’t give us any way of capturing the distinctiveness of the left-
hand side. Although Rorty recognizes that there is an epistemic
“peculiarity” (MBIPC; MLM, 120) about first-person reports of sensa-
tions, his response is intended more as a diagnostic appurtenance,
aimed at removing an obstacle to explanatory completeness. To that
end he deploys Wittgensteinian considerations to show that attempts
to hitch the concept of the mental to the authority of sincere first-
person reports through the notion of their “private subject matter”
simply beg the question about the intelligibility of such a subject
matter. That is to say, since epistemic authority (for example, about
one’s being in pain) is the gift of concept-mastery, and such correct
usage is a matter of meeting public criteria, one cannot be right or

wrong about what is private. However, it is to IMM that we must turn
for Rorty’s full account.
Rorty acknowledges that the commonsense view of the
mental – “the concept actually built into our language” – is “irre-
deemably Cartesian” in holding that it “must contain properties
incompatible with properties of physical entities” (IMM; MLM 154,
n16). The challenge confronted in IMM is thus to make sense of the
mental–physical distinction by capturing the supplementary “peculi-
arity” of first-person reports and asserting thereby the required iden-
tity. But this must be done in such a way that it is evident how
pragmatic concerns alone ensure that it doesn’t disappear, and along
with it the referring use of sensation terms. The question is what is
that “peculiarity” and how does its identification serve to vindicate
materialism? The story here is much more familiar. Drawing on
Sellars’s claim that “all awareness . . . even of . . . so-called immediate
experience . . . is a linguistic affair” (Sellars 1997, 63) and the “Myth of
Jones” wherein theoretical terms can take on a noninferential
reporting role, Rorty concludes that the “criterion” of the mental –
what makes the mental mental – is the epistemic property that
certain reports have of being held incorrigible. But since “being held”
thus and so simply nominates the “awareness” that members of a
linguistic community have of the correctness of certain sorts of
(contingent) linguistic moves, the normative authority invested in
“being held” incapable of error is neutral with respect to content. If
a community maintained that what variety of beetle a member had in
her box was invulnerable to the scrutiny of entomologists, then “I
have a whirligig” would be a (noninferential) report on a mental event
(IMM; MLM, 167).5 Likewise, if there were no linguistic practices that
invested reports with such authority, there would be no mental
contents. According to IMM, then, the supplementary epistemic
“peculiarity” of the first-person “route” to the asserted identity is
elucidated as the contingent property of “incorrigibility.” But since
their status as “mental” is vouchsafed to first-person reports by the
54 neil gascoigne
linguistic practice rather than that practice merely representing an

antecedent ontological order, there is nothing nonnatural about
such contents.
Of course, the fact that they are not nonnatural doesn’t quite
get us to the full story. As we noted above, the aim is to vindicate
materialism by showing that a proposal like (I) appears to lack sense
only because it is being judged from the perspective of the present and
not some (possible) future standpoint brought about by an (imagined)
empirical discovery. Rorty purports to offer the materialist two pro-
posals for thinking about that future:
(ξ1) The argument from MBIPC: It might come to pass that we are able
to explain behavior “at least as well” without reference to mental
states/features.
(ξ2) The argument from IMM: It “might turn out that there are no
entities about which we are incorrigible.”
(IMM; MLM, 169)
Whereas in the event of ξ2 we would continue to use sensation terms

but in the absence of the authority that marked them as “mental,” in
ξ1 such terms might disappear from the language altogether and
brain-process talk be used instead. But since “either of these changes
would give the ‘eliminative’ materialist the right to say that it had
been discovered that there were no mental entities” (IMM; MLM,
169), both ξ1 and ξ2 purportedly vindicate materialism.
Beginning with ξ1: although this is intended to vindicate
materialism, it can do no such thing, because the identity in question
can only be asserted on the grounds of explanatory equivalence. But
to take those criteria to exhaust what is relevant to establishing the
identity in question is just to assume the truth of materialism. So the
proposed future exemplifies the expectation that Peirce’s “method of
science” will eventuate in a standpoint from which only the forms of
inquiry associated with such a method will determine what is and
what is not – what can and cannot be referred to.6 That future
represents, as it were, the stage of thought at which the materialism

that is true now comes to Geist-like “self-awareness.” Now, this
Hegelian spin on Quine’s pragmatism is required to retain truth-talk
for sensation terms, but it returns us to the concern noted above in
relation to the schemas for (I’) and (III’): why does “table” retain its
referring function at stage (2) but not “sensation”? For Rorty, the
difference here is that while the in-principle elimination of “table”
would not leave what “table” would as a consequence refer to at (2) –
viz, clouds of molecules – belonging to a different ontological
category, the in-principle elimination of “sensation” does. The iden-
tity in (I’) is not a change within materialism but seeks to show that a
whole stretch of putative reality – the immaterially mental – would
be eliminated. We can impugn existence and retain truth because,
although the things we thought we were talking about (sensations;
like unicorn horns) didn’t exist, we were referring to something (brain
states). But since the (sensation) language we use continues to be fit
for purpose, we won’t move to a point where – as with unicorns – we
will displace such talk and as a consequence come to think of it as
empty. But if we think of “fitness of purpose” in terms of answering
to the appropriate norms for usage, then it is clear that strict identity
requires that these are specified in terms of prediction and control.
The truth of materialism is presupposed in order to impugn the
existence of the nonmaterial.
ξ1 highlights the tension between a pragmatic account of lin-
guistic practices and a materialism that sets a priori limits on their
associated standards of correctness. That becomes more acute when
one turns to ξ2. On the face of it, Rorty is offering an account by
which the supplementary “peculiarity” associated with sensation
reports can be naturalized in terms of contingent but authority-
bestowing linguistic practices. The fact that those practices might
be – as it were – “de-Jonesed” without loss is thus intended to buttress
the assumption of explanatory equivalence that underpins the affirm-
ations of identity required to vindicate materialism; an approach
presupposing the truth of materialism. But what Rorty’s analysis of
56 neil gascoigne
the “mental” points toward is a radical pluralism in lieu of traditional

ontology. After all, materialism is nothing if not the assumption that
certain terms in our linguistic repertoire derive their authority from
the world by virtue of the associated methods of inquiry. But if what
makes something mental is related to its inferential role in our
linguistic practices, then why not what makes something “mater-
ial”? In that sense, Materialism can be contrasted with materialism
(with a small “m”). We could say that in the future folk might be
materialists, but the mere possibility that they speak materialese is
no vindication of Materialism. Indeed, “materialism” is only a possi-
bility on the basis of adopting the post-ontological pragmatist analy-
sis of linguistic authority. And once we embrace the contention
that what makes the mental mental and the physical physical relates
to the acknowledged authority of social practices, then it follows
that what makes something moral, aesthetic, or political is to be
understood likewise.
ξ2 makes evident the conflict between the pragmatist construal
of normativity and the conviction that one is making a move within
Philosophy (by vindicating Materialism). Purged of any association
with explanatory equivalence and Materialism, the eliminative expli-
cation of identities associated with ξ2 becomes otiose. On the “loose”
interpretation of (III) and (IV) mooted above, we rest content on the
understanding that the property asymmetries are metaphysically
benignant, and so are untroubled by the notion that “table” retains
its referring function. Moreover, once we embrace the idea that the
“ontological” imprimatur of a term relates only to its socially man-
dated normative standing, we can accept that all sorts of uses can be
nonexplanatory without thereby sanctioning a non-Material realm.
And as with tables and clouds of molecules, so for the association of
sensations and brain states: the inferential roles of the respective
terms can diverge without that precipitating ontological anxieties.
Only the Philosopher qua Materialist is worried about such uses.
We began this section noting Rorty’s deflationary assessment of
his eliminativist vindication of Materialist identity. But what he
latterly dismissed in terms of the “current philosophical jargon” regis-

ters an awareness that his thinking had been conditioned by a certain
metaphysical picture. Rorty’s attempt to work through and out of that
picture – the shift in “shifts” – can be characterized as an effort to
elucidate the metaphilosophical significance of eliminativism.7 In any
event, it characterizes the shift in his work that takes place in the early
1970s and which eventuates in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.
Key here are two deeply related bits of that Philosophical “jargon”:
Reference and Truth. Recall that Rorty’s eliminativism is founded on
the conceit that one might impugn the existence of certain items – and
thus of what we can refer to – whilst redeeming the normative standing
(truth) of claims made in their names. What seems to underpin elim-
inativist identity, then, is the following:
(T) “There are Xs” is true just in case what we use X-talk to really
refer to exist.
As we have seen, the trick works only if we assume the (end-of-

inquiry) Materialism required to ensure that what one refers to when
one uses a sensation term is identical to what one refers to when one
uses the corresponding brain-state term, because (i) they have the
same explanatory role and (ii) that role exhausts the consequential.
Without that assumption there is nothing to ensure an alignment of
ontological commitments and justified statements: of what there are
to really refer to and what can be said of them.
The clearest example of Rorty’s development of an alternative
“philosophical jargon” is his “Realism and Reference” (1976). In this
he distinguishes three different uses of “reference.” Reference1 targets
the casual usage according to which it means “talk about.” From this
relaxed stance we refer to Harry Potter when we use Harry-Potter-talk
and to injustice, SARS-CoV-2, and Donald Trump likewise. This con-
trasts with reference3, which carries the connotations of metaphysical
tub-thumping associated with claims to have identified the actually
existent. Whereas from the standpoint of reference3 the ontological
order fixes the (“ready-made”) domain of what can be referred3 to in
58 neil gascoigne
order to engage in truth-talk, from the commonsense, pluralistic stand-

point associated with reference1, what we say truthfully about an X is
determined by social norms and so, as a consequence, is what we “talk
about” when we engage in X-talk. This disambiguation makes clear
what went wrong with eliminativism; namely, that Rorty – under the
influence of the “current Philosophical jargon” – conflated the ordin-
ary and Philosophical uses of reference. That is to say, where the
pragmatic analysis of the norms for the correct use of terms sanctioned
the association of truth with reference1, (T) assumes that there must be
some ontologically independent order to which one must ultimately be
referring3 (albeit at the “end” of inquiry).
Now, if the Philosophical use of reference3 is impugned in this
way, what are we to make of articulations of the eliminativist for-
mula? After all, they were used to “make sense” of conceptual
changes. Purged of the old jargon, what status are we to accord the
reflective stance of such formulations? Well, we have reference2. Like
reference3, this is used to contrast present or past or prospectively
past usages in order to contradistinguish their implied object with
what is taken to be its real referent. But here the “real” does not
indicate that the standpoint that is being adopted is metaphysically/
ontologically privileged, signifying instead that the linguistic practice
in question is being reconfigured or redescribed in order to address
inconsistencies and bring about (always temporary) coherence. So
when one says
What people used to call “Xs” = Ys
this is not a matter of making the Philosophical claim that
When people used to talk about (refer1 to) “Xs” they were really
talking about (referring3 to) Ys
but the philosophical claim that
When people used to talk about (refer1 to) “Xs” they were really
talking about (referring2 to) Ys.
From this perspective, it is clear what the irreducible-properties

objection amounts to. Recalling (I’), we now have two interpretations:
(a) “Sensations” refers3 to brain processes.

(b) “Sensations” refers2 to brain processes.
If we ascribe brain-state properties using the referring3 term “sensation,”

then sensations will turn out to have the same properties (a).8 But
properties aren’t commutable in this way in (b), because the norms that
determine what is said truthfully about (and thus determine reference1
to) sensations are not assimilable to those that serve likewise in the
linguistic domain of brain-processes-talk. The metaphilosophical signifi-
cance of eliminativism is that when Philosophy undertakes analyses that
presuppose the intelligibility of reference3 it helps itself to the idea that it
has available to it the criteria for determining the ontologically signifi-
cant mode of existence (materialist, immaterialist, etc.). But the idea that
what is is determined by social norms undermines this sense of privilege.
Rallying calls for linguistic reform that express the eliminativist formula
can then only be proposals for the “redescription” of current practices.
With the abandonment of a “controlling” reference3 and the assumption
of a monistic ontology goes the rejection of the idea that what the
redescriptions are intended to ramify are the narrow purposes, values,
or interests that the Materialist takes to be exhaustive. Accordingly, we
might propose a linguistic reform that undermines incorrigibility in the
hope that it will bring about a less individualistic and more collectivist
culture; or, indeed, oppose such a reform for the selfsame reasons.
“Redescription” knows no natural limits on its scope, then, but
what does that tell us about philosophy as opposed to Philosophy?
Before considering that question, we need to say something about
truth. Intuitions relating to the Philosophical association of reference
with truth go as follows:
“There are Xs” is true3 just in case we use “X” to refer3.
Instead we have
“There are Xs” is true1 just in case we use “X” to refer1.

60 neil gascoigne
We can associate true3 with the Philosophy’s “True.” Likewise, true1

is the pluralistic, entity-positing use associated with justification. But
what about a correlate for the all-important reference2, which relates
to the reflective standpoint from which redescriptions are proposed?
Its role requires acknowledging that, since normative practices can
change, the use of “truth” cannot be equated simply with justifica-
tion. What is required is:
“There are Xs” is true1 but it might not be true2.
Rorty later nominates this the “cautionary” use of true, “reminding

ourselves that justification [of S] is relative to, and no better than, the
beliefs cited as [its] grounds” (ORT, 128). But that downplays its role
in philosophy. True2 makes evident that to offer the sort of redescrip-
tions associated with the eliminativist schema is to conceive of
concrete communities of inquirers whose beliefs have been modified
“in the interest of greater predictive power, charm, or what have you”
(CP, 12). This may be Philosophically innocuous, but (contra Rorty) it
is not “philosophically innocuous” (CP, 13).
Rorty’s judgment that his dalliance with materialism was an
“awkward attempt[s]” to “make sense” of “our natural reaction to
an encounter with the Antipodeans” (PMN, 119) is typically
revealing/concealing. As Wittgenstein would have it, such a meet-
ing would be with a community whose “life would simply look
quite different from ours” in divers and not fully accountable terms.
The temptation to conceive wholly of such an alternative form of
life in terms of some future standpoint derives from the seductive
appeal of that “current . . . jargon,” which assumes that there’s a
neutral frame of inquiry with which one can settle matters of truth3
and what’s real3. What Rorty comes to see, then, is that it is that
jargon – the jargon of Philosophy – that has to be redescribed/elim-
inated. Whereas truth3 promises a standpoint on our linguistic prac-
tices – including the sentences of our Philosophical theories – that
regards them as answerable to the World, truth2 concerns prophetic
proposals for the sorts of sentences that linguistic norms might in
the future come to sanction the use of. It nominates the standpoint
from which philosophy is practiced.
splitting the déférance

In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Rorty writes: “I have spent
40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating
my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for” (PSH, 11).
If this appears to be at odds with my opening claim that Rorty’s “mid-
period” works constitute a protreptic vindication of Philosophy (as
philosophy), recall two points from Alexander’s formulation of the
Dilemma. The first is that one cannot (as Cavell might say) mean
what one wants to say if one attempts to pose the question “Should
we do philosophy?” external to the practice of it. Making philoso-
phy’s self-questioning intrinsic to its nature doesn’t render it immune
from internal censure, of course. Since the self-questioning that is
part of the way philosophy is being characterized is at the same time a
source of instability, one might endeavor to “cure” oneself of philo-
sophical restlessness by seeing philosophy’s task as to serve as a
latter-day Pyrrhonian emetic. But as Kant says, such a “surrender
itself to a skeptical hopelessness” would constitute no vindication
of “a healthy philosophy” (Kant 1998, 460). The second point is that
philosophy is to be exculpated by demonstrating that its self-
questioning practice is “appropriate for a human.” Given the central-
ity of human needs and interests to pragmatism, we can regard
Rorty’s “worries” as attempts to conciliate the instability that derives
from philosophy’s self-questioning with the requirement to satisfy
some (perhaps “profound”) human need. In the period under consider-
ation, this proceeded through an engagement with three thinkers in
particular, and the motivating question ascribed to them is an expres-
sion of Rorty’s own “worries”: “‘Given that this is how philosophy
has been, what, if anything, can philosophy now be?’ Suggesting . . .
that philosophy may have exhausted its potentialities, he asks
whether the motives which led to philosophy’s existence still exist
and whether they should” (CP, 40). The “he” in question is
62 neil gascoigne
Heidegger, whose views are helpfully played off against those of

another member of the triumvirate, Dewey. As Rorty states, he has
no “impartially sympathetic synthesis” (CP, 51) to conclude with: his
sympathies are avowedly Deweyan at this point. Whereas Heidegger
wishes to preserve something from the metaphysical tradition that
we can attach the name “philosophy” to, Dewey sees no role for a
post-ontological successor to that tradition (CP, 51).
The idea that something goes missing in this reduction of
Thought to metaphysical thinking recalls Nehamas’s criticism:
Rorty’s rejection of Philosophy is at the same time a rejection of a
deep human need that can itself eventuate in a regression into meta-
physical thinking. But just as Rorty is critical of Dewey’s own lapses
into metaphysics (CP, 72–89), his sense of what “shifting” reflection
away from the Philosophical picture would be was (in part) born from
his awareness that the attempt to vindicate Materialism itself consti-
tuted such a dereliction. What’s important here is the status of the
“motives which led to philosophy’s existence.” Rorty’s objection is to
seeing these as more than expressions of contingent human need by
associating them – in the guise of Philosophy – with the “spiritual
destiny of the Western world” (Heidegger 1959, 37, quoted at CP, 53).
But if we think about the “spiritual” aspects of the “Western world”
and its destiny in terms of the values and achievements of which we
approve, and if we likewise read the works that make up the
Philosophical canon as narrating a history of those achievements,
there doesn’t seem to be much difference here. The objection is to
the notion that texts of the canon offer us the only path to under-
standing “our” destiny. In other words, what Rorty rejects is the
contention that they “speak” to us in the name of the truth3 about
what is “appropriate” for the anti-humanistic “we” that we are.
In their own ways, then, both Heidegger and Dewey make the
same mistake: they assume that there is truth in philosophy. This
brings us naturally enough to the third figure, who does indeed allow
for some degree of synthesis: Wittgenstein. In “Keeping Philosophy
Pure,” Rorty poses the Dilemma and our related question from a
slightly different angle in response to David Pears (1969). Is there any

way, he asks, to avoid the stark choice between regarding Wittgenstein
as either proposing “one more dubious philosophical theory” or “not
‘doing philosophy’ at all” (CP, 22)? Crucially, he argues that this only
becomes pressing if one reads Wittgenstein’s Investigations as a con-
tribution to Philosophy. And the hallmark of Philosophical inquiry is
that it centers on “attempts to . . . find something interesting to say
about the essence of Truth . . . and . . . of criticisms of those attempts”
(CP, xiv). Without a criterion of “philosophical truth” (CP, 22) – of
what we’ve called truth3 – there is nothing to return metaphysics to
“the secure path of science” (PMN, 384–5). But it is the restless, self-
questioning striving for that longed-for method or criterion that brings
about the instability that precipitates what Kant calls the “euthanasia
of pure reason” (Kant 1998, 460). What is required, then, is the discov-
ery that “gives philosophy peace”: the one that allows the philosopher
to “break off philosophizing” when she wants to precisely because,
being “no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in ques-
tion,” it embraces a method according to which “Problems are solved
(difficulties eliminated), not a single problem” (Wittgenstein 1998, 51).
For Rorty, that “single problem” is the problem of truth3 and
the metaphysical temptations that accompany it. He tops and tails
his introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism with the following
reflections:
The essays in this book are attempts to draw consequences from a

pragmatist theory about truth. This theory says that truth is not
the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically
interesting theory about . . . The question of whether the
pragmatist view of truth – that it is not a profitable topic – is itself
true is . . . a question about whether a post-Philosophical culture is
a good thing to try for. (CP, xiii, xliii)
In terms of the eliminativist formula,
What people used to call “truth3” is just truth1 (and that’s the
truth2).
64 neil gascoigne
To propose the redescription of Philosophy in the interests of a post-

Philosophical culture is to suggest we replace a subject that invites
metaphilosophical speculation “about its subject and method” (CP,
28).9 When Rorty designates the successor to Philosophy – “philoso-
phy-as-vision” (CP, 31) – “Sellarsian,” the vision of “things” and how
they “hang together” is of course wildly pluralistic. It designates “the
sort of writing which generalizes so sweepingly that one has no other
compartment for it” (CP, 28). But it doesn’t mean that involves the
abandonment of whatever “profound need” or interests might be
thought to have motivated Philosophy. Indeed, the proposed elimination
What people used to call “Philosophy” is philosophy
is advanced in order to vindicate what we find compelling still/appro-

priate for a human in that need under the heading of “philosophy.”
But as we saw earlier, the “shift” that is proposed here is not meta-
physically underpinned. We are still at the point where we use “phil-
osophy” in this way in the prophetic mode of reflection associated
with truth2. Indeed, Rorty’s proleptic vindication of philosophy (“as-
vision”) proceeds by proposing a standpoint for the reflective individ-
ual that expresses the human need to make sense of things in an
expanded Sellarsian way but which does not suffer from the instabil-
ity that the search for truth3 provokes.
In his later writings, Rorty came to champion what we have
been referring to as “philosophy” under the name of cultural politics.
In his final collection of essays, he writes: “I want to argue that
cultural politics should replace ontology, and also that whether it
should or not is itself a matter of cultural politics” (PCP, 5). Instead
of the above, we have:
What people used to call “Ontology” is cultural politics.
Rorty picked his terms to suit the times, but the reflective standpoint of
the post-ontological eliminativist remains the same. There is no truth3,
so all proposals are advanced in the prophetic mode of truth2. To return
to our opening point, then: Nehamas’s pessimism is rooted in the
assumption that Rorty fails to respond to the challenge of the Protreptic

Dilemma because he is striving for an external standpoint on
Philosophy. But it’s Philosophy that demands that standpoint in the
name of (a criterion of ) truth3. And to reject that possible use of “true”
amounts to a rejection of the very idea of such an external standpoint.
Rorty’s erinaceousness (Rorty 2004d, 4) can be characterized in many
ways, but this is the lesson learned from his dalliance with Materialism,
and the understanding of conceptual change it gives rise to informs his
subsequent work. At the risk of belaboring the point, this is not a
rejection of what Philosophers do. Pace Heidegger, the metaphysical
tradition is not redeemed because it lights a clearing in which we can
see what we really are and what as a consequence is truly appropriate
for us. It’s a seed bank of useful tools, a repository of wildly creative
insights and proposals for how we might come to think of ourselves.
Rorty’s “place” in Philosophy turns on the fact that he gives us a way of
thinking about the history and technical aspects of the discipline that
gives it a broader significance as part of philosophy.
Writing about his “heroes,” Rorty observes that few philosophers
indeed have had the audacity to suggest not only that Philosophy itself
resulted from a mistake but that “we are not, even now, in a position to
state alternatives to those false assumptions or confused concepts – to
see reality plain” (CP, 40). The reason why Rorty’s work in the 1970s is
of such importance to the destiny of contemporary pragmatism is that
he vindicates the role of philosophy by presenting it with a different
conception of what the reality in question “is.” It allows us to envisage
a post-Philosophical age in which debates within technical philosophy
continue to play a role in working out a vision of the future.10
notes
Thanks to David Rondel and Michael Bacon for comments on an
earlier draft.
1 Nehamas’s source does not include reference to what is “appropriate for
a human.”
2 Likewise endorsed by Stout 2010.
66 neil gascoigne
3 MBIPC and IMM will refer to “Mind–Body Identity, Privacy, and

Categories” (1965) and “Incorrigibility as the Mark of the Mental” (1970),
respectively. Both essays are reprinted in MLM.
4 The Antipodeans are Rorty’s imagined race who, since they are raised to
correlate verbal reports with the states of their central nervous system,
have no distinctive role in their language games for sensation-talk and
thus appear to lack one of the sui generis features of mental life.
5 See Wittgenstein 1998, 100.
6 For an exploration of Rorty’s relationship to Peirce see Voparil
forthcoming.
7 In Gascoigne 2008, I refer to this “working out” as Rorty’s Kehre.
8 Note that “‘Brain processes’ refers3 to Sensations” might constitute an
immaterialist expression of the same Philosophical standpoint.
9 On the metaphilosophy–philosophy distinction in neo-pragmatism, see
Gascoigne and Bacon forthcoming.
10 See Gascoigne 2019.
3 Rorty and Classical Pragmatism
Christopher Voparil
It may come as a surprise to those only recently acquainted with the

pragmatist tradition that the figure most closely associated with its
contemporary revival was, for decades, persona non grata in many
pragmatist circles. As interest in pragmatism surged during the 1980s
and 1990s beyond philosophy to other disciplines and across the
globe, many were already sounding the alarm. The source of the
concern was clear: Rorty’s alleged misunderstanding and even willful
distortion of the core ideas and commitments of the classical prag-
matists – specifically, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and
John Dewey. As an analytic philosopher who had been seduced by
the irresponsible thrills of postmodernism, the worries ran, his grasp
of pragmatism was tenuous, and his motives suspect. At least one
perceptive reader glimpsed the potential of Rorty’s work to “initiate a
new stage of creative and scholarly work on pragmatism and the
several pragmatists” (Brodsky 1982, 333). Much more dominant were
laments that “Rorty threatens to undo Dewey’s work, rather than
carry it forward” (Guinlock 1990, 266), and that his interpretations
“threaten to affect the fortunes of the whole of American philosophy”
(Margolis 2000, 535).1
Indeed, the figure of Rorty continues to function as a negative,
fixed pole against which philosophers and intellectuals of all stripes
position themselves. Virtually all pragmatists on the contemporary
scene, whether Deweyan, Jamesian, or Peircean, “classico,” “paleo,”
“neo,” or “New,” use Rorty as a foil to justify their stances. At times,
his work seems an obstacle itself. Yet the wave of scholarship that has
gained momentum since Rorty’s death in 2007 has buoyed hopes that
his critical challenges and affirmations, still largely untapped, will be
taken up in articulating the tradition’s contemporary relevance.2
67
68 christopher voparil
This chapter aims to take Rorty seriously as an integral part of

the pragmatist tradition by elucidating his efforts to reconstruct it. It
eschews the overwhelmingly negative, critical tenor of most existing
commentary on Rorty’s relation to the classical figures. Reading the
classical pragmatists in nonpolemical dialogue with Rorty reveals
limitations of the often static received images of Peirce, James, and
Dewey that predominate in current debates, and promises to create
space for new, fresher modes of understanding. It also establishes that
Rorty’s stances on language, realism, the role of philosophy, and ethics
owe more to the classical pragmatists than currently appreciated.3
Any mention of Rorty and classical pragmatism inevitably trig-
gers questions about the divide between experiential and linguistic
pragmatisms. The experience vs. language debate is too freighted
with decades of baggage to attempt to settle here.4 Moreover, not
only does the experience–language opposition obscure as much as it
may reveal, it often blocks the road of inquiry. One way to clear a
path is by historicizing rather than essentializing the opposition.
Certainly, as Cheryl Misak has alleged, Rorty contributed to “setting
up a false choice between language and experience” (Misak 2014, 29).
Yet this choice was not always a live one for Rorty, or, lest we forget,
for the classical pragmatists themselves.
Misak’s reminder that both language and experience were
important to the classical figures bears repeating. That both language
and experience were important to Rorty would no doubt face firmer
resistance. Yet an opposition between language and experience is not
central to Rorty’s early work and is not a necessary axiom of his
pragmatism, taken in full portraiture.5 That is, Rorty’s signature
move to make conversation the “ultimate context within which
knowledge is to be understood” (PMN, 389) is less a repudiation of
experience than an affirmation of a social practice that includes
linguistic and nonlinguistic behavior, as well as propositional and
nonpropositional knowledge. Rorty’s social practice account of
conversation, which in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature he
dubbed, rather awkwardly, “epistemological behaviorism,” was not
rorty and classical pragmatism 69
based on a divorce of language from experience. Rather, it sets the

linguistic against the isolated Cartesian mind and builds on a disposi-
tional conception of meaning he gleaned from Quine, who in turn
attributed it to Dewey’s naturalistic view of language and account of
meaning as a property of behavior (Quine 1969, 27). Admittedly,
I cannot defend these claims here.6 My aim is merely to enable
sufficient suspension of disbelief to open a space where Rorty’s rela-
tion to classical pragmatism can be reconsidered.
rorty’s early encounter with classical

pragmatism
Hopefully, by now the once-common view that Rorty was an analyt-
ically trained philosopher who lost his faith and flippantly dabbled in
postmodernist pragmatism has been successfully debunked. There is
little to support the notion that Rorty was trained in the analytic
style. The philosophy departments where he studied – the University
of Chicago in the late 1940s and Yale University in the 1950s – were
known for their pluralism and commitments to the history of phil-
osophy.7 To be sure, Rorty made his initial mark as a professional
philosopher through a series of influential analytic essays in the
philosophy of mind, on topics like the mind–body problem, elimina-
tive materialism, and the incorrigibility of first-person reports.8 But
Rorty had picked up the analytic style largely on his own, for strategic
professional reasons, without undergoing any deep indoctrination.9
Rorty was not only exposed to pragmatism but engaged it in
significant depth prior to his forays into the analytic realm. At
Chicago, the intellectual environment of the Hutchins College was
decidedly not Dewey-friendly, given Robert Hutchins’s own crusade
“against the pragmatist and ‘relativist’ legacy of Dewey” (Rorty
2010a, 5). Yet Richard McKeon, who may have had the greatest influ-
ence on the young Rorty, had studied at Columbia under Dewey and
was familiar with debates between realism and pragmatism in the
1920s (Gross 2008, 107). Whiteheadian Charles Hartshorne, who
supervised Rorty’s master’s thesis at Chicago, was a student of
Ralph Barton Perry and C. I. Lewis, who in turn had been students of
William James and Josiah Royce, respectively. At Yale, pragmatism
had a more positive presence. Rorty took classes with Roycean ideal-
ist Brand Blanshard and studied with Peirce scholars Rulon Wells and
Paul Weiss, who chaired his dissertation committee. For a time, he
was a graduate teaching assistant for John E. Smith (Gross 2008,
119–20; Rorty 2010a, 6–8).
Rorty’s knowledge of Peirce was the most advanced by far. Yet
he downplayed his early work on Peirce, recounting that he had
devoted his “27th and 28th years” – roughly 1958 and 1959 – to a
fruitless effort “to discover the secret of Charles Sanders Peirce’s
esoteric doctrine of ‘the reality of Thirdness’ and thus of his fantastic-
ally elaborate semiotico-metaphysical ‘System’” (PSH, 134). A better
indication is that by 1963 Rorty’s renown in Peirce circles, based on
his teachers and early publications, was enough that Edward Moore
and Richard Robin would invite him to contribute to the volume they
were preparing to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Peirce’s
death, an invitation nearly inconceivable even two decades later.10 In
his earliest published essays, Rorty used Peirce (and Wittgenstein) to
bridge pragmatism and analytic philosophy.
In early writings, Rorty seemed to go out of his way to invoke
Dewey’s name when he could, though without significant depth.
Despite Rorty’s heralding Dewey as among the three most important
philosophers of the twentieth century, neither Dewey nor pragmatism
as such figures prominently in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,
though he believed “there is a dialectical strand within analytic
philosophy which fulfills itself in the American philosophers Quine
and Sellars in a way which leads back to Dewey and the American
Pragmatists.”11 As Rorty turned to social and political issues more
directly in the 1980s and 1990s, Dewey became an abiding ally, often
to the chagrin and even horror of Deweyans.
James, understandably, doesn’t come up much in Rorty’s early
work, as Peirce was the better conduit between pragmatism and
analytic philosophy. But we know Rorty was exposed to James at
Yale via Smith’s seminars.12 Rorty’s teaching syllabi and book

reviews from the 1960s display familiarity with James.13 His respect
for James ran deep. When asked in an interview to name a philosopher
he especially admired, he responded, “I think the one I admire most is
William James. He never lost a sense of humor about his own writing.
He wrote because he enjoyed it. There’s a kind of joyful exuberance to
his work that I wish I could imitate” (Rorty 2003b). Richard Bernstein
has described James as “one of Rorty’s heroes” (Bernstein 2010, 213).
Nevertheless, one is hard-pressed to find any extended treatment of
James until the mid-1990s. This later work on James constitutes the
most significant site for constructive dialogue between their melior-
istic projects and reveals a central, often underappreciated, Jamesian
ethical thread in Rorty’s philosophy.
In broad terms, the fundamental insight that the early Rorty
gains from classical pragmatism is the primacy of practice in philo-
sophical discourse. The overriding preoccupation of his early work is
how to avoid “the central paradox of metaphilosophy” associated
with the impossibility of philosophical neutrality – namely, the fact
that “each system can and does create its own metaphilosophical
criteria, designed to authenticate itself and disallow its competitors”
(MLM, 50). As he more bluntly put it, philosophy is “a game in which
each player is at liberty to change the rules whenever he wishes”
(Rorty 1961, 299). One reaction to this unhandsome state of affairs is
skepticism. Another is realism, of one version or another, which
holds that “adequacy to something external to one’s system” pro-
vides a check on the philosopher’s ability to redefine or redescribe not
only her own position but that of her opponents. Dissatisfied with
both these responses, he is drawn to a third option, which he calls
“metaphilosophical pragmatism” (Rorty 1961, 299–301). Rather than
attempting to flee or quell the philosopher’s creative ability to intro-
duce new vocabularies, distinctions, and criteria of relevance, prag-
matism makes a virtue of necessity and embraces it.
In Rorty’s view, Peirce and Dewey authorize a pragmatic turn in
philosophy through their respective recognitions of the dependence of
the theoretical on the practical. They grasp that philosophical discourse

is embedded within the normative horizon of a community. This
pragmatic turn’s chief consequence is a deflation of the privilege trad-
itionally accorded epistemology and metaphysics.14 To those familiar
with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, this should come as no
surprise. What is noteworthy is that already in the early 1960s Rorty
had arrived at this critical posture via the classical pragmatists’ meta-
philosophical orientation toward practice. To Rorty, for Peirce this
means that “Veridical knowledge is never a starting point of
inquiry . . . but only its ideal end” (MLM, 64). For Dewey, it amounts
to “analyzing ‘truth’ as ‘satisfaction of needs’ (and then taking the need
served by philosophy to be, pre-eminently, communication)” (Rorty
1961, 302). The pragmatic turn entails for Rorty a recognition of the
fallibility, selectivity, and relativity of the knowing subject; affirmation
of the irreducibility of indeterminacy, pluralism, and the ineluctability
of interpretation; and a rejection of a permanent neutral matrix
for inquiry.
The sections that follow on Peirce, Dewey, and James highlight
three particular insights that Rorty derives from classical pragmatism
and which become defining characteristics of his mature thought.
The first is his attention to language: “a conception of philosophy as
something that lives, moves, and has its being within language”
(MLM, 59). Given the philosopher’s agency to redefine and redescribe,
any account of the philosophical endeavor must grapple with what he
later calls vocabularies and our criteria for vocabulary choice.
The second is that traditional conceptions of realism as corres-
pondence are inadequate. As Rorty put it, pragmatism entails a
“reversal of the traditional notion of the relation between language
and reality” (MLM, 63). In simplified terms, the traditional realist
view posits the existence of The Way Things Are (or things-in-them-
selves) and aims to discern the most accurate representation of this
nonlinguistic reality to determine the right language to use to
describe it. Metaphysics, for accessing this independent reality, and
epistemology, for judging the accuracy of its descriptions and
establishing validity, are thus indispensable to the pursuit of

knowledge. By contrast, on the view Rorty gleans from Peirce, “to
propose a set of categories is not to offer a description of a non-
linguistic fact, but to offer a tool for getting a job done” (MLM, 61).
An abiding concern for Rorty in his early work is eschewing realistic
legitimations of knowledge that proceed by positing “something
determinate underlying the indeterminate” that knowledge must
match (MLM, 35). Once we acknowledge the philosopher’s metaphi-
losophical acuity for changing the rules and redescribing, such legit-
imation loses its force.
The third implication is that epistemology is dethroned and
made subservient to ethics. He called this “the dependence of criter-
iology upon ethical norms” (MLM, 50). The positions he critiques in
the early work – reductionism, nominalism, and intuitionism – all
share the assumption that we can “penetrate through language to
non-linguistic data which will guide our choice of languages”
(MLM, 59). Instead, he holds that norms to guide vocabulary choice
and to judge relative worth derive not from epistemology but from the
community of inquiry in which philosophical discourse is embedded.
rorty and peirce

Given the long, unfortunate, shadow cast by Rorty’s infamous state-
ment that Peirce’s “contribution to pragmatism was merely to have
given it a name, and to have stimulated James” (CP, 161), readers
might be surprised to learn that the early Rorty held that Peirce’s
view that Scotistic realism and pragmatism reciprocally entail each
other is “sound and important” (MLM, 16). Beyond the needless
antipathy it activated in Peirceans, his dismissal distracted from
Rorty’s own indebtedness to Peirce. Our understanding of Rorty’s
mature pragmatism is impoverished if we overlook the residues
of Peircean positions that continued to inform it. Indeed, without
early insights derived from Peirce, Rorty’s pragmatism would not
have developed along the lines that it did. I will focus on three such
Peircean influences.
Rather than being a hollow invocation of a prejudice for lan-

guage attributable to the linguistic turn, the well-known cornerstone
of Rorty’s linguistic pragmatism – the idea that language cannot be
transcended – derives from Peirce. For the early Rorty, the reason why
Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and Scotistic realism entail each other is
that they are both affirmations of “the reality of Thirdness” (MLM,
25). Peirce opposes scholastic realism to nominalism, which insists
that vagueness is not real. Among the vague things that Peirce
thought could not be reduced by nominalists are “Intelligence,
Intention, Signs, Continuity, Potentiality, Meaning, Rules, and
Habits.” What these things share, Rorty saw, is that “their adequate
characterization requires a language which contains, as primitive
predicates, the names of triadic relations” (MLM, 18). Our inability
to transcend language is for Rorty a corollary of the inescapably
mediated nature of thought Peirce dubbed “semeiotic.” Rorty is quite
explicit that in stating, “language is incurably vague, but perfectly
real and utterly inescapable,” he wishes to affirm Peirce’s claims that
“there is no exception to the law that every thought-sign is translated
or interpreted in a subsequent one” and that “no collection of facts
can constitute a law” (Peirce, quoted at MLM, 21).
The second important influence is that the early Rorty sub-
scribed to a distinctly Peircean form of realism that affirms both the
mind-independent existence of reality and the selectivity and fallibil-
ity of our efforts to represent it. If nominalists are those who try to
reduce what Peirce called Thirds to Seconds, in order to eliminate the
vagueness or indeterminacy that inheres in meaning, habits, inten-
tions, and the like, the defense against this is to insist upon “the
irreducibility of the indefinite and the indeterminate” (MLM, 26).15
Following Peirce, Rorty contends that since a sign is always “a deter-
minate indetermination,” naming is “neither simply artificial (inde-
terminate) nor simply natural (determinate), neither forced on us nor
performed by us in a spirit of pure whimsy” (MLM, 27). Signs, for
Rorty, “while giving us latitude for interpretation, resist some inter-
pretations more than others.” “Just insofar as we are ‘realists’ in
Peirce’s sense,” he held, we do not assume that “progress toward

definiteness and determinacy is completable,” nor that “the fully
determinate is somehow there already” (MLM, 26–7).
The third significant Peircean element in Rorty’s early work
is his openness to the possibility of a pragmatic metaphysics.
Rorty thought that Peirce had found a way to solve the problem
of how we can “maintain a philosophic thesis about the ultimacy
of some given set of categories without falling into the dilemma of
self-referential inconsistency on the one hand and circularity on
the other” (MLM, 60). Peirce’s Categories are for Rorty a paradigm
case of pragmatic naming for two reasons: as a theory of the nature
of ultimate categories, it is not dictated by epistemology – that is,
not an accurate description of a nonlinguistic fact – and it pre-
serves a space for choice of vocabulary. Peirce eschews recourse to
a theory “tailor-made to suit an antecedently chosen epistemol-
ogy,” as Rorty thought Russell, Carnap, and Bergmann had done
(MLM, 63). As Rorty explains, by reversing “the usual relationship
between signs and what they signify,” Peirce shapes his categorical
distinctions “around the requirements of the process of significa-
tion, rather than around a putative intuition of what it is that
needs to be signified” (MLM, 63). Importantly, Rorty grasps that
recognizing with Peirce that nature has habits or utters signs does
not “take us any deeper into our own expecting and talking than
we were already” (MLM, 29). That is, calling nature’s habits
rational simply means that nature “contains the sort of determin-
ate indeterminations that our mind does,” not that it “recognizes
the same universals” or otherwise contains any necessary epi-
stemic linkage between mind and world. (MLM, 29). Giving a
name to “a batch of things” is simply “my establishing a habit of
correlating tokens of a given sign with tokens of other signs”
(MLM, 28). Following Peirce’s insights about induction, Rorty
understands that this naming – “slicing up nature in certain
ways” – involves reading off how “that nature has already sliced
itself up by developing habits on its own” (MLM, 28).16
The importance of this cluster of Peircean influences goes

beyond mere historical significance. Understanding the early influ-
ence of Peirce on Rorty reveals the philosophical coherence of later
stances espoused with far less nuance. Without the distinct version of
Peircean realism, Rorty’s critique of correspondence theories seems
to leave his pragmatism wholly unmoored. Despite some polemical
statements of his own to the contrary, Rorty should not be regarded as
rejecting the idea that a mind-independent reality exists and con-
strains our interpretations.17 His early engagement with Peirce
makes clear that he merely abandoned the foundational justificatory
significance of the concept of an uninterpreted, unmediated reality.18
He rejected the assumption that external constraints carry truth-
value on the order of “intuitions,” as something that can get us
outside of and settle conflicting theories, vocabularies, and interpret-
ations, not the existence of Peircean Secondness. Even when he
ceased relying explicitly on Peirce, in the 1970s Rorty espoused
“relaxed” and “philosophically innocuous” conceptions of “true”
and “real” that not only are consistent with his pragmatism but
alleviate misplaced criticisms that he confusedly or irresponsibly
abandoned commonsense uses of these notions.19
My aim in this no doubt too hasty foray into Peirce’s ideas is
modest: to open a space where the possibility grasped by Vincent
Colapietro can at least be entertained, that “Peirce can be read as
preparing the way for Rorty in certain fundamental respects; in add-
ition, Rorty can be read as carrying forward some impulses clearly
integral to Peirce’s project” (Colapietro 2011, 40). The first step is
resisting the urge simply to reinscribe the distance between them
without rethinking our received pictures of each. In Peirce are
resources that can be used to understand and even defend Rorty’s
philosophical positions, especially to fellow pragmatists. Marshaling
these resources has the potential to alleviate the confusion and con-
sternation generated by Rorty’s more provocative assertions, particu-
larly for philosophers who felt – and feel – that his positions lack
depth and adequate philosophical coherence.
rorty and dewey

Going against the grain of received views, I see Rorty and Dewey as
holding more in common than most – specifically, a conception of
philosophy as an instrument of social change. The fundamental
motivation behind Rorty’s thinking and writing is profoundly
Deweyan: promoting ethical, social, and political change by recon-
ceiving our understanding of philosophy and its role in the culture.
When Rorty objected to particular elements in Dewey’s work, it is
because he believed they get in the way of reconstructing philosophy
as an instrument of social change. In other words, he reconstructed
rather than misread or misunderstood Dewey.20
There is no doubt, however, that Rorty enlisted Dewey into his
own project of reconstruction, which involved philosophical and cul-
tural transformation aimed at getting us beyond “the entire cultural
tradition which made truth . . . a central virtue” (CP, 35). His critique
of traditional philosophy in its rationalist and foundationalist regis-
ters follows from judgments about “causal efficacy” for “how best to
bring about the utopia sketched by the Enlightenment” (TP, 172). If
we recall the third implication of Rorty’s pragmatic turn to practice
noted above, his decentering of epistemology and metaphysics in
favor of ethics set the stage for what he called “the priority of democ-
racy to philosophy” (see ORT). Dewey’s importance for Rorty, ultim-
ately, was in developing a “strategy for shifting philosophers’
attention from the problems of metaphysics and epistemology to
the needs of democratic politics” (Rorty 1998, 638).
In Rorty’s use of Dewey we can identify the negative, critical, or
therapeutic side mobilized in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,
but also a positive conception of “philosophy-as-criticism-of-culture”
(CP, 75). Rorty severs this idea of criticism of culture from the (much
reformed) metaphysical and epistemological strands Dewey saw as
necessary for this work.21 Unfortunately, during the decades when
most scholarship on the Dewey–Rorty relation railed against the
choosy nature of Rorty’s appropriation of Dewey, the normativity
driving Rorty’s selectivity was not fully understood and the extent of
common ground they share in their positive conception of philoso-
phy’s role went largely overlooked.
Rorty’s attraction to the idea of philosophy as “culture criti-
cism” is an important theme in Consequences of Pragmatism. He
sought to revive the “celebrations of American democracy, natural-
ism, and social reconstruction” prevalent during the “great days of
Deweyan philosophy and social science” between the wars, when
philosophy took on a distinctly cultural role in the nation’s life,
providing “moral leadership” and engaging “new problems arising
from the social sciences and the arts” (CP, 61–4). As logical
empiricism morphed into analytic philosophy during the postwar
period, this socially concerned conception was displaced by the prac-
tice of philosophy as a rigorous, technical discipline modeled on the
more narrowly professionalized mathematical and natural sciences.
As a result, Rorty argues, the underlying social concern that animated
Deweyan philosophy was abandoned and philosophy lost contact
with both the social sciences on one side and the arts on the other.
The attempt to recover these dimensions of the Deweyan pragmatic
project is an enduring concern in Rorty’s work. In the second section
of Philosophy and Social Hope, he returns to this positive role for
philosophy, citing Dewey’s idea of “making philosophy an instru-
ment of change” and the function of philosophy as “mediat[ing]
between old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks,
with new ways of speaking, developed in response to new demands”
(PSH, 29, 66). It is echoed in his call in Philosophy as Cultural Politics
for philosophers to “intervene in cultural politics” and to see this as
“their principal assignment” (PCP, x).
If this Dewey-centered reading is accurate, why were Deweyans
so exercised by Rorty’s efforts? For one thing, they objected to Rorty’s
suggestion that advancing the Deweyan project required dropping
certain parts of Dewey’s philosophy that recent work had revealed
as problematic (Koopman 2009). Rorty understood his reconstruction
of Dewey as reconciling an implicit tension within Dewey’s own
practice of philosophy. One side is the Dewey that Rorty found inspir-
ational: Dewey “the philosopher as social activist, concerned to keep
the spirit of reform alive by constant criticism of the adequacy of
current practices and institutions” (Rorty 1986b, x). The other side is
Dewey “the philosopher as politically neutral theoretician – a special-
ist in, and authority upon, such peculiarly philosophical topics as the
rules of logic, the nature of science, or the nature of thought” (Rorty
1986b, x). Rorty’s reconstruction of Dewey involves developing the
philosopher as social activist side and combining it with Dewey’s
critical anti-spectatorial, anti-Cartesian, and anti-Kantian thrust,
while reading out the parts that either support, or purport to support,
a conception of philosophy that flirts with violating Rorty’s
historicism and anti-authoritarianism via givenism, privileged epi-
stemic status, or a neutral matrix for inquiry.
To be clear, there is much in Dewey that goes nowhere near
these problems. After all, it is Dewey’s work itself that informs
Rorty’s reconstructive project in the first place. Still, Rorty uses
the two priorities noted above – attention to the cultural context
of philosophy and its level of engagement with social and political
questions – as a critical lens through which to analyze Dewey’s own
project of developing a “metaphysics of experience” in Experience
and Nature. Rorty’s claim is that a metaphysics of experience that
finds its “generic traits” is not necessary to provide a philosophical
basis for the criticism of culture.22 The basic problem Rorty sees is
the contradiction between a naturalistic metaphysics that claims to
identify the generic traits of experience and Dewey’s insistence on
the necessity of attending to the cultural matrix in which inquiry
occurs. Specifically, Rorty worries that Dewey’s metaphysical pro-
ject assumes “there must be a standpoint from which experience can
be seen in terms of some ‘generic traits’” (CP, 80). On Rorty’s view,
Dewey never escaped the notion that “what he himself said about
experience described what experience looked like” – that is, that the
virtue of his method was that it is more empirical than that of his
opponents (CP, 81). On this reading, Dewey set out to accomplish
two things with his turn to a naturalistic metaphysics: to undermine

traditional philosophical dualisms by providing a more empirically
sound alternative to realist and idealist metaphysics; and to “open
up new avenues for cultural development,” as Rorty puts it, through
a conception of philosophy as criticism of culture (CP, 85). For
Rorty, the project of attaining a more naturalistic description of
the generic traits of experience simply is not necessary for the latter
aim (Voparil 2013b).
What we have here, then, are two conceptions of doing cultural
criticism: one that turns to a method and community of inquirers
exemplified in science and one that embraces forms of narrative
knowledge, each with an activist, though differently circumscribed,
role for philosophy. It is possible to see these two accounts as comple-
mentary, the difference between what we might call normal and
abnormal modes of discourse, where “normal” (Dewey) entails a state
where shared criteria exist, communities are relatively stable, and
inferential patterns are widely held, and “abnormal” (Rorty) connotes
conditions characterized by higher levels of rational disagreement
and social marginalization or exclusion, where recourse to shared
criteria finds little traction. Because more thoroughly informed by
the priority of democracy to philosophy, Rorty’s philosophical
assumptions direct us toward the limits of our conceptions of
rationality and community – i.e., to those whom we exclude – and
toward making them more inclusive. By calling our attention to the
importance of expanding the logical space in which inferentially
based argumentation proceeds, Rorty helps make pragmatism more
explicitly oriented toward extending our communal attachments to
include previously excluded groups (Voparil 2013b).
Pragmatism’s contemporary relevance could be enhanced by
incorporating both Deweyan and Rortyan versions into an enriched
practice of pragmatist philosophy as cultural criticism. For starters,
pragmatist cultural criticism should continue to decenter socially
uninterested forms of philosophy to become more pluralistic and
open to interdisciplinarity. Rorty’s embrace of literature and narrative
can be seen as an extension of Dewey’s recognition of the role of

poetry, the drama, and the novel in communication in The Public
and Its Problems. Pragmatist cultural critics should recognize that all
intellectual “moves,” including appeals to scientific method,
rationality, and intelligence, take place within the game of cultural
politics. Rorty’s recognition that our attempts to define criteria and
define what is common are never metaphilosophically or politically
neutral, acknowledges the effects of power and positionality on demo-
cratic discourse and social inquiry, even when Rorty himself did not
perceive this clearly enough. Pragmatist cultural criticism should
develop a keener awareness of the limits of rational discourse and of
the importance of cultivating the imagination. For Rorty, the imagin-
ation, rather than rational argumentation, is “the cutting edge of
cultural evolution” (PSH, 87). Dewey’s account likewise needs the
imagination and interpretive novelty to generate growth and avoid
the routine and unreflective. “Only when the facts are allowed free
play for the suggestion of new points of view,” he tells us, “is any
significant conversion of conviction as to meaning possible.” Yet in
the very next sentence he reminds us, “Take away from physical
science its laboratory apparatus and its mathematical technique,
and the human imagination might run wild in its theories of inter-
pretation even if we suppose the brute facts to remain the same”
(Dewey 1927, 238).
rorty and james

Rorty’s allusions to James prior to the mid-1990s are generally posi-
tive but thin gestures of affiliation – for instance, with James’s anti-
essentialism; his conception of truth as “what is good in the way of
belief,” which Rorty glosses as recognition that “the vocabulary of
practice is uneliminable” (CP, 162–3); his antiprofessionalism; and
his sense of our human, all-too-human, lot (CP, 166). A turning point
in Rorty’s engagement with James is the 1997 essay “Religious Faith,
Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance” (in PSH), where he moves
from assimilating James into his therapeutic philosophical critiques
to developing positive arguments for “the ‘ethics of belief’ that I share

with William James”(Rorty 2003a, 142).23 While affirming James’s
ethics of belief, Rorty also reconstructs James, identifying tensions
in his thought: between his Pragmatism and moral philosophy, on the
one hand, and his Radical Pragmatism and Varieties of Religious of
Experience, on the other. He claims that James was “for better or
worse, more than just a pragmatist,” and aligns himself with James’s
most pragmatic views (Rorty 2004c, 96).
Somewhat surprisingly, the relation of James’s and Rorty’s phil-
osophies remains relatively unexplored. Both James’s “unfinished”
universe and Rorty’s recognition of contingency evoke a conception
of knowledge in which humans are active participants in the con-
struction of what is right and true. In a word, they are philosophers of
agency. Their attention to agency is the result of a fundamental shift
in orientation that James described as “[t]he attitude of looking away
from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of
looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (James 1987,
510). Both James and Rorty eschew appeals to rationality and turn
instead to emotions, sentiment, and the imagination. Because they
turn away from, in James’s words, “bad a priori reasons, from fixed
principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins”
(James 1987, 509), they are also philosophers of pluralism and irredu-
cible difference, rather than of consensus and commensuration,
eschewing any reduction of this heterogeneity to monisms and
“The One Right Description” (CIS, 40). Both James and Rorty set
themselves against dogmatism and authoritarianism, in all their
forms. The prospect of anything shared names a task, something that
must be actively strived for and achieved, rather than posited a priori
or compelled by ahistorical essences or foundations. In Rorty’s par-
lance, they are “edifying” rather than “systematic” thinkers.24
James and Rorty articulate a pragmatist response to how we
choose and how we can account for obligation and responsibility in
a nominalist and historicist milieu where there is no “abstract
moral order in which the objective truth resides” (James 1977,
616), no “order beyond time and change” to which we can appeal for
“a hierarchy of responsibilities” (CIS, xv). As we have seen, Rorty’s
initial interest in pragmatism centered on its recognition, beginning
with Peirce, of how “the appeal to practice transfers the question of
the acceptability of a philosophical program out of metaphilosophy
and into the realm of moral choice” (MLM, 50). This recognition of
the ineluctability of choice for Rorty generates the need for an
ethics – “not a ‘substantive’ ethics, for it would not tell a man
which arguments to propound, but rather a ‘formalist’ ethics which
would tell him what his responsibilities were to any arguments
which he found himself propounding” (Rorty 1961, 315). To an
extent that has gone largely unnoticed, Rorty’s relatively late turn
to James gives him resources from which to develop his ameliora-
tive ethics, which features a conception of ethics as responsiveness
and attentiveness to others.25
Rorty’s Jamesian ethics of belief comprises four key commit-
ments. The first is a commitment to the irreducible pluralism of
human life. He expresses this in various ways, including the idea of
“polytheism” and Isaiah Berlin’s “well-known doctrine of the incom-
mensurability of human values” (PCP, 29–30). The second is his anti-
authoritarianism – his belief that there is no higher authority to
which we owe responsibility than our fellow humans. From James,
Rorty derives a non-Kantian conception of obligation that arises not
from an impersonal moral law or Truth or Reason or Reality but from
the claims of concrete human beings (PSH, 148). The third is a
pragmatic conception of truth as what would be better for us to
believe. For Rorty this means that “the utility of a belief is the only
judge of its truth” (Rorty 2004c, 89) – namely, “the one that will do
most for human happiness” (PCP, 5). The fourth commitment is to a
conception of beliefs as habits of action rather than representations of
reality, a view Rorty notes that “James took over from Bain and
Peirce” (PCP, 34).
Some have worried this pluralism culminates in a “hands-off,”
live-and-let-live, Millean liberalism that counsels only tolerance and
noninterference in the face of difference. Yet James and Rorty both go

beyond passive tolerance to promote active engagement with others
and the cultivation of virtues and habits that facilitate such engage-
ment. They advocate not only noticing but taking a sympathetic
interest in the lives of others, including the ways our own habits
and practices and even philosophical self-conceptions may wrong
them. By shifting our attention away from representationalist views
of knowledge and toward our relations to other concrete human
beings, they understand that a live interest in the concerns – specific-
ally, the suffering – of others is needed for the self-correction of belief
to take place. Rorty conveys this stance in the only passage in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity where James receives more than
passing mention. He likens the Freud-inspired account of the contin-
gency of self-identity he has been elaborating, the idea that any
idiosyncratic constellation of things can “set the tone of a life,” to
overcoming “what William James called ‘a certain blindness in
human beings’” (CIS, 37–8). Rorty credits James for recognizing that
it is possible “to juggle several descriptions of the same event without
asking which one was right . . . to see a new vocabulary not as some-
thing which was supposed to replace all other vocabularies, some-
thing which claimed to represent reality, but simply as one more
vocabulary, one more human project, one person’s chosen meta-
phoric” (CIS, 39).
As with Dewey, Rorty reconstructs James, both deriving his
ethics of belief from key Jamesian notions and using them as a
standpoint for criticizing other aspects of James that do not cohere
with this ethics. For example, he suggests that James’s famous
defense of the right to believe in the absence of evidence does not
go far enough in affirming James’s own robust emphasis on human
agency. For Rorty, James’s conception of the religious hypothesis
“associates religion with the conviction that a power that is not
ourselves will do unimaginably vast good, rather with the hope that
we ourselves will do such good” (PSH, 160). Rorty also thought James
harbored two distinct versions of the pragmatist theory of truth: one
in his famous claim that “the true . . . is only the expedient in the way
of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of
behaving”; and the other in his assertion that “ideas . . . become true
just insofar as they help us get into satisfactory relation with other
parts of our experience” (quoted in TP, 294). For Rorty, the latter
theory’s privileging of “‘fit’ with the objects being described” under-
mines James’s salutary pluralism and the agency inherent in a right to
believe (Rorty 1999, 14). As Rorty puts it, by the end of the Varieties,
James suggests “that the experiences of religious virtuosi provide
evidence sufficient to make it only rational for naturalists to give up
their naturalism” (Rorty 2004c, 95).
I have sought to reinterpret Rorty’s relation to classical
pragmatism through the lens of reconstruction. My hope is that this
reconsideration has the potential to identify and foster fruitful lines of
dialogue and inquiry capable of overcoming current impasses gener-
ated, in small or large part, by Rorty’s prolific pen. Devoting so little
space to differences that make a difference among them has its risks.
Yet the existing body of scholarship on Rorty and the classical prag-
matists already has this ground well covered. I by no means seek to
cut the distance to zero. My aim is more modest: to reduce the
distance – or at least the severity of the divergence – between his
work and that of the classical pragmatists so as to make fruitful
dialogue possible. Both Rorty’s thought and the contemporary rele-
vance of the pragmatic tradition as a whole are enriched when the
continuities as well as differences are present.
notes
1 For more in-depth discussion of Rorty’s reception see Voparil 2005 and
2014a.
2 See, for example, Bacon 2012, Bernstein 2010, Calcaterra 2019, Chin
2018, Curtis 2015, Gröschner et al. 2013, Koopman 2009, McClean 2014,
Rydenfelt 2019, and Voparil 2006.
3 Certainly, there are other topics and figures that could be fruitfully
pursued in relation to Rorty, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josiah
Royce, F.C.S. Schiller, George Santayana, George Herbert Mead, and

Randolph Bourne. For initial forays into these areas, see Goodman 2008
and Schulenberg 2015.
4 A recent journal issue devoted to the topic evidences how little the
skirmishes have subsided. See European Journal of Pragmatism and
American Philosophy 6.2 (2014).
5 Rorty certainly campaigned against the epistemological salience of
experience as being irretrievably compromised by foundationalism and
givenness, but also embraced a Deweyan understanding of language as a
tool we put to work in experience (see Calcaterra 2019). The stance that
language and experience are opposed does not emerge in Rorty’s writings
until the late 1980s. See “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of
Language” (in EHO), though this essay makes no mention of Dewey or
classical pragmatism. The earliest statement of an oppositional view of
language and experience that I have found comes in Rorty 1985. See
Voparil 2021.
6 For a fuller explication, see Voparil 2021.
7 See Gross 2008 and Voparil & Bernstein 2010.
8 See Rorty 2014. For an account of this work that stresses the continuity
with Rorty’s later, “mature” pragmatism, see Brandom 2013. While
illuminating of certain strands of Rorty’s thought, Brandom’s reading
overlooks the prevalence of pragmatic concerns in the period that
precedes Rorty’s eliminative materialism that I highlight here.
9 See Gross 2008. At Chicago, Rorty took a class with Rudolf Carnap, from
whom, he recounted in an interview, “I learned my first lessons in
analytic philosophy,” which included Carnap assigning Ayer’s Language,
Truth, and Logic (Voparil & Bernstein 2010, 512).
10 Moore and Robin to Rorty, March 6, 1963, Richard Rorty Papers, MS-
C017, Special Collections and Archives, The UC Irvine Libraries, Irvine,
California (hereafter abbreviated RRP). Box 31, Folder 1, accessed 2015.
The volume is Moore & Robin 1964. Rorty ultimately was unable to
contribute an essay due to illness.
11 Voparil & Bernstein 2010, 494. Rorty said that he “rediscovered” Dewey
in the early 1970s (PSH, 12).
12 The surviving notes indicate that they read from Pragmatism, The
Meaning of Truth, Radical Empiricism, and A Pluralistic Universe (RRP,
Box 44: Folder 8).
13 Syllabi from his early years at Princeton show a regular presence of James,
usually his Pragmatism, “The Will to Believe,” or Varieties of Religious
Experience (see RRP, Box 48: Folders 3 and 5; Box 50: Folders 5 and 6).
14 Colapietro reminds us that “It is often missed that Peirce was no less than
Dewey repulsed by epistemology (including the word itself )” (Colapietro
2011, 46).
15 As Rorty put it, “Peirce’s realism is simply the phrasing in metaphysical
language of the unrestricted form of the doctrine that language cannot be
transcended” (MLM, 26).
16 For more on Rorty and the possibility of pragmatic metaphysics, see
Ramberg 2008.
17 This point has been recognized and elaborated in Bacon 2017, Curtis
2015, and Gascoigne 2008.
18 Rorty later admitted that it was “a mistake” on his part to fuse criticism
of truth as accurate representation of the intrinsic nature of reality with
rejection of true statements getting things right (Rorty 2000b, 374–5).
19 See, for instance, Rorty 1976, 1979. Understanding the Peircean realism
in Rorty’s early work also makes his late reversal on whether we get
things right and whether there are word–world relations less surprising.
See Rorty 2000b.
20 For a full survey of existing work on the Rorty–Dewey relationship, see
Voparil 2014a.
21 For an account of what was central to Dewey, see Boisvert 1989.
22 For a defense of the assumption that Rorty rejects, see Alexander 1980.
23 James, too, is central to Rorty’s “pragmatist philosophy of religion” (PCP,
34), a sustained rethinking of views initially expressed in “Religion as a
Conversation-Stopper” (PSH, 168–74) and continued in Rorty 1999,
2003a, and 2004c. See also “Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” and
“Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God” (both in
PCP).
24 This paragraph draws from the fuller analysis in Voparil 2016.
25 On Rorty’s conception of ethics, see Voparil 2014b and 2020.
4 A Pragmatism More Ironic
Than Pragmatic
Barry Allen
The principal difference between Rorty’s pragmatism and that of

Peirce, James, and Dewey is his commitment to the nominalism that
Peirce identified as the Achilles heel of modern empiricism. In their
different ways, Peirce, James, and Dewey sought to eliminate nomin-
alism from empiricism. That is their “radical empiricism.” Rorty, by
contrast, was deeply impressed with the nominalism and anti-
empiricism of postwar analytic philosophy, in the work of Wilfrid
Sellars, Donald Davidson, and Robert Brandom. He reverses the tren-
chant antinominalism of the classical pragmatists. The result is a
pragmatism without much pragmatism (though a lot of nominalism),
an ironic pragmatism, more ironic than pragmatic.
nominalism
Nominalism is a medieval thesis associated with the fourteenth-
century scholastic philosopher William Ockham. Despite what text-
books say, the problem of universals is not the heart of the matter.
Banishing universals from ontology is no more than an example of
nominalism’s modus operandi. Ockham says that the error he wants
to set right, “the basis of many errors in philosophy,” is the assump-
tion “that a distinct signification always corresponds to a distinct
word, so that the distinction among things signified is just as great as
that among names or significant words” (Ockham, in Panaccio 2004,
147).1 Take for instance the distinctions in Aristotle’s theory of cat-
egories. They are sound, but philosophers make a mistake to suppose
they are categories of being. They are not, they are categories of
predication. The argument of nominalism is not about universals
per se – no more specifically about them than about potentials, rela-
tions, motions, or durations. All of these nonactual nonindividuals
88
a pragmatism more ironic than pragmatic 89
are redescribed as logical categories of predication; not differences in

being, but differences in terms and modes of signifying.
This is the heart of Ockham’s nominalism – to conceive the
diversity of being (universal, individual, essence, existence, actual,
potential, substantial, and accidental) as a diversity of terms (abstract,
concrete, connotative, absolute, personal, and material supposition).
The diversity of being is a diversity of terms variously signifying the
same extramental nature. For Ockham, that nature is an order of
absolute individuals – individual substances qualified by individual
accidents. Only singular beings and their singular qualities are phys-
ically real; only they can be referred to, whether naturally by concepts
or conventionally by words. The rest is redescription, and it is all in
the mind, in the language, in an intentional, logical space of reasons.
Not only are there no universals. There is no potential, nothing
indeterminate in a world of actual, fully determined, absolute indi-
viduals. “Besides absolute things (res absolutae), namely substances
and qualities, no thing (res) is imaginable either in act or in potency”
(Ockham, in McMullin 1963, 330).
It has been observed that Ockham felt a strong intuition of the
autonomy or separability of real things, an autonomy from one
another but all the more so from thought. In order to be real, a thing
must be independent of our thinking of it. We must therefore be
careful and not mistakenly attribute to things properties of the signs
that signify them, which are not independent of our thinking. That is
Ockham’s objection to “realism.” It populates the world with things
that exist only for thought. For instance, relations. A world of abso-
lute individuals is a world of completely separate singulars, any of
which can exist apart from any other and none of which has anything
real in common. Obviously, relations do not exist in the primary way
that individuals do. Nominalist principle disallows physical, natural,
de re connections among terms. Relations are concepts, notions,
ficta. Nothing that natural knowledge puts together really belongs
together apart from convenience to our thought. Hume’s thesis on
causality merely waits to be made explicit. 2
90 barry allen
Nominalism exerts pressure on everything in Ockham’s phil-

osophy, including his unenthusiastic empiricism. The contingency of
nature implies that effects can be produced by many naturally pos-
sible lines of causation. It is impossible to rule these out, therefore
certainty is unattainable in natural philosophy. We can make saga-
cious conjectures, but “it is impossible to demonstrate that anything
is a cause.” The emphasis falls on demonstrate. He is not saying that
we cannot have error-free knowledge of causes. He is saying that we
cannot demonstrate these causes in the way Aristotle stipulates as
science (episteme, scientia). Ultimately, the reason is God’s power.
“God is a free cause in relation to any effect.” It is impossible for mere
logic to lay down a law for the sovereign will of God. Knowledge of
nature therefore reduces to perceptual knowledge of existence – fall-
ible, hypothetical correlations verified by experience or experiment
(synonymous in his time). Experimental cognition is not full-dress
Aristotelian scientia, but it is the best natural knowledge mortals can
attain, and its logic can be respectably formalized (Ockham, in Adams
1987, 750, 788).
Ockham’s nominalism has been fraying and redistributing
threads for seven hundred years, as different parts appeal to different
thinkers. Peirce emphasized this unraveling, though his image is of a
wave. “There was a tidal wave of nominalism. Descartes was a nom-
inalist. Locke and all his following, Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, and
even Reid were nominalists. Leibniz was an extreme nominalist . . .
Kant was a nominalist . . . In one word, all modern philosophy of every
sect has been nominalistic” (Peirce 1958, Vol. 1, 19) – not for holding
Ockham’s whole package, but for variations on the core nominalist
idea that modes of being are modes of predication, judgment,
or understanding.
Peirce’s criticism of nominalism concentrates on its actualism,
the exclusion of potential, indeterminacy, and generality from nature.
He explains nominalism as the theory that possibles and potentials
are determined by actuals and the only action is mechanical. Its
“great error” is to suppose “that the potential, or possible, is nothing
but what the actual makes it to be.” He thought experimental science

made a mockery of this stipulation. Reference to tendency, capacity,
and power cannot be eliminated from scientific theory. They are what
“laws of nature” are about, and why lawlike order exists to be found.
They are Peirce’s “generals,” so-called Thirds, the potencies, tenden-
cies, powers, and capacities that make their names something to
reckon with. (Peirce 1958, Vol. 1, 422).3
Another consequence of nominalism is the “intellectualism”
that Bergson and James resist. James’s principal engagement with
nominalism is his criticism of mental atomism and fictionalism
about relations, first in Principles of Psychology, then in the unfin-
ished work on Radical Empiricism. Locke and Hume (and Ockham)
were wrong to think that only the terms of relations are empirically
real. Empiricism compromised itself – its empirical character – by
this alliance with nominalism. Radical empiricism, as James
imagined it, is a more consistent empiricism, purged of nominalism,
which he calls intellectualism and lauds Bergson for exploding.
The compulsion to disqualify experience has always come from
some version of rationalism: Parmenides against the Ionians, Plato
against Democritus, Plotinus against Aristotle, Leibniz against
Newton, Bradley against James, Russell against Bergson, Sellars
against the sons of Schlick, and Rorty against his pragmatist prede-
cessors. Rationalism is an old theme in philosophy. The word “ration-
alist” (logikoi) was invented by Alexandrian physicians trying to align
themselves with Greek philosophy, but the philosophers did not learn
their rationalism from the physicians, unless it is true that
Parmenides was a doctor. The rationalism of classical philosophy is
the equation of being with the reasonably said or sayable, the being of
the logos. To be is to be rational, logical, amenable to a truthful
discourse. This is the motif of rationalism from Parmenides to
Plotinus, opposed by the empiricism of Democritus, Epicurus, and
the Empirical wing of ancient medicine, including the Skeptics.4
Medical rationalists acquired their rationalism in imitation of
the philosophers. The rationalism of the philosophers identifies being
92 barry allen
and logos. To explain or justify a thing is to make its rationality

explicit. If you cannot do that, you understand nothing. That is how
it could seem urgent for medicine to be rationalized. It is not enough
that doctors know how to relieve suffering; they must understand
what they do, which means they must understand the causes. If you
do not know why medicine works, you do not really know that it
works. It is just habit, so-called experience. You have to have a reason,
and experience is never a reason. Memory is not a rational power, and
much memory – Aristotle’s definition of experience – is not a reason.
It is usual in Anglophone philosophy to equate “experience”
with the conscious present – “my present experience.” Aristotle
explains experience better when he says it is not mere awareness
but perception combined with memory, a mnemic synthesis of past
and present perception. “Sense perception gives rise to memory, as
we call it; and repeated memories of the same give rise to experience
(empeiria); because memories though numerically many are a single
experience.” Experience is “much memory,” in the epitome by
Thomas Hobbes, an Oxford graduate with a license to teach
Aristotle’s logical works. (Hobbes, in Oakeshott 1946, 1.2) The con-
scious present is perception, which becomes experience as it is
recollected and allowed to enhance action. Experience is not just a
moment of conscious perception, it is having learned from percep-
tion, having been changed by perception. If you learn nothing, there
is no experience. Experience is not something had, it is something
recalled, perception deferred and belated, a quality of the remem-
bered past that was never the quality of a conscious present. The
passage of time adds something. It is called experience.5
It is in medicine that we find the first robust claims made on
behalf of experience as an instrument of knowledge. Empiricism pro-
vides the alternative to rationalism, whether in medicine or philosophy.
Democritus was the foremost empiricist whom Plato and Aristotle had
to discredit, and his empiricism indicates collaboration with sources of
the Hippocratic literature new in his time. It is clear from the example
of Aristotle, Ockham, Hobbes, Carnap, and Quine that rationalism can
have an empirical moment. Allowing experience a place in natural

knowledge is not the same as empiricism or, more precisely, not a
consistently empirical empiricism, which is radical empiricism.
Modern empiricism was from an early point tangled with
Ockham’s nominalism, to the deficit of the resulting philosophy.
Under nominalism, what we mean, think, conceive, or perceive is
conditioned by the semantics of terms, the modern logos. Experience
has nothing to do. That has made nominalism an obstacle to consist-
ent empiricism at least since Hobbes picked it up and tried to shut
down the experimental program of the Royal Society. Peirce and
James saw pragmatism as a modern empiricism consistently abjuring
nominalism. That was the point of James’s “Radical Empiricism,”
which Peirce said “substantially answers to [my] definition of prag-
matism.” (Peirce 1958, Vol. 5, 414). Empiricism becomes radical in
eliminating vestiges of the nominalism that has dogged empiricism
since the fourteenth century.6
Sellars and Davidson are more consistent nominalists than
Hobbes, who was uninterested in semantics and thought Aristotle was
the summit of logic. In aligning pragmatism with their nominalism,
Rorty undoes what was radical about radical empiricism, reimposing the
nominalism and rationalism that the pragmatists wanted to liberate
empiricism from.
nominalism in sellars and davidson

Ockham’s empiricism and nominalism pass into modern philosophy
with Hobbes, Gassendi, Locke, and Leibniz, who adjudged “the nom-
inalist sect” to be “the most profound among all the scholastics, and
the most consistent with the character of our present-day, reformed
philosophy” (Leibniz, in Pasnau 2011, 87). In the twentieth century,
Ockham’s legacy bifurcates into a more consistent nominalism that
eschews empiricism (Sellars, Davidson, Rorty), and a more consistent
empiricism that eschews nominalism, which is the position of radical
empiricism from Peirce and James to Bergson, Dewey, and Deleuze.
The analytic philosophers find empiricism inconsistent with their
94 barry allen
nominalism, criticizing “dogmas of empiricism” and the “myth of the

given,” while the radical empiricists repudiate nominalism’s rational-
istic evacuation of experience, and reaffirm its creative power.7
Nominalism entered postwar Anglophone philosophy with
Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956).
The program of the logical empiricists (e.g., Rudolf Carnap) was to
construct “the world” (or science’s theory of it) from the irrefragable
data of the given. The difficulty Sellars raises is that we cannot
specify what these privileged moments evince without presupposing
objective forms that supposedly have no determination until they are
constructed from the given. Concepts ostensibly constructed from
uninterpreted sensory data turn out to be presuppositions of the data.
We cannot say what is given without tacitly relying on more than we
say is given.
Sellars reformulates Kant’s argument against cognitive imme-
diacy in the then-new terms of linguistic philosophy. Nothing in
experience, nothing in conscious awareness, is simply given, imme-
diate, or spontaneously apprehended. Such awareness is invariably
mediated, which Sellars understands in exclusively linguistic terms.
“All awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all aware-
ness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness of particulars –is a
linguistic affair” (Sellars 1963, 160). “There is [no] awareness of
logical space prior to, or independent of, the acquisition of a lan-
guage” (Sellars 1963, 162). Sellars identifies the thesis with
nominalism and presupposes it without argument. He is a nominalist
because he carries out a program of semantic reduction innovated by
Ockham, and he is an anti-empiricist because he is more consistently
nominalist even than Ockham. Experience cannot have anything to
do with the things of the logos, which for Sellars means semantics.
When we read Sellars’s argument as a criticism of epistemic
immediacy, its conclusion is merely negative – knowledge is never
not mediated. That is something pragmatism allows and even
requires. The trail of the human serpent is over everything, James
said. But add the nominalism, the assumption that all the epistemic
mediation belongs to language and follows its logic, a language game

of giving and accepting reasons, and Sellars’s incidental pragmatism
becomes the nominalism that Rorty esteems and which is his princi-
pal difference from earlier pragmatists.
Donald Davidson found unexpected riches in the austere tech-
nicalities of Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. Before Tarski, it
seemed inevitable to think of truth in terms of relations extending
beyond language. With Tarski, truth becomes an artifact of the logic
of language. The only way to explain what it is for a sentence to be
true is to show how it relates to an infinite set of other sentences. The
account never strays from relations of language to language. The
result is an idea of truth that is as technically precise as a purist could
ask for, and supports no metaphysical interpretation. Instead, the
metaphysical idea of truth as some kind of relation, as “correspond-
ence,” stands exposed as extravagant and superfluous.
This is classic nominalism. The “metaphysical” idea of truth
Davidson refutes – the idea that truth presupposes bits of language
appropriately related to bits of something emphatically not language –
is an example of the error that Ockham complained of. Philosophers
attribute to nature qualities that have no existence apart from
thought and its logic. Davidson exposes the traditional way of think-
ing about truth as logically superfluous and semantically indefens-
ible. Like a good nominalist, he applies The Razor. “Nothing . . . no
thing, makes sentences and theories true: not experience, not surface
irritations, not the world, can make a sentence true . . . The sentence
‘My skin is warm’ is true if and only if my skin is warm. Here there is
no reference to a fact, a world, an experience, or a piece of evidence”
(Davidson 1984, 194). This triumph of nominalism eliminates the last
vestige of the idea that the significant use of language depends on
something that is natural, unconventional, somehow more than just
more language.
As a consistent nominalist, Davidson is also an anti-empiricist.
Only a sentence can be a reason for a sentence. Experience has
nothing to do with language meaning, and may as well be dropped.
96 barry allen
That is his difference from Quine, whom he criticizes for thinking

that somehow, somewhere, science is conditioned by sensory evi-
dence. Quine balks at the idea that science might be no more than a
consistent system of sentences. There has to be a source of friction,
however global; something outside, something perceived and experi-
enced, something altogether different from sentences and constrain-
ing their truth-value. For Quine, fitting the totality of experience “is
what makes scientific method partly empirical rather than solely a
quest for internal coherence” (Quine 1981, 39). Science has a touch-
stone in something natural, physical, not just more signs. “Science
itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to the
irritations of our surfaces” (Quine 1981, 72).
Quine was a prominent critic of logical empiricism, but he
remains loyal to two of its principles. First, that “whatever evi-
dence there is for science is sensory evidence”; second, that “all
inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory
evidence” (Quine 1969, 75). These principles ensure that the ultim-
ate evidence for science is empeiria. Davidson thinks that is pre-
cisely Quine’s mistake – “there is no such concept of ultimate
evidence” (Davidson 2005, 49). The sources of truth are as many
as the causes of utterance; there is no one, ground-scale truth-
maker, especially not “sensation.” “No doubt meaning and
knowledge depend on experience, and experience ultimately on
sensation. But this is the ‘depend’ of causality, not of evidence or
justification” (Davidson 2001, 146).
In Davidson, and especially in his difference from Quine,
assumptions that have knit empiricism and nominalism together
since Ockham come apart. Davidson and James are mirror images of
each other in philosophy. James eliminates nominalism for a more
consistent empiricism, Davidson eliminates empiricism for a more
consistent nominalism. He reoccupies the position of medical
rationalism and tells doctors like James that their experience counts
for nothing. They have to have a reason, the reason has to be reason-
able, which means communicable, and once we have language to
assess we can ignore experience, which is at most a cause, determin-

ing nothing bearing on language meaning.
rorty’s version
Rorty entitled a series of three lectures, subsequently published as
books in German and French, “Hope in Place of Knowledge:
A Version of Pragmatism.” He explains that it is a version “that
delights in throwing out as much of the philosophical tradition as
possible” (TP, 150). For instance, he finds “nothing worth saving in
empiricism,” and “would rather forget empiricism than radicalize it”
(TP, 292). Like Sellars, like Davidson, and against the grain of the
American philosophy he is thought to renovate, Rorty disavows
empiricism for a nominalism he advances as a new and improved
pragmatism.
Against Empiricism
Rorty repeatedly remarks on the need to bear in mind that we are
“alone, merely finite, with no links to something Beyond” (CP, xlii–
xliii). Metaphysical comforts must be exposed and derided.
Sometimes he couches disapproval of this Beyond, a transcendent
postulate, in the technical terms of theoretical philosophy. “As long
as our beliefs are said to be answerable to something, we shall want to
be told more about how this answering works, and the history of
epistemology suggests that there is nothing to be said” (TP, 133).
Epistemology is, of course, hopeless. But Rorty also suggests that
something more is at stake. This transcendent reference is not merely
a bad answer to a bad question. It is an idol, and arouses an iconoclas-
tic emotion in Rorty. It preserves “an image of the relation between
people and nonpeople that might be called ‘authoritarian’ – the image
of human beings being subject to a judgment other than that of a
consensus of other human beings” (TP, 135).
Pragmatism is supposed to show that nothing in the practice of
inquiry or the success of science requires references that pass beyond
98 barry allen
conversational practice. All that is presupposed by the practice

belongs to the same history as the practice and introduces nothing
transcendent. Language is language games, a contingent historical
economy of marks and noises. At no point do thoughts break out in
a “relation to something not ourselves” (ORT, 156). Truth and
knowledge are but games of “true” and “false,” as Foucault called
them, with no “foundation.” Rorty coaxes from Davidson the apothe-
osis of nominalism, finally dispensing with the absolute individuals
that were Ockham’s concession to ontology.
One reason Rorty does not want empiricism in pragmatism is
because he can’t imagine what empiricism is or was supposed to be if
not another theory of transcendent reference. Isn’t “experience” just
another name for the Being we need to be true to? “Empiricists tell us
that we can break out from under the authority of the local commu-
nity by making unmediated contact with reality” (PCP, 9) – which
makes empiricism another resentful rationale for human self-
abasement. Empiricism is one more “beyond” for minds unembar-
rassed by metaphysical comfort. Empiricists want to be slaves, they
“hanker after answerability” (TP, 135).
Another reason to eschew empiricism is that it is philosophic-
ally superfluous. It addresses a problem that should be dismissed
rather than solved. Rorty’s understanding of empiricism and its con-
cept of experience is largely that of British Hegelian T. H. Green in his
(1968) analysis of Locke and Hume, the predecessor to Sellars’s argu-
ment in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Like Green and
Sellars, Rorty draws a sharp line between “experience as the cause of
the occurrence of a justification” and what he regards as the empiri-
cist notion of experience “as itself justificatory,” as a power of non-
inferential acquisition of true beliefs “as a result of neurologically
describable causal transactions with the world” (TP, 141).
In other words, empiricists think experience is a privileged
cause, a justification-inducing cause, but there is no such a thing.
The idea confuses the mechanical movement of causes with the
exchange of marks and noises in the space of reasons. This is the
essential error that Ockham directed his nominalism against, that is,
attributing qualities of our signs, of our language, of our games, to the
things language refers to and describes. Truth and justification are
values internal to the economy of marks and noises. Their rationality
and truth-value no more require a transcendent referent than a dollar
bill requires a bit of dedicated gold somewhere to legitimately circu-
late as money.
So there is nothing that needs doing and that only experience
can do. Philosophy simply has no use for the idea or the empiricism
that champions it. When he is careful, Rorty uses the word “experi-
ence” for nonverbal awareness, usually modeled on sensation, and
epistemologically presumed incorrigible. This is the “given” with
which Carnap proposed to construct the world. Rorty tends to equate
Sellars’s refutation of this rather special epistemological given with a
sweeping refutation of “experience” in any philosophically interest-
ing sense. He says that in epistemology “experience” should not be
understood as what Aristotle called empeiria but rather as the more
Platonic-sounding ta phainomena, the appearances. He says that
notions like experience and consciousness “were originally invoked
to contrast something that varied independently of nature with
nature itself. The philosophically interesting sense – the only sense
relevant to epistemology – of experience is one that goes back to ta
phainomena rather than empeiria, to a realm that might well be ‘out
of touch’ with nature because it could vary while nature remained the
same, and remain the same when nature varied” (TP, 296).
Without being conspicuous about it, Rorty in effect makes
Cartesian consciousness the model of experience. Empiricists may
grumble, but Rorty is not listening. His is the “empiricism” of the
critics of empiricism, the “empiricism” of Descartes and Kant, not of
Bacon, Galileo, Gassendi, Boyle, or Newton, as if there were nothing
more to empiricism than some egregious answer to the skeptic. That
ignores empeiria, which has been central in the historical develop-
ment of empiricism from antiquity to the eighteenth century. It gives
“experience” a Platonic-Cartesian gloss that sets up a target for
100 barry allen
skepticism, should we be so foolish to think that experience makes

some contribution to knowledge. Rorty concludes that we do not
require “experience” to explain anything that wants explaining about
knowledge, truth, or science. Let us therefore invoke Ockham’s Razor
and dismiss the notion from philosophy.
For Rorty, knowledge begins, not with experience and not with
innate ideas, but with discourse, language games, and social inter-
action in the space of reasons. Knowledge is not a causal transmission
duly initiated by perception. It is a discursive, argumentative trajec-
tory through the logical space of reasons. Experience matters only as
much as a community agrees that it does, which is what matters
most. To matter, experience has to matter to others, which requires
communication, and then it is the language that matters, how state-
ments stand in the logical space of reasons, not the experience of their
putative cause.
The argument emboldens Rorty to a vast linguistic reduction.
Everything about anything is just something about language. Human
beings are “nothing more than sentential attitudes – nothing more
than the presence or absence of dispositions toward the use of sen-
tences phrased in some historically conditioned vocabulary” (CIS,
88). Since “language provides our only cognitive access to objects”
(PSH, 55), it follows that “all our knowledge is under descriptions
suited to our current social purposes” (PSH, 48). The success of
pragmatism depends on appreciating both the power and the contin-
gency of language games. It is not as easy as Rorty makes it look, and
sometimes even he has doubts. “Can the ubiquity of language ever
really be taken seriously? Can we see ourselves as never encountering
reality except under a chosen description?” (CP, xxxix).
The challenge is to live with the implication that anything,
really anything, can “be made to look good or bad, important or
unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed” (CIS, 7).
Anything is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, only under a
description. Redescribed, their value may change. That is the power
of redescription. There is no power greater. It does what we used to
think only a god could do. But it is not a god, not an idol of transcend-
ent reference. It is merely your neighbor and your neighbor’s neigh-
bor, endlessly reiterated in the ever-changing play of language games.
Rorty is adamantly averse to the radical empiricism James
shares with the adamantly disdained Bergson. In an ironically self-
effacing passage, he writes, “The philosophers of today who speak
well of James and Dewey tend to speak ill of Bergson. They tend to
talk about sentences a lot, but to say very little about ideas of experi-
ences” (TP, 291). Professionally, Rorty sees no point or value in a
concept of experience. There is no problem in philosophy that
“experience” solves. So why keep alluding to it as something pre-
cious? It is a word, only a word.
Rorty defines the bounds of the philosophically interesting
rather professionally. James tended to define them more personally.
Problems were problems he felt, not professional problems, or at least
not only them. Jean Wahl calls that James’s romanticism, which he
explains as fidelity to a philosopher’s experience rather than to a
professional consensus. He describes James’s pluralism as “a sort of
empirical romanticism. To the pluralist, experience is romantic, facts
are hard, strange, threatening . . . It is observation, fidelity to what the
pluralist sees and feels, that we see at the origin of [James’s] romantic
theories of volunteerism, of temporalism, of vaster consciousnesses
absorbing consciousnesses of a lesser span” (Wahl 1925, 280). All of
that is for Rorty the very worst of James, an aversion fueled not by
more consistent pragmatism but more consistent nominalism.8
The Higher Nominalism

Rorty’s nominalism is self-ascribed. It begins with Sellars’s psycho-
logical nominalism, which Rorty extends in the direction of what
calls a “higher nominalism.” Sellars says “the categories of intention-
ality are, at bottom, semantical categories pertaining to overt verbal
performances” – Rorty’s “marks and noises.” This is a variation on
Ockham’s nominalist agenda. Categories of being are categories of
prediction. What used to seem like ontology (a question of what
102 barry allen
exists) becomes a matter of semantics, a question of how we should

talk or formalize our talk. In Sellars the nominalism is “psycho-
logical,” because the “beings” it abolishes are mental entities (e.g.,
“self-authenticating awarenesses”) existing in advance of language
and making its meaning possible. Psychological nominalism implies
that “if you have semantical talk you have all the intentional talk you
need” (TP, 125). Minds do not exist. Instead, we have the logical space
of reasons and the language game of argument (Sellars 1963, 180).
Rorty’s “higher nominalism” extends psychological nominalism
to a comprehensive anti-essentialism that Sellars did not make expli-
cit. Rorty expresses the extended claim when he explains psycho-
logical nominalism as “the doctrine that there is nothing to be
known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing
it . . . there is no knowledge by acquaintance, no knowledge which does
not take the form of a sentential attitude” (PSH, 54). To him, that
implies a world of relations without substance of any kind. Things
have no intrinsic character that it is our responsibility to grasp. We are
advised to “brush aside all questions about where the thing stops and
its relations begin, all questions about where its intrinsic nature [stops]
and its external relations begin, all questions about where its essential
core ends and its periphery begins” (PSH, 57–8). Thus extended, psy-
chological nominalism becomes a version of “the pragmatist doctrine
that truth is a matter of the utility of a belief rather than of a relation
between pieces of the world and pieces of language” (TP, 127). Solely
convenience and consensus, no nonhuman authority, makes the use of
a word or an entire vocabulary right or wrong. (Rorty 1986a)
This is consistent nominalism, more so even than Ockham. It
was not nominalism that made Ockham retain the category of sub-
stance. It was to save the theology of the Eucharist. A more consistent
nominalism might eliminate substance, as Rorty and Hume do.
Ockham allowed substance, but not knowledge of it. “We can natur-
ally cognize no external corporeal substance in itself” (Ockham, in
Pasnau 2011, 120).9 Wittgenstein quipped that a nothing is as good as
a something we can say nothing about. Nominalism thus implies
anti-essentialism – not that essences exist but are unknowable;

rather, there is no essence, no veiled subject, no thing-in-itself.
There is nothing more to the presuppositions of meaningful language
than regularities of behavior. The right idea about language
“according to us nominalists,” is “that ‘recognition of meaning’ is
simply ability to substitute sensible signs (i.e., marks and noises) for
other signs, and still other signs for the latter, and so on indefinitely”
(EHO, 115). “Nominalists see language as just human beings using
marks and noises to get what they want” (EHO, 127).
Nothing is more historically contingent than language games.
That may be why Rorty tends to mention nominalism and historicism
together, not as equivalent but complementary, Hegel finishing what
Ockham started. For Rorty, “historicism” means the historical contin-
gency of language games, and with them all epistemic values. He says
that “on a historicist account, there is no description of nature that is
more or less accurate or concrete than some rivals” (TP, 294). He says
that “by ‘historicism’ I mean the doctrine that there is no relation of
‘closeness of fit’ between language and the world: no image of the
world projected by language is more or less representative of the way
the world really is than any other” (TP, 293–4).
The opposite of historicism is an aspiration “to escape the
vocabulary and practices of one’s own time and find something ahis-
torical and necessary to cling to,” that slavish hankering to bend the
knee and be idolatrously true to something nonhuman, an other-
worldly aspiration Rorty attributes to “the Western philosophical
tradition” and “the culture for which that tradition speaks” (CP,
165). Consistent historicism can only be ironical. One must be true
to the conviction that there is nothing to be true to, and live with it.
Rorty’s ironists cheerfully (or is this also ironic?) abandon the idea
that their most cherished convictions are made to be true by “some-
thing beyond the reach of time and chance” (CIS, xv). A “historicist
and nominalist culture,” one in which such individuals write the
table of values, would idealize the proliferation of Freedom over
convergence toward an already existing Truth (CIS, xvi).
104 barry allen
why not nominalism?

Rorty’s version of pragmatism restores the nominalism James and
Dewey chased out, foreclosing their radical empiricism. And so what
if he does? The criticism Rorty expects and is prepared for is that he
does violence to experience, whereas James and Dewey have a better
idea of what experience is really like. Rorty’s ready answer refutes the
idea that experience is something “in itself,” something with a nature
that might be represented more or less adequately. Practically every
word of the assumption names one of Rorty’s polemical themes –
“nature,” “representation,” “adequacy.” None of these notions has
credibility in his pragmatism, and they have been discarded with the
arguments of the higher nominalism.
The proper question to ask at this point, as it is the only one
Rorty acknowledges, is What difference does it make? “For pragma-
tists, the question should always be ‘What use is it?’ rather than ‘Is it
real?’” (TP, 45). Do not say I do violence to experience. Show how
introducing a reference to experience would do something worth
doing that we cannot do so conveniently without it. “Some relevance
to cultural politics . . . needs to be demonstrated before a problem is
taken seriously” (PCP, 149).
What evidence establishes such relevance? It asks too much to
expect some actual practical change due to one’s cultural-political
argument. Would that we had such power! But it asks too little to
accept any story, however fanciful, about how a given idea might
change the future. Would that it were so easy! Just because a theory
does not seem likely to change anything soon, who is to say what its
long-term prospects are? The best rule in cultural politics may
be anarchy.
Be that as it may, what difference does experience make? For
one, it makes the difference between learning and not having learned,
and between having tried and not having tried. It is the difference
between experiments and thought experiments, or trials and fanta-
sies. A fantasy is not an experience, because experience involves
actual sensory perception and not just imagination (phantasia). To

say that experience makes this difference implies something about
perception and something about memory. It refutes the tendentious
equation of experience with present awareness. Empiricism is con-
cerned with the experience from which we learn, and that experience
(empeiria) is not a quale, tingle, or self-authenticating awareness.
Experience requires memory, living through trials, a history of being
changed by surprising encounters. Without surprise and change,
nothing is learned and there is as yet no experience.
Rorty thinks the idea of experience is simply futile in philoso-
phy. There is nothing we need that it does – whoever “we” are! This is,
of course, quintessential nominalism. We do not require it in our
ontology; it is superfluous, adds nothing, explains nothing that we do
not understand without a reference to experience. Perhaps not.
Certainly only a belief, not an experience, can be a reason for a belief,
and only a sentence a reason for a sentence. But who would say that
only a belief can create a belief, or only sentence inspire a sentence?
The only thing that creates new beliefs and inspires new sentences is
experience. If we feel dissatisfied by concepts, motivated to experiment
with new and different ones, it is not because of logic, which accom-
modates anything (with compensatory adjustment). Nor is not because
of what others say, or not only that; for we do not have to take issue
with them. Why do we insist, even at some price to consensus? The
reason (I mean the cause) is experience. Without experience there
would be no life of the mind. Without experience there would be no
history, no art, no culture. That’s the difference experience makes, and
radical empiricism is its most consistent philosophy.
A look at Rorty’s idea of metaphor reaches a complementary
conclusion. He describes metaphor as “a voice from outside logical
space . . . a call to change one’s language and one’s life” (EHO, 13). He
places metaphor on par with perception and inference as ways of
adding new beliefs and motivating the reweaving of belief and desire
(EHO, 14). How is metaphor so effective? He explains that a metaphor
on first appearance is nothing but an unfamiliar noise. We recognize
106 barry allen
the parts, familiar words, but not the juxtaposition. I call it a metaphor,
but it could be misspoken or a coincidental combination. What it
primarily is, is unfamiliar. Metaphors are unfamiliar noises. That is
all metaphors are, merely unfamiliar noises. Rorty proposes to “give
the highest flights of genius the same metaphysical status as thunder-
claps and birdsongs” (ORT, 168): mere stimuli, mere evocations. The
event may be ephemeral, but if the noise becomes a formula and is
repeated, it gradually becomes normal and semantic, eventually taking
its place as a literal meaning and not a metaphor at all. Until then, it is
merely an unfamiliar noise. Everything depends on repetition.
What Rorty seems to overlook is that metaphor is motivated,
both in production and repetition. It is an unfamiliar noise to you, but
not to the speaker, who means it. One makes a metaphor to do
something, to express something. That is not to say there is a meta-
phorical sense that captures the meaning. And it is not to say that
some non-metaphor might express the same sense. The point is not
about metaphorical senses or meanings at all. It is about why people
produce those unfamiliar noises and why we pay attention to them.
Metaphorical speech is expressive action. The noises are sufficiently
familiar to elicit linguistic interpretation, rather than ignoring them
as we do irrelevant environmental noise, unfamiliar though it may be.
What motivates a metaphor will be as different as the metaphors, but
one thing we can say about all of these occasions – they are motivated
by someone’s experience, some memory of perception, some repeti-
tion of sensation recollected.
What is the difference between unfamiliar noises that turn out
to be metaphors and unfamiliar environmental noises? It comes down
to repetition. If we wanted to, we could establish instruments and
notations that would enable us to repeat practically any sound we can
hear. But we do not. Why do we select these few special “unfamiliar
noises” for repetition? Under this description, the behavior seems
bizarre. But if we consider expression, it is less strange. Going by
our experience, we recognize that we have heard more than an
unfamiliar noise; we have heard an expression: something – call it
thought or feeling, impression or sensation – has been expressed. The

motive for doing so was the speaker’s experience, and the motive for
repetition (if it happens) will be the audience’s experience. That is not
to say the same experience; for who can ascertain such sameness? But
that it is their various experience that motivates the metaphor no less
than its repetition seems to me beyond doubt.
In response to experience, something that is not a verbal struc-
ture becomes a motive to change verbal structures. Without experi-
ence, what motive would there be? Mere logical consistency is not a
challenge, or not the right sort of challenge. This is the point on which
Quine, in the name of empiricism, resisted Davidson’s more consistent
nominalism. The rational efficacy of marks and noises depends on
something other than more of the same. It depends on experience.
With experience, what has been said and said ad nauseam can come
to seem ill-motivated, motivating unfamiliar noises. The noises are not
merely unfamiliar; they are oriented, pregnant, expressing and explor-
ing virtualities of thought not hitherto probed, actuated by the experi-
ence of dissatisfaction and problems in knowledge as we know it.
Returning radical empiricism to pragmatism would make it less
rationalistic than Rorty’s version. His critics may balk. Would that he
were more rational! Philosophy is rationalistic in the way empiricism
traditionally criticizes when it turns away from experience toward
discourse and formalism cut loose from experience. Carnap tried this
one way, Rorty, infinitely more genial, tries another. “All descrip-
tions of experience, nature, and their relation to one another will be
evaluated simply in terms of expediency – of suitability for accom-
plishing the purpose at hand” (TP, 301). Either you are efficient,
economical, prosaic, practical, pragmatic, and justified in the eye of
one’s peers, or you are sentimental, a private poet, a solitary religieux.
Sometimes even Rorty wonders whether he overdoes it. “I need
to put a leash on my nominalism” (TP, 349). With nominalism
leashed, pragmatism would have no motive to exaggerate the value
of language. It could dispense with the dichotomy of reasons and
causes, and convert the logical space of reasons into the technical
108 barry allen
space of mediation, open to infinity. Such pragmatism would be more

consistently empirical, not that Rorty values that. It also affords a
more consistent relation to classical pragmatism, and does not
require pragmatists to behave like vandals with respect to their own
tradition, or pass everything through the filter of nominalism.
***
Should we abandon empiricism and dismiss talk of experience in

philosophy? That is the wish of nominalists like Sellars, Davidson,
and Rorty. But we still respect and insist on experiments and expect
to learn from experience. Certainly, there is more to experimental
science than logical empiricism avowed. That has been the consistent
message of the history and sociology of science since T. S. Kuhn. But
there is also more to experience than logical empiricism averred,
mutilated as it was by nominalism.
Peirce and James saw pragmatism as empiricism liberated from
nominalism and made consistently experimental. That was James’s
radical empiricism, in which Peirce recognized his pragmatism. By
dismissing radical empiricism, Rorty’s version devolves into utilitar-
ian nominalism. Its credibility as pragmatism requires the ironic
acknowledgment that it is not what pragmatism ever was before or
wanted to be. Rorty labors to make pragmatism say as little as pos-
sible, and make what it does say as banal as possible, producing
something pragmatism’s founders never dreamed of – a philosophy
for those who have lost faith in the value of philosophy. For a reason
not well explained, this demoralized nominalism is all that pragma-
tism has a right to be anymore.
notes
1 On nominalism and Ockham see also Pasnau 2011, 83–8.
2 See Boler 1985; Adams 1987, 53, 67, 537–8, 743–6, on the difference from
Hume on causation.
3 On “actualism,” see Adams 1974. On Peirce’s objections to nominalism,
see Wilson 2016.
4 On rationalism, see Frede and Striker 1996.

5 See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 99b and Metaphysics, 980b–81a.
6 On Hobbes and the Royal Society, see Shapin and Schaffer 1985.
7 On Rorty’s relation to earlier pragmatists, see Allen 2000 and 2004; and
on Deleuze, Allen 2015.
8 I study this side of James in Allen 2017. On James and Bergson, see Allen
2013.
9 On Ockham and the Eucharist, see Pasnau 2011, 406n.
5 Rorty and Semantic
Minimalism
Simon Blackburn
two teams
As all his readers know, Richard Rorty painted his picture of Western
philosophy with a very broad brush. It resolved that history into a
battle between two sides. In one corner, we have rationalists and
metaphysicians, including most analytic philosophers. These are fol-
lowers of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, who conceive themselves as
dealing with independent facts and structures and talk unblushingly
of reasons, arguments, analysis, distinctions, objectivity, and truth.
These are wedded to the view that in many of their endeavors people
manage to get things right, and that often enough later endeavors, by
refining and building on earlier achievements, get them more nearly
right, or sometimes more totally right, than their predecessors. In the
other corner, Rorty places himself alongside pragmatists such as James
or Dewey, not to mention Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Sellars,
Davidson, Quine, Foucault, and Derrida. These are said to think differ-
ently. They are ironically resigned to history, contingency, and forces
of social and linguistic change whose effects cannot be anticipated.
They have no interest in epistemology and reason; they see discourse
in terms of politics, not accuracy of representation. They may call
themselves relativists or social constructivists or pragmatists or nihil-
ists, but the labels are not important, and can safely be brushed aside.
For in face of the crucial distance between the two orientations, fine
details and potential differences between the members of these teams
scarcely matter. All that matters is whether you share the delusive self-
image of the first team, conceiving yourself as a servant of logos, or
whether you are a clear-sighted player in the second team. As with all
crusades, you have to choose sides. Rorty was nothing if not a great
team builder.
110
rorty and semantic minimalism 111
I always recall at this point a remark the great literary critic

F. R. Leavis said about a similar choice: “When people line up so
promptly one suspects not only that the appeal of the chic has some-
thing to do with it, but that the differences are not of a kind that has
much to do with thinking” (Leavis 1986, 42). But do the teams in fact
line up so quickly, or was the belief that they do so merely an illusion
due to the broadness of Rorty’s brush? Others have effectively, and
with some amazement, criticized a taxonomy that makes Descartes
look just like Kant, and Kant look just like Plato (Rosenberg 1993).
I incline as well to worry about exactly what is supposed to unite the
bad team, and exactly how their opposition to the good team works.
There are, of course, many pointers in Rorty’s work: the bad
team might adhere to a correspondence theory of truth, to a myth of
the given, to a realistic notion of “the world,” to an analytic–
synthetic distinction, to truth in the surprising sense of “truth taken
apart from any theory,” to a distinction between receptivity and
spontaneity, or experience and theory, to a mysterious theory or
irresoluble “hard problem” of consciousness. The good team throws
all these out.
But when we have no use for these things, what else goes
missing?1 Sometimes, it appears, quite a lot. For it becomes easy to
move from abjuring high philosophical theory to appearing to for-
swear much of the everyday with what to my eye is often an alarming
nonchalance. On his best behavior, Rorty can be clear-eyed about
avoiding this slide. For example, in one seminal paper, “The World
Well Lost,” he contrasts the philosophers’ (alleged) notion of “the
World,” the one that he wants us to lose, with the world of “the stars,
the people, the tables and the grass,” which is supposed to be just
fine – as presumably are events like the people observing the stars or
the tables or the grass (CP, 14). But in many other places the contrast
seems to blur or disappear, such as when we are told that it is only the
raggle-taggle bunch of Kantians and that lot who share the “ingenu-
ous image of themselves as accurately representing how things are”
(CP, 92–3). For when people minutely observe the grass and see,
112 simon blackburn
perhaps to their surprise, a bumblebee in it, what is so ingenuous or

naive about them supposing that their report that there was such a
thing “accurately represents how things are”? They put themselves,
surely, in a position that, given their background abilities, makes it
near enough certain that they believe that there is a bumblebee there
if and only if there is, and telling this is exactly what is meant by
accurately representing this bit of the world.
When Rorty asserts that “There is no way to get outside of our
beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence,”
is he also forgetting that in a perfectly everyday sense you have to get
outside and go where the grass grows in order to observe whether there
is a bumblebee there? When he tells us that “Nothing counts as
justification unless by reference to what we already accept,” is he
denying that the activity of observation not only helps but often
provides justification (PMN, 178)? If asked whether there are bumble-
bees in the grass, am I supposed to answer simply “by reference to what
I already accept,” excogitating an answer even if I have never been near
the grass nor received intelligence about it?
Apart from the inverted commas, Rorty is on stronger ground
when he tells us to “see justification as a social phenomenon rather
than a transaction between ‘the knowing subject’ and ‘reality’” (PMN,
9). He is right that justification is a social matter in the sense that it is
only people who give verdicts allowing that people are justified in
saying or believing what they do. Nobody ever has to defend them-
selves as being justified to a tribunal made up of the stars or the grass.
We can say, with only a little imprecision, that justification is an
element in solidarity, maintaining your status in the eyes of others,
although of course you can also justify yourself to yourself. But very
often the verdict of others hinges precisely on whether they suppose
that the defendants had seen what they claim to have seen, as well as
whether they interpreted it in the light of shared habits and prin-
ciples. In a court of law, that’s the difference between being a credible
witness and being a fantasist, fraud, or impostor. When he lets his hair
down, Rorty is not enamored of that distinction either: “To treat
beliefs not as representations but as habits of action, and words not as

representations but as tools, is to make it pointless to ask ‘Am
I discovering or inventing, making or finding?’” (PSH, xxv). As
I write this in the United Kingdom, a liar and fantasist, Carl Beech,
has been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for neglecting exactly
that distinction as he spun libelous stories incriminating many of the
great and the good in horrible pedophile goings-on. I do not think this
is proof that courts and jurors have been taken in by any of Plato,
Descartes, or Kant.
To be fair, Rorty might not have meant that sort of invention.
Perhaps he meant the invention of new vocabularies, for example. But
first of all, while lots of people make discoveries, such as the bum-
blebee in the grass, very few invent new vocabularies. And when they
do, it typically results from a discovery, when new terms (“New
Zealand,” “muon”) are needed to refer to what has been discovered.
(It would be mischievous to dwell on the thought that Rorty’s para-
digm intellectual activity, literary criticism, perhaps along with other
hermeneutic studies, is one place where vocabulary inventions seem
sometimes to be substantially independent of discovery.)
In earlier work, I puzzled over similar slides by one of Rorty’s
heroes, Donald Davidson, who says very similar things: “There is,
then, very good reason to conclude that there is no clear meaning to
the idea of comparing our beliefs with reality or confronting our
hypotheses with observations” (Davidson 1986, 324; emphasis added).2
As I said, here, too, something that starts life supposedly as a deep
philosophical objection to a high-flown correspondence theory of truth
instantly metamorphoses into what sounds like the rejection of a
crucial everyday activity. Davidson goes on to explain that “No such
confrontation makes sense, for of course we can’t get outside our skins
to find out what is causing the internal happening of which we are
aware” (Davidson 2001, 144). But in any ordinary sense, confronting a
hypothesis with observation is not a matter of starting with an aware-
ness of internal happenings. It is a matter of, for instance, going and
looking and possibly revising what we were inclined to believe in the
114 simon blackburn
light of what we find. I confront my happy belief that the grass is safe to
sit upon with observation when I look and notice the bumblebee.
I postpone giving a diagnosis of these extraordinary doctrines
for the moment.
Meanwhile, similar worries beset some of the things that Rorty
claims about truth and representation. He roundly tells us that “A
pragmatist in the philosophy of science cannot use the truth of
Galileo’s views as an explanation either of his success at prediction
or of his gradually increasing fame” (TP, 226). Perhaps “truth” here is
intended in the upper-case sense allegedly common to Plato’s team,
and we know that Rorty would, rightly, not allow truth in that sense,
completely beyond our ken, ever to explain anything. Nor would
most other people. If we entertain Cartesian doubt, worried in case
the stars and the grass and indeed the whole world of space and time
is but a Matrix-like virtual reality, a veil obscuring the Truth that is
beyond us, we would presumably admit that it cannot be that Truth,
as opposed to truth about the stars and the rest, that explains
Galileo’s success. Indeed, it would be a standard part of the skeptical
package that we couldn’t give any such explanation. But truth in the
world of stars and people and tables and grass, Galileo’s world, the
world we talk about, can certainly help to explain successes at pre-
diction and gradually increasing fame. Perhaps the point is instead
that the truth, for instance, that the acceleration of a falling body does
not vary with its weight, does not by itself explain why Galileo got
interested in the topic and found out about it. But then the claim is
completely uninteresting, and certainly not the private insight of
pragmatists, or any other philosophical school.3 In any more interest-
ing sense, the claim is manifestly indefensible. The truth that there
was a bumblebee in the grass clearly helps to explain why I believed it
was there, even if the reason I was investigating the grass remains
unclear to people. The astonishing accuracy of Captain Cook’s charts
of different coastlines is exactly what explains his fame as a navigator,
exactly what explained the habit of seamen seeking out and using
those charts to navigate, and exactly what explained the fact that they
coped so much better when they did so. And, fortunately, Cook did
not excogitate the topography “by reference to what he already
accepted.” He had to go and measure.
Of course, it was already accepted by navigators long before Cook
that you do indeed have to go and measure. But it wasn’t joining in that
acceptance that explained Cook’s success. It was how he acted upon it
and, because of the accuracy of the newly invented chronometer, how
he was able to do so scrupulously and with unprecedented precision.
Rorty tells us that “Instead of seeking ‘vertical’ relationships
between language, or ourselves as language users, and the world, we
must concentrate upon ‘horizontal’ or inferential processes, whereby
we advance and accept reasons from each other. Justification
becomes a ‘social phenomenon’ rather than a transaction between a
‘knowing subject’ and ‘reality’” (PMN, 9): solidarity, not copying.
I would find it very difficult to see Cook’s procedures and success in
terms of this opposition. As we have already seen, justification is
indeed a matter of justification to yourself and others. But this is
not in contrast to putting yourself in touch with reality. It is largely
determined by it. Not being, as sometimes mapmakers before him
and since him have been, a fantasist or a fraud, Cook carefully put
himself into an interesting relationship with different coastlines of
the world. It was only his having done so that justified him in pub-
lishing his charts and gave them their utility.
When he did so, they were taken up and read. There wouldn’t
have been much social to-and-fro about his justification for what they
tell. He produced and others consumed – after all, they were in no
position to conduct a trial of his sayings. They hadn’t been there. They
trusted him, and their trust was well placed. Here, semantic termin-
ology swims into view. A good, precise way of putting it is that the
people who could read knew what the symbols and signs on the chart
represented. They had to learn to do this kind of thing, and it is not a
trivial matter. The booklet that currently enables this in the United
Kingdom is entitled Symbols and Abbreviations Used on Admiralty
Charts. My 1984 edition contains thirty-seven densely packed pages,
116 simon blackburn
interpreting twenty-two categories of symbols and abbreviations.

Without knowing what those symbols represent, a chart is useless.
Knowing what they represent is indeed a success in the social world,
putting the reader in touch with the cartographer, and if you cannot
navigate this bit of the social world, you cannot navigate at all. If you
go to sea, it would not be the world that is lost, but the sailor.4 That is
your motivation for putting yourself in touch with Cook, or nowadays
with the Admiralty, by learning their language.
One symbol on a chart represents a dangerous rock that covers
and uncovers at different phases of the tide. If we find semantic
terminology mysterious, or have some philosophical animus against
it, we might look for analysis or paraphrase. Consider the nonacci-
dental coordination between author and reader. The author has put
into the public domain a sign, and this enables the reader to make
appropriate inferences and responses. We might wish to talk of inten-
tions, as Grice did, or habits or conventions, as I would prefer. Neither
approach would undermine the simple fact that the chart works by
representing a rock that covers and uncovers at a certain place, and
the reader has had to learn as much.
So why did representation, together with reference and truth,
become such a target for Rorty’s second team? Part of the diagnosis
must be that Rorty and Davidson have absorbed Sellars’s distinction
between the “space of causes” and “the space of reasons,” and taken
it to imply that since observation is a causal process the processes of
observation cannot have anything to do with reason and justification.
It is as if there is no difference between looking and seeing the
bumblebee and being caused by something else, such as a blow on
the head or a mad brainstorm, to form a conviction that there is a
bumblebee in the grass. The different causal etiology can make no
difference to the justification of the belief. Cook would have been
equally justified in publishing his charts if he had hallucinated the
coastlines of New Zealand and New South Wales from his bed.
Surely, however, this implication only has to be exposed to reveal
its absurdity. Our senses are adaptations for increasing the probability
that beliefs formed using them are true; brainstorms are not. We do
not have to be bog-standard empiricists to be aware that such an
increase in probability has a great deal to do with justification.
A glimpse, a bark, or a whiff might any of them justify me in suspect-
ing the presence of Fido in my vicinity.
Even more discreditably, perhaps, the doctrine that observation
is theory-laden confused some people into thinking that there is no
significant difference between relying on observation and merely
relying on the lore you bring with you, as if good observation is
entirely a matter of shuffling words and thoughts.
Or is it that the bogey of the indeterminacy of translation led to
despair as to whether the symbol really indicates the presence of a
rock that covers and uncovers, or something else? It doesn’t do to
despair over that when you are in a boat. And in spite of Nietzsche’s
alignment of truth and metaphor, there is nothing metaphorical
about what the chart tells the sailor. If I said that a sometimes-
submerged rock threatens to sink Rorty’s semantic boat, the meta-
phor would need to be unpacked, but there is no unpacking to be done
when using the chart. Nor is there anything to deconstruct, only
something to read. Irony is not in place.
Since these explanations only seem to give weak excuses, it
might take hard work from the admired Edinburgh school to under-
stand why in the late twentieth century people began to say these
extraordinary things, and to be heard and applauded for doing so.
Perhaps, though, there is another issue in the background, which
Rorty may have inherited from Dewey.
misunderstanding dewey?
John Dewey wrote that
the basic fallacy in representative realism is that while it actually

depends upon the inferential phase of enquiry, it fails to
interpret the immediate quality and the related idea in terms of
their functions in inquiry. On the contrary it views representative
118 simon blackburn
power as an inherent property of sensations and ideas as such,

treating them as “representations” in and of themselves. Dualism
or bifurcation of mental and physical existence is a necessary
result, presented, however, not as a result but as a given fact . . .
psychological or mental existences which are then endowed with
the miraculous power of standing for and pointing to existences of
a different order. (Dewey 1938, 514–15)
Dewey’s target here is the idea that representative power could be

the intrinsic property of a particular thing. If we thought that, then
we would soon notice that ordinary things around us, such as
arrangements of marks on paper, or sounds in auditory space, or
for that matter arrangements of furniture or flowers, have no such
intrinsic powers. We might then be in danger of thinking that since
such things are, as it were, disappointingly inert, the real power
must come from some other kind of thing: mental existences of a
different order, such as ideas or concepts. Wittgenstein had a similar
target in the passages on rule-following. Our dispositions to apply or
withhold terms in new contexts can only be contingently associated
with any particular thing, whether on the page or in the head. It
cannot be explained by the range or extent of a presence in the mind
or anywhere else.
Dewey calls his target “representative realism,” but that was
misleading. Firstly, on the face of it the problem has nothing to do
with realism: the difficulty over intrinsic or immediate representa-
tional power would be just as serious if it were applied to representa-
tions of Santa Claus or fairies instead of sometimes-submerged rocks.
But secondly, and I think more importantly for a discussion of Rorty’s
philosophy, the target is not representation as such, but a particular
account of what representation requires. The target is not our ability
to represent coastlines with charts, foodstuffs with menus, or times of
departure with timetables, but the idea that we do such things by
making present to our minds one or another entity with an intrinsic,
self-standing, and miraculous, power of doing it for us.5
I think there is no doubt that Rorty rightly absorbed Dewey’s

criticism of this kind of theory of representational power. That much
is visible in his dislike of semantic atomism and his rejection of
semantic nominalism, that being any theory that construes all mean-
ing in terms of a name–bearer relation, forgetting that it is only by
having been given a use that a word has meaning. But there is a
question whether Rorty himself misconstrued Dewey, by imagining
that his target included the very idea of representation itself, as if,
having decided that maps, menus, and timetables don’t work one
way, we conclude that they don’t work, full stop. That would unfor-
tunately reveal enslavement by the theory Dewey is attacking, sup-
posing that if it does not tell us the way representation works, it
cannot work any way at all.
Twentieth-century pragmatism itself barred any such inference
in the case of truth. Ramsey, Wittgenstein, Quine, and numerous
followers offer deflationist or minimalist conceptions of this. They
confirm the innocence of the notion by ensuring that it smuggles no
metaphysical luggage, and implies no doubtful philosophy of its own.
So it cannot be a sensible target of philosophical critique. Not too far
from these deflationists stand other philosophers such as Davidson,
who, without subscribing to full-scale minimalism or deflationism,
nevertheless admit that truth and representation are so tied in with
concepts such as belief and assertion that they could not be jettisoned
without at the same time abandoning all the rest of our intentional
vocabulary, denying ourselves the title of thinking and believing
things at all.
Nevertheless, many pragmatists of a generation following Rorty
have inherited some of his nervousness about “representationalism.”
One manifestation of this, perhaps encouraged by deflationism about
truth, is what Huw Price calls semantic minimalism, and in the rest of
this chapter I shall offer some remarks about any such program.6
In the hands of Paul Horwich, perhaps its most influential
defender, deflationism about truth is applied to propositions, not
sentences or inscriptions or words on a page. As such, it comes at
120 simon blackburn
the same time as interpretation, not before it. That is, at exactly the
same time and by exactly the same process as we learn to interpret a
sentence on a page, we learn what does or would make the thought it
expresses true. There is no grasp of the one without the other. But
deflationism about truth is utterly silent about what might be needed
for this process of interpretation to take place. In other words, it does
not concern itself with what it is to learn to hear or read what is being
said to you. If we are allowed to use the terminology, we could say
that it is a priori that the proposition that there is a sometimes-
submerged rock at some place is just the same as the proposition that
it is true that there is a sometimes-submerged rock at that place. But
it is not a priori that any particular sign or symbol or sentence means
that. It is entirely contingent whether anyone grasps that.
There are familiar kinds of thing that might be said by someone
giving the semantics of some term, or terms, or sentences, or other
fragments, of some language. Let us say that doing this is giving a
semantic description of these terms or fragments or sentences. Such
semantic descriptions offer interpretations. Familiar examples might be:
“Schnee” in German refers to snow.
“Snow” in English refers to snow.
“London” in English refers to London.
“Santa Claus” in English refers to Santa Claus.
“Good” in English is true of good things.
“London is a good city” is true in English if and only if London

is a good city.
“London is a good city” means in English that London is a
good city.
Although familiar, such sentences can spawn confusion. One such

might arise if we do not notice an ambiguity in what is being talked of
as “English” or “German.” Are these identified syntactically, in the
way that a logician would identify a formal language – that is, by their
lexicons and by whatever tells competent speakers that such-and-

such is a grammatical construction within the language, correspond-
ing to a well-formed formula in a logical calculus? Having specified a
formal language in this way, logicians can choose whatever interpret-
ation they wish for symbols of the language, and it is contingent
which ones they do choose. By parity, if this is the model, our speci-
men sentences are plainly contingent: had history been slightly dif-
ferent, “snow” in English might have referred to hail. There are quite
nearby possible worlds in which it does so. The speakers of English
are, together, sovereign in just the same way that the logician is, and
their collective habits could have been different.
A different policy would identify languages by some larger set of
capacities exercised by their users – some combination of syntax and
interpretation, so that, strictly speaking, it would not be English if
“snow” did not refer to snow. In this case interpretation-giving state-
ments, such as those just listed, are necessarily true, or made true by
the definition of what counts as English. On this way of thinking, just
as it wouldn’t be chess if the King could move two squares at a time
(it would not really be a King, either) it wouldn’t be English unless the
whole panoply of words and sentences used by English speakers had
the meanings they do.
Presumably, we are free to define English or German whichever
way we like, just as we could decide to let in variant versions of chess
as chess, not as some other game (we do this with bridge or poker,
which have different versions with different rules). And it is familiar
that the contingency that is subverted if we go in for a partially
semantic identification of a language reappears at a different place.
If, instead of saying that it is contingent that “snow” in English refers
to snow, we say that it is necessary because it is an essential property
of English that it does so, we have made English into an abstract
structure implicitly defined by its totality of lexicon and semantics.
But in that case, of course, it is contingent that English is the actual
language implemented in the speech of any particular population –
just as, if we define chess by its totality of rules, it becomes
122 simon blackburn
contingent that anyone has ever played it. So there is still a contin-
gency that needs identifying and perhaps explaining and justifying,
namely the contingency that people like me speak and read and
understand English.7 It cannot be something minimal, but something
substantial in my dispositions and abilities that makes this true, just
as it is a substantial and unfortunate gap in my dispositions and
abilities that makes it true that I do not speak Mandarin, for example,
and it must be something about a player’s dispositions and their
guidance that makes it true that he is playing chess and not some
little-known or private variant.
It might seem, then, that there is no space for real semantic
minimalism. Nevertheless, one way of sympathizing with it (perhaps
not the only one) takes off from a basically Davidsonian approach to
thinking about meaning, in which we imagine a Tarskian truth
theory for a language that simply gives interpretations for some basic
expressions and then “chases truth up the tree of grammar” as Quine
nicely put it (1986, 35). When our project is to describe the actual
language of some population, we proceed empirically and holistically,
adopting a methodological principle of charity. Tarski’s T-sentences
are of course extensional, but the fact that a T-sentence is a suitable
entry in an interpretative theory of English is not. That is, the sen-
tence “‘snow is white’ is true in English iff snow is white” is a
suitable entry, whereas the extensionally equivalent sentence “‘snow
is white’ is true in English iff grass is green” is not. The first is
suitable because we could embed it in a systematic system for inter-
preting many, many English sentences, delivering results that make
English speakers appear both rational and truthful.
Reference comes into this story because as well as clauses for
whole sentences we need clauses determining their makeup from
their contributing constituents. Only if we do this can we track the
way in which the contributing ingredients can be reshuffled in
order to generate new sentences that are also part of English, and
that can be more or less automatically understood by competent
users of the language on the basis of what they have already
absorbed. Then the idea is that these atomic entries are only impli-
citly defined by their role in the whole overall picture of the
language. That is, there is no need to ask, and no point in asking,
whether “reference” is the same whether we talk about an abstract
object, a physical place, a real person, or a fictional person.
Reference becomes a bookkeeping notion, necessary to help us
keep accounts rather than itself a source of semantic capital. It is
as general as the capacity of humans to pay attention to things, or
have their attention drawn to them.
It is perhaps easier to grasp this idea if we proceed in terms of
Sellars’s dot notation. With this we say that “x” is a •X• where x is an
expression of the object language, X is an expression in the language
we are using to describe the object language (these may be the same),
and the result of putting X between the dots is to denote the concep-
tual role that, contingently, is the one played by X. We might put this
by saying that •X• is a rigid designator denoting the role of the term
inside the dots that works by giving us an instance or a sample of the
role in question.
The dot notation gives us a rigid designator in the metalan-
guage, fixed to the role some specific word or sentence of the object
language has. Using it gives us what Peter Strawson (1949) called
degenerate contingent metastatements: contingent given that we
think that English might have evolved with words having different
roles than those they actually have, meta since they are statements
about object-language terms and sentences, and degenerate in the
sense that unless you already know the role played by the terms or
sentences inside the dots, they would not be intelligible to you. As
information-giving sentences about those roles, they are therefore
useless, but they are true, and, of course, fitted to play a role in a
systematic semantics, satisfying Quine’s ambition.
These semantic clauses are themselves minimal – we might
say, disappointing, degenerate, or, in one terminology, “modest,” in
the precise sense that they take the roles of the expressions in the
metalanguage for granted. They are simply silent about what those
124 simon blackburn
roles are, and they are similarly silent about the nature of the rapport
between utterer and reader or hearer.
From this beginning, minimalism might now transmute into
the doctrine that I called “quietism,” denying that philosophers can
find genuinely informative things to say about the terms central to
our schemes of thought. It may not be possible to say anything
interesting about •chair• or •cause• or •good•. We may be able to
use these terms, like others, without being able to say what their use
is. Any philosophical commentary could only be making explicit
something that is normally implicit, and there is room for uncer-
tainty whether this can be done.8
This is certainly not so across the board. If we want to know
what these roles are, sometimes there is plenty of space for commen-
tary to come flooding back.
So, consider examples like “Fore!” in English is a •Fore!• or
“Abracadabra” in English is an •Abracadabra•. These are both true,
and both degenerate in the sense that each takes reference to its
respective role for granted. It is up to the reader to supply knowledge
of that. But of course we can go on to make explicit the information
implicitly supplied by the knowing reader of such clauses. The •Fore!•
role is that of a warning most frequently used on a golf course to warn
people of an oncoming ball. The •Abracadabra• role is that of a term
mostly used by stage magicians to herald the unveiling of a surprise.
We might say that this commentary is itself part of semantics, or we
might choose to call this an exercise of metasemantics, a commentary
on the minimal truths contained in semantics proper. I cannot see that
anything hangs on this choice: either way, the explication of the roles
obviously gives us something more than the minimal clauses, and
something that we clearly need in order to be able to say informatively
how these terms function in English.
The role •refers• seems to be one which is quite amenable to a
clarificatory story. Michael Williams (2013) has helpfully suggested
that pragmatists should distinguish three elements in an explanation
of meaning in terms of use (an EMU). There is to be an
epistemological element describing how claims using the concept can

be justified or established. There is to be an inferential element
describing the conditionals that link them to other claims or other
mental states, and there is a functional element describing what job is
done by having such terms in our repertoire.
In the case of reference, the three components would firstly
describe how you come to know that a term “a” refers to some object
of thought a. The second would describe the inferences in which this
piece of knowledge is embedded (this is what the predicate calculus
provides for us). And the functional clause would explain the utility of
knowing this kind of thing, which is that it enables you to understand
what others are talking about, and in many cases enables you to
anticipate what you will find as you move around the world.
Reference, representation, and their kin need not surface as primi-
tives, but as useful concepts telling of the role that particular terms
play in the communicative habits and communicative successes of
the users of a language. In this way, pragmatism should not be hostile
to representation, but should enfold it.
We might now face a choice. We might want our concepts of
reference and representation to be entirely catholic, covering any-
thing that might be a topic or intended focus of shared attention –
anything at all in fact, echoing the thought that if a reader or hearer is
to understand the producer of a term then they must literally know
what the producer is talking about. Or, we might wish to be discrim-
inating about where such terms are appropriate. At the beginning of
the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes it plain that he
rejects Augustine’s name–bearer picture of language in general. But
he does not say that it never applies: indeed the “primitive” language
of his builders, one of whom calls for and the other of whom delivers
deliver blocks, pillars, slabs, and beams, is presented precisely as
wholly Augustinian. But
Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication;

only not everything that we call language is this system. And one
126 simon blackburn
has to say this in many cases where the question arises “Is this an
appropriate description or not?” The answer is: “Yes, it is appropriate,
but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of
what you were claiming to describe.” (Wittgenstein 1998, 3)
Unfortunately, it is not clear what circumscribes the region. Is

it that the builders are dealing with visible objects, present in their
environment and within a close causal range of them? It seems
unlikely that Augustine did not realize that we refer to a huge variety
of things outside our present ken. Wittgenstein goes on to say, “When
we say: ‘every word in language signifies something’ we have so far
said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what dis-
tinction we wish to make” (Wittgenstein 1998, 7). In other words,
taken by itself, Augustine’s picture is utterly bland rather than perni-
cious. Similar points can be made about all semantic vocabulary.
There are truths to be had about every subject matter under the
sun. Equally, we can be said to express ourselves on any subject
matter whatsoever, which raises the worry that “global expressi-
vism” will no more identify a definite doctrine than “global
representationalism.” After all, we are always trying to express some-
thing when we communicate. The detail has to come in the contrasts
we draw and the distinctions we make. But which contrasts and
distinctions is a poor philosopher equipped to make? Does a kind of
minimalism resurface here?
We say that a symbol refers to or represents something when,
amongst some set of people, in virtue of conventions or regularities in
their behavior, it has the power reliably to coordinate attention on
that thing. Hence, reference and representation are as wide-ranging as
our abilities to fix attention on the same thing. Those abilities
include having attention to things in an environment, like rocks
and coastlines, but extend across the whole field of thought, including
attention to abstract objects, fictional objects, properties, functions,
and so on. There will also be cases where we think we are focusing
attention on one object, but there is no object there. This is when
reference fails, and some version of the theory of descriptions is at

hand to tell us what we are doing instead. There is therefore scope
here for the semantics or metasemantics to lead us to exorcizing
unnecessary metaphysics: values, necessities, numbers, selves, and
other suspects can be revealed not, as appears at first sight, as objects
of attention, but as reifications deriving from our inferential or
other practices.
It would be legitimate to talk of semantic minimalism if, but
only if, the phenomena of shared attention were themselves wholly
intralinguistic. In other words, the only criterion of success would be
that onetime hearers or readers go on to imitate the linguistic behav-
ior of a producer, becoming themselves producers in turn. But as
Sellars or Wittgenstein should have taught us, this is by no means
so. To be sure, a symbol will be embedded in inferential practices,
mastery of which is signaled by equivalence of linguistic behavior.
But it is hostage to shared entry rules (response to observation) and
exit rules (coordination of nonlinguistic activity as a result of
sayings). Learners demonstrate that they can now read a piece of
music not by saying the right things but by playing the right notes
often enough, and mariners demonstrate they can read charts when
they plot safe courses by using them. The prime criterion of under-
standing the notion of causation is that you use causal judgments to
determine how you expect events to unfold or how you manipulate
them to unfold in a desired way.
I see this story as pragmatist in spirit. It vindicates the idea that
words are tools – tools for coordinating attention and action. It also
vindicates the view that anything more substantial that needs saying
will be at the local level, where Wittgenstein hoped to uncover it. It
redeems semantic vocabulary by placing it where it should be placed,
in the mundane communicative abilities of people. If it suggests that
further understanding of those abilities is not to be found only in
linguistic behavior but will require an injection from the philosophy
of mind, telling us more about our intensional powers, that may
surely be no bad thing.
128 simon blackburn
Wittgenstein also said that, in some cases but not all, the
meaning of a word is its use (Wittgenstein 1998, 20). I think he should
have done without the qualification.
notes
1 As Jay Rosenberg says, “When such a torrent of bathwater hits the
pavement, it’s easy enough to overlook the occasional discarded baby that
goes floating by” (Rosenberg 1993, 196).
2 I discussed Davidson’s pronouncements in Blackburn 2005, 148–62.
3 In a footnote, Rorty commends philosophers of the Edinburgh school of
sociology of science for bringing in the background history of Galileo and
his readers’ interest in such a matter. But the no doubt fascinating history
of why I should be interested in the denizens of the grass does not topple
the presence of the bumblebee from its role in explaining why I thought it
was there (TP, 226, n43).
4 Rorty sometimes describes human beings as no more than “incarnated
vocabularies” (CIS, 88). But you cannot imagine a vocabulary of any kind
hitting the rocks and drowning.
5 We might remember Frank Jackson’s famous jibe that that “he has been
at conferences in which people attacking representation nevertheless
have in their pockets pieces of paper with writing on them that tell them
where the conference dinner is and when the taxis leave for the airport”
(Jackson 1997, 270).
6 These remarks overlap to some extent with a discussion with a slightly
different focus in Blackburn 2019.
7 Carnap was nicely clear about the choice between these two ways of
thinking of a language, distinguishing between a “pure” semantics in
which we have made the logician’s choice, identifying a language purely
by its lexicon and formation rules, retaining the authority to interpret the
symbols however we wish, and an “applied” semantics in which
interpretation is beholden to the actual behavior of some identified
population (Carnap 1942).
8 Price, for one, is not a semantic minimalist in this sense. He applauds the
Wittgensteinian emphasis on differences of linguistic function, quoting
the famous image of the levers in the locomotive to suggest the
way forward.
6 Returning to the Particular:
Morality and the Self after Rorty
Alan Malachowski
Richard Rorty’s handling of morality generally receives less concerted

attention than his treatment of other topics considered central to the
concerns of Western philosophers. One unfortunate reason for this is
that, from very early on, commentators and critics have tended to
assume the force of their objections to his views on the other topics
such as the foundations of knowledge or the nature of truth automat-
ically carries over to those on morality, so these warrant little further
discussion. This is a mistake, but one of some interest.
Leaving aside the issue as to whether those objections are dam-
aging to their primary targets, they do not automatically invalidate
Rorty’s views on morality. And, in any case, they fail to address inter-
esting complexities and developments in his thinking. Nevertheless,
the error is an understandable one. For Rorty’s pragmatist approach to
moral matters can appear to derive initially from the epistemological
behaviorism he advocates in what he rightly regards as the pivotal
chapter – chapter IV – of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. At that
stage, it also seems to depend on the epistemological picture of philo-
sophy’s development painted throughout at least a third of the book.
In Rorty’s overall approach to morality, the most striking fea-
ture is undoubtedly his downplaying of the philosophical emphasis
that is placed on both principles and rationality within the Kantian
ethical tradition or under its influence. He insists principles are best
generated out of, and hence conceived as, attempts to cope with our
changing world and, especially, with each other. We build them into
our adaptive strategies, so they should be thought of as contingent
rules of thumb, not timeless, unimpeachable rules. To say “they are
rational” as an intended gesture of ultimate approval can be to say no
more than: “there is currently sufficient general agreement that they
129
130 alan malachowski
work for us.” There is no higher court of appeal for their validation
and no formula for deciding in advance exactly what “sufficient
general agreement” entails. Rorty’s estimation of principles is well
summed up by Jerome Schneewind when he tells us Rorty “particu-
larly dislikes the attachment philosophers have to universal prin-
ciples. His attitude rests in part on his view that principles are only
summaries of what has been found to be acceptable in the past”
(Schneewind 2010, 496). And this clearly falls in line with John
Dewey’s definition: “Principles are empirical generalizations from
the ways in which previous judgments of conduct have worked out”
(Dewey 1922, 240).
Rorty’s distaste for the philosophical elevation of principles
also fits in with his rampant anti-authoritarianism and his overarch-
ing enthusiasm for what we can call “radical self-reliance,” according
to which human beings and their cultural practices are beholden to
no trans-social authority and certainly not to what he dubs “the
quasi-divinity”: Reason.1
For the most part, the present chapter sidesteps the theme of
“principles and rationality” to instead reconsider Rorty’s way of
dealing with morality and the self. But it first visits the question as
to whether his approach needs, from the outset, to incorporate a more
robust conception of rationality than his epistemological behaviorism
seems to allow.
We make this detour because the critical reception of Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature is swamped with complaints that Rorty’s
behaviorism and his related views on knowledge, morality, reason, and
truth add up to no more than an ill-disguised form of self-defeating
relativism. At the time of writing, he recognized that such negative
responses are to be expected: “To say that the True and the Right are
matters of social practice may seem to condemn us to a relativism
which, all by itself, is a reductio of a behaviorist approach to either
knowledge or morals” (PMN, 178). And, as we might expect, Rorty
takes steps to forestall accusations of blatant relativism. These demur-
rals are mostly ignored or regarded as transparently unsuccessful.
returning to the particular 131
But in all fairness, they are not particularly robust. Since similar
complaints have lingered throughout Rorty’s career, I thought it would
be a good idea to see whether his approach to morality could have been
made less assailable in this respect from an early stage.
I initially suspected that the best way to do this would be to
squeeze more objectivity into Rorty’s conception of morality by
bringing his conception of radical self-reliance closer to the Kantian
notion of autonomy and then to somehow realign it with epistemo-
logical behaviorism, even though Rorty pits this against Kant’s views.
My hunch here was that without impinging on the practical upshot,
Rorty’s take on morality could be given a face-lift, one that made it
more formally acceptable in the manner of simply not appearing to be
so vulnerable to distracting charges of relativism.
But, in reviewing Rorty’s various responses to Kantian morality
alongside what he perceives to be the benefits of his own approach,
I realized that such a face-lift is neither required nor, in fact, possible. It
turns out that Rorty’s treatment of morality stands firmly enough on
its own pragmatist feet, as intended, not as a putative refutation of
Kant’s account, but rather as an incommensurable, down-to-earth
alternative to it, one that caters for morality at ground level as a
cultural practice evolving from, and subject to, particular historical
pressures. At the same time, it becomes clear that complaints about
relativism are invariably beside the point because they tend to assume
Rorty’s approach to morality has to answer to universal constraints
Kant envisaged, or ones that are narrowly exacting in kind.
Such complaints fail to acknowledge that Rorty’s conception of
morality is expressly designed to meet pragmatic criteria of success.
Then, they ignore the fact that it succumbs to the particular pressures
exerted by these criteria only when they are filtered through the
demands of a liberal democratic political framework. Indeed, we
might also describe these demands in terms of a need for morality
to comport with the kind of self that Rorty believes liberalism both
gives birth to and depends on. These latter requirements, these “lib-
eral demands,” are not brought to the table until Rorty affords
political realism priority over morality as it is usually philosophically

depicted and develops a corresponding notion of the self. This priori-
tizing is something he conceives during a journey that begins with
writings such as “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” (ORT,
175–96), takes an engaging trip through Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, and ends with Rorty’s enthusiastic endorsement of what
he terms “Cultural Politics.”
morality and the epistemological enterprise

In Chapter IV of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the pivotal
chapter, Rorty defines epistemological behaviorism, rather casually it
may seem, in societal terms: “Explaining rationality and epistemic
authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter
by the former is the essence of what I shall call ‘epistemological behav-
iorism’” (PMN, 174). However, as so often with Rorty, the insouciant
surface appearance is deceptive. This formulation is the precipitate of
his understanding of salient themes in the work of Quine and Sellars,
which are outlined in Chapter IV. And it embodies, as he also points
out, “an attitude common to John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein”
(PMN, 174). This attitude regards presumptive foundational phenom-
ena, such as those identified in metaphysical frameworks or at onto-
logical base camps, to be surplus to philosophical requirements.
The kernel of what Rorty extracts from Quine and Sellars is the
idea that “truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of
the inquirers of our own day” (PMN, 178, emphasis added), and that
an adequate epistemology needs to be thoroughly holistic, because
“there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to
find some test other than coherence” (PMN, 178).
Rorty spends time showing us that there is a path leading from
both Quine and Sellars to what might best be termed “social practice
holism.” He takes it that Quine’s attack on the analytic/synthetic
distinction invites us to get away from thinking that there are words
the meanings of which are “super stable” because they cannot be
overturned by empirical considerations in the to-and-fro of life.
Philosophers can, then, and ought to, give up their dependence upon
and the search for anything of that incontrovertible kind to serve
grounding purposes or to rationalize how sensory input should be
organized to the satisfaction of philosophical rectitude.
As for Sellars, here Rorty finds support for his own pragmatist
view that the justification of knowledge claims is primarily a social,
interpersonal concern rather than one involving relations between
minds and the world and/or their own contents. He takes it that
Sellars’s famous account of science as a “self-correcting enterprise”
(Sellars 1963, 170) shows “rationality is a matter not of obedience to
standards (which epistemologists might hope to codify), but rather
of give-and-take participation in a co-operative social project”
(Rorty 1997b, 6).
But we do not need to retrace Rorty’s steps along this path,
because what is more interesting and to the point here is (1) how he
gets from the backing he extracts for his conclusions regarding epi-
stemic authority to talk of “the Right” alongside “the True,” and
then (2) whether this talk actually involves a behavioral conception of
morality. Epistemological concerns dominate much of Philosophy
and the Mirror of Nature. Indeed, the chapter preceding Chapter IV
is even entitled “The Idea of a ‘Theory of Knowledge.’” Epistemology
is dominant because, according to Rorty’s understanding of the role
Kant played in the progress of philosophical thought within the West,
it came to dominate philosophy. There are two key elements.
First, Rorty credits Kant with having virtually single-handedly
reinvented philosophy by professionalizing it as an epistemological
enterprise, thus enabling “historians of philosophy to make the
thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fall into place
as attempting to answer the question ‘How is our knowledge pos-
sible?’” (PMN, 132). Second, he submits that given the all-embracing
nature of the Kantian epistemological enterprise, morality is exigently
subsumed under its jurisdiction. This means that if epistemology is
relieved of its obsessions with certain notions concerning what
rationality and truth must involve, then morality gains similar relief.
Notice, however, that in playing along with the Kantian juris-

dictional claim and not clearly distancing his own approach from its
epistemological capture of morality, Rorty seems to be echoing an
underlying assumption of his own critics: “What goes for behavioral
epistemology also goes for morality.” At the same time, he is ambigu-
ous throughout Mirror whenever he discusses morality in conjunc-
tion with epistemology.
We said earlier that Rorty’s approach to morality can appear to
derive from his epistemological behaviorism, but at times he writes
as if the derivation goes the other way. That is to say, without
providing independent confirmation of such a move, he appeals to
analogies with morality to bolster his account of epistemology. At a
minimum, he then appears to be implying, “If justification by social
means works for morality, why should it not work for epistemology?”
A clear-cut instance of this reverse derivation involves Rorty’s
appeal to moral philosophers’ differing outlooks on the status of
human rights, where he points out that they are generally inclined
to agree these are needed and should be granted, but are divided over
“whether there are ‘ontological foundations’ for [them]” (PMN, 178).
Rorty suggests the analogy involved “lets us focus on the issue
about behaviorism in epistemology.” It does this, he maintains,
because it shows that what is at stake is “not adequacy of explan-
ation of fact [because the existence of, or necessity for, human rights
is accepted], but rather whether a practice of justification can be
given a ‘grounding’ in fact.” Then the pertinent question is
“whether the idea of epistemic or moral authority having a ‘ground’
in nature is a coherent one” (PMN, 178). Rorty insists that for the
pragmatist, it is not. “For the pragmatist in morals, the claim that
the customs of a given society are ‘grounded in human nature’ is not
one which he knows how to argue about. He is a pragmatist because
he cannot see what it would be like for a custom to be so grounded”
(PMN,178). But to the alert reader’s eye, this unwittingly raises the
possibility that morality can be handled separately from epistemo-
logical behaviorism. Moreover, without further argument and
elaboration, Rorty’s appeal to the pragmatist’s inability to discern

how customs connected with morality are grounded in nature sheds
little light on, nor provides any direct support for, his antifounda-
tionalist behavioral contentions regarding knowledge.
an independent conception
In Chapter VI of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, one of the
places where he explicitly responds to the charge of relativism, Rorty
drives a further wedge between epistemology and morality, by distin-
guishing two senses of “good”: a philosophical sense and an ordinary
“shopworn” sense. It is only in the first sense that problems such as
relativism arise, he tells us, because such problems are caused by the
very way in which the philosophical tradition has treated words such
as “good.” They are, so to speak, philosophical creations, “designed
precisely to stand for the Unconditioned – that which escapes the
context within which discourse is conducted and inquiry pursued and
purports to establish a new context” (PMN, 309). Philosophical prob-
lems such as “relativism” only occur when such words, though
invoked in full philosophical plumage, inevitably fail to live up to
absolutist expectations.
Here, as elsewhere in Mirror, Rorty seems to be entirely confi-
dent that just as the use of the ordinary version of “good” to com-
mend things requires no philosophical elucidation or backup, its
moral counterpart is correspondingly self-sufficient. Indeed, for him,
there is no sharp line dividing the two, and “one is not going to find a
set of necessary and sufficient conditions for goodness which will
enable one to find the Good Life, resolve moral dilemmas, grade
apples, or whatever” (PMN, 307). We are equally entitled to call
something good whether we regard it as commendable or it satisfies
our current moral intuitions. Philosophers have no genuine incentive,
and certainly no inherent right, to try to interfere in a definitive way
in either case.
However, if we read between the lines here, and it does not
always have to be between them, we can see Rorty is floating a
conception of morality that is independent, and not just of epistemo-

logical behaviorism. When, for example, he says that it is highly
unlikely that “none of our moral intuitions are right” (PMN, 305),
he is assuming this can be accepted simply as said, that is without
support from the kind of arguments he lifted from Quine and Sellars.
Rorty is, or so it appears, already thinking of morality as an autono-
mous social practice, one that incorporates its own standards of
efficacy, adjusting these as it develops over time in its own particular
ways, which means beyond the reach of philosophy, even the epi-
stemological behaviorist’s kind. It is out of reach presumably,
although Rorty does not state this outright, because as a participatory
social practice morality cannot only be properly understood from the
external perspective that has to be adopted by philosophical theory.
There are three immediate consequences of Rorty’s tendency to
think of morality as independent in the sense considered here.
I alluded to the first earlier. However, it follows not from him think-
ing of morality in this way, but rather from his failure to be clear from
the outset that he is thinking of it in this way. As a result, Rorty’s
approach to morality, to say it again, is frequently not differentiated
by critics from his approach to epistemology and the related roles of
rationality and truth. They are therefore inclined to take Rorty’s
conception of morality even less seriously than they take his avow-
edly “Deweyan conception of knowledge” (PMN, 9). At best, as we
also said, they assume their complaints about Rorty’s handling of
epistemological issues carry straight over to his treatment of moral
matters, which they can then ignore. And, to repeat, Rorty does little
to discourage this.
The second consequence is more positive, but because of the
first, it is often overlooked. Rorty treats morality as a sociohistorical
phenomenon constituted by cultural practices over which philoso-
phers as such have no special authority because Kant was simply
wrong to claim that moral concepts “have their seat and origin fully
a priori in reason” (Kant 2002, 28). An ethical life is, as Hegel main-
tained, “a life arising out of history and culture, not an a priori
system” (Bates 2010, 4). Indeed, it is an integral part of, to borrow

Herbert Marcuse’s memorable phrase, “the living substance of his-
tory,” something which when thought about philosophically needs to
be thought about on such particular terms (Marcuse 2005, 106). And
Rorty suggests this involves engaging with a greater variety of fruitful
questions than those normally addressed within the theoretical con-
fines dictated by traditional moral philosophy. These questions cater
for the practical complexities of morality, and concern such matters
as how and why it changes, what natural authority it has, and what
lends it stability. They are also closely connected, as we intimated
earlier, with a notion of the self that Rorty unfolds throughout vari-
ous writings, a notion that takes it to be “centerless” and thereby
dispenses with “the idea that we have a true self, one shared with all
other humans, and . . . that the demands of this true self – specifically
moral demands – take precedence over all others” (EHO, 155). And
again, further fresh questions arise. For example, instead of consider-
ing whether it is morally correct for us to do X, Rorty suggests we can
often more fruitfully wonder, “What kind of person will I be if I do
X?” or “How will doing X impact on my sense of who I am and who
others take me to be?”
The third consequence here is that, since Rorty locates mor-
ality in social practices, he has to be happily committed to an
innocuous relativism of a limited kind: a relativism of difference.2
This follows from the fact that the practices where he locates
morality differ over time and, as it were, geographically. Since he
believes there are no universal sources of moral justification that
transcend culture and history, this is not a philosophical problem
for him. Where moral differences between communities have
notable consequences, the only possible means of redress is persua-
sive negotiation with no pretense to transcultural authority.
Philosophical problems only arise under the misapprehension that
there is such an authority.
What we find, then, in Rorty’s approach to morality, even
early on, is a prior appreciation of it as a set of sociohistorically
specific practices that are both self-sufficient and open to change in

the winds of history – prior, that is, to any traditional philosophical
appreciation of what morality is, what it is supposed to be, and how
its content, so to speak, should be represented or codified and, where
possible, refined. This can make it look as if Rorty is taking up the
sort of hands-off stance with regard to morality that the later
Wittgenstein is often accused of doing in respect of language when
he makes claims like “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the
actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it
cannot give it any foundation (justify it) either. It leaves everything
as it is” (Wittgenstein 1998, 49).
But, although Rorty is skeptical about the value of theoretical
inference and the standard philosophical positions from which it has
been carried out, his approach is more complex, and ultimately less
reticent, than any such comparison with Wittgenstein suggests. This
becomes clearer when he leaves talk of epistemological behaviorism
behind and discusses morality in other contexts.
In those various discussions, a host of common characteristics
emerge. These provide a backcloth to most of what Rorty says about
moral concerns and need to be considered together to provide a full
picture of what his approach to morality involves in its maturity.
They include: (1) Dewey’s influence, (2) the setting aside of Kant’s
views, (3) pragmatic considerations taking center stage, (4) the
downplaying of philosophical pretensions in the arena of practical
moral life, (5) taking the implications of revisionary accounts of the
genesis and motivational foundations of morality (e.g. those by
Freud and Nietzsche) seriously, (6) the importance of nonphiloso-
phical sources of moral inspiration and instruction (e.g. literature),
(7) the factoring-in of liberal political considerations, (8) an emphasis
on the role of the imagination, and (9) the exploration of morality’s
relationship to the self.3
Each of these plays a significant part in Rorty’s thinking on
morality, but for reasons of space, I am only going to say something
very briefly about (1) and (2) before concentrating on (9) in order to
highlight what I take to be some of the most problematic and yet still
importantly interesting features of that thinking. The first two “char-
acteristics,” (1) and (2), can be profitably considered together.
Though it is tempting, there is little point in trying to discover
detailed arguments in Dewey’s writings that prompt Rorty to formu-
late his own views on morality. For what Rorty finds there are, he
believes, useful ways of talking about morality that, putting it bluntly,
enable us to ignore Kant, and do so in good philosophical faith.
Rorty acknowledges that Kantian morality is important, not
least because it has exerted, and continues to exert, a major influ-
ence on philosophy. But, he does not think it has to be confronted
directly on its own terms. To be sure, he believes Kant commits
large errors, notably in conjuring up a “baroque faculty psychology”
(PCP, 189) and making moral demands unconditionally binding even
after dispensing with divine authority as the source. However, Rorty
is not interested in exploiting, still less exploring, such mistakes,
because he believes that when Dewey’s approach to morality is
embraced, they need no longer interest us. Now of course, inciting
a loss of interest in Kant’s moral views or encouraging a propensity
to talk past those views is not necessarily a laudable achievement. It
can be done by invoking distractions that feed off, and into, ignor-
ance. But, Rorty insists a philosophical account of morality ought to
answer to how it is lived, and how it can be lived in particular
circumstances, rather than to normative ideals, which in floating
above its natural domain require some theoretical spin-doctoring
from on high to establish their relevance and authority. He insists
that by talking about morality in social practice terms, a Deweyan
approach meets the answerability requirement, thereby obviating
the necessity for assessing the merits of a Kantian, or any other,
theoretical alternative that does not. At work again here, and we
will have to return once more to this point, is the thought that
morality involves independent social practices – “independent” in
that they spontaneously generate their own sphere of influence,
their own locus of authority and practical utility.
morality and the self without pessimism

Key elements of Rorty’s mature approach to morality are prefigured,
indeed at times presciently illuminated, by the literary critic Lionel
Trilling in his once celebrated, and perhaps still provocative, essay on
Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, an essay which shares the novel’s title
(Trilling 2000).4 A principal theme of this work, first published in
1954, concerns the emerging nature of modern morality, covering its
multifarious aspects, how and why it changes, and what personal
costs it levies.
Trilling deals with the advent of a change in the morality of the
developed West, that is, morality both as it is coming to be under-
stood in Austen’s time and as he believes it can, and should, still be
understood until some historically disruptive perturbations of culture
determine otherwise. In unfolding this theme, he sheds light on
elements of the above backcloth, quickly making it clear, for
instance, that since “literature offers the experience of the diversifi-
cation of the self” (Trilling 2000, 302), and explores the ensuing
complexities of its moral standing, Rorty is absolutely right to pay
close attention to the works of novelists and poets as sources of moral
inspiration and discrimination.5 But toward the end of the essay,
Trilling is also especially insightful, again in advance, on certain
consequences of morality’s independence, with an emphasis this time
on its flight from religion, that Rorty pays scant regard to. And,
Trilling is then equally instructive on why it is both necessary and
valuable to explore the connections between morality and the self,
while even managing to indicate that this has Dewey’s imprimatur.
With regard to the issue of independence, Trilling shows how
Austen captures and negotiates the additional complexity and depth
that morality has to assume when it aspires to the status of autonomy
involving, in Hegel’s terms, the secularization of spirituality and then
the consequent separation from religion. Trilling suggests, with cred-
ibility, that Austen is the first novelist to explore in detail what this
transfiguration amounts to. It embodies the emergence of what he
terms “the specifically modern personality” as well as the culture in

which “it [has] its being.” But more than that, he tells us, it engenders
fresh demands upon the nascent personality, for “never before [has]
the moral life been conceived to be so complex and difficult and
exhausting” (Trilling 2000, 308).
Rorty is well aware of the historical process of secularization.
The phrase “de-divinization of culture” encapsulates one of his
highest hopes for liberalism in the modern world: “in its ideal form,
the culture of liberalism would be one which was enlightened,
secular, through and through. It would be one in which no trace of
divinity remained” (CIS, 45). But his take on the process itself is
somewhat different. It appears unrealistically utopian compared to
Trilling’s. He does not acknowledge the extra burdens imposed upon
those who are intent on living a resolutely secular moral life or just
happen to live it. Rorty passes these impositions by, and pays atten-
tion instead to what he perceives to be the benefits of extracting
control of morality from the clutches of philosophers who wish to
enclose it within theories, ideally so they can recommend modifying
cultural practices accordingly.
Trilling, by contrast, is willing to risk hyperbole in this connec-
tion. He says, for example, that Austen is “the first to be aware of the
Terror which rules our moral situation” (Trilling 2000, 309). Dire
warnings from Nietzsche and Dostoevsky obviously lurk behind this,
but Trilling is alluding specifically to the demands our judgmental
sensibilities will tend to impose upon others and, indeed, ourselves
when unconstrained by traditions of religious forbearance: “We learn
from her [Austen] what our lives should be and by what subtle and
fierce criteria they will be judged, and how to pass [judgment] upon
the lives of our friends and fellows” (Trilling 2000, 309). Without a
shield of dutiful religious observance, our agency, or rather the per-
sonality it is represented by in public, comes under greater moral
scrutiny. For secularization “requires of us that we judge not merely
the moral act itself but also, and even more searchingly, the quality of
the agent” (Trilling 2000, 309). Trilling reminds us that Hegel
envisages exactly this when he takes so much trouble to forge his

distinction between character and personality and “show how the
development of the idea of personality is one of the elements of
secularization” (Trilling 2000, 309). Trilling elaborates on this point
about Hegel in a pungent preface to The Opposing Self:
Hegel understood in a remarkable way what he believed to be a

new phenomenon of culture, a kind of cultural mutation. This is
the bringing into play in the moral life of a new category of
judgment, the category of quality. Not merely the deed itself, he
said, is now submitted to judgment, but also the personal quality of
the doer of the deed. It has become not merely a question of
whether the action conforms to the appropriate principle or maxim
of morality, but also of the manner in which it is performed, of
what it implies about the entire nature, the being, of the agent.
This is what Hegel had in mind when he instituted his elaborate
distinction between “character” and “personality,” the latter term
having reference to what we might call the manner and style of the
moral action. (Trilling 1955, i–xii)
He also notes, again in his essay “Mansfield Park,” that Dewey, much
influenced by Hegel, follows suit by insisting moral choices should be
made according to the sort of self we want to be and not dictated by
supposedly more appropriate rules, maxims, or principles.6
If we assume that “perturbations of culture” have not yet
created a credible conception of morality that recognizably renders
Trilling’s observations otiose,7 we can see how they help explain why
Rorty is correct to put an emphasis on the self when he discusses
morality. But Trilling’s darker appreciation of the relationship
between the self and secularized morality raises some cautionary
thoughts that can make Rorty’s perception of it seem rather cavalier
by comparison. This also applies, though we can only mention this in
passing, to the relationship between the self and liberalism. Having
granted that we are liable to assume “placing the personality at the
center of the moral life is a chief glory of the spirit in its modern
manifestation,” Trilling then reminds us “we at times become aware

of the terrible strain it imposes upon us, of the exhausting effort
which the concept of personality requires us to make, and of the pain
of the exacerbated sensitivity to others” (Trilling 2000, 309).
Rorty, contrary to Trilling’s grave reservations, often gives the
impression that the prospects for a happy communion between mor-
ality and the self are only darkened by the twofold failure of modern
moral philosophers. First, under the influence of Kant, they have
failed to follow through on secularization. In preserving the uncondi-
tional force of moral obligations despite forswearing their sanctity as
divine commands, philosophers “are up to their old Platonic tricks . . .
trying to shortcut the ongoing calculation of consequences by
appealing to something stable and permanent, something whose
authority is not subject to empirical test” (PCP, 192). And second,
they are prone to proceeding as if moral philosophy has a peculiar
autonomous authority stemming from reason that enables it to sanc-
tion and guide interference in cultural practices, thereby undermining
morality’s own independence and perhaps the possibility for its con-
genial union with liberal modes of social being as Rorty conceives
them, which also need to be free of interference “from above.”
The thinking behind this negative depiction of moral philoso-
phers in the second consideration is explicitly set out by Rorty in his
late essay “Kant vs. Dewey: The Current Situation of Moral
Philosophy” (PCP, 183–202), where he indicates that as far back as
1974, he was, as our reading of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
suggests, already regarding morality as an independent practical, cul-
tural concern of little philosophical interest rather than “the name of
a still rather mysterious entity that requires intensive study” (PCP,
188). Rorty’s guiding thought here seems to be that since it is a social
practice, morality is not, and cannot be, so elusive that it is best
understood from the outside. He is therefore highly skeptical of phil-
osophers’ claims to possess special expertise concerning moral
matters, the kind that enables them to produce theories capable of
changing people’s minds on key issues: “I think the notion of a moral
theory based on something sounder than a set of moral intuitions as

dubious as the idea that moral concepts have a special nature that the
experts understand better than the vulgar, and as the idea that moral
argument has a special logic that philosophical training enables one
to appreciate” (PCP, 185). Rorty holds that moral progress generally is
not, and should not be, dictated by philosophical theories.
We spoke earlier of an ambiguity in the way Rorty handles
morality in Mirror. However, a more preponderant dubiety in his
approach to morality is introduced by his article “Freud and Moral
Reflection” (in EHO) and lingers later without resolution. Rorty
distinguishes two meanings of the term “morality” or, in effect, two
kinds of morality: “‘Morality’ can mean either the attempt to be just
in one’s treatment of others or the search for perfection in oneself.
The former is public morality, codifiable in statutes and maxims. The
latter is private morality, the development of character” (EHO, 153).
Rorty, of all people, should perhaps have recalled Durkheim’s solid
reservation: “Society is not a simple aggregate of individuals who,
when they enter it, bring their own intrinsic morality with them;
rather, people are moral beings only because they live in society”
(Durkheim 1972, 311).
Now, of course, an important private/public distinction com-
prises the centerpiece of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, but
that is primarily a politico/cultural distinction concerned with a
partition between the realms of life that the self inhabits rather than
morality. Rorty’s intentions in this respect have been well captured
by Nancy Fraser:
This then is the strategy of Rorty’s partition position: to bifurcate

the map of culture down the middle. On one side will be public life,
the preserve of pragmatism, the sphere where utility and solidarity
predominate. On the other side will be private life, the preserve of
Romanticism, the sphere of self-discovery, sublimity and irony. In
the public sphere, one’s duty to one’s community takes precedence;
social hope, decency and the greatest happiness of the greatest
number are the order of the day. In the private sphere, by contrast,
the reigning cause is one’s duty to oneself; here, one may disaffiliate
from the community, attend to the fashioning of one’s self and, so,
deal with one’s aloneness. (Fraser 1990, 311)
By putting morality on the back burner, Rorty is moving beyond the

admission he makes immediately after introducing the previously
mentioned division between public and private morality: “Like
Freud, I am concerned only with the latter” (EHO, 153). It seems he
is exclusively interested in private morality because he finds the
public version, as instanced in “the search for justice,” to be “rela-
tively simple and obvious” (EHO, 153) and not worth making a big
deal about, philosophically or otherwise. The reasons for this assess-
ment do not emerge until the “Kant vs. Dewey” article, as just
discussed, but they blend in with Rorty’s perception of morality as
having the independence earlier described.
In the light of Freud’s account of idiosyncratic contingencies
that determine the development of the self, Rorty discerns greater
possibilities for personal moral growth. These involve a form of self-
knowledge that abjures the quest for identifying an essential or pure
self and concentrates instead on learning how to broker relationships
between different beings inhabiting each of us, in keeping with a
multiperson account of selfhood. On this account – and here Rorty
is extrapolating from Freud while also leaning heavily on Donald
Davidson’s (1982) interpretation of him – we should think of each
person as being inhabited by a number of selves, all of which are
sufficiently rational to hold beliefs and have desires: “What is novel
in Freud’s view of our unconscious is his claim that our unconscious
selves are not dumb, sullen, lurching brutes, but rather the intellec-
tual peers of our conscious selves, possible conversational partners for
those selves” (EHO, 149). Rorty does not say, or even speculate as to,
how many such selves there are or where they stand with regard to
Freud’s famous tripartite structure of the mind involving the id, ego,
and superego. Nor does he explain whether the barriers put up by
defenses and the forces of repression hypothesized by Freud can be

surmounted outside psychoanalytic therapy to allow “conversational
partnerships.” We also need an idea of how the prospect of such
partnerships maps onto, or replaces, Freud’s therapeutic techniques.
And there is the further thorny question of how, since they do not
participate directly in worldly life, the various extra inhabitants of the
self acquire enough beliefs to satisfy the Davidsonian holistic
demand that since these must feed off one another they can only
accrue in massive tranches. Finally, Rorty does not explain how the
additional selves, while not being active members of any moral com-
munity, can gain an understanding of moral questions or have any
incentive to take an interest in them.
Those not inconsiderable issues aside, when Rorty discusses
how Freud can have a salutary influence on the private version of
morality, his grip on this as a version of morality is tenuous. For that
discussion ostensibly introduces the fresh modes of self-definition
Freud makes available to the conscious self. To accept that these
have a moral significance, we must first at least accept that Rorty is
right to say “finding out about our unconscious motives is not just an
intriguing exercise, but more like a moral obligation” (EHO, 145).
While it is not difficult to think of reasons why it can be morally
important to uncover our unconscious motives in specific circum-
stances, it is not at all clear why there should be a more general
obligation of this kind so that, in principle, everyone ought to undergo,
or somehow undertake, psychoanalysis or its proxy. Rorty does not
give reasons in either case. Instead, he simply assumes that Freud’s
undeniable contribution to morality is first to help demystify it along
the genealogical lines we alluded to in (5) above, and then to provide
fresh ideas and new words that enable us to extend our “vocabularies of
moral reflection” (EHO, 154). Moreover, when Rorty provides
examples of the sort of words that might make up such vocabularies,
they appear to be words of comparison and judgment for sure, but there
is nothing distinctively Freudian or moral about them. Nor, we might
add, do they have anything to do with privacy:
By “a vocabulary of moral reflection” I mean a set of terms in

which one compares oneself to other human beings. Such
vocabularies contain terms like magnanimous, a true Christian,
decent, cowardly, God-fearing, hypocritical, self-deceptive,
epicene, self-destructive, cold, an antique Roman, a saint, a Julien
Sorel, a Becky Sharpe, a red-blooded American, a shy gazelle,
a hyena, a depressive, a Bloomsbury type, a man of respect,
a grand dame. (EHO, 154)
Rorty suggests vocabularies containing such terms are suited to

resolving questions of character, both that of others and one’s own.
Consequently, they can help us answer the kind of questions we
earlier alluded to as Rorty’s additions to the standard repertoire of
moral questions: “What kind of person would want to be like that?”,
“Would I want to be like that?” and so forth. Rorty further claims the
terms involved are those “one uses when one tries to resolve moral
dilemmas by asking ‘What sort of person would I be if I did this?’”
(EHO, 155). Here, Rorty is conjuring up some unnecessary muddles.
Moral dilemmas cannot normally be resolved by non-moral means.
To resolve such dilemmas by asking the sort of questions Rorty
recommends, it is necessary to have at least presumed moral reasons
for wanting to be such-and-such a type of person and/or for there to be
moral consequences attending such a choice; otherwise, if it is a
matter of moral indifference whether we want to be, or are, that type
of person, morality drops out of the picture. But, then the moral
difficulty is thrown back at what motivates such reasons and/or
explains the consequences. And that difficulty cannot be resolved
by asking more of these questions, and certainly not by answering
them in private. In addition, the very notion of private morality is
itself fraught with problems. If it is genuinely private (and not para-
sitic on public morality), then it is vulnerable to objections akin to
those Wittgenstein voiced against the notion of a private language:
without external reference points, then whatever seems morally right
is going to be morally right.
So at the time of “Freud and Moral Reflection,” Rorty’s

approach to morality is problematic. Interestingly, he can smooth
things out by taking the route that Lionel Trilling takes through his
career-long ruminations on the self, its powers of self-constitution, its
moral significance, and its place in culture. From his vague, but
pregnant, intimation of “moral issues having something to do with
gratuitously chosen images of personal being” (Trilling 2000, 388),
Trilling finally cashes out the notion of “gratuitous choice” in aes-
thetic rather than moral terms, making the selection of forms of
selfhood entirely a matter of style. The ideal self is then “the
experience of art projected into the actuality and totality of life”
(Trilling 1955, xiv). This, in effect, privatizes self-creation and exter-
nalizes morality. Trilling is cognizant of difficulties accompanying
this duality, and of the resistance it is liable to provoke. Indeed, he
reads Mansfield Park as at least partly an ironic protest against it, as a
forlorn elevation of moral principle over style’s dominion over the
self, a protest achieved by depicting the personage of Lady Bertram as
a “self safe from the Terror of secularized spirituality,” one that
experiences “the bliss of being able to remain unconscious of the
demands of personality” (Trilling 2000, 230).
Rorty is more unabashedly enthusiastic about self-creation,
apparently seeing no downside to “the demands of personality.”
And, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he revisits what he
regards as Freud’s contributions to our vocabularies of moral reflec-
tion, this time providing examples that seem at first more pertinent:
He gives each of us the equipment to construct our own private

vocabulary of moral deliberation. For terms like “infantile” or
“sadistic” or “obsessional” or “paranoid,” unlike the names of
vices and virtues which we inherit from the Greeks and the
Christians, have very specific and very different resonances for
each individual who uses them. (CIS, 32)
But when he shows us how these terms are supposed to be put to

work, it is again unclear how they provide an alternative moral
vocabulary: “They enable us to sketch a narrative of our own devel-

opment, our idiosyncratic moral struggle, which is far more finely
textured, far more custom-tailored to our individual case, than the
moral vocabulary which the philosophical tradition offered us” (CIS,
32). What is missing here is an explanation of what makes the par-
ticularities of our private “idiosyncratic struggles” into moral
struggles, how Freudian terminology translates into moral language,
and how it can gain moral status if it replaces existing examples of
such language.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty leaves behind this
muddle by implementing the sort of aestheticizing move that Trilling
makes. Taking his cue from Trilling’s claim that Freud “showed us
that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of mind, being, in
the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty”
(Trilling 1967, 89), Rorty then talks about self-creation as being a
matter of poetic choice rather than a moral consideration. Such per-
sonal, or private, morality as remains in play becomes more or less
monotonic: avoid cruelty (although Rorty is acutely sensitive to the
many forms this can take and the corresponding necessity for intri-
cate strategies of avoidance).
Rorty arrives at the same destination as Trilling, but does not
take the same route. Trilling reaches the apotheosis of his extensive
ruminations on the self, which are his considered responses to what
he perceives to be the sociohistorical circumstances of his time and
the foreseeable time to come, using literature as his main guide and
under the imposing shadow of his interpretations of Freud, all the
while working, as he puts it, “in the dark and bloody crossroads where
literature and politics meet” (Trilling 1951, 11). He finds in the works
of poets and novelists different models of the self that themselves
respond to or anticipate those circumstances. In the novels of E. M.
Forster, for example, he discovers a conception of self that is liberal-
minded in the classic political sense and yet acutely aware of its own
deficiencies and blind spots. This conception provides something of
an antidote to the complacency that Trilling detects in the
imaginations of the liberal progressives of his day. When he takes the

sense of selfhood in American society to be suffering from a lack of
gravitas, the kind of weightlessness diagnosed by Nietzsche as one
momentous consequence of secularization, Trilling seeks historical
redress in imperturbable, deeply rooted figures such as Wordsworth’s
Leech-gatherer in his poem ‘Resolution and Independence.’ But, in
the midst of considering a variety of such models, Trilling is always
acutely aware of the costs and the paradoxes involved, looking to
minimize these without hope this can ever be achieved or despair
because it cannot. There is a sense in his writing, almost entirely
absent from Rorty’s, that a severe degree of pessimism regarding
personal being is not just necessary, but something it would be peril-
ous to forfeit. It is necessary because the self, even when gratuitously
chosen, must evolve in culture, and culture always extracts its price.
Trilling’s immense attraction to Freud’s Civilization and Its
Discontents (Freud 2004), especially its thesis about the toll exacted
by instinctual repression, determines this bleak outlook in conjunc-
tion with his own advocacy of moral realism, which involves “aware-
ness not of morality itself, but of the contradictions and dangers of
living the moral life” (Trilling 1943, 11–12).8 The Freud that Trilling
echoes “conceives of the self,” as Philip Rieff rightly tells us, “not as
an abstract entity uniting experience and cognition, but as the subject
of a struggle between two objective forces – unregenerate instincts
and overbearing culture” (Rieff 1979, 28).9 Trilling believes giving up
pessimism is perilous because it answers faithfully to inevitable fea-
tures of life that rightly disturb us, and so should not be ignored. But,
it would be equally perilous if pessimism were to become unneces-
sary. Such features are required for shaping a worthwhile self, one of
significant weight.
The contrast with Rorty’s lack of pessimism in this regard is
important because it helps us to get a fix on how seriously we can
take his utopian aspirations for self-creation and, in the end, his
liberalism. It is tempting to put the contrast down to the historical
gap between Trilling and Rorty. Although they were born only
twenty-six years apart, Trilling’s earlier birth in 1905 at the turn of

the century makes it understandable that the catastrophic events
of his time would lead him to suggest “the activity of the mind
fails before the incommunicability of human suffering” (Trilling
1951, 265). This also means Trilling is closer to an era when it was
more common to admire strong selves unflinchingly, selves
tempered by adversity, pain, and tragedy. So it should not be
surprising that he takes a somber view of the prospect of such
selves disappearing together with any genuine appreciation of the
role of the circumstances that generate them. If we consider that
by the time of Trilling’s death in 1975, it had become less and less
feasible to take such admiration seriously, and even less so such
selves, we might find it perfectly understandable why Rorty
handles self-creation and its moral significance with a lighter
touch. But there is more to it.
Rorty’s contrasting attitude, his altogether lighter touch, is
philosophically motivated, or at least he takes it to be. For Rorty’s
writings are infused with intentions to liberate such that anyone of us
who takes their message on board should feel life’s load has lightened.
And, “anyone,” though it cannot mean “everyone,” is still the right
word here, for the message is not just directed at philosophers.
Trilling’s view, as we said, is that the cultural mutation identi-
fied by Hegel places new burdens on the self, including the tasks of
constructing its own personality, sitting in judgment on the person-
alities of others, and dealing with the judgments passed upon it. And
he argues that Jane Austen displayed an acute understanding of this
not just in Mansfield Park, but in all her novels:
[She] perceived the nature of the deep psychological change which

accompanied the establishment of democratic society – she was
aware of the increase of the psychological burden of the individual,
she understood the new necessity of conscious self-definition and
self-criticism, the need to make private judgments of reality.
(Trilling 1967, 54)10
But Rorty writes as if these difficulties, which Trilling still agonizes

over in his last writings, are largely anachronistic or at least agonizing
about them is. Acts of self-definition and judgments of reality are
simply constitutive of life in modern democratic communities.
Moreover, they can become easier, he believes, if certain constraints
are thrown off. This involves the adoption of vocabularies in which
they play no substantial role. Living then becomes lighter, because
questions that were previously so irksome no longer need to be asked.
In Mirror, Rorty is mainly concerned with the constraining effect of
certain traditional philosophical questions and the questionable
assumptions he believes are generating and feeding them. But, though
he continues to discuss these, he soon realizes that it is not enough
simply to become a philosophical escape artist. He is then concerned
with questions of more general social import, questions of “Cultural
Politics.” Moral questions worth addressing belong in this category.
What makes Rorty’s approach to morality interesting, and
importantly so despite the problem we have identified, is that it
opens up the field of moral reflection by initiating new conversations
and making fresh demands on its resources. These demands recognize
that morality concerns the identities people can create and the socio-
political arrangements they can construct to ensure not only that
such identities are possible, but that the relationships between them
are just. This approach calls for less involvement in the competitive
arena of high-level moral theorizing and more attention to the par-
ticularities of morality in its own right, as it is forged and lived by
selves that can, and should, be encouraged to be more aware of the
opportunities they have to fashion their ways of being in the world.
notes
1 Compare: “When we ceased to agree with Dostoevsky that if God did not
exist, everything would be permitted, we should have put aside the
morality–prudence distinction. We should not have substituted “Reason”
for “God” as the name of a law-giver” (PCP, 187).
2 The relativism is limited for familiar Davidsonian reasons that Rorty

endorses. It is innocuous because it is, as it were, a relativism of relative
differences. There can be no absolute differences specifiable as between
moral practices, because if there were (and this is the Davidsonian line),
the meaning of “moral” could not then span those practices.
3 I leave irony out of the picture, because, as Rorty came to accept, it can
play no useful role in a pragmatist approach to morality, and actually only
adds confusion to his own approach, which, in any case, works better by
reverting to a more traditional fallibilism. For his retraction, see Rorty
2010b.
4 Austen’s novel has been much criticized on political grounds concerning,
for example, her alleged complicity with imperialism. Although there is
no space to comment in any detail on the controversial issues involved,
I am inclined to agree with Frainman’s view that in Edward Said’s
influential (1993) critique of Mansfield Park, its “particular complexity,
including its moral complexity, has been sacrificed.” Indeed, I would go
further and suggest that this view applies to much of the criticism Austen
has generated in this respect (Frainman 1995, 807).
5 Consider also: “The function of literature, through all its mutations, has
been to make us aware of the particularity of selves” (Trilling 1967, 98).
For a comprehensive, but nuanced, account of Trilling’s approach to the
relationships between literature and the self, see Krupnick 1986.
6 “The moral assumption on which Dos Passos seems to work was
expressed by John Dewey some thirty years ago: ‘This is the question
finally at stake in any genuinely moral situation: What shall the agent be?
What sort of character shall he assume?’” (Trilling 2000, 8).
7 The pervasive invasiveness of social media has, for many it seems,
actually increased the burdens on the personality Austen originally
envisaged, a consideration that perhaps makes her insights (and Trilling’s)
more important than ever.
8 This moral realism also has its own distinctively Freudian tinge: in his
introduction to Ernest Jones’s The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, we
find Trilling remarking on how much of Freud’s therapeutic effort is
“directed upon the harm that is done by the extravagant claims of the
moral life” (Trilling 1964, 14).
9 Rieff emphasizes Freud’s belief that human life is inherently cruel and
painful in ways that cannot be avoided, but only at best endured.
Although Rorty was familiar with Rieff’s work on Freud (it is cited at CIS,
36), he ignores the claim that Freud perceived the human situation to be
inescapably tragic. Moreover, Rieff mines subtleties in Freud’s views that
Rorty leaves unexamined. He explains, for example, that on Freud’s
understanding, the instincts cannot be handled smoothly by sociocultural
conditioning as Dewey (and no doubt Rorty) holds, because they are
ambivalently structured and have “their own built-in vicissitudes” (Rieff
1979, 31). Jean Bethke Elshtain also objects that Freud’s pessimism and
sense of tragedy disappear from Rorty’s account (Elshtain 2003, 148).
10 Rorty does reveal a darker side in various writings about recent
developments in modern politics, but, unlike Freud, does not accept that
the relationship between human beings and their civilizing projects could
be inherently problematic.
7 Rorty’s Political Philosophy
Michael Bacon and Alexis Dianda
Rorty’s liberalism is heterodox. It often strays so far from its classical

form that one might wonder why we cluster him together with
thinkers like Locke, Kant, or even more recent liberals like Rawls.
Clarifying the particulars of Rorty’s political philosophy – his particu-
lar liberalism – requires one to enter into a set of debates about
metaphysics, epistemology, and social thought that go beyond liberal-
ism itself, veering into literary criticism, critical theory, and Marxism.
What we lay out here is an attempt to give the broad contours of
Rorty’s philosophical commitments, and how they come together in
what he calls his own “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism.”
To clarify the particulars of Rorty’s liberalism it is helpful to
first consider why he is often placed alongside thinkers such as
Foucault and Derrida as “postmodern.” Though Rorty once
embraced the term, it is one from which he grew increasingly dis-
tant. One reason for this disassociation was that “postmodern”
came to be used in so many different ways that it simply became
unhelpful. Another, perhaps more significant reason, is that
postmodernism is often associated with the wholesale rejection of
the aspirations and legacy of the European Enlightenment. Though
there are affinities between Rorty and many others we tend to call
postmodern, Rorty never abandons the core of the Enlightenment’s
political project. For him, the Enlightenment constitutes the single
most significant philosophical contribution to Western culture. It
earns that status because of its challenge to the respect and obedi-
ence that were once thought to be owed to traditional forms of
authority, such as that of revealed religion. For the philosophers of
the Enlightenment, authority itself demanded vindication through
the exercise of reason.
155
156 michael bacon and alexis dianda
Although committed to some of its central ideals, Rorty argues

that it is important to distinguish between what he regards as the
Enlightenment’s two quite separate projects: the philosophical and
the political. These projects concern two different issues, and carry
separate sets of implications and consequences. The philosophical
project of the Enlightenment is oriented toward the foundations of
liberalism, asking specifically whether liberal institutions are justi-
fied by a source such as natural right or human nature. In contrast,
the political project addresses the desirability of liberal institutions
and their advantages when compared to alternatives. Rorty is adam-
ant that we can and should abandon the Enlightenment’s philosoph-
ical project, and that doing so does not endanger the legitimacy of the
political project. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that by insisting on
the historical specificity of what the tradition has taken to be eternal
problems while also defending contemporary Western values and
institutions, Rorty managed to ruffle the feathers of both traditional-
ists and radicals.
Rorty’s political thought is no exception to his more general
antifoundationalist worldview. As in epistemology, Rorty dismisses
any transcendental philosophy or appeal to foundations, and as such
insists on the divorce of liberalism’s two projects. Liberals of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attempted to ground liberty in
varied accounts of natural right. Locke, for example, appealed to God,
whereas in contrast Kant held that natural right involves a priori
principles of reason. Yet, in both cases, liberal institutions were seen
as resting on philosophical foundations, where authority and govern-
ment are justified insofar as they protect political rights (and, in the
cases of both Locke and Kant, those of private property).
So, while Rorty shares what is often understood as the post-
modern (though we could equally here say pragmatic) suspicion of
transcendence and foundations, he does not take on its skepticism of
the outcomes and institutions associated with classical liberalism.
The contrast can be seen by turning to Rorty’s engagements with
liberalism’s critics. In their The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944),
rorty’s political philosophy 157
Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the challenge the Enlightenment

presented to traditional forms of authority ultimately came to under-
mine the convictions of the Enlightenment itself. As a result of the
quest for emancipation through the exercise of reason, the
Enlightenment showed up the absence of its own foundations by
undercutting notions of rationality and human nature. For
Horkheimer and Adorno, liberalism thus deprived itself both of its
philosophical foundations and its source of social cohesion, leaving it
not only intellectually but also morally bankrupt.
Rorty shares this understanding of Enlightenment philosophy.
However, he rejects the conclusion that Enlightenment liberal insti-
tutions are thereby left without means of defense. He says:
Horkheimer and Adorno assumed that the terms in which those

who begin a historical development described their enterprise
remain the terms which describe it correctly, and then inferred that
the dissolution of that terminology deprives the results of that
development of the right to, or the possibility of, continued
existence. This is almost never the case. (CIS, 56)
Rorty acknowledges the advances heralded by Enlightenment

metaphysics, but thinks that metaphysics is only a halfway measure.
For example, the rhetoric of Locke and Kant retained the religious
need for human projects to be underwritten by a nonhuman author-
ity, but in Rorty’s view it is possible, and important, to go beyond
them, urging contemporary democracies “to throw away some of the
ladders used in their own construction” (CIS, 194).
The connection that Horkheimer and Adorno identify between
the philosophical and the political projects of the Enlightenment may,
Rorty claims, “reflect nothing more than a historical coincidence”
(Rorty 1997a, 36). But his argument does not stop there. He argues that
the perceived need to claim metaphysical or epistemic foundations for
liberal institutions is undesirable because it potentially stands in the
way of securing freedom and equality. Like Dewey, Rorty argues that
while the classical liberals provided an important justification for
freedom and toleration, their approach later came to stand in the way
of necessary social reform. Dewey pointed out that while the change in
social conditions brought about by economic rights benefited some, it
also created new relations of dependence for others. Rorty similarly
argues that the emphasis placed on rights can be seen as conservative,
enshrining the benefits and problems of a particular time and place. He
notes that no less a liberal than Thomas Jefferson affirmed the absolute
truth that all men are endowed with inalienable rights, while also
owning slaves (TP, 167).
In support of the claim that liberal institutions might be
defended while setting aside Enlightenment philosophy, Rorty dis-
cusses those whom he takes to have successfully mounted such a
defense. These theorists can be said to be pragmatists who sought to
justify liberal institutions by drawing on the beliefs and practices of
modern pluralist societies. Writers such as Dewey, Berlin, Oakeshott,
and Rawls are positioned as
the self-cancelling and self-fulfilling triumph of the Enlightenment.

Their pragmatism is antithetical to Enlightenment rationalism,
although it was itself made possible (in good dialectical fashion) only
by that rationalism. It can serve as the vocabulary of a mature (de-
scientized, de-philosophized) Enlightenment liberalism. (CIS, 57)
These liberals, in dispensing with Enlightenment rationalism, are

able to offer a defense of liberal institutions stronger than that of their
liberal forebears.
postmodernist bourgeois liberalism

Rorty locates himself in the canon of liberalism, but what exactly
does his particular form of liberalism amount to? This question can
best be answered by locating his position in the context of a debate to
which he contributed in the 1980s. At that time, the central issue in
Anglo-American political theory was what came to be known as the
liberal–communitarian debate. Prompted in part by the publication of
Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971, philosophers such as Sandel,
Walzer, and MacIntyre criticized liberalism for ignoring the social

contexts within which people live out their lives and commitments.
In different ways, they took issue with the undue emphasis that
liberals seem to them to place on individual rights and their related
failure to attend to the particular circumstances of justice.
In his earliest writings on political theory, Rorty was sympa-
thetic to communitarianism. Rorty’s quasi-Hegelian attempt to
defend liberal institutions and practices without reference to
Kantian notions of an ahistorical rationality was first outlined in
“Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism” (ORT, 197–202). He carves
out his position here in dialogue with Kantian liberals (e.g. Dworkin
and, as he then thought, Rawls) who maintain an ahistorical approach
to moral and political thought so as to secure liberal institutions and
practices, and Hegelians (e.g., Unger, MacIntyre) who want to aban-
don those institutions because they rest upon suspect philosophical
positions. “Postmodernist bourgeois liberalism” is a form of liberal-
ism which is historically contingent through and through, accepting
that liberal institutions and practices are the products of particular
circumstances and that loyalty to them rests on nothing firmer than
those contingencies.
Although Rorty came to regret associating himself with
postmodernism, he never departed from his understanding of
liberalism as historically contingent. He did, however, refine his
understanding of both the communitarians and Rawls. In “The
Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” he presents communitarians
such as Sandel as maintaining “that liberal institutions and culture
either should not or cannot survive the collapse of the philosophical
justification that the Enlightenment provided for them” (ORT, 177).
As in his response to Horkheimer and Adorno, Rorty contests the
claim that liberalism stands or falls with the philosophical justifi-
cations that have been provided for it, arguing that there is no sense
“in which liberal democracy ‘needs’ philosophical justification at
all.” Although liberalism may “need philosophical articulation, it
does not need philosophical backup” (ORT, 178).
In “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy,” Rorty takes the

position he outlines to be consistent with that of Rawls.1 The claim
that liberal democracy does not require “philosophical backup” has,
however, been criticized by those who think that if we adopt Rorty’s
approach, nothing can be said to defend liberalism against its critics.
(e.g. Mulhall and Swift 1992, chapter 8). Yet this is to conflate two
different claims. According to Rorty, there is no justification of liber-
alism that will necessarily persuade every rational person, but this is
not to claim that there is nothing to be said at all. He writes, “I do not
know how to ‘justify’ or ‘defend’ social democracy . . . in a large
philosophical way (as opposed to going over the nitty-gritty advan-
tages and disadvantages of the alternatives [critics of liberalism] pro-
pose)” (Rorty 1987, 577–8). Although a philosophical justification is
unavailable, one can seek to justify liberalism by arguing for its
concrete advantages. He suggests that the best way to do so is through
invidious comparison: “the justification of liberal society [is]
simply . . . a matter of historical comparisons with other attempts at
social organization – those of the past and those envisaged by uto-
pians” (CIS, 53).
The claim that liberalism does not need (and could not have)
philosophical justification and legitimation resonates with Rorty’s
approach to all of our deepest convictions, be they metaphysical,
epistemological, moral, or political. This claim has been a source of
contention across the scope of his work, and has led him to defend a
number of positions that, on the surface, seem to run counter to his
own liberalism. So, for example, in his Tanner Lecture, he urges
feminists to “consider the possibility of dropping the notion that
the subordination of women is intrinsically abominable, dropping
the claim that there is something called ‘right’ or ‘justice’ or ‘human-
ity’ which has always been on their side, making their claims true”
(TP, 210, emphasis in original).
So the question arises, how then do we critique practices that
strike us as unjust without appeal to the universal, the intrinsic, or
the morally real? Rorty’s response to the pragmatic feminist aligns
well with his response to the antimetaphysical liberal, and turns on

the difference between the following types of statements:
(1) It is intrinsically wrong that women are oppressed;

(2) We ought to overcome oppression.
The first statement is descriptive, which, when we interpret it in the

language of philosophy, makes a claim about the nature of truth and
reality: it is objectively true that women should not be oppressed.
Rorty’s concern here is that such claims, when articulated within a
theoretical discourse, put us on the terrain of moral realism and
metaphysically infused politics. The second, however, is a call to
action that hinges on solidarity. I assert a goal that makes no claim
to the way the world is: I make an appeal to my fellow citizens,
workers, and human beings. I do not appeal to God, truth, reality as
it is in itself, or a normative standard that exists independently of the
practices of the community. The force of the “ought” comes from an
appeal to shared desires, goals, or practices. What resists the norma-
tive standard is not a recalcitrant truth but a conflicting set of desires,
aims, or goals. If liberals or feminists take Rorty’s claims seriously,
the conversation changes. For those enmeshed in the language of the
universal, we are back in the discussions of the seventeenth century,
trying to parse the origin of dignity, rights, and so on. However, if we
go with the postmodernists or the pragmatists, the conversation
becomes one of how best to achieve our goal, which practices hinder
emancipation and which constitute oppression, and so on. In this
case, any appeal to the intrinsic justice of a position, the universality
of a value, and so on become a convenient shorthand. As Rorty notes,
“Although practical politics will doubtless often require feminists to
speak with the universalist vulgar, I think they might profit from
thinking with the pragmatists” (TP, 210).
the ideally liberal society

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity presents Rorty’s most sustained
thoughts on political theory. In it Rorty sketches what he calls “the
ideally liberal society,” a society in which liberal institutions are seen

as the product of historical contingencies that do not have (nor do
they stand in need of ) anything like a philosophical justification.
Rorty’s argument presupposes the account of language and
knowledge presented in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature but is
of wider compass, drawing freely on philosophical, theoretical,
and literary works. Bringing together figures such as Nietzsche,
Davidson, Freud, Orwell, Nabokov, and Proust, Rorty argues that
there is no need to try to weave together one’s private passions (e.g.,
self-creation, wild orchids, bird-watching) with one’s social responsi-
bilities and political commitments (e.g., supporting one’s union, pol-
itical activism). Earlier we saw Rorty take up the question, “How do
you undermine the foundations of Western thought while also
defending its central values?” Another way to phrase this question,
one that comes to the fore in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, is
“How do you reconcile the supposed tension between your private
commitments to self-creation with your commitments to fellow
human beings, a love of, say, Nabokov and Orwell, poetry and just-
ice?” Rorty will say that you can have both once you accept that
values, private passions, or liberal institutions do not require the
traditional forms of justification. His historicism aims at undermin-
ing the desire for synthesis – for a grand theory that would bring
together one’s private passions and hopes with one’s public commit-
ments – while preserving the virtues of both. The ideally liberal
society provides a framework within which individuals are treated
equally in certain respects but leaves them be to pursue ends consist-
ent with the enjoyment of those freedoms by others, many of whom
will have different views of the good. As Rorty puts it, “J. S. Mill’s
suggestion that governments devote themselves to optimizing the
balance between leaving people’s private lives alone and preventing
suffering seems to me pretty much the last word” (CIS, 63).
The ideally liberal society is one in which citizens are free to
create a life for themselves. Rorty is careful, however, to distinguish
the kind of autonomy the ideally liberal society frees its citizens to
pursue from the autonomy proposed by Kant and the liberal tradition
that follows him. For Kant, autonomy is a matter of self-legislation in
which one’s choices are made by reason and not influenced by
experience. In contrast, the sense of the term Rorty has in mind is a
matter of embracing contingency – in particular, of seeing one’s self
and those things that are central to one’s identity as the result of such
contingencies, and re-creating them by redescription.
Like many other liberals, Rorty conceives of freedom primarily
in terms of what Berlin calls negative liberty, a matter of the absence
of interference by other people on one’s actions. Viewing freedom this
way, Rorty departs from Dewey’s political thought. Dewey was a
proponent of greater citizen participation in democracy, arguing that
an active community life is a prerequisite for individual freedom.
In contrast, Rorty expresses no attraction to a life of civic participa-
tion and distances himself from Dewey’s defense of participatory
democracy (AOC, 104). He also rejects the suggestion, made by
Misak, Westbrook, and others, that Dewey’s epistemology can be
worked up into an account of deliberative democracy (Rorty 2007,
918). Although he sometimes describes himself as a Deweyan, Rorty
nowhere attends to the details of Dewey’s political writings, and he
looks to other philosophers to exemplify what he has in mind when
he speaks of freedom. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, the most
significant such philosopher is Nietzsche. Nietzsche is held to be a
philosopher of self-creation who identified the importance of appro-
priating and redescribing the past rather than accepting inherited
descriptions. As Rorty writes, “To create one’s mind is to create one’s
own language, rather than to let the length of one’s mind be set by the
language other human beings have left behind” (CIS, 27).
This account of self-creation is fleshed out by appeal to Freud’s
distinction between the ascetic and the aesthetic life. The ascetic life
is a matter of purity, characterized by the attempt to purge from
oneself all that is accidental and contingent in order to achieve a
keener awareness of one’s “true self.” In contrast, the aesthetic life
is marked not by purity but self-enlargement, by “the development of
richer, fuller ways of formulating one’s desires and hopes, and thus
making those desires and hopes themselves – and thereby oneself –
richer and fuller” (EHO, 154). In place of the ascetic pursuit of the
true self, the aesthete creates narratives within which she tells the
story of her life. Rorty identifies the aims of what he calls self-
creation with the aesthetic life, emphasizing that such a life ultim-
ately depends on what it has inherited from the narratives that have
come before it. Rather than seeing the autonomous person as
inventing a world for herself ex nihilo, she should be seen as drawing
on and redescribing what has gone on before. On this point, Rorty
takes himself to depart from Nietzsche. There “can be no fully
Nietzschean lives, lives which are pure action rather than reaction –
no lives which are not largely parasitical on an un-redescribed past
and depending on the charity of as yet unborn generations” (CIS, 42).
The importance accorded by Rorty to self-creation through
redescription is central to his claim that the citizens of the ideally
liberal society will be “ironists.” Ironists place self-creation at the
heart of their identity by standing in a specific relation to their “final
vocabulary.” Such a vocabulary is called “final” because the words of
which it consists – “good,” “right,” “just,” “beautiful” – cannot be
backed up by a noncircular argument. If the use of those words is
questioned, the only response is to appeal to other beliefs whose
justification depends at least partly on the belief in question. Rather
than seeking to purify herself from doubt, to secure her beliefs by
something not itself a belief, the ironist grasps and embraces the
inescapability of contingency. And, because of this embrace of con-
tingency, the ironist’s final vocabulary is fallible. She undertakes self-
creation though redescription, recognizing that there is no way to
move beyond such description to reality as it is in itself.
Rortyan irony is sometimes held to preclude any committed
engagement with social issues, because it encourages an attitude of
detachment (e.g. MacIntyre 1999, 151–3). Others question whether or
not one who has doubts about their own final vocabulary (which
contains words like “just” and “unjust”) could carry the weight
necessary for conviction. Could one, for example, die for a belief or a
claim of justice about which one has radical doubts? In Rorty’s view,
however, the recognition of contingency need have no deleterious
consequences for conviction. For, if there is no such thing as a belief
or conviction that swings free of contingency, recognizing its absence
does not alter the strength of one’s convictions. The ironist is, simply,
not bothered by the absence of a secure foundation for her belief. The
ironist does not believe her vocabulary to lay bare truth or reality, but
this does not entail that that her belief is less worthy or capable of
motivating action. The contest between beliefs, the clash of final
vocabularies, must be played out practically (answering questions
such as “Whose belief affords more of what we want and less of what
we don’t?”), not theoretically.
Self-creation is one of the aims of the ideal liberal society. The
second yet no less crucial aim concerns one’s responsibilities to one’s
fellow citizens. Rorty captures this relation of responsibility with
reference to a suggestion made by Shklar, who defines liberals as
people for whom “cruelty is the worst thing we do” (CIS, xv). Rorty
takes up Shklar’s distinction between sin and cruelty by presenting
liberals as people who take their duties to be owed exclusively to their
fellow human beings.
In itself, the injunction to avoid cruelty tells us nothing about
what cruelty might be or how it is to be avoided. Some have pressed
Rorty to provide a definition of cruelty, but such a request seems to
miss his point. To specify cruelty’s necessary and sufficient conditions
implies that we might give a definitive account of what is and is not
cruel, but Rorty’s claim is that we will never be in that position.
Moreover, surety of such a conviction as “This is what counts as
cruel,” seems to desensitize us to new possibilities, new revisions of
how we understand cruelty that we may have been completely
unaware of. Rorty’s argument here recalls Dewey, who worried that
rights might enshrine new forms of injustice. In a comment about the
injustice and cruelty inflicted on sexual minorities, Rorty writes: “dis-
cussion of which rights exist and which do not, seems to me a
philosophical blind alley, a pointless importation of legal discourse

into politics, and a distraction from what is really needed in this case:
an attempt by the straights to put themselves in the shoes of the gays”
(Rorty 1996c, 15–16). Liberal societies need to be constantly reminded
of the ways in which the current arrangement of rights may be pur-
chased at the expense of other’s rights, how current definitions of
cruelty may in fact blind us to real (and avoidable) pain and suffering.
Rorty thinks that philosophers such as Mill and Rawls have a
role to play in alerting us to cruelty, but that more useful are those
who sensitize us to the details of particular forms of suffering. These
he calls “the specialists in particularity – historians, novelists, eth-
nographers, and muckraking journalists” (ORT, 207). Such people
bring into focus the details of particular lives. Novelists are especially
helpful in this regard. We see this quite clearly in Rorty’s appeal to
Nabokov and his creation of Humbert, that “monster of incuriosity.”
A novel such as Lolita “contribut[es] to our knowledge of human
possibilities” (CIS, 161) by confronting us with subtle and powerful
illustrations of forms of cruelty, inattention, and suffering that we
may not have had language to describe or the sensitivity to notice.
Writers such as Nabokov and Dickens provide details of forms of
cruelty (committed either by individuals or by institutions) that we
had not previously considered, of cruelty inflicted on people with
whom we may not have concerned ourselves.
The need for such a reminder is further evidenced in Rorty’s view
of Mill. Although Rorty thinks that the attempt to balance private
interests and passions with social responsibilities constitutes the last
word conceptually in political theory, he also thinks that the nature of
that balance will vary according to circumstance. Thus, for example, he
takes Rawls to have added to Mill the claim that the exercise of freedom
requires significant levels of economic redistribution.
Rorty has been challenged on a number of fronts for his insist-
ence on what he calls a “firm distinction” between the public and the
private (CIS, 83). This “firm distinction” has, for example, been taken
to ignore many of the better and necessary points made by feminist
critics; one can think here of the claim that “the personal is the
political” (e.g. Fraser 1991). It should be noted, however, that Rorty
is not insisting on a categorical division between the private and the
public, such that what happens behind closed doors is not open to
public scrutiny or helped or hindered by political forces. His point
could be refined to say that when we consider the public and the
private, one is often irrelevant for the other. At the same time,
however, he recognizes that this is not always so, and allows that
there is a role for ironic redescription in public life:
As I am a liberal, the part of my final vocabulary which is relevant

to [public] actions requires me to become aware of all the various
ways in which other human beings whom I might act upon can be
humiliated. So the liberal ironist needs as much imaginative
acquaintance with alternative final vocabularies as possible, not
just for her own edification, but in order to understand the actual
and possible humiliation of the people who use these alternative
final vocabularies. (CIS, 91–2)
By way of illustration, Rorty claims that, after women gained the right
to vote, the Left forgot to attend to the ways in which women con-
tinued to suffer prejudice. To overcome this prejudice, society needed
to be redescribed so that “the male–female distinction is no longer of
much interest” (TP, 227). Accordingly, he applauds feminists for
having exposed hitherto unrecognized instances of cruelty and thus
expanding the frontiers of our imaginations and moral world.
from self-creation to prophecy

What Rorty calls the ideally liberal society is one in which we “no
longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity,
where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our com-
munity – as a product of time and chance” (CIS, 22, emphasis in
original). By setting aside nonhuman authorities, he hopes that we
will come to see that there are only two responsibilities which ought
to be acknowledged: the responsibilities to ourselves and those to
other human beings. However, Rorty is less attentive to the ways in

which human authorities might themselves limit the capacity for
redescription. It has seemed to a number of commentators that
Rorty fails to see that, even in democratic societies, conversations
are marked by injustices. Some of these take him to be offering no
more than an apology for the institutions and practices of contempor-
ary liberal society.2
However, Rorty’s ideally liberal society is just that – an ideal
that he nowhere identifies with actually existing conditions. While
he writes in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that Western thought
and culture require no further “conceptual revolution,” (CIS, 63,
emphasis in original) he also thinks that liberal societies need con-
stant reminders of the ways in which the arrangement of rights
impact negatively upon many of its members. Theorists such as
Mill and Rawls have provided descriptions of the ideal liberal society,
but those descriptions will inevitably need to be supplemented and
expanded upon in response to new events and circumstances.
The question, though, is how such reform might be effected,
and here other commentators have been more insightful about the
limitations of Rorty’s position in Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity. According to Hartsock, “Rorty ignores power relations:
We are not all in a position to participate as equals in conversation.
Many of us have not yet had a chance to name ourselves and our
situations” (Hartsock 1998, 213). Connolly argues that it is a mis-
take to think that self-creation is a private activity, for the reason
that one’s identity is not something one chooses but is rather bound
up with how one is recognized by others. Connolly refers to what he
calls “branded contingencies,” descriptions that, while contingent,
resist modification once they have been established. He writes:
“If you live in a time when homosexuality is treated as funda-
mentally constitutive of the self and the homosexual is defined as
either sick or morally deficient, then your sexual identity will be
impressed upon you through a set of contingent, institutionalized
conventions. It is unlikely that you will escape fully the imprint of
these conventions upon your soul, even as you strive to struggle

against them” (Connolly 1991, 175, emphasis in original).
We have seen that Rorty defines liberals as those who hold that
cruelty is the worst thing we do, and that the category of cruelty is
deliberately left open to allow for the inclusion of beliefs and practices
that have not been described as such. However, this raises the import-
ant question of why so little is done to address forms of cruelty that are
already very clear. It has been argued that Rorty is simply blind to the
social and economic structures within which such blindness exists and
which must be examined if they are to be understood and addressed.
The heroes of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity are the
“strong poet” and the “utopian revolutionary,” and the public role
these figures play is, as we have seen, to help sensitize the rest of us to
the details of particular forms of suffering (CIS, 60). The problem,
though, is that Rorty often presents innovation and reform to be the
exclusive preserve of individual aesthetes, and is silent about the role
that social movements might play. Commenting on Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity and other essays from the 1980s, Fraser points
out that “There is no place in Rorty’s framework for political motiv-
ations for the invention of new idioms, no place for idioms invented
to overcome the enforced silencing or muting of disadvantaged social
groups” (Fraser 1990, 316, emphasis in original).
While Fraser is certainly correct to point to the lack of attention
paid to social and political forces and motivations, one could amend
Rorty’s thought quite seamlessly. Ramberg, for example, has done just
that with the figure he calls “Radical Rorty.” Radical Rorty agrees with
Rorty that the idea of moral and political progress can be retained
without support from supposedly transcendental accounts of truth
and reason, and also shares his view of the contingency of self and
language. However, Radical Rorty “takes the view that thick,
sensibility-enhancing reportage that cuts into our organs of empathy
is, in the context conflicting interests and opaque forces, quite pointless
without accounts of structures and mechanisms to empower our bleed-
ing hearts” (Ramberg 1993, 244). In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity,
Rorty does not provide such an account, and indeed is critical of the
kind of theorizing that claims to do so. However, Ramberg counters
that, conceptually, there is nothing in Rorty’s position that would
preclude such theorizing. And, further, that Rorty’s own understanding
of moral progress commits him to it, as evidenced by the fact that
moral progress of the kind he describes and supports is a matter of
extending rights and freedoms to groups (for example, women and
African Americans) rather than to individuals. Throughout his life,
Rorty was skeptical of theorizing structures; as we will examine below,
he objects to those who prefer “talking about ‘the system’ rather than
about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices”
(AOC, 103). Ramberg, however, argues that it is equally a mistake to
focus on the particular without relating this to the structures in which
they exist and play out. As he puts it, “to be sensitized is to be
sensitized to patterns, likenesses and differences with respect to which
one was once deaf; it is to come to recognize and evaluate situation
types in new ways” (Ramberg 1993, 243).
Fraser identifies a significant omission from Contingency, Irony,
and Solidarity and other writings from the 1980s, but Ramberg shows
that there is nothing in Rorty’s position which precludes attending to it.
And, in subsequent writing, Rorty amends his position to address the
concern with structural issues to which Ramberg and Fraser alert us.
This change in Rorty’s position can be seen in “Feminism and
Pragmatism” (1991). That paper, in part, reiterates the antirepresenta-
tionalist account of knowledge presented in Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity. With reference to MacKinnon, Rorty argues that pragmatism
might play a role in helping to realize the conditions in which women
might participate fully in the conversation of democratic society by
challenging the assumption that current ideas and social practices are
natural, and in so doing provide space for redescription.
“Feminism and Pragmatism” represents a shift in Rorty’s view
of the agents of moral progress and of how the ideally liberal society
might be realized. Rorty’s insistence on the importance of redescrip-
tion and linguistic innovation remains, but these come to be viewed
socially and politically, with feminists described and applauded for

creating themselves by struggling against dominant structures. And,
in so doing, Rorty argues that their descriptions should be viewed not
as separate to political life, but central to it. By offering descriptions of
themselves, Rorty takes writers such as MacKinnon, Frye, and Rich
to have also offered redescriptions of the world – not only of their
private lives but the public world of which they are a part. Rorty’s
later position recognizes Hartsock’s claim that many people haven’t
yet had the opportunity to name themselves and their situation. He
can also accept that the demand for inclusion made by excluded and
marginalized groups is not that they be included in the terms of the
established order, for they challenge the legitimacy of that order and
urge that it be changed. For this reason, the “firm distinction” that
Rorty drew in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity between the public
and the private, and associated distinctions between the individual
and the collective and the political and the aesthetic, can be seen to
have been set aside in his work from the early 1990s.
achieving freedom and equality

In Achieving Our Country (1998) and a number of related of essays,
interviews, and newspaper articles published around that time, Rorty
argues that social justice consists of two elements: economic equality
and fair treatment, the former captured more or less in Rawls’s “dif-
ference principle,” the latter a matter of extending freedom and
opportunity to everyone irrespective of gender, race, and sexuality.
He takes both to be the traditional goals of what is sometimes called
“the Old Left.” This is the Left that, at its best,
assumed that creating a decent and civilized society was in part a

matter of redistributing money and opportunity, and in part a
matter of erasing stigma by eliminating prejudice. These two
efforts were assumed to go hand in hand. No theoretical problems
arose as to how to integrate the two, though many practical
problems did. (Rorty 2000d, 9)
In this context, let us turn to Rorty’s view of contemporary

politics, and in particular to calls for the recognition of cultural
identity. For the Old Left, “recognition” meant the goal of recogniz-
ing members of groups who suffer discrimination and prejudice as
fellow human beings. It held that creating a more just society meant
focusing on our common humanity, a commonality that required
extending freedom and rights to all. Along with many academic and
journalistic commentators, Rorty identifies the Sixties as marking a
significant change of emphasis in the Left. The New Left (or, as he
sometimes calls it, the “cultural Left”) came to the view that it is
insufficient to focus on the economy and prejudice, because that does
not account for injustices that could not properly be attributed to
either. For the New Left, social justice required recognizing the dis-
tinctiveness of the culture of members of oppressed groups.
Rorty describes the ideals of the Old Left as having been com-
mitted to empowering marginalized groups so that they might par-
ticipate fully as equals in society. He holds up the Civil Rights
movement and its achievements as expressions of this commitment,
and we can infer that had he lived to see it, he would have been
supportive of movements such as Black Lives Matter and the resur-
gent feminism of movements such as the current wave of women’s
rights movements (e.g., MeToo, the International Women’s Strike,
etc.). He takes such movements to respond to stigmatization and
cruelty that is a result of being picked out by some feature, such as
one’s skin color or gender expression, and being humiliated and
discriminated against on the basis of it. For example, according to
Rorty, King’s legacy is rooted in antipoverty, the antiwar movement,
and in the political enfranchisement of African Americans. It is not
found on appeals to “culture” (Nystrom and Puckett 1998, 32).
As Rorty sees it, the New Left has a very different conception of
recognition, a difference that emerges once again in conversation
with Fraser. They agree that it is desirable for feminists to give up
on universalism and realism and that their task is not to discover
preexisting identities and sensibilities but to create new ones;
however, Fraser argues that Rorty fails to follow up on the implica-

tions of these insights. Fraser’s key point is that he focuses exclu-
sively on economics, something which she claims is inadequate. To
illustrate why, Fraser cites instances of injustice such as marriage
laws which exclude same-sex partnerships, welfare policies which
target single mothers, and racial profiling. “By no means simple by-
products of political economy, such instances of misrecognition
cannot redressed by a politics of redistribution alone” (Fraser 2000,
24). Addressing them requires, Fraser argues, focusing not on our
common humanity but rather acknowledging distinct group identity,
for example, “that persons who can give birth have as much legitim-
acy in the workplace as those who cannot” (Fraser 2000, 26). What
Fraser calls the “status model of recognition” aims to overcome the
subordinate status imposed on women and non-whites and enhance
their abilities to participate fully as citizens. Only in so doing can the
parity of participation that she and Rorty take to be central to a just
society be achieved.
Rorty goes some way with Fraser. He acknowledges that the
New Left has had “extraordinary success” in reducing socially
acceptable forms of sadism and cruelty (AOC, 80). But he raises
two sets of concerns with its approach. The first is that it is mis-
taken in thinking that reducing such cruelty requires anything other
than securing the goals of the Old Left. Here it should be noted that
Rorty does not focus exclusively on economic redistribution. As
mentioned above, he speaks of the need for the redistribution of
“money and opportunity,” something which entails the redistribu-
tion of legal rights, one instance of which is, to use Fraser’s example,
setting aside the assumption that women are less suited to enter the
labor market than men. Fraser is correct that Rorty sees economics
as the key element in achieving social justice, but mistaken to infer
that he takes others, such as securing legal rights, as separate to this
and as unimportant.
However, one could still note that Rorty’s emphasis on the
economic coupled with his skepticism concerning the New Left’s
emphasis on identity and culture might prevent him from coming

to terms with some of the features of identity-based injustice that
saturate our political landscape. Fraser’s recent dialogue with
Dawson, for instance, has brought more attention to the ways in
which the economic injustices of capitalism has always been
entangled with racial oppression (from slave-based plantation cap-
italism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through to Jim
Crow industrialization in the twentieth century, to the deindus-
trializing, mass-incarceration, and subprime capitalism of the pre-
sent) and gender oppression (violence, unwaged labor that is
overwhelmingly performed by women and feminized subjects)
(Dawson 2016; Fraser 2016).
The second objection Rorty makes to the New Left and what
we now might more familiarly call “identity politics” is practical,
concerning how social justice might be achieved. Fraser writes that
“[a]t its best, the feminist counterpublic is a space where ‘semantic
authority’ is constructed collectively, critically, and democratically,
rather than imposed via prophetic pronouncements from mountain-
tops” (Fraser 1991, 266). Rorty’s view is that a change in social
attitudes typically follows from the latter rather than the former.
He makes this point in a review of Richard Posner’s book Law,
Pragmatism, and Democracy (2003). Commenting on the Brown
v. Board of Education ruling, Posner argues that it was appropriate
because it was reached after segregation had come to be seen as “a
proven failure,” and that accordingly the court rightly ruled that
“separate but equal” was unconstitutional. Rorty interprets the case
differently: “This is not how I remember the United States at the time
of the Brown decision . . . ‘Separate but equal’ was not ‘a proven
failure.’ It was just a lie – a lie that had long been exposed” (Rorty
2003c, 101). In his view, it was a lie that had to be corrected not
though achieving a democratic consensus but by what Fraser refers to
pejoratively as “prophetic pronouncements.” Progressive social
movements do not seek to reflect changes in attitudes but cause
them. Rorty suggests that we should
think of Martin Luther King, Betty Friedan, and the leaders of the
gay rights movement as helping to create, rather than as detecting,
a changed environment. They changed it by telling us,
singlemindedly and passionately, how human lives were being
needlessly damaged by cruel institutions. They incited social hope
by proposing programs of action, and by prophesying a
better future. (Rorty 2007, 924)
In Achieving Our Country, Rorty acknowledges the success of

the New Left in reducing instances of cruelty and sadism directed at
marginalized groups, but argues that what he takes to be a mistaken
focus on cultural identity has led to a neglect of the socioeconomic
circumstances in which such cruelty and sadism arise and are per-
petuated. But while in his view the achievements of the Old Left are
much clearer and more significant, he recognizes that they too were
limited, and that today we are faced with problems that the Left did
not anticipate, problems about which they had nothing to say:
[A] problem Dewey and [Herbert] Croly never envisaged has taken
its place, and measures which might cope with this new problem
have hardly even been sketched. The problem is that the wage
levels, and the social benefits enjoyed by workers in Europe, Japan,
and North America no longer bear any relation to the newly fluid
global labor market. (AOC, 84–5)
One writer who did envisage such problems, and who offered
explanations of the economic and political phenomena Rorty is con-
cerned with, is Marx. Rorty’s affinity with some elements of Marxism
is clear, and are summed up when he writes that “the Marxists were
absolutely right about one thing: the soul of history is economic”
(PSH, 227, emphasis in original). Yet references to Marx and Marxism
in his work are for the most part negative and dismissive. There are
two reasons for this. One is his skepticism of “metanarratives” and
philosophies such as Marx’s, which take history to have a teleological
structure. The second reason is that Rorty grew up during the Cold
War in the context of the horrors perpetrated by twentieth-century

Marxist regimes. However, one can agree to the historical point about
communism in the twentieth century and still retain what is useful
in Marx, much in the way that Rorty retains what is useful in Locke
and Kant while setting aside what is wrong, unhelpful, or dangerous.3
Put otherwise, one could recognize that there is, as Rorty claims, no
interesting difference between Stalin and Hitler without thinking
that this imputes Marx’s position.
Notwithstanding his objections to Marx’s philosophy of history
and the evils committed by regimes which bore his name, Rorty shares
his basic insight: class struggle is the engine of history and historical
change. Rorty makes the point when he writes that “As Karl Marx
pointed out, the history of the modern age is the history of class
warfare, and in America today, it is a war in which the rich are
winning, the poor are losing, and the left, for the most part, is standing
by” (Rorty 1996c, 15). In this light, it can be noted that Rorty would
agree with Marx’s second Thesis on Feuerbach: “The dispute over the
nature of reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice
is a purely scholastic question.”4 Rorty, like Marx, has little interest in
such disputes, thinking that any contribution which might be made to
them is likely to make little if any difference to practice. In political
questions, he argues that what is needed is an explanation of our
situation, of the causes of persistent and deepening inequality, which
if provided might have practical consequences for how they might be
addressed. In a paper discussing the role of philosophy, Rorty writes:
Just insofar as we take time seriously, we philosophers have to give

up the priority of contemplation over action. We have to agree with
Marx that our job is to help make the future different from the past,
rather than claiming to know what the future must necessarily
have in common with the past. We have to shift from the kind of
role that philosophers have shared with priests and sages to a social
role that has more in common with the engineer or the lawyer.
(Rorty 1995c, 198)
Accordingly, we can see why Rorty was critical of Rawls when he is

taken to be a Kantian, and why he became more sympathetic when
Rawls is understood to be offering a description of and recommenda-
tions for our particular circumstances.
Rorty dismisses a number of central features of both liberalism
and Marxism, making a classification of his politics more difficult
than it might initially seem. And yet, whether he is invoking the
memories of Stalin’s gulags, the bloody history of appeals to natural
right, or the suffering of the workers in a market-driven culture,
Rorty’s political thought remains focused on two features: the free-
dom, leisure, and economic security required to create ourselves; and
the injustice that arises when one person’s freedom, leisure, security,
or wealth is purchased at the expense of another’s. Taking a cue from
Rorty, perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much about where our self-
descriptions come from. Whether we call ourselves liberals,
Christians, pragmatists, socialists, or Marxists, what matters is that
we have the same goals, the same hopes for our future.
notes
1 In a comment from 1990, Shapiro writes: “Illuminating as this account is
about Rorty’s views, it is not remotely plausible as a reading of Rawls,
early or late” (Shapiro 1990, 29). To support his claim, Shapiro notes that
Rawls presents elements of his account in A Theory of Justice in Kantian
terms, e.g. that the two principles of justice are “procedural expressions of
the categorical imperative.” However, this is merely to take over Rawls’s
presentation without examining how far his rhetoric is consistent with
the substance of his position.
2 See for example Bernstein 1987, 541; Shapiro 1990, 40; Mouffe 2006, 10.
3 Rorty is given to what, borrowing Harold Bloom’s term, he calls “strong
misreading.” In the case of Dewey, Rorty is clear that he has no interest in
being faithful to his texts but rather in separating what is living from what
is dead in them. In the case of Hegel, Rorty takes writers such as
Brandom, Pippin, and Pinkard to have successfully demonstrated how one
might reject Hegel’s absolute idealism and teleological theory of history
and yet take oneself to be a Hegelian.
4 Rorty also agrees with Marx that criticizing theoretical ideas for their lack
of coherence is pointless, for the reason it has little payoff for political
change. He points out that overcoming apparent inconsistencies is not
difficult: “For coherence is a matter of avoiding contradictions, and St.
Thomas’s advice, ‘When you meet a contradiction, make a distinction,’
makes that pretty easy” (PSH, 10).
8 Tinkering with Truth,
Tinkering with Difference:
Rorty and (Liberal) Feminism
Susan Dieleman
introduction: rorty’s liberal “we”

As a feminist, I have regularly found myself in the position of having
to defend to fellow feminist philosophers my tendency to see in
Richard Rorty an ally. Yet different feminist philosophers are likely
to cite different reasons for seeing in Rorty less of an ally and more of
an impediment to feminist progress. Some, like Sonia Kruks, think
his linguistic version of pragmatism, relying as it (supposedly) does on
an expulsion of experience, narrows the resources available to
feminism as a liberatory project. Others, like Susan Bickford, distance
themselves from Rorty’s project because of its reliance on a (sup-
posedly strict) delineation between public and private. Still others,
like Dorothy Leland, find it problematic that Rorty endorses a
liberalism that (again, supposedly) maintains an unjust status quo.
And some feminists, like Charlene Haddock Siegfried, point to each
of these as a reason for avoiding Rorty as much as is possible. In
amongst these various reasons feminists have for dismissing or criti-
cizing Rorty’s work as useful for feminism, one regularly finds
expressed a concern about Rorty’s ubiquitous use of the term “we.”
Several commentators – feminists among them – cite Rorty’s pre-
sumption that there is a “we” about which or for whom he can
meaningfully speak as a reason for their hesitance, or outright refusal,
to take Rorty’s views seriously. This worry about Rorty’s “we” is
similar and related to frequently expressed worries about his
unabashed “ethnocentrism,” but I think the motivation for the con-
cern lies elsewhere. Many who criticize Rorty’s ethnocentrism
179
180 susan dieleman
consider it a slippery slope to a relativism they would rather avoid.

However, feminists and other leftist critics who are concerned about
Rorty’s “we-saying” are motivated by a different (albeit related)
worry. They worry specifically about who gets counted as part of this
“we” and who does not.
There are a variety of “we’s” scattered throughout Rorty’s
work. At times, he invokes “we” to identify the group of philosophers
with whom he identifies, namely, pragmatists. But more regularly, he
invokes “we” to identify the inheritors of the Enlightenment project.
That is, the “we” he most often refers to is those of us living in (and
particularly those of us enjoying the benefits of ) Western liberal
democracies. For example, this “we” is adopted and defended by
Rorty in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) where, in the final
chapter, he writes, “We should stay on the lookout for marginalized
people – people whom we still instinctively think of as ‘they’ rather
than ‘us’. We should try to notice our similarities with them” (CIS,
196). He continues by explaining that the term “we” should be given
“as concrete and historically specific a sense as possible: It will mean
something like ‘we twentieth-century liberals’ or ‘we heirs to the
historical contingencies which have created more and more cosmo-
politan, more and more democratic political institutions’” (CIS, 196).
This is the “we” that feminist and other leftist critics have
worries about. Especially worrisome, they think, is Rorty’s idea that
social progress occurs when more and more of “them” join and are
considered part of “we.” Richard J. Bernstein, for example, writes,
“Rorty frequently speaks of ‘we’ – ‘we liberals,’ ‘we pragmatists,’ ‘we
inheritors of European civilization.’ But who precisely constitutes
this ‘we’? Sometimes it seems as if what Rorty means by ‘we’ are
‘all those who agree with me’” (Bernstein 1987, 553–4). Nancy Fraser
contends that Rorty’s political vision is of a homogenized social
space, where solidarity represents the “communitarian comfort of a
single ‘we’” (Fraser 1989, 104). He problematically assumes, Fraser
thinks, that “there are no deep social cleavages capable of generating
conflicting solidarities and opposing ‘we’s’” (Fraser 1989, 104).
tinkering with truth and with difference 181
Christopher Voparil lays out the content of some of these concerns

when he notes that Rorty’s “otherwise attractive perspective” is
limited by the fact that he never really stops to consider why it would
be best for others to join the conversation of the Western liberal
democracies, rather than the other way around: “Rorty’s political
vision of a global liberal utopia seeks to subsume everyone under a
grand ‘we’” (Voparil 2011b, 125).1
In his introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991),
Rorty responds to these sorts of criticisms by tackling the “we” ques-
tion directly, suggesting that such leftist critics fail to recognize that
they are themselves part of the “we” of which he speaks. He writes,
“when I say ethnocentric things like ‘our culture’ or ‘we liberals,’ their
[critics on the left] reaction is ‘who, we?’ I, however, find it hard to see
them as outsiders to this culture; they look to me like people playing a
role – an important role – within it” (ORT, 15).
Why does Rorty think that even critics of liberalism are liberals
after all, and thus are to be counted as members of the liberal “we”
that Rorty invokes? In this chapter, I attempt to answer this question
by looking to a pair of claims Rorty presents in “Globalization, the
Politics of Identity, and Social Hope,” a paper originally published in
1996. The first claim is that “‘identity’ and ‘difference’ are [not]
concepts which can be made relevant to political deliberation,” and
the second is that “tinkering with the notions of ‘rationality’ and
‘truth’ might, in the very long run, and in a very indirect way, have
a certain amount of political utility” (PSH, 234).2 I examine these two
claims by considering Rorty’s views on the work of two feminist
philosophers: Catharine A. MacKinnon and Iris Marion Young.
What this examination will reveal is that, on Rorty’s view, it is nigh
on impossible for a contemporary feminist thinker to be anything
other than a liberal. However, his view nonetheless leaves just
enough space for feminists like MacKinnon and Young to contribute
to reforming liberalism.
In the first section of this chapter, I start with the second of
these claims, exploring why it is that Rorty thinks “tinkering” with
182 susan dieleman
the concepts of rationality and truth can be relevant to political

deliberation. In brief, Rorty thinks that the philosophical anti-
authoritarianism that results from pragmatist criticisms of philo-
sophical concepts like rationality and truth helps move us from
philosophy to redescription, and what I will call “redescription in a
prophetic key” specifically. Redescription in a prophetic key is for
Rorty the main engine of social progress. Thus, tinkering with
rationality and truth can ultimately be politically useful insofar as
it makes space for social progress by helping us move from philoso-
phy to redescription. In the second section of this chapter, I turn to
the first of these claims, exploring why it is that Rorty thinks
tinkering with the concepts of identity and difference cannot be
relevant to political deliberation. There are two elements to
Rorty’s view here. On the one hand, Rorty thinks that the politics
of identity as a philosophical program (the name for such tinkering)
is both overly theoretical and overly pessimistic. Thus, tinkering
with identity and difference is unlikely to be useful for achieving
social progress. On the other hand, Rorty thinks that the politics of
identity as a political project (not involved in such tinkering, but
involved instead in advocating for specific identity groups) amounts
to nothing more than good, old-fashioned liberalism. As he puts it,
these sorts of political projects – he has feminist, gay liberation, and
similar movements in mind – are not “practicing a new sort of
politics,” nor do they require “philosophical sophistication for their
description or evaluation” (PSH, 235). Thus, a feminist thinker like
Young is mistaken, Rorty contends, if she thinks she is up to any-
thing other than “ordinary interest-group politics” (PSH, 237). This
means that the politics of identity as a political project can be
politically useful, but only because it contributes to and strengthens
the kind of liberalism Rorty commends. In the third and concluding
section, I will show where the combination of these two claims
leaves feminist philosophers on Rorty’s view, namely, in a position
where we cannot radically undermine liberalism, but where we can,
as philosophers or prophets or activists, work to gradually reform it.
tinkering with rationality and truth:

redescription in a prophetic key
In Defending Rorty: Pragmatism and Liberal Virtue (2015), William
M. Curtis notes that Rorty’s project advances “two related thrusts: (1)
a critical, ‘therapeutic’ subproject, and (2) a constructive, explicitly
normative, utopian subproject” (Curtis 2015, 34). The first project
involves Rorty’s pragmatist critique of Philosophy (with a capital
‘P’), a tradition whose practitioners understand themselves to be
engaged in a search for the Truth about how things really are.
Practitioners in this tradition tend to endorse the correspondence
theory of truth, and believe in the “representationalist” thesis that,
insofar as any particular sentence accurately represents how things
really are, it can be said to be true. Rorty’s claim is that our individual
sentences are not made true or false by how well they do or do not
represent how things really are. Instead, they are made true or false
depending on how well they fit the larger set of descriptions (or “final
vocabulary”) we have chosen to adopt in order to deal with the world
we inhabit. The set of descriptions we choose, in turn, depends on our
ends. Certain descriptions will be better suited to certain purposes
than others, and so our descriptions are contingent on the ends we
choose to prioritize. Description and redescription, rather than accur-
ate representation, is a better account of how we do, and how we
should understand ourselves to, interact with the world and with
others. In abandoning traditional philosophical authorities (God,
Truth, Reason, etc.), Rorty embraces a position of philosophical
“anti-authoritarianism.”
Moreover, redescription can be used to show how things might
go better than they currently do. When someone proposes that one set
of descriptions be replaced by another, and when a society adopts that
new, proposed set of descriptions, this is how social progress is
achieved. Thus, when it comes to social progress, redescription
requires what I will be calling redescription in a prophetic key. That
is, social progress requires redescription that articulates and
184 susan dieleman
encourages a better possible future. In “Globalization, the Politics of

Identity, and Social Hope” (1996), Rorty asserts that the best social
and political philosophy will be prophetic rather than philosophical:
The appropriate intellectual background to political deliberation is

historical narrative rather than philosophical or quasi-philosophical
theory. More specifically, it is the kind of historical narrative which
segues into a utopian scenario about how we can get from the
present to a better future. Social and political philosophy usually has
been, and always ought to be, parasitic on such narratives.
He continues,
Hobbes’s and Locke’s accounts of the state were parasitic on

different accounts of recent English history. Marx’s philosophy was
parasitic on his narrative of the rise of the bourgeoisie and his
forecast of a successful proletarian revolution. Dewey’s social theory
was, and Rawls’s political theory is, parasitic on different accounts
of the recent history of the United States. All these philosophers
formulated their taxonomies of social phenomena, and designed the
conceptual tools they used to criticize existing institutions, by
reference to a story about what had happened and what we might
reasonably hope could happen in the future. (PSH, 231–2)
In claiming that redescription in a prophetic key is the appropriate

background for social and political philosophy, Rorty is claiming that
actual social progress can usually be traced to such redescriptive
efforts on the part of someone with a vision of how things could go
better than they currently are.3 This means, Rorty continues, that
When it comes to political deliberation, philosophy is a good

servant but a bad master. If one knows what one wants and has
some hope of getting it, philosophy can be useful in formulating
redescriptions of social phenomena. The appropriation of these
redescriptions, and of the jargon in which they are formulated, may
speed up the pace of social change. (PSH, 232)
Social progress always involves a contest between an existing set of

descriptions and a new set of descriptions. The best kind of social and
political philosophy recognizes that social progress involves “a con-
test between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance
and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great
things” (CIS, 9).
In “Feminism and Pragmatism,” Rorty holds up the work of
Catharine MacKinnon and Marilyn Frye as examples of feminist
thinkers who see that social progress is best achieved through
redescription in a prophetic key. He notes that he is particularly
struck by both MacKinnon’s and Frye’s recognition that they are
working not to discover anything in particular, but to create a new
moral identity for women. Thus, when MacKinnon claims that she is
“evoking for women a role that we have yet to make, in the name of a
voice that, unsilenced, might say something that has never been
heard” (MacKinnon in Rorty TP, 202), Rorty interprets her as saying
that social progress depends upon offering new descriptions that open
up space to pursue and achieve ends that were otherwise inconceiv-
able given the set of descriptions currently available. Similarly, when
Frye says that her own writing is “a sort of flirtation with meaning-
lessness” (Frye in Rorty TP, 217), Rorty sees her as saying that she is
caught between an existing set of descriptions and a new set of
descriptions that have not yet been fully articulated or that have
not yet fully caught on. Thus, both MacKinnon and Frye can be
counted as philosophical anti-authoritarians. Neither sees herself as
engaged in a project of discovering an antecedent truth about what,
objectively, women are. They are trying to show that existing descrip-
tions of women are inadequate not because they fail somehow to
capture the reality of what women really are, but because existing
descriptions of women have certain (negative) effects. They are trying
to offer novel descriptions in place of existing ones because novel
descriptions – distinctively feminist novel descriptions – of what
women are will have different (positive) effects.4 Both MacKinnon
and Frye can thus be read as engaging in the best kind of social and
186 susan dieleman
political philosophy, the kind that turns the contingency of descrip-

tion into an opportunity to pursue social change.5
Rorty writes, “MacKinnon’s central point, as I read her, is that ‘a
woman’ is not yet the name of a way of being human – not yet the
name of a moral identity, but, at most, the name of a disability” (TP,
205). In this accounting, Rorty is certainly correct: the bulk of
MacKinnon’s work in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and
Law (1987) and Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (1989) is
intended to offer a new description of what it means to be “a woman”
in a patriarchal society.6 Her hope is that her feminist description of
“woman” will replace the existing, patriarchal description of “woman,”
and that this new description will have the effect of reforming sex
discrimination law so that it can better serve women.
MacKinnon suggests that for feminists (or radical feminists,
more specifically), “the issue is not the gender difference, but the
difference gender makes, the social meaning imposed upon our
bodies – what it means to be a woman or a man is a social process
and, as such, is subject to change” (MacKinnon 1987, 23). In short, she
claims that the descriptions of “gender” currently in use are socially
constructed, and these social constructions make a difference in the
lives of men and women. Her specific target is sex discrimination law,
which, because of existing, patriarchal definitions of gender, nega-
tively affects women. In a patriarchal society, where patriarchal
descriptions of men and women have currency and circulate, sex
discrimination law will function, she argues, on the assumption that
men and women are the same as individuals, but different as genders.
This patriarchal set of descriptions is what MacKinnon calls “the
difference approach.” According to the difference approach, discrim-
ination is legally wrong because every individual, considered in the
abstract, is the same and therefore deserving of equal treatment.
However, what this abstract individual is like is defined by men as
maleness; the treatment individuals deserve is to be treated like a
man. However, sex discrimination law requires an acknowledgment
that women are not men; they are different from men. This is why sex
discrimination law is “a contradiction in terms” (MacKinnon 1987,

33). Yet how women are different from men is still defined by men:
“Sex equality in law has not been meaningfully defined for women,
but has been defined and limited from the male point of view to
correspond with the existing social reality of sex inequality”
(MacKinnon 1989, 242).
As sex discrimination law currently functions, according to
MacKinnon, “to be a woman means either to be like a man or to be
like a lady. We have to meet either the male standard for males or the
male standard for females” (MacKinnon 1987, 71). So, on the one
hand, women who, under sex discrimination law, want to be treated
as individuals deserving of equal treatment must leave behind the
specificity of their gender to assume the specificity of the male gender
upon which the idea of the abstract individual is based. As
MacKinnon notes, such women are “served equality with a ven-
geance” because they are expected to meet male standards. On the
other hand, women who, under sex discrimination law, want to be
treated not as men but as women, must conform to the male standard
of what a woman is. Indeed, in a patriarchal society, this is the only
other option available to her. Thus, women who seek equality as
women have to present themselves as men define women: as in need
of men’s protection, as “ladies.” The politics that underlies the differ-
ence approach, which conceives of equality in terms of sameness and
difference, is that “man has become the measure of all things. Under
the sameness standard, women are measured according to our corres-
pondence with man, our equality judged by our proximity to his
measure. Under the difference standard, we are measured according
to our lack of correspondence with him, our womanhood judged by
our distance from his measure” (MacKinnon 1987, 34).
An example that MacKinnon provides and Rorty cites to illus-
trate the double bind women find themselves in under patriarchal
descriptions of gender is Dothard v. Rawlinson, where refusing to
hire women as prison guards did not count as discrimination.
MacKinnon argues that this was not seen as unlawful
188 susan dieleman
discrimination because the women involved were seen as “ladies.”

Women’s capacity to be raped – and their need to be protected from
rape – justified the decision not to hire them. The problem with this
decision – and the set of descriptions upon which it was premised –
is that, when women’s sexual subordination is described as a natural
and unavoidable feature of what it is to be a woman, then the fact of
that subordination is never challenged. As MacKinnon writes, “The
plaintiffs were protected out of a job they wanted while the condi-
tions that create women’s rapeability as the definition of woman-
hood were not even seen as susceptible to change” (MacKinnon
1987, 73).7 This is just one example of the way that the difference
approach – the patriarchal set of descriptions of men and women
that informs sex discrimination law – fails women. MacKinnon’s
proposal is to offer a new set of descriptions, which she calls “the
dominance approach.” According to the dominance approach, dis-
crimination and equality will be questions of the distribution of
power rather than of sameness and difference. On the dominance
approach, issues like sexual violence would always be issues of sex
equality – they would always count as discrimination – because they
involve “the systematic relegation of an entire group of people to a
condition of inferiority and attribute it to their nature” (MacKinnon
1987, 41). The dominance approach “proposes to expose that which
women have had little choice but to be confined to, in order to
change it” (MacKinnon 1987, 40).
The dominance approach therefore sees gender not as a system
of sameness and difference (i.e. men and women should be treated the
same, except when they are different) but as a system of dominance
and subordination – and particularly, sexual subordination (i.e. what
it means to be a man is to be dominant; what it means to be a woman
is to be subordinate). The dominance approach is explicitly feminist:
it “sees the inequality of the social world from the standpoint of the
subordination of women to men” (MacKinnon 1987, 43). In a patri-
archal society, these features are not incidental to men and women,
but are rather integral. This is not to say MacKinnon thinks that
subordination and domination are essential – her proposed

redescription does not capture the true nature of men and women
any more than the patriarchal description of men and women as the
same but different captures the true nature of men and women.
Rather, it attempts to persuade us to adopt the feminist description
according to which men and women in patriarchal societies are in a
relationship of domination and subordination. If we understand
gender in this feminist way (the dominance approach), rather than
in a patriarchal way (the difference approach), then sex discrimination
law will have to function differently. The effect of this redescription
would be practical: sex discrimination law would have to consider
women not as individuals, but rather as a social group that is defined
as subordinate to men. If sex discrimination law were premised on the
dominance approach, then decisions made on the basis that women
are “naturally” sexually subordinate to men would always count as a
form of discrimination. Insofar as refusing women employment or
dismissing sexual harassment as a matter of natural sexual relations
between men and women keeps women, as a group, in a subordinate
position, such actions would count as discrimination.8
The preceding overview of MacKinnon’s position is not an
endorsement of her views, but rather an accounting of what Rorty
means when he says that a feminist like MacKinnon is a prophetic
voice, and why he thinks that, if feminists were to look for a philo-
sophical ally, then pragmatism would make a good one. The philo-
sophical anti-authoritarianism of pragmatism comports well with the
sort of feminist work that MacKinnon is doing. Rorty thinks this is
abundantly clear when MacKinnon writes things like, “The differ-
ence approach tries to map reality; the dominance approach tries to
challenge and change it” (MacKinnon 1987, 44) and “If the shift in
perspective from gender as difference to gender as dominance is
followed, gender changes from a distinction that is ontological and
presumptively valid to a detriment that is epistemological and pre-
sumptively suspect. The given becomes the contingent” (MacKinnon
1989, 243). She is providing a new description of gender that has the
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potential to radically alter how sex discrimination law functions and,

in turn and eventually, dramatically improve women’s status.
Rorty concludes “Feminism and Pragmatism” by writing,
“Feminists who are also pragmatists will not see the formation of
such a society as the removal of social constructs and the restoration
of the way things were always meant to be. They will see it as the
production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently
available, and thus as the creation of a new and better sort of human
being” (TP, 226–7). This helps make sense of MacKinnon’s argument
that distinctively feminist law is required: “Equality will require
change, not reflection – a new jurisprudence, a new relation between
life and law” (MacKinnon 1989, 249). This jurisprudence will not be
better because it is based on a more accurate representation of gender
than the patriarchal jurisprudence it would replace, but better
because it will work to end the suffering, inequality, and injustice
women experience as women in a patriarchal society.
MacKinnon is for Rorty an example of why it is that philosoph-
ical tinkering with concepts like rationality and truth can be seen as
politically valuable. If undermining the traditional philosophical con-
cepts that presume we use language to accurately represent the world
makes redescription more likely, and if redescription has the potential
to be politically useful, then the work of pragmatists can, “in the long
run, and in a very direct way,” be useful for the work of thinkers like
MacKinnon. However, Rorty does not just think that philosophical
anti-authoritarianism comports with social progress; he also thinks that
it is good for liberalism specifically. He claims, “to see one’s language,
one’s conscience, one’s morality, and one’s highest hopes as contingent
products . . . is to adopt a self-identity which suits one for citizenship
in . . . an ideally liberal state” (CIS, 61). To put it another way, a society
that sees redescription in a prophetic key as the best way to achieve
social progress will be an ideally liberal state. Rorty’s account of this
ideally liberal state is, recall, the second subproject highlighted by
Curtis: Rorty’s “constructive, explicitly normative, utopian subproject”
(Curtis 2015, 34). Philosophical anti-authoritarianism – the recognition
that the descriptions we use to navigate the world, to understand

ourselves, and to interact with others, are fundamentally “up for
grabs” – makes a good “junior partner” for liberalism. This is because
an ideally liberal society is one where social progress is “fulfilled by
persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution, by the
free and open encounters of present linguistic and other practices with
suggestions for new practices” (CIS, 60).
One has to be careful here. Rorty is not arguing that philo-
sophical anti-authoritarianism necessarily leads to liberalism. As
has been well documented, Rorty does not think that pragmatism
entails any particular political commitments: “any philosophical
view is a tool which can be used by many different hands” (PSH,
23).9 Still, Rorty does think that an anti-authoritarian philosophy
like pragmatism comports well with liberalism. This is because it
facilitates “a consensus that there is no source of authority other
than the free agreement of human beings,” and that this consensus,
in turn, makes it more likely that people will be willing “to accept
the liberal goal of maximal room for individual variation” (PSH,
237). The first step in Rorty’s argument here makes good sense: if
we are not answerable to something “out there,” something nonhu-
man, then we can only be answerable to each other. If we give up
looking for a nonhuman authority to tell us when we have settled on
the right set of descriptions, then we can only know if we have
settled on the right set by turning to our fellow human beings.
This is why Rorty controversially states that the truth is just what
our peers will let us get away with saying. Only our peers – only
intersubjective agreement – can tell us when the descriptions we
have chosen are the best set of descriptions; it is only by our peers’
adoption of those descriptions that we can claim we have gotten
them right.10 Getting things right is more a matter of “solidarity”
than it is of “objectivity.”
But how does Rorty make the second step in his argument?
How is it that embracing ethnocentrism – the idea that our inquir-
ies must start from the discursive communities in which we find
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ourselves – makes one more likely to also embrace liberalism? Part

of the answer here is already contained in the question: to be in a
situation where one can take advantage of the pragmatist critique
of authoritarian philosophies is to already be heir to the
Enlightenment tradition. However, Rorty also claims that philo-
sophical anti-authoritarianism “encourages people to have a self-
image in which their real or imagined citizenship in a democratic
republic is central . . . [It] helps people set aside religious and ethnic
identities in favor of an image of themselves as part of a great
human adventure” (PSH, 238–9). As I read Rorty, he is suggesting
here that seeing oneself as answerable only to other human beings
is likely to lead one to seeing oneself as engaged in a democratic
project (in the Deweyan sense of “democratic”), where democracy
is fundamentally a form of experimental, associated living. To be
answerable to our fellow human beings is to see ourselves as
working together, and in particular working together to make the
lives of every member of our community more free and more
interesting. In short, if we give up the idea that we have responsi-
bilities to nonhuman authorities and take on the idea that we have
responsibilities to others, we are more likely to see ourselves
engaged jointly in an experimental project, and that experimental
project will go better if each individual is maximally free to self-
fashion. Self-fashioning, in turn, goes better if we engage with
others, if we are exposed to other ways of describing the world,
from which we can take inspiration.
So, Rorty thinks that, insofar as “Pragmatism is useful for
getting . . . assumptions out of the path of social progress” (Balslev
and Rorty 1991, 44–5), it is not just politically useful in a generic
sense, but it is useful for liberalism in particular. Again, the political
usefulness of such tinkering is only very indirect. As he puts it,
“doing the sort of thing we philosophy professors do . . . is just one
more nudge in the right direction – the sort of modest little contribu-
tion to social progress to which a somewhat peripheral academic
discipline may aspire” (TP, 58). At best, pragmatism can offer political
movements “something comparatively small and unimportant, a set

of answers to philosophical questions” (TP, 212). But what tinkering
with rationality and truth helps us do is realize that our descriptions
are optional and changeable; they are up to us, so to speak. New and
diverse descriptions are only possible in a culture with the freedom to
construct these descriptions. Social progress occurs if and when we
find ourselves exposed to more and diverse descriptions, when we
expand our community by adopting new descriptions, and act less
cruelly when we are willing to acknowledge the moral identities they
help to create.
In his earlier work up to and including Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity, Rorty saw these new descriptions as resulting from
“strong poets” who engaged, privately and in an ironic spirit, in
individual self-fashioning. However, as Nancy Fraser notes, with the
publication of “Feminism and Pragmatism” in 1991, the oppositions
in Rorty’s work “between the public and the private, the community
and the individual, the political and the aesthetic are exploded”
(Fraser 1991, 262). Redescription thus became a political, rather than
a merely private, poetic affair. Redescription, in the hands of feminist
thinkers and activists like MacKinnon, becomes a political tool for
rendering visible forms of suffering, injustice, and inequality, as well
as for proposing new descriptions to minimize such suffering, injust-
ice, and inequality.
tinkering with identity and difference:

the politics of identity as philosophical program
and as political project
In “Globalization, the Politics of Identity, and Social Hope” (1996),
Rorty indicates that he has nothing against political movements like
“feminism, gay liberation, various sorts of ethnic separatism, abori-
ginal rights, and the like” (PSH, 235). However, he does claim that
these movements are not “practicing a new sort of politics,” nor do
they require “philosophical sophistication for their description or
evaluation” (PSH, 235). Thus, he expresses two, related concerns
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about the politics of identity. Taking them in reverse order, the

second examines the politics of identity as a philosophical program.
In this sense of the term, Rorty associates “the politics of identity”
with people – primarily academics – who channel their political rage
into something “over-theoretical and over-philosophized” (ORT,
16).11 This captures one of Rorty’s two reasons for thinking the
politics of identity as a philosophical program is misguided. As noted
in the introduction to this chapter, Rorty thinks that, if we under-
stand the politics of identity as a philosophical program, then it
forsakes philosophical anti-authoritarianism and the usefulness of
the method for social and political philosophy and utopian politics
that it provides. Recall his claim that philosophers
cannot reveal the philosophical weaknesses of the bourgeois

liberalism common to Mill and Dewey; they can only reveal its
blind spots, its failure to perceive forms of suffering which it should
have perceived. There were many such blind spots, but they were
not a result of some wholesale failure to understand the nature of
the subject, or of desire, or of language, or of society, or of history,
or of anything else of similar magnitude. They were the sorts of
blind spots which we all have – correctable not by increasing
philosophical sophistication, but simply by having our attention
called to the harm we have been doing without noticing that we are
doing it. (PSH, 236–7)
Attempting to remedy injustice by exploring arcane philosophical

issues like “the metaphysics of the subject,” for example, has rarely,
if ever, been useful for improving the situation of subordinated
groups. Redescription in a prophetic key, by contrast, has helped to
improve the situation of subordinated groups.
Rorty does admit in passing that philosophical tinkering with
identity and difference might be politically useful, but only in a “long-
term, atmospheric, indirect way” (ORT, 16), and only if those tinker-
ers also “can come up with an alternative practice” (ORT, 16). Yet
this rarely occurs, Rorty thinks, because academics who engage in
this sort of philosophical tinkering almost never offer such a sketch.

This is because the academic practitioners of the politics of identity
“refuse . . . to rejoice in the country [they] inhabit. [They] repudiate . . .
the idea of a national identity, and the emotion of national pride”
(PSH, 252). Thus, because practitioners of the politics of identity tend
to be unpatriotic, because they have no interest in trying to achieve
their country, their work is instead an expression of “resentment and
frustration” (PSH, 232). Not only is the politics of identity, as a
philosophical program, overly theoretical, it also lacks hope, and this
hopelessness does not comport well with a politics of redescription,
let alone redescription in a prophetic key.
However, Rorty also thinks that, if we understand the politics
of identity as a political project – if we are thinking of movements
like “feminism, gay liberation, various sorts of ethnic separatism,
aboriginal rights, and the like” (PSH, 235) – then it really amounts
to nothing more than efforts to concretize a liberal utopia. That is,
when examining those who advocate a “politics of difference” as a
better form of politics than liberalism, Rorty thinks that they are
not really presenting a new style of politics at all. Their criticisms
of liberalism simply amount to efforts to flesh out liberalism in
further detail. This is the criticism Rorty has of Iris Marion Young,
who, in Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), argues that
liberal accounts of what justice requires are insufficiently attentive
to difference. This is because liberalism presumes that equality is
achieved by treating everyone the same, regardless of difference.
However, by requiring sameness, liberalism fails to recognize that
sometimes justice requires differential treatment. According to the
liberal ideal of justice – what Young calls the “assimilationist
ideal” – “all persons should have the liberty to be and do anything
they want, to choose their own lives and not be hampered by
traditional expectations and stereotypes.” Young champions
instead a politics of difference, where difference is understood
“more fluidly and relationally as the product of social processes”
(Young 1990, 157–8). Young writes,
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An emancipatory politics that affirms group difference involves

a reconception of the meaning of equality. The assimilationist
ideal assumes that equal social status for all persons requires
treating everyone according to the same principles, rules, and
standards. A politics of difference argues, on the other hand, that
equality as the participation and inclusion of all groups
sometimes requires different treatment for oppressed or
disadvantaged groups. (Young 1990, 158)
In short, liberalism attends only to formal equality, and fails to con-

sider substantive equality. It does this by prioritizing impartiality over
partiality, by assuming that it is both possible and desirable to achieve
a moral or political perspective that is a “view from nowhere.” Rorty
claims that Young thinks there is more to be said about identity and
difference than there really is: “Young sees the liberal tradition, the
tradition of Mill and Dewey, as devoted to a project of ‘homogeniza-
tion’ of difference. This seems wrong to me” (PSH, 237). The reason
this seems wrong to Rorty is that liberalism, on his view, values
difference precisely because it maximizes opportunities for variation.
In other words, liberalism encourages pluralism, despite Young’s claim
that it is homogenizing. Thus, Young’s politics of difference is not
opposed to liberalism on Rorty’s reading of it. Rather, its concrete
proposals are proposals to improve liberalism.
conclusion: feminist redescription as

feminist tinkering
MacKinnon explicitly locates her own work in opposition to
liberalism; it is liberalism that supports the difference approach,
she claims, and radical feminism that supports the dominance
approach. But Rorty thinks she has simply made a mistake here:
“The phenomenon she is pointing to [that liberalism only sees the
effects of power, and not power itself] certainly exists, but ‘liberal-
ism’ seems to me the wrong name for it” (TP, 215). Like MacKinnon,
Young criticizes liberalism, but Rorty sees her work as offering, at
bottom, little more than an effort to show how liberalism has failed
to notice the suffering of women and other subordinated groups.
This failure does not undermine or even challenge liberalism on
Rorty’s view, but simply helps to fill in some of the missing details.
He writes, “I do not see the politics of difference as differing in any
interesting way from the ordinary interest-group politics which has
been familiar throughout the history of parliamentary democracies”
(PSH, 237). Thus, the work of thinkers like Young actually helps
improve liberalism by pointing out when and how it has not lived up
to its own values, as when subordinated groups are, in practice,
thought of as “them” rather than members of “we liberals.” In short,
even though both MacKinnon and Young consider themselves
critics of liberalism, Rorty thinks they are engaged in the liberal
project of increasing tolerance and freedom. At best, the sorts of
critiques that MacKinnon and Young offer could be understood as
internal critiques of liberalism; they offer critiques of liberals as
liberals. Indeed, for Rorty, this is the only way to make sense of
their views. They are, as noted earlier, insiders to liberal culture,
playing an important role in holding liberalism accountable to its
own professed values. It would seem, therefore, that there is no way
for a contemporary feminist thinker to be anything other than a
liberal on Rorty’s view.
However, in claiming that it is possible to work from inside
liberalism to criticize it, Rorty leaves an important, if narrow, space
within which feminist (and other) thinkers may not only improve
liberalism by keeping its basic values in place, but also reform
liberalism. As Curtis notes, on Rorty’s view, “The content of our
liberal values and the activities of our liberal practices must be
politically always up for grabs, though usually at the margins.
Debate over these values and practices is what constitutes liberal
democratic politics” (Curtis 2015, 88). Rorty contends that engaging
in debate about liberal values and practices – and, I would add, about
liberal policies and institutions – amounts to engaging in liberal
democratic politics. Yet it is possible, as Curtis points out, that
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debating liberal values, practices, policies, and institutions could

lead to something radically different than liberalism. Rorty himself
acknowledges that “we have to hold open the possibility that we
might come to be Nazis by a process of rational persuasion” (TP,
n36). Thus, Rorty is perhaps too quick in saying that feminist
thinkers who criticize liberalism are only making sure that liberal-
ism lives up to its own standards. If we understand tinkering with
concepts like identity and difference in the sense of social and
political philosophical tinkering outlined at the beginning of this
chapter, or if we understand tinkering to involve political tinkering
with concepts like identity and difference, then such tinkerings can
have political utility beyond merely fleshing out liberalism. While
engaging in debate may locate oneself within liberal democratic
politics, this does not mean the values and practices upon which
those politics are premised are impervious to change. Both Young’s
and MacKinnon’s tinkerings are such that, if taken on board, they
can alter the very values of liberalism. Thus, while it may be the
case that such tinkerings may not usher in a conceptual revolution
that overturns Mill’s account of what liberalism is, it can be the case
that it may usher in conceptual reform, even to the point where
liberalism itself, in the long run, becomes something contemporary
liberals would not recognize as liberalism.
notes
1 This is one of four limitations noted by Voparil. The others similarly
provide reasons for why one might find Rorty’s “we” problematic. See
Voparil 2011b, 123–5.
2 In this paper, and in Achieving Our Country (1998), Rorty uses multiple
terms to refer to a collection of related, but arguably distinct, political and
philosophical projects, including “the politics of identity,” “identity
politics,” “the politics of recognition,” and “the politics of difference.”
I will use the term “the politics of identity” throughout to try to capture
the specific approach Rorty takes issue with, as presented in
“Globalization, the Politics of Identity, and Social Hope” (PSH, 229–39).
See Young 2000, 102–8, for an exploration of how “the politics of

identity” and “politics of difference” refer to distinct projects.
3 See Voparil 2011a and Curtis 2015 for the claim that hope for social
progress is what fundamentally motivates Rorty’s philosophical anti-
authoritarianism.
4 I have explored the influence of MacKinnon’s work on Rorty’s
pragmatism in Dieleman 2011.
5 I hope that this helps blunt Fraser’s criticism of Rorty’s “Feminism and
Pragmatism,” where she claims that Rorty has put feminists who are
philosophers in an impossible bind. She writes, “Rorty is in effect offering
to do the [philosophical] housework so that we [feminists] can be freed for
world-historical activity in the public sphere. Now this really does look
like an attractive proposition. But many of us have learned the hard way
that when men offer to help with housework there are frequently hidden
costs. In the case of Rorty’s proposal, the hidden cost is the implication
that feminists – Marilyn Frye or myself, for example – are not
philosophers. Granted, we’re something bigger, grander, more important –
prophets; but I don’t know of any universities with departments of
prophecy in which we might be gainfully employed and tenured as
prophets” (Fraser 1991, 260).
6 In “Feminism and Pragmatism” (TP, 202–27) Rorty refers only to
Feminism Unmodified, and almost exclusively to one paper within that
collection: “On Exceptionality: Women as Women in Law.” I am not sure
whether he ever read Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, but I refer to
both texts here, as their core arguments are similar.
7 MacKinnon adds: “When courts learn that sexual harassment is as vicious
and pervasive and damaging to women in workplaces everywhere as rape
is to women guards in male prisons, and as disruptive to production as
rape is to prison security, will women be excluded from the workplace
altogether?” (MacKinnon 1987, 73).
8 This is why MacKinnon (successfully) argued that sexual harassment is a
form of sex discrimination: because it is a pernicious practice that keeps
women subordinate to men. It is important not to underestimate the
success of MacKinnon’s efforts in this area. As Cass Sunstein notes,
MacKinnon’s efforts to have sexual harassment seen as a form of sex
discrimination – which “seemed bizarre and radical to many when
initially put forward, . . . was accepted in 1986 by every member of the
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Supreme Court . . . This development must count as one of the more

dramatic and rapid changes in legal and social understanding in recent
years” (Sunstein 1988, 829).
9 Rorty continues: “There will always be room for a lot of philosophical
disagreement between people who share the same politics, and for
diametrically opposed political views among philosophers of the same
school. In particular, there is no reason why a fascist could not be a
pragmatist, in the sense of agreeing with pretty much everything Dewey
said about the nature of truth, knowledge, rationality and morality” (PSH,
23). He makes a similar point, in “Feminism, Ideology, and
Deconstruction: A Pragmatist View” (1993), when he suggests
“Pragmatism – considered as a set of philosophical views about truth,
knowledge, objectivity, and language – is neutral between feminism and
masculinism. So if one wants specifically feminist doctrines about these
topics, pragmatism will not provide them” (Rorty 1993, 101).
10 See Rorty’s “Solidarity or Objectivity” (ORT, 21–34) for more on this.
11 This argument is most fully articulated in Achieving Our Country, where
Rorty suggests that a myopic focus on the politics of identity will leave
behind those who are suffering economically, ultimately resulting in the
election of a strongman. See Dieleman (2019) for further exploration of
Rorty’s criticisms of the Left as unpatriotic, and especially of the
relationship between cultural politics and class politics.
9 Rorty’s Insouciant
Social Thought
James T. Kloppenberg
Richard Rorty was his own worst enemy. He insisted that the lin-
guistic turn meant that philosophers should abandon the idea of
experience, yet some of the abiding passions of his life, such as his
fascination with wild orchids and his love of bird-watching, under-
cut his argument for the priority of language to the ineffable and
noncognitive. He professed a commitment to liberal and democratic
principles, yet his emphasis on contingency and irony undercut the
force as well as the earnestness of his political and social criticism.
He offered stinging critiques of the selfishness and greed character-
istic of contemporary American capitalism, yet at times he deni-
grated the potential of social movements to effect the changes he
sought and offered no alternative strategies to animate democratic
activism. He focused his analysis of twentieth-century American
reform on the labor movement, yet he failed to acknowledge the
technological dynamics that, together with the political and eco-
nomic forces he identified, have marginalized America’s industrial
workforce. He proclaimed himself an anti-absolutist, and he adopted
a pose of blithe indifference to criticism, yet he could be as unwilling
to engage with, and at times as intolerant of, alternative understand-
ings of pragmatism as any of the thinkers he excoriated for their
alleged foundationalism.
Rorty was raised in a family with roots deep in the reformist
traditions of American progressivism. His father, the writer James
Rorty, was an anticommunist socialist active in the circles of mid-
century New York intellectuals. His mother Winifred, daughter of
the most important theologian in the Social Gospel, Walter
Rauschenbusch, was a rebellious early feminist. Her writings, like
those of Rorty’s father, focused on social criticism. She had worked
201
202 james t. kloppenberg
as a research assistant for urban sociologist Robert Park at the

University of Chicago, and her reformist articles ranged from cri-
tiques of racial discrimination to a Veblenesque take on women
and, to use the title of one of her articles, “the idiot god fashion”
(Rauschenbusch 1931). One of Winifred’s brothers, Paul, married
the daughter of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Together
they helped establish the pioneering unemployment insurance
system in Wisconsin. The young Rorty visited them in Madison,
the incubator of “the Wisconsin idea” of progressive reform, during
some summers. Another of Winifred’s brothers, Carl, was also an
economist, and his wife Esther was a literature professor who
became the president of Sarah Lawrence College. Nurtured in a
family of progressive intellectuals and, by his own admission,
imbibing a reverence for radicals from John Dewey to Leon
Trotsky, Rorty grew up in a world in which the idea of self-
fulfillment was inextricably linked to the idea of social obligation.
His parents would have rejected out of hand the notion of a strict
separation between political engagement and a world of personal
pleasures, a world cordoned off from public life and social action. In
a 1995 interview, Rorty said he was “brought up a Trotskyite” and
compared his family’s devotion to radical causes to the religious
faiths of “Methodists or Jews.” In his words, “it was just the faith of
the household” (Rorty, in Gross 2008, 93).
Rorty found much of that world uncongenial. A bookish child
bored and bullied in school, at the tender age of fifteen he headed off
to the University of Chicago, where he was sucked into the Great
Books curriculum in general and the allure of Plato and Aristotle in
particular. Like many Americans of his generation, he was searching
for eternal truths. Writing to his father about the nascent environ-
mentalist movement spawned by the New Deal, he complained that
“man is much more than an animal and he can’t treat himself the
way he has treated all the things of nature. To reduce him to the part
that he actually plays in the biological scheme seems to me both
impossible and valueless” (Rorty, in Gross 2008, 97). That view of
rorty’s insouciant social thought 203
nature, and humans, Rorty would come to reject. Humans, he argued

in an essay published in 1993, should be understood “as slightly-
more-complicated animals” (TP, 48).
After Rorty struggled through the first part of his undergraduate
studies, he gradually settled on philosophy as his focus field. In a light-
hearted letter to his mother written in 1950, he characterized a paper
he wrote for a class with émigré Rudolf Carnap as being of interest only
to the “little clique of reactionary metaphysicians (the rank to which
I aspire)” eager to “stop the positivist invasion” threatening philosophy
(Rorty, in Gross 2008, 123). His first attempt to land a graduate fellow-
ship at a leading PhD program failed, however, so Rorty remained at
Chicago to earn an MA. His thesis on the idea of potentiality in the
philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, an essay bursting with abstrac-
tions of the sort he would later reject, reflected the influence of his
adviser, the metaphysician Charles Hartshorne (Rorty 1952).
From Chicago, Rorty was off to the PhD program in philosophy
at Yale, another department that continued to teach subjects ranging
from the history of ideas to pragmatism, with a faculty that likewise
resisted the onslaughts of Anglo-American analytic philosophy and
continental logical empiricism. His Chicago mentor Hartshorne had
been influenced by both Plato and Charles Sanders Peirce, and the
persistence of interest in classical as well as American pragmatist
philosophy at Yale made it the right place for Rorty. His Yale disser-
tation, again on the subject of potentiality, traced the idea from
Aristotle through Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz to its contempor-
ary articulation by logical empiricists Carnap and Nelson Goodman.
Rather than proclaiming one of these traditions superior to the
others, Rorty concluded that his work aimed toward “promoting
mutual understanding between exponents of different positions” in
order to find “possible solutions of common problems” (Rorty 1956,
564). Like his earlier insistence on differentiating humans from the
rest of nature, that commitment to pluralism, and that confidence
that “mutual understanding” offered the best path toward solving
“common problems,” faded in Rorty’s mature work.
Immersion in, and careful examination of, the writings of mid-

twentieth-century analytic and logical empiricist philosophers was
indispensable to Rorty’s ascent in the academic world. Yet the influ-
ence of pragmatism, imbibed from his parents and from some of his
teachers at Chicago and Yale, never disappeared. He had studied
Peirce at Yale, but his reading of W. V. O. Quine and, while teaching
at Wellesley College, the later Wittgenstein proved decisive. As early
as 1959, in a review of Alan Pasch, Experience and the Analytic, he
wrote, “The central theme of Pasch’s ‘pragmatic reconstruction’ . . . is
that a question is always a question within a context, that a context is
always one among alternative possible contexts, and that one selects
one’s context to fill a purpose.” The “basic themes and theses” of
Pasch’s argument, he observed, “are familiar enough from Dewey and
his followers” (Rorty 1959, 75–7).
Two years later, before there was much evidence to sustain his
claim, Rorty announced, “Pragmatism is getting respectable again.”
In “Pragmatism, Categories, and Language,” he wrote, “Some phil-
osophers are still content to think of [pragmatism] as a sort of muddle-
headed first approximation to logical positivism – which they think of
in turn as a prelude to our own enlightened epoch. But those who
have taken a closer look have realized that the movement of thought
involved here is more like a pendulum than like an arrow” (MLM, 16).
Two years after that, reviewing Paul Goodman’s Utopian Essays and
Practical Proposals, Rorty’s growing interest in pragmatism became
more apparent. He characterized Dewey’s philosophy as “the noblest
and most profound statement of the aim of a democratic society”
(Rorty 1963, 743–4).
I will not narrate Rorty’s familiar rise to prominence as a result
of editing The Linguistic Turn (1967) and writing Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature (1979).1 I want only to emphasize that his education
and his early writings show both his familiarity with multiple philo-
sophical traditions and an eagerness to take seriously a range of ideas
out of favor in the American academic mainstream. They also mani-
fest a willingness to consider the possibility that valuable insights
might be available in the writings of many different thinkers. At

Chicago it was Plato and Whitehead, at Yale thinkers from Aristotle
through Carnap. The hard-won command of (his own versions of ) the
major ideas of major thinkers from classical to contemporary, like the
self-deprecating tone that masked a robust self-regard, were equally
apparent from the beginning of his career. In his Introduction to The
Linguistic Turn, to provide just one more example of Rorty’s early
latitudinarianism, he offered no fewer than six possible futures
resulting from the discipline’s increasing focus on language, a shift
that was taking competing philosophers in a variety of distinctly
different directions. The fourth possibility, which sketched out the
path Rorty himself would later take, merits consideration: It might
be, he suggested, that philosophy itself would “come to an end,” and
philosophers “would come to look upon a post-philosophical culture
as just as possible, and just as desirable, as a post-religious culture. We
might come to see philosophy as a cultural disease which has been
cured” (Rorty 1967, 34).
In this discussion of Rorty’s insouciant social thought, I will
focus on three different dimensions of his writings, at least in part
because so many of these issues are addressed in other chapters of this
volume. This chapter ties my arguments to my own experience with
Rorty’s writings and with Rorty himself, not because I think my
experiences were unusual but precisely because they seem to me
more typical than atypical. For that reason they might illuminate
the ways in which the influence of his ideas extended beyond the
domain of philosophy, in my case into the field of intellectual history,
and suggest some of the reasons why many critics found his later
writings unsatisfying.
The first of my objections to the position Rorty held from the
1970s until his death in 2007 concerns his challenge to the earlier
pragmatists’ emphasis on experience. Once Rorty had formulated his
own mature critique of analytic philosophy and logical empiricism, he
argued that the entire enterprise of philosophy had been based on a series
of errors – much as he predicted in his Introduction to The Linguistic
Turn. It was no longer possible, he argued in Philosophy and the Mirror of

Nature, to believe that philosophers would ever solve the problems they
had set for themselves, primarily because the problems were premised
on centuries of mistaken assumptions. As he put it later, analytic phil-
osophers were “busy solving problem which no nonphilosopher recog-
nizes as problems,” which rendered Anglophone philosophy “invisible”
outside university departments of philosophy (AOC, 129). Although
most of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature was devoted to dismantling
analytic philosophy, the most galvanizing sections offered readings of
“edifying” philosophers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Sartre, Foucault,
Derrida, Habermas, the later Wittgenstein – and Dewey, a figure not
typically grouped with those continental worthies.
Many readers already impatient with or suspicious of the
claims as well as the methods of analytic philosophy (including me)
found the first sections of the book satisfying and the final section
inspiring. Here was an invitation to return to texts that many such
readers found more engaging, and ideas that they found more promis-
ing, than the arid problem-solving exercises and thought experiments
that constituted much contemporary academic philosophy. If Rorty
was right, philosophers had been barking up the wrong tree for a long
time. Instead scholars should return to the “spirit of playfulness” that
Rorty associated with Wilhelm Dilthey’s hermeneutics and Dewey’s
pragmatism, a spirit extinguished by the “mathematical logic” that
he claimed had bewitched twentieth-century philosophers (PMN,
168). Abandoning the futile quest for answers to non-questions would
fulfill Rorty’s 1967 prediction: philosophy itself would close up shop.
Philosophers would realize that they had come to a dead end. If on the
one hand they became more “naturalistic,” they would be swallowed
up by cognitive science and the “hard” behavioral social sciences. If
on the other hand they became more “historicist,” they would be
swallowed up by “intellectual history, literary criticism, and similar
soft spots in ‘the humanities’” (PMN, 168).
When I first read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in the
early 1980s, I was in the midst of revising my own dissertation, which
eventually became Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and

Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920.
Rorty seemed to vindicate both parts of my argument. When I was
completing my PhD in History and Humanities at Stanford between
1977 and 1980, I had found in the writings of late nineteenth-century
thinkers from different traditions – T. H. Green and Henry Sidgwick,
Dilthey and Alfred Fouillée, James and Dewey – a shared commit-
ment to transcending the tired controversies dividing idealists from
positivists and an aspiration to change the trajectory of philosophy.
I had also found links tying those renegade philosophers to two
distinct reform movements. Leading social democrats such as
Beatrice Webb and Sidney Webb, Jean Jaurès, Eduard Bernstein, and
Rorty’s grandfather Walter Rauschenbusch, all wayward socialists,
were moving away from orthodox Marxism. Progressive reformers
included equally heterodox liberals such as L. T. Hobhouse, Léon
Bourgeois, Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Herbert Croly, and, surprisingly
to Americans who knew him only by reputation, Max Weber, all of
whom rejected the dogmas of laissez-faire and urged government
intervention to regulate market economies in the public interest.
These reformers and many others helped transform European and
American politics in the pre-World War I era. I found copious evi-
dence that these thinkers’ adoption of activist government and piece-
meal, democratic reform measures descended from their adoption of,
or was closely allied with, the philosophers’ embrace of uncertainty
and their denial of what Dewey liked to call “the quest for certainty.”
Like many readers, I was invigorated by Rorty’s cheerleading for
the ideas he announced in his two final chapters of Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature, “From Epistemology to Hermeneutics” and
“Philosophy Without Mirrors.” Yet I was not sure exactly what he
thought we should do once we had abandoned the procedures and
problems of mainstream academic philosophy. In his final chapter, he
dismissed with a wave of his hand the ideas of Habermas (whose
name, oddly, does not even appear in the index of Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature), whom I, along with many others, considered
the rightful heir to the legacy of the philosophers, social democrats,

and progressive theorists I was studying. Whereas my cast of charac-
ters had explicitly grounded their reformist political programs on
their philosophical ideas about epistemology and ethics, Rorty in
the final pages of his book denied even the possibility that philosophy
might provide such foundations. I argued that Dilthey’s writings on
“Erlebnis,” James’s on “immediate experience,” Fouillée’s on “idées-
forces,” and Sidgwick’s and Dewey’s efforts to create a moral
philosophy drawing on the best of both the deontological and utilitar-
ian traditions constituted a search for what I called a via media, a
path between Kant and Mill that provided a philosophical rationale
for the emerging political movements of social democracy and
progressivism on both sides of the Atlantic. Themselves active in
various reform movements, these philosophers thought there was a
clear connection between their ideas about knowledge and ethics and
their ideas about politics. Envisioning philosophy instead as nothing
more than a “conversation,” as Rorty did in the closing pages of
Mirror, struck me as odd and unconvincing (PMN, 389–94).
Those misgivings notwithstanding, I was surprised and intrigued
when Rorty asked to read my book manuscript. I was flattered when he
offered to have it appear in a new series he was editing for Cambridge
University Press with the philosopher Jerome Schneewind (whose
seminal work on Sidgwick had been indispensable to me) and the
intellectual historian Quentin Skinner, a series to be called “Ideas in
Context.” Given how important the work of those three scholars had
been, for me and for countless others, I was seriously tempted to accept
their invitation. In the end, my senior colleagues at Brandeis persuaded
me to publish with Oxford University Press. I have never regretted that
decision, yet I was sorry not to have the chance to work more closely
with three fine scholars willing to help me shape, and to add their
imprimatur to, my first book.
My next encounter with Rorty, who was as kind and generous
with me in person as he seems to have been with everyone – includ-
ing those of us who disagreed with him about some of his central
ideas, as I did – came at the annual meeting of the Organization of

American Historians in 1989, three years after Uncertain Victory
appeared. There I presented a paper, later published in my book The
Virtues of Liberalism as “Why History Matters to Political Theory.”
Rorty provided a bracing commentary on the paper. I drew on Rorty’s
historicism in my analysis of contemporary thinkers whom
I admired, thinkers ranging from John Rawls, Michael Walzer, and
Michael Sandel to Habermas, Roberto Unger, and Charles Taylor.
I claimed, along with Rorty, that their arguments would be more
convincing and efficacious were they to descend from the strato-
sphere of abstractions and consider more carefully the concrete his-
torical circumstances framing political projects.
My paper also raised a question about Rorty’s consistently
dismissive treatment of religion. For someone descended from
Rauschenbusch, who proclaimed himself a man of the left, Rorty
seemed to me oddly blind to the crucial role played by religious
activists in American politics from the eighteenth century to the
present. Neither independence nor antislavery, neither the struggle
for women’s suffrage nor the labor movement, neither the antiwar
movements nor the Civil Rights movement could be understood,
I argued, without paying attention to the religious motivations of
many activists. Rorty was happy to talk about the ideas of communi-
tarians and the reasons why he found their ideas unsatisfying, but he
ignored the topic of religion. When I pressed him on it, his face
registered only the chagrin familiar to all who knew him. It was an
issue he did not want to discuss. He said he wished I didn’t consider it
important. Religion was, to use the title of one of Rorty’s later essays,
a “conversation stopper” (PSH, 168–74). This is a familiar but, for
historians at least, a facile move. It evades consideration of one of the
most important dimensions of life for most human throughout most
of human history, and for millions of humans, in the US and the rest
of the world, in the twenty-first century. To dismiss religion as simply
“unintelligible,” as Rorty’s onetime coeditor Quentin Skinner likes
to do, is to dismiss the study of history. That nonchalance concerning
one of the central motivating factors of humans, for good or ill,

which means projecting secular scholars’ worldview onto all people,
is hard to fathom.
Rorty was among the scholars invited in 1990 and 1991 to attend
conferences in Italy and Germany on the topic of modernism in the
Geisteswissenschaften. I was fortunate to be among them. Rorty’s
paper for the first of those conferences, “Dewey between Hegel and
Darwin,” was published in French in 1992, then in the volume of
conference papers, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, edited
by Dorothy Ross. The essay was reprinted in Rorty and Pragmatism
and then again in Rorty’s Truth and Progress. For these conferences
I wrote and revised a paper, “Democracy and Disenchantment,” com-
paring Dewey, Max Weber, Habermas, and Rorty. I argued that
Habermas, who was by then calling himself a “good Deweyan pragma-
tist,” was writing more consistently in the vein of Deweyan pragmatist
democracy than was Rorty, whose position I linked to the dark,
Nietzsche-tinged, disenchanted political and ethical writings of
Weber. I do not know if Rorty intended his essay “Dewey between
Hegel and Darwin” as a response to my criticism of his work, but his
essay began and ended by characterizing my position, and that of David
Hollinger, as a form of “panpsychism.” This gambit, which I came to
recognize as one of Rorty’s signature moves, caught me off guard. As
Rorty later explained in Consequences of Pragmatism and even more
pointedly in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he came to believe
that redescription was among the most useful tools available to phil-
osophers: “anything can be made to look good or bad by being rede-
scribed” (CIS, 73). Extracting from the detailed arguments that I and
many others had made concerning the phenomenological turn taken
by the generation of Dilthey, James, Dewey, and others, and poking fun
at their idea of immediate experience as a kind of spiritualist mumbo
jumbo, was Rorty’s way of changing the subject. Again, he wished
earlier philosophers just hadn’t made such arguments, which seemed
to him futile attempts to keep alive the now exhausted enterprise of
epistemology. The philosophers of the via media thought they were on
to something when they broke down the subject–object and mind–

body dualisms with their concept of immediate experience as social,
relational, creative, and imbued with historically specific cultural
values. Rorty claimed that they were still giving in to that bad old
impulse to commit metaphysics and construct mirrors of nature. But
Rorty’s “redescription” rested on an error. Although James near the
end of his life developed a metaphysics that many critics have found
problematic, his conception of immediate experience, like Dilthey’s
distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, was epistemological
rather than metaphysical, and it emerged in his classic Principles of
Psychology (1890) rather than in his late essays.2
Scholars such as Richard Bernstein, Hilary Putnam, Jeffrey
Stout, and some of those writing in this volume, have pointed out
that Rorty discarded earlier dualisms only to replace them with his
own. These included systematic versus edifying, argument versus
redescription, finding versus making, analytic versus conversational,
and, perhaps the most notorious, public versus private.3 Rorty traced
that final dichotomy, in his autobiographical essay “Trotsky and the
Wild Orchids,” to his uneasiness about the distance between his self-
proclaimed commitment to social justice and what he called his
“private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable” passions, notably his
love of bird-watching and his fascination with the wild orchids grow-
ing near his childhood home in rural New Jersey (PSH, 6). That
categorical distinction, antithetical to the thinking of the early prag-
matists, helps explain Rorty’s refusal to take seriously the arguments
that James and Dewey made for the centrality of prelinguistic, pre-
cognitive, ineffable experience. The domains of such experiences
included, but are hardly limited to, what James called religious
experience and what Dewey called consummatory experiences of
many kinds. For both James and Dewey, experiences of physical and
emotional intimacy, aesthetic and natural beauty, the exhilaration of
participating in or witnessing athletic or artistic performances, and
varieties of intense spirituality were of enormous significance for
philosophy. Although words cannot adequately express what makes
such forms of experience so powerful, as Rorty acknowledged by

terming them “incommunicable,” exiling them from philosophical
discussion need not follow from that realization.
James acknowledged the paradox in his original introduction to
the Gifford Lectures that became The Varieties of Religious
Experience. “There is something in life, as one feels its presence, that
seems to defy all the possible resources of phraseology.” But still we
try. “Life defies our phrases” because “it is infinitely continuous and
subtle and shaded,” whereas “our verbal terms are discrete, rude and
few.” Moreover, “our words come together leaning on each other
laterally for support, in chains and propositions,” all of which depend
on each other for their meaning. The meaning of our most intense
“living moments,” by contrast, “seems to well up from out of their
very centre” in ways difficult to describe in words. “If you take a disk
painted with a concentric spiral pattern, and make it revolve, it will
seem to be growing continuously and indefinitely” and yet, paradox-
ically, to remain “always of the same size.” It is this “self-sustaining
in the midst of self-removal,” which language and logic fail to cap-
ture, that philosophers must try to understand even though words
cannot adequately express it. “For what glimmers and twinkles like a
bird’s wing in the sunshine,” James concluded, it is philosophers’ aim
to “snatch and fix.” Yet when they fire their “volley of vocables”
from their “philosophic shot gun,” no matter how much success they
may feel, they also grasp “at the same time the finer hollowness and
irrelevancy” of their efforts (James, in Perry 1935, Vol. 2, 328–9).
Dewey likewise was fascinated by the capacity of art, nature,
and religion to spark some of the most powerful experiences of life.
His books Art as Experience and A Common Faith, as Richard
Shusterman and Steven C. Rockefeller have argued, show him wrest-
ling with ways to understand and examine such “consummatory
experiences.”4 In his 1938 Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, Dewey
wrote, “a universe of experience is a precondition of a universe of
discourse. Without its controlling presence, there is no way to deter-
mine the relevancy, weight, or coherence of any designated
distinction or relation. The universe of experience surrounds and

regulates the universe of discourse but never appears as such within
the latter” (Dewey 1938, 74). From the beginning to the end of his
career, Dewey declined to abandon the word in the face of objections
from analytic philosophers: “we need a cautionary and directive
word, like experience, to remind us that the world which is lived,
suffered and enjoyed as well as logically thought, has the last word in
all human inquiries” (Dewey 1925, 372).
Of course, Rorty himself came to see the inaccuracy of his
readings of the early pragmatists. Perhaps on his own, or perhaps
because he had been badgered by philosophers such as Bernstein,
Hilary Putnam, and some of the contributors to this volume, and by
historians such as Robert Westbrook, David Hollinger, and me, Rorty
offered another dualism. He drew a distinction between the “histor-
ical Dewey,” who had written his books and made his arguments, and
his very own “hypothetical Dewey,” who would have been a sensible
pragmatist “without being a radical empiricist.” Like Rorty’s imagin-
ary James, such a Dewey should have shared Rorty’s judgment and
“should have dropped the term ‘experience,’ not redefined it” (TP,
297). Once Rorty adopted that stance, it was hard to see why he
persisted in calling himself a pragmatist. He had already dismissed
Peirce. James’s and Dewey’s own versions of pragmatism rested
squarely on their conception of individual and collective experience.5
When Rorty turned his attention more directly to politics in
his later writings, his philosophy came to seem self-defeating for a
second reason. In perhaps his most widely read book, Contingency,
Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty adopted the posture of a sage reflecting
sadly on a culture gone mad with mistaken ideas about philosophy
and “theory,” a culture that could be redeemed only by a return to
literature and the adoption of what Rorty called “cultural politics.”
He argued that just as language is contingent, so are our ideas of
morality. Historical development he characterized as nothing more
than series of lucky accidents. What was called “progress” was
merely “a product of time and chance” (CIS, 22). Challenging
Habermas’s attempt to provide a philosophical foundation for a

radically democratic politics, he wrote, “People who try to update
and rewrite the standard social democratic scenario about human
equality, the scenario which their grandparents wrote around the
turn of the century, are not having much success” (CIS, 86). Rorty
called instead for a “poetized culture.” The people of his “liberal
utopia” would have “a sense of the contingency of their language of
moral deliberation, and thus of their consciences, and thus of their
community” (CIS, 60).
There are at least two problems with this easy dismissal of the
generations stretching from his grandparents and his parents, and
the pragmatists whose legacy he still wanted to claim as his own, to
the social democrats of his own day. First, Rauschenbusch and many
of the contemporary progressive and later New Deal reformers he
inspired worked hard to achieve the limited progress they made
through legal challenges and local, state, and national legislation. It
was difficult, demanding work, as generations of historians have
demonstrated. It did not just happen accidentally. Second, Dewey
explicitly repudiated the claim that philosophy has nothing to do
with politics. As he wrote in 1940, “any theory of activity in social
and moral matters, liberal or otherwise, which is not grounded in a
comprehensive philosophy, seems to me to be only a projection of
arbitrary personal preferences” (Dewey 1940, 150). Since “arbitrary
personal preferences” seemed to be precisely what Rorty was offering
in Contingency, and not just unapologetically but smugly, the gulf
between his and Dewey’s conceptions of philosophy and politics
could hardly have been wider.
Rorty’s self-proclaimed ironism undercut any effort to mobilize
political movements on behalf of the values he claimed to cherish. He
conceded the problem but hardly resolved it. He considered the
“poetized culture” he wanted “both possible and desirable.” He con-
ceded, however, that “I cannot go on to claim that there could or
ought to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ‘ironist.’ I cannot
imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make
them continually dubious about their own process of socialization.

Irony seems inherently a private matter.” Ironists, he concluded,
must “have something to have doubts about, something from which
to be alienated” (CIS, 87). From the perspective of Rorty’s many
critics, that was precisely the problem. It is one thing to dismiss the
significance of individual and collective experience and champion
chance and ironic detachment. Once that has been done, how is it
possible to rebuild the seriousness of purpose necessary to generate
effective social movements or political action? Rorty’s insouciance
pulled the rug out from under his attempt to present himself as a
thoroughgoing foe of cruelty in all its forms. As long as everyone is
free to read Proust, go birding, and wander amidst the wild orchids,
asked his readers (and many of the students to whom I assigned the
book), why should we worry about problems of inequality and injust-
ice? Rorty vociferously denied that any philosophical ideas or argu-
ments can generate the solidarity he sought. He never explained
what, in a culture of irony, could do the job.6
Accused by critics right and left of corrupting American cul-
ture, Rorty made several attempts to establish himself as a “left
patriot” in the spirit of his parents. Both Philosophy and Social
Hope and Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-
Century America, however, show just how inadequate his version
of pragmatism was to sustain his version of progressive politics.
Several of the essays in the former volume are notable for their
gloomy predictions. In “Looking Backward from the Year 2096,”
Rorty adopted the conceit that Edward Bellamy had used in his
utopian novel Looking Backward, one of the most widely read books
of the late nineteenth century. The article, entitled “Fraternity,” was
said to have been written for the seventh edition of A Companion to
American Thought, a book by then edited not by two white males but
by Cynthia Rodriguez, S. J., and Youzheng Patel. (To the editors of the
first edition, that looked like genuine progress.) The author of
“Fraternity” was writing from the perspective of the late twenty-
first century. A series of catastrophic experiences – there is no other
word for it – notably “the breakdown of democratic institutions

during the Dark Years (2014–44),” had led Americans to repudiate
the individualism of the late twentieth-century “rights revolution”
and renew their commitment to solidarity. A “burst of selfishness
had produced tax revolts in the 1970s,” which halted “the fairly
steady progress toward a fully-fledged welfare state that had been
under way since the New Deal.” Renewed racial animosity and dra-
matically increasing inequality then combined to spark a Second
Great Depression and murderous lawlessness that ended only with
the imposition of military rule. Thanks to a new force, the
Democratic Vista Party, a party created by a coalition of trade unions
and social gospel churches, the reign of the rich gave way to a new
cultural devotion to fraternity. Like Bellamy’s earlier effort, it was
both an indictment of our nightmarish condition and a lovely vision
of an alternative. And like Bellamy’s, Rorty’s flight of utopian fancy
offered no clue about how to get from here to there (PSH, 243–51).
Achieving Our Country, Rorty’s less fanciful attempt at social
and political analysis, suffered from three principal problems. First,
it was blind to the role of religion. Evidently the social gospel
churches in “Looking Backward” mattered less than readers of that
little essay might have been led to believe. Although Rorty men-
tioned his grandfather in passing and mentioned Martin Luther
King, Jr., in a litany of lions of the “reformist left,” he refused to
acknowledge the role played by the social gospel in early twentieth-
century progressivism, by the Catholic left generally and John Ryan,
aka “Right Reverend New Dealer,” in the rise of the trade union
movement, the roles played by the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and progressive Jews and Christians in the Civil Rights
movement, the role of religious groups in multiple antiwar move-
ments, or the role of religious faith in the decades-long efforts of
Cesar Chavez and his allies to galvanize farmworkers. In the years
since Rorty wrote, as in the century he described in the book, many
insurgent reformers, and many prominent Democratic Party polit-
icians, from Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren to Cory Booker
and Peter Buttigieg, have continued to invoke traditions of progres-

sive activism grounded in their commitments to egalitarian
Christianity. Perhaps because Rorty was convinced that religion is
a reactionary force with no place in his poetized culture of irony, he
ignored its indispensable role in twentieth-century leftist thought.
The historical record tells another story.
The second problem had to do with Rorty’s impatience with the
new social movements that transformed American politics after
World War II. Rorty’s Achieving Our Country is a tribute to the
heroism of the labor movement. He denigrated what he called the
“identity politics” of the post-1960s “cultural left,” whose activists
focused attention less on the working class than on forms of oppres-
sion having to do with race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. Such
crusades made universities better places, Rorty conceded, but they
antagonized most Americans and thereby facilitated the triumph of
reaction, selfishness, and greed. Finally, because Rorty remained, as
he proclaimed proudly, a fierce anticommunist long after the fall of
the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, his analysis
was locked not just in the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s but the
anti-Stalinism of his parents.
The United States will not move toward a more social demo-
cratic future unless the Democratic Party manages to fuse what
Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth have called the legitimate demands
for recognition with the equally legitimate demands for redistribution
and representation.7 The twenty-four years that have elapsed since
Rorty delivered the Massey Lectures, on which Achieving Our
Country was based, have made ever more clear that there will be no
second Truce of Detroit, the agreement that established the terms of
the post–World War II regime of labor relations that Rorty nostalgic-
ally invoked. Our postindustrial world, dominated not by the steel
industry and auto makers but by monopoly powers such as Amazon,
Facebook, Google, and Apple on the one hand, and by the precarity of
life in the gig economy on the other, presents us with a new set
of challenges. Those will be met, if at all, by new generations of
Americans committed not to enjoying the private pleasures of art or

consumption but to restoring a commitment to equality, to be
achieved through sustained political engagement and the nurturing
of deliberative democracy.
I was in the audience at Harvard when Rorty delivered his
Massey Lectures. Then and afterward, I expressed to him my misgiv-
ings about his skirting of the religious left, about the blinkered nature
of his narrative about the culture wars, and about the pointlessness of
continuing to fight the Cold War – no longer against the Soviet Union
but against potential allies on the left. When Achieving Our Country
appeared, he generously sent me a copy, along with a letter that read,
in part, “although I was sensible of your point that there was very
little social context displayed” in the lectures or the earlier draft of
the book, “I despaired of being able to add much – largely because the
holes in my knowledge seemed to [sic] large to fill.”8 Those holes,
I think, were less in Rorty’s knowledge than a result of his insouci-
ance. Learned as he was, he never succeeded in gluing back together
the private and the public worlds that he had pried apart. Nor did he
acknowledge the ideals that motivated earlier generations of activists
to undertake struggles against social injustice and economic inequal-
ity. Those generations did not share his commitment to ironism any
more than does the rising generation of activists who demand recog-
nition and representation as well as redistribution to address twenty-
first-century problems.
Since the presidential election of 2016, Achieving Our Country
has achieved unexpected notoriety because of a prediction Rorty
offered near the end of the book. If the left continued to focus on
cultural rather than economic issues, Rorty warned, and if politicians
“keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent
of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities,
and with debates about sexual mores,” then manufactured pseudo-
events will keep “the proles” distracted while the “super-rich” lux-
uriate in their ever-growing wealth. Battles over borders will rip apart
the older (industrial) from the newer (cultural) left. At that point,
“something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that

the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote
for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the
smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and post-
modernist professors will no longer be calling the shots” (AOC, 88–9).
As the chants of angry crowds demanding “Lock her up!” and
“Build the wall!” echo in the minds of Rorty’s post-2016 readers,
Rorty’s nightmare vision has come chillingly to life, not only in the
person of Donald Trump but in other dangerous autocrats around the
globe. Inequality continues to snowball, within nations and between
the northern and southern hemispheres. Competing factions from the
far left to the center left continue to squabble rather than unite,
primarily because of disagreements concerning the relative signifi-
cance of the shared concerns that animate all of them: demands not
only for recognition, redistribution, and representation but also, and
perhaps most ominously of all, climate change.
Rorty’s antidote to this poisonous condition, however, suffered
from a familiar vacuousness. If only we were to abandon religion, phil-
osophy, and “theory” more generally, and if only we were give up on
“participatory democracy and the end of capitalism,” we could return to
the magic of “American patriotism” (AOC, 102). In the spring of 2020,
many American leftists share the dissident soccer star Megan Rapinoe’s
proud declaration of her patriotism. But patriotism will not be enough to
end the reign of selfishness and greed, which, as Rorty accurately
observed, has dismantled much of the regulatory and redistributive
apparatus that rendered the populations of many nations much less
unequal between 1945 and 1980. If leftist thinkers have nothing to offer
but ironism, private utopias, or predictions of gloom, they will never
inspire electorates to action. If instead they acknowledge that the his-
tory of democracy shows the progress that people committed to the
ideals of liberty, equality, and justice can achieve, and if they call
attention to how much arduous political work is required to make even
limited (but never merely “accidental”) progress, they have a better
chance of reversing our decades-long decline into oligarchy.
In conclusion, I want to return to a memorable weekend

gathering in the summer of 1991. Rorty’s friend Richard Bernstein
convened a group to spend three days discussing Dewey in a lovely,
rustic spot in New York’s Adirondack mountains. Those in attend-
ance included, among others, Bernstein and Rorty, Casey Blake,
Robert Boynton, Juan Carlos Geneyro, Maria Pia Lara Zavala,
Richard Shusterman, William Sullivan, Cornel West, Robert
Westbrook, Alan Wolfe, and me. Occasioned by the publication of
Westbrook’s magisterial John Dewey and American Democracy
(Westbrook 1991), the conference turned into a symposium/camp
meeting at which all of us tried, in various ways but with equally
negligible results, to convert Rorty into a Deweyan. Citing chapter
and verse, from Dewey and from Westbrook, we tried to persuade
Rorty that he had misunderstood Dewey, and that his own “post-
modern bourgeois liberalism” was counterproductive. Our collect-
ive effort failed completely. Shrugging his shoulders and speaking in
the world-weary tones of a wise elder patiently explaining how and
why we misunderstood the philosophical as well as the political
issues, Rorty held his ground. He seemed genuinely unable to see
that it was possible to understand him perfectly and yet disagree
with him completely. In the breaks for coffee, lunch, and dinner,
many of us kept hashing out the issues. We argued over our diverse
understandings of the meanings of pragmatism and democracy – and
tried to imagine new, more persuasive arguments that might suc-
ceed in changing Rorty’s mind. Sometimes Rorty took part in those
exchanges. Often he went birding.
notes
1 For a brief account, see the appreciation from his lifelong friend Richard
J. Bernstein (Bernstein 2008). Gross 2008 is also relevant.
2 This is one of the central arguments of Kloppenberg 1986, chapters 2, 3, 6,
and 8. For a brief account of that argument, see Kloppenberg 1996,
100–38.
3 See Bernstein 2008 and Stout 2007.
4 See Shusterman 1992, 1997, 2002 (especially 203–7), and Rockefeller

1991.
5 Showing the connection between their ideas of immediate experience,
their ethics, and their pragmatism is central to the argument in
Kloppenberg 1986 and Kloppenberg 1996.
6 In addition to Richard Bernstein’s writings on Rorty, among the many
articles making this point are Williams 2000 and Isaac 2000.
7 Fraser and Honneth 2003. Their more recent works include Fraser and
Jaeggi 2018 and Honneth 2017.
8 Richard Rorty to James T. Kloppenberg, October 31, 1997, in the
author’s possession.
10 Rorty and National Pride
Georgia Warnke
Chief among the criticisms Richard Rorty levels at what he calls the
cultural Left in his Achieving Our Country is its “Gothic” account of
American history, an account that is haunted by specters of power
and hypocrisy and that condemns the United States for atrocities for
which no future acts can atone (AOC, 95). In Rorty’s view, this
account diverges disastrously from the assessment of James
Baldwin, from whom he takes the title of his book. In his famous
1963 letter to his fifteen-year-old nephew, Baldwin writes, “This is
the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for
which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they
have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and
do not know it and do not want to know it.” But he also writes, “If
we – and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the rela-
tively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create the
consciousness of others – do not falter in our duty now, we may be
able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our
county, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin 1991, 5).
Despite the crimes of which he accuses his country, Baldwin retains
hope that the United States will be able to realize its founding ideals,
including its commitment to freedom and equality. Rorty thinks
much the same can be said for the old or reformist Left, which
possessed a “national pride” in those commitments and in what it
saw as progressive attempts to make them real. In contrast, he says
the cultural Left gave up on achieving its country in favor of an
impotent self-disgust.
In this chapter, I want to explore Rorty’s charge against the
cultural Left but also ask whether, if we reject self-disgust, a simple
return to national pride is our best option. Might we not temper one
222
rorty and national pride 223
with the other and even learn to accommodate both? I begin with
Rorty’s history of the cultural Left.
the problem of the cultural left

Rorty sees the cultural Left as an outgrowth of the New Left and he
agrees with Todd Gitlin that we might locate the latter’s decisive break
with the older reformist Left in the year 1964, when the Democratic
Convention decided not to seat the members of the Mississippi
Freedom Democratic Party and Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf
Resolution. At that point, members of the New Left decided that
something was so “deeply wrong” with the United States that it was
beyond reform (AOC, 66). Rorty thinks that the country owes the New
Left a large debt for ending the Vietnam War. Indeed, he thinks,
“America will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which
rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972” (AOC, 68).
Nevertheless, he faults the New Left for assuming that the reformist
Left had nothing to teach it and for being unable to see itself as part of
the same reformist tradition to which that older Left belonged. Had it
done so, it would have found important resources in thinkers such as
Herbert Croly, John Dewey, and Walt Whitman, and it would not have
leaned toward the abstract Continental theory that Rorty claims
became the bedrock of the cultural Left.
Before the 1960s, according to Rorty, academic leftists were
mainly centered in social science departments and focused on such
economic questions as income inequality, labor relations, social wel-
fare, and the effects of money in politics. After the 60s, academic
leftists were largely to be found in literature departments, where they
replaced efforts to reform the system with attempts to name its vices:
“Cold War ideology,” “technocratic rationality,” “phallogocentrism,”
and the like (AOC, 79). Rather than economic reform, the solutions to
these vices were meant to be new academic programs focused on
marginalized groups such as women and on issues of social identity
in general. As he does the New Left, Rorty credits this cultural Left
with a great deal of success. By exposing the forms of degradation and
224 georgia warnke
humiliation to which various groups were subjected, the cultural Left

helped alter attitudes and make the United States a more civilized
place than it had been; it helped to change relations between men
and women, to make the lives of members of marginalized groups,
especially gays and lesbians, better, and generally to decrease what
Rorty calls the sadism in American culture. Nevertheless, although
he admits that the older Left simply assumed that eliminating gross
economic disparities would also eliminate other forms of injustice, he
thinks the cultural Left made a similar mistake in focusing too exclu-
sively on issues of identity. The result was that “During the same
period in which socially accepted sadism . . . steadily diminished, eco-
nomic inequality and economic insecurity . . . steadily increased”
(AOC, 83). Indeed, as globalization led to massive labor realignments,
substantial insecurity, and enormous economic differentials, Rorty
says the cultural Left continued to focus only on questions of stigma
and humiliation. And he predicts that once members of labor unions
and unorganized unskilled workers come to realize the degree of public
indifference to their plight, something will “crack.” In two paragraphs
widely quoted after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as President of
the United States, Rorty writes:
The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed
and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone
willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug
bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and
postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made
in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by
homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will
come back into fashion . . . All the resentment which badly
educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to
them by college graduates will find an outlet. (AOC, 90)1
It is not difficult to confirm Rorty’s foresight. Trump was

elected on a populist vote to bring back lost manufacturing jobs
and revitalize rural towns but also to drain the bureaucratic

“swamp” in Washington, DC and, indeed, as a stinging rebuke to
the liberal elite and urban intellectuals. He began his presidential
campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as criminals and
rapists and by insisting that he could not get a fair trial from a
Mexican-American judge; he also governed in this vein, among other
actions claiming that black Americans are responsible for most
murders of whites, referring to El Salvador, Haiti, and African coun-
tries as “shithole countries” and trying to limit even legal immigra-
tion. In 2017, hate crimes in US cities rose by 17 percent, 58 percent
of which were based on race, ethnicity, and ancestry.2 Avowed white
nationalists stabbed an African American man in New York City,
fatally stabbed two men protecting a hijab-wearing Muslim woman
in Portland, Oregon, and killed a woman during a “Unite the Right”
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.3 In October 2018, a gunman killed
eleven people at a Pittsburgh synagogue; in April 2019, another
gunman attacked a synagogue in San Diego. Meanwhile, imposing
tariffs on imports, withdrawing from international agreements and
organizations, and criticizing allies may have a populist bent, but it
is not clear how productive they are in improving the lives of those
left behind in the new economy.
What could have gone differently? Rorty’s more specific ques-
tion is why the Left could not “channel the mounting rage of the
newly dispossessed?” (AOC, 91).4 His answer is that it was in the
universities reading theorists such as Jacques Lacan and Michel
Foucault. Instead of trying to figure out how to reverse increasing
inequality or how to mitigate some of the consequences of
globalization, the cultural Left was more interested in adequately
“theorizing” what has been “inadequately theorized” and in “prob-
lematizing familiar concepts” (AOC, 93). What moves the cultural
Left, according to Rorty, is narratives about “ubiquitous specters,”
“webs of power,” and “the insidious influence of a hegemonic ideol-
ogy.” These narratives, he says, do for the cultural Left “what stories
about the Lamanites did for Joseph Smith and what stories about
226 georgia warnke
Yakkub did for Elijah Muhammad:” they show that the United States
is irredeemably evil (AOC, 94–5).
For Rorty, the contrast between this intellectual orientation
and the one taken up by Croly, Dewey, and Whitman and character-
istic of the American Left prior to the Vietnam War could not be
starker. The basic feature of this older orientation is its faith in the
United States. “We may distrust and dislike much of that is done in
the name of our country,” Croly writes, “but our country itself, its
democratic system, and its prosperous future are above suspicion”
(Croly, in AOC, 10). Likewise, for Dewey and Whitman, the United
States represents democracy and self-determination. Whitman calls
the United States “the greatest poem” because it is beholden to no
higher authority than itself and to no preset idea of what it should be.
Instead, it is “the first thoroughgoing experiment in national self-
creation” (AOC, 22) and neither he nor Dewey sees the need for a
theoretical frame of reference in terms of which elements of that
experiment might be assessed and justified. Nor, in Rorty’s reading,
do they find it particularly important to focus on “the real” as
opposed to the hope “for what might become real” (AOC, 18).
Rather, for Whitman and Dewey, America is an attempt to foster a
new society in which individuals can flourish and an endless variety
of ways of living can take root. Both thought the attempt could fail.
Nevertheless, Rorty writes, “Whereas Marx and Spencer claimed to
know what was bound to happen, Whitman and Dewey denied such
knowledge in order to make room for pure joyous hope” (AOC, 23).
Rorty thinks, “there is no point in asking whether . . . Whitman
or Dewey got America right.” As he continues, “Stories about what a
nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate
representation but rather attempts to forge a moral identity” (AOC,
13). Hence, if the Croly–Whitman–Dewey version of America is
better than that of the cultural Left, it is not because it offers a more
“accurate representation.” Rather, for Rorty, it is because, unlike the
version the cultural Left presents, it allows for national pride and
because national pride is crucial to efforts at social reform:
National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a

necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national
pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive
self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect
makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so
insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate
about national policy unlikely. (AOC, 3)5
Rorty does not say why insufficient national pride attenuates

possibilities for energetic and effective debate; indeed, Germany’s
post–World War II culture of atonement would seem to offer a coun-
terexample. Yet even if national pride is necessary for this sort of
debate, surely it must be earned. Rorty emphasizes the difference
between the members of the cultural Left and Baldwin: the former
find America “unforgiveable” as he did, but they also find it
“unachievable, as he did not” (AOC, 35). Here, however, Rorty
glosses over some of what Baldwin finds unforgiveable: not only that
his country and countrymen “have destroyed and are destroying
hundreds of thousands of lives” but also that “they do not know it
and do not want to know it.” Although Rorty denies that “stories
about what a nation has been . . . are . . . attempts at accurate repre-
sentation,” he also intimates that pride in the United States is con-
sistent with an accurate representation. Even if less brash and
bellicose, that pride remains “compatible with remembering that
we expanded our boundaries by massacring the tribes that blocked
our way, that we broke the word we had pledged in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo and that we caused the death of a million
Vietnamese out of sheer macho arrogance” (AOC, 32). Yet even
assuming that most Americans share Rorty’s view of the meaning
of the war in Vietnam, how extensive is their historical memory?6
How much do most Americans know or want to know about the
massacres of Native Americans or violations of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo? If national pride is compatible with remember-
ing the massacres, lies, and macho arrogance in which a nation has
228 georgia warnke
been engaged, is it also compatible with not remembering, not

wanting to remember, or misremembering them? The focus of
Baldwin’s concern, widespread and deliberate ignorance about the
historical experiences of African Americans, raises reasons for doubt.
historical ignorance
Take the place of slavery and the Civil War in American public
memory. In 2011, at the start of the War’s sesquicentennial, a survey
by the Pew Research Center found that only 38 percent of Americans
attributed the fundamental cause of the war to slavery and that
48 percent attributed it to the South’s attempt to defend states’ rights
(Heimlich 2011). A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law
Center on the teaching of American slavery and the Civil War offered
no indication that knowledge about slavery and its role in the Civil
War had improved during the intervening six years. Surveying high
school seniors in fifteen states, the report found that only 8 percent of
the students named slavery as the war’s central cause; 68 percent
were not aware that it took a constitutional amendment to end the
institution; few knew it existed outside the South; and 78 percent
could not say how provisions of the US Constitution advantaged
slaveholders (Shuster 2018).
To be sure, Americans know very little about their history in
general. A 2018 survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship
Foundation found that 72 percent of those surveyed could not identify
the thirteen original colonies; only 24 percent knew why the colon-
ists went to war against the British; and 12 percent thought Dwight
D. Eisenhower was a Civil War general. (Another 6 percent thought
he was a general during the war in Vietnam).7 In the case of these
lapses, however, US history textbooks and instruction provide the
correct information for those who are interested. In contrast, the
report by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds that with regard to
the enslavement of African Americans, textbooks regularly used in
schools provide inadequate coverage and that teachers often offer a
sanitized picture. Rather than emphasizing or exploring the
experience of the enslaved population or the place of slavery in

American life, they generally focus on positive stories about the
abolition movement or black leaders such as Harriet Tubman.
Moreover, as measured against a set of ten concepts that the report
says are key to understanding slavery and its history, standards in all
the fifteen states it surveyed are inadequate. These key concepts
range from the economic importance of slavery to the experience of
enslaved people to the influence of enslaved and free people of African
descent on American culture. State standards in New Jersey and New
Mexico omit all ten concepts; Virginia, Kansas, Louisiana, and
Washington omit nine of them; and South Carolina, Oklahoma, and
Florida omit eight. California performs the best, omitting two.
Nevertheless, according to the report, most states fail “to lay out
meaningful requirements for learning about slavery, about the lives
of the millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was
essential to the American economy” (Shuster 2018, 10).
In his preface to the report, historian Hasan Kwame Jeffries
attributes the inadequacy of instruction and state standards on
slavery to Americans’ aversion to “hard history”: we “prefer to pick
and choose what aspects of the past to hold on to, gladly jettisoning
that which makes us uneasy” (Shuster 2018, 5). In his introduction to
the report, historian David Blight attributes this aversion to “a deep,
abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as
‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the
improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the
broadening of pursuits of happiness for all” (Shuster 2018, 8). In other
work on the Civil War and its aftermath, Blight goes further: we can
attribute our lack of knowledge of slavery not only to a need to see
American history as progress but also to myths about the war and its
causes that began to develop as soon as it was over (Blight 2001). With
the devastation of the South, Southerners, and particularly the United
Daughters of the Confederacy, promoted the more palatable idea that
it fought the war to defend states’ rights rather than, as the articles of
secession themselves claimed, to preserve the institution of slavery.
230 georgia warnke
For their part, reconciliationists, including Whitman, eager to bind

the nation back together, downplayed understandings of the war that
saw it as a war of emancipation and emphasized instead the shared
hardships of the North and South. What was to be remembered was
the equal courage and valor of Northern and Southern soldiers, as
well as their shared suffering: “the dead, the dead, the dead – or South,
or North, ours all,” Whitman wrote (Whitman, in Blight 2001, 18).
To be sure, there were other voices: those of Frederick Douglass
and some radical Republicans who continued to insist that the mean-
ing of the war lay in emancipation and its promise of full citizenship for
the former slaves. Nevertheless, in the years following the Civil War, a
different view largely won out: the South’s secession became the Lost
Cause, Robert E. Lee became a national hero, and Reconstruction, in its
efforts to ensure the freedom and equality of African Americans,
became a terrible mistake, one that Whitman called “the black domin-
ation, but little above the beasts” (Whitman, in Blight 2001, 22).
Statues of Confederate generals, memorials to the Confederate cause,
and public displays of the Confederate flag cropped up across the
country, and the antebellum South became a moonlight and magnolia
fable in which slavery was recalled as a largely benevolent institution.
Ten United States military bases still bear the names of Confederate
generals, and although some municipalities have begun to remove
Confederate statues, memorials, and flags, the sometimes violent pro-
tests against this by so-called heritage defenders attest to the staying
power of Civil War myths.
Indeed, monuments and memorials to the Southern “cause”
continue vastly to outnumber remembrances of those who suffered
from it. Victims of the thousands of lynchings that followed the Civil
War and continued into the twentieth century are finally being
memorialized in the steel columns hanging from the roof of the
National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
But what about remembrances of other forms of racial violence: say,
memorials dedicated to victims of riots protesting African American
suffrage during Reconstruction, histories of white mob destructions
of entire black communities in the years before World War I, or

examinations of redlining, housing covenants, and white violence,
including bombings, that kept African Americans in ghettos through
most of the twentieth century? Not simply in these actions and
events but also, and importantly, in their forgetting, mythologizing,
and misremembering – a forgetting, mythologizing, and misremem-
bering that extends to the Native American massacres and violations
of treaties that Rorty notes – we might trace the not knowing and not
wanting to know that is Baldwin’s concern. Indeed, we might be
tempted to endorse the cultural Left’s view of the “insidious influ-
ence of a hegemonic ideology” that in this case works to minimize or
cover over important histories of racial injustice and largely omit
them from the historical record.
Charles W. Mills comes close to the cultural Left’s view from a
decidedly different intellectual orientation. His sympathies are with
what he thinks “will seem to many a deplorably old-fashioned, ‘con-
servative,’ realist, intellectual framework, one in which truth, falsity,
facts, reality, and so forth are not enclosed with ironic scare quotes”
(Mills 2007, 15), and he thus finds Lacan and Foucault as counter-
productive as Rorty does. Nevertheless, for Mills the influence of a
hegemonic racial ideology that does not know and does not want to
know is extensive, reaching from historical memory to political phil-
osophy. The standard narrative of analytic political philosophy claims
that the field was moribund from the late nineteenth century until
1971, when John Rawls revived it with A Theory of Justice (Mills
2015). Yet, as Mills points out, this standard narrative overlooks a
great deal of pre-Rawlsian political theory, including the work of the
Frankfurt School theorists, Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist philoso-
phy, Hannah Arendt’s post–World War II writings, and, importantly,
all the work of non-white theorists such as Douglass and W. E. B. Du
Bois. Moreover, Rawls’s political theory has an ideological function,
in Mills’s view. On the one hand, it reorients social contract theory so
that it takes an explicitly hypothetical form and replaces issues of
political obligation with those of social justice. On the other hand,
232 georgia warnke
in neither Rawls’s work nor in the vast secondary literature on it, the
indexing of which Mills notes “would constitute a book in itself,” do
considerations of racial justice appear (Mills 2015, 3). Questions cen-
tral to political theory in the United States surely include the state of
race relations and the source of racial disparities in wealth, income,
health, and the like. By asking instead the hypothetical question of
what principles of justice we would choose from an original position
under certain idealized conditions, Rawls’s political theory simply
removes such questions from view.
Indeed, Mills contends that if one looks carefully at the social
contract tradition that Rawls is praised for reviving, it become
clear that the contract at issue is already a racial one. Papal bulls
and pronouncements, European discussions about colonialism and
international law, “discovery” documents, pacts, treaties, legal
decisions and structures, and the infamous requerimientos in
which the Spanish, on pain of war, required assent by Native
Americans to statements read out to them in Spanish, all indicate
that when social contract theory talks about free consent it means
free consent among white people about people of color. To the
extent that the Declaration of Independence faults the British
Crown for setting “merciless Indian Savages” against the colonists
and that the US Constitution not only calculates an African
American at three-fifths of a person but consents to their continued
enslavement, Mills maintains that the founding documents of the
United States possess this racial contract at their base (Mills 1997).
In this regard his views are close to those of Nikole Hannah-Jones’
1619 project.
Thus, while Rorty thinks national pride in American reformist
progress is compatible with remembering the ways in which the
United States has mistaken its way, like the cultural Left Mills
suggests that were we to remember all those allegedly mistaken
ways, we would have to reverse the judgment of what we count as
progress and what we count as mistakes; indeed, the mistakes are the
progress, and the efforts, the mistakes. Where does this contrast
between Rorty and the progressives, on the one hand, and Mills and
the cultural Left, on the other, leave us? The question with which we
began was whether national pride was compatible with not knowing
and not wanting to know. Pride that rests on myths and ideology
makes for a tenuous sort of pride, one easily either undercut by
coming to know what has been elided or made so defensive by its
revelation that it denies those elisions. Indeed, it is not hard to
imagine that both the cultural Left’s disgust at American history
and the current zeal of heritage defenders in protecting the Lost
Cause tradition are reactions to disclosures about a past that has been
obscured and assiduously mis-transmitted. Although Rorty dismisses
the need to tie American moral identity to an accurate representa-
tion, might we not ask whether our representation of our history is
not so obfuscating and, moreover, our refusal to acknowledge the
lives we have destroyed so adamant that the descent of the cultural
Left into self-disgust and of heritage defenders into what Rorty might
see as bellicosity are all too predictable?
Despite his general agreement with the cultural Left, Mills’s
work also contains suggestions that point down a different path. Here
he distinguishes between the nonideal racial ideals that he thinks are
embodied in the social contract and what he calls ideal raceless
ideals. Moreover, he denies that the United States is condemned to
the former but rather maintains that we can move toward the latter
by fully researching, remembering, and acknowledging both what we
have thus far, or at least too often, refused to remember and acknow-
ledge, and why we have refused to remember and acknowledge it:
Realizing a better future requires not merely admitting the ugly

truth of the past – and present – but understanding the ways in
which these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white
population. We want to know – both to describe and to explain –
the circumstances that actually blocked achievement of the ideal
raceless ideals and promoted instead the naturalized nonideal
racial ideals. We want to know what went wrong in the past, is
going wrong now, and is likely to continue to go wrong in the
future if we do not guard against it. (Mills 1997, 92)
234 georgia warnke
Mills does not reconcile his view of the United States as a racial
polity with his reference to America’s “ideal raceless ideals” or with
his interest in unearthing the impediments to reaching them. In
effect, he adopts both the condemnatory position of the cultural
Left and the hopes of Baldwin and Rorty that our country and its
ideals might still be achieved. In what follows I want to argue that
this unreconciled stance is a more solid basis for “energetic and
effective debate about national policy” than self-disgust, bellicosity,
or a national pride based on ignorance. If we are to deliberate clearly
and well over the direction of our future, we need to know where we
have been and what we have done in the past. We need to acknow-
ledge and confront the full extent of a repugnant history that we have
buried or ignored. At the same time, we also need to take seriously
our ideal raceless ideals of freedom and equality and celebrate what-
ever progress we have made in realizing them. In short, we need to
foster an ability to accept our past and to understand it in at least two
ways at once. I think Jürgen Habermas suggests a possible approach in
pointing to the psychoanalytic theory of Edith Jacobson in his inter-
vention in the 1980s historians’ debate over the place of the Third
Reich in German history.
troubled legacies
Revisionist German historians in the 1980s seemed to have had
thoughts somewhat similar to Rorty’s idea of the importance of
national pride. In their view, Germany’s culture of atonement had
run its course and national pride or a positive image of Germany was
necessary for the country’s future – in specific, for social integration
and stable foreign relations. Hence they argued that the emphasis on
the Holocaust had to be leveled out in favor of a wider and longer
historical lens, one that placed Nazism in the context of dislocations
of the modern era, other historical massacres, and, perhaps most
importantly, opposition to Bolshevism (Habermas 1988).8
Habermas’s own intervention into the debate was driven by two
related events: the conservative historians’ popular publications on the
issue and the visit of US President Ronald Reagan, after a morning trip
to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, to the Bitburg cemetery
where SS members are interred. Like Whitman, Habermas suggests
that memorializing mutual experiences of suffering can foster recon-
ciliation and help construct a common tradition. At the same time, he
is quite clear that memorialization of mutual sufferings does not
include equating sufferings that are incommensurable. If some
Americans lionize the suffering endured by the South and its Lost
Cause, with regard to SS members and Jewish victims, Habermas
imposes a limit. “The less communality . . . a collective life-context
allowed internally and the more it maintained itself by usurping and
destroying the lives of others, the greater then is the ambivalence of
the burden of reconciliation which is loaded onto subsequent gener-
ations’ allotted task of mourning” (Habermas 1988, 46).
Habermas also claims to be not unsympathetic to the public use of
history to forge a moral identity. At the same time, whereas Rorty denies
that “stories about what a nation has been . . . are . . . attempts at accurate
representation” and, indeed, that there is no “nonmythological, non-
ideological way of telling a country’s story” (AOC, 11), Habermas insists
that there are mythological and ideological ways, and he offers the work
of historians such as Andreas Hillgruber as an example. Just as Lost
Cause histories of the Civil War emphasize the struggles and suffering
of Confederate soldiers and their generals, Hillgruber thinks that if we
are to understand the meaning of the Second World War we must look at
it from the point of view of the soldier on the Eastern front – those who,
he says, fought to protect “the German population in the east” against
“the Red Army’s orgy of revenge.” Never mind that these efforts allowed
the operations of the death camps to continue – for Hillgruber,
employing this retrospective knowledge devalues the actions of the
soldiers themselves in their desperate attempt to save the Prussian-
Eastern provinces for the West. Likewise, for Southern heritage defend-
ers what is important about the Civil War is the perspective of the
Confederate soldiers, their generals, and their valor – never mind that
had they won slavery would have continued.
236 georgia warnke
In his attempt to make sense out of the appeal of such German

historical revisionism, Habermas looks to Jacobson’s insight that the
developing child needs to learn to accommodate two opposing experi-
ences of its primary caregiver. The child experiences that caregiver,
on the one hand, as sometimes loving and giving and, on the other, as
sometimes withdrawing and unavailable. Out of these conflicting
experiences the child must form a complex image that enfolds both
experiences into the experience of the same person. Yet the child can
also fail and attempt to resolve the conflict and the cognitive disson-
ance it entails by simply substituting one experience for the other;
indeed, as Habermas writes, the attempt is “all the more understand-
able the further apart the two extremes become” (Habermas 1988,
46). In the context of the Third Reich he thinks a similar attempt can
try to resolve conflict and cognitive dissonance by substituting, say,
“the positive impressions of one’s own father or brother, which are
saturated with experience” for “the disquieting information which is
provided by abstract reports about the contexts of these persons’
actions and their entanglements, persons so intimately connected
with oneself” (Habermas 1988, 46).
Tony Horowitz makes a similar point about heritage defenders.
In their view, because the Civil War was fought over states’ rights not
slavery and because the Lost Cause was a valiant one, Confederate
monuments, statues of Confederate generals, and public displays of the
Confederate flag do not commemorate racial oppression but rather
honor their ancestors. Of course, most of the monuments and statues
were erected during the Jim Crow era between 1890 and 1950, while
the Confederate flag began to be prominently displayed or woven into
state flags only in the 1950s and 60s during the Civil Rights era and as a
protest against integration (Gunter and Kizzire 2019).
On the other hand, about 20 percent of white Southern males of
military age died in the Civil War, while countless others were
wounded and their farms and homes ruined. Hence, here again, it can
be difficult to hold in mind both their sacrifice and the ghastliness it
was dedicated to preserve. It is easier simply to forget or downplay the
latter in favor of the former – or, as Horowitz puts the point, “No one
wants to be asked to spit on their ancestors’ graves” (Horowitz 2015).
Yet I think we need to learn both to honor and to spit – in effect
to learn to live with the cognitive dissonance Jacobson examines. The
cultural Left and heritage defenders are similar in their attempts to
reduce the past to one story, to a single account without internal
conflict. Either American history is the litany of crimes that cultural
Leftists attribute to it or, at least in its Southern version, it represents
a lost but valued way of life to be commemorated. The same goes for
what Blight terms the deep American need to see our history as the
progressive working out of straightforward ideals. All three
approaches try to flatten out a legacy that we might rather recognize
as conflicted. Just as we must learn to see the loving and giving
caregiver as the same person as the withdrawing and unavailable
one, we must learn to see the man who wrote the first draft of the
Declaration of Independence as the same man who had small
enslaved boys whipped in his nail foundry at Monticello and to see
the poet of democracy as the same man who thought African
Americans were “but little above the beasts.” Referring to slavery,
Blight makes much the same point:
Freedom and tyranny, wrapped in the same historical bundle,

feeding upon and making one another, created by the late 18th
century a remarkably original nation dedicated to Thomas
Jefferson’s idea of the ‘truths’ of natural rights, popular sovereignty,
the right of revolution, and human equality, but also built as an
edifice designed to protect and expand chattel slavery. Americans
do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so
many ways, we are our contradictions. (Shuster 2018, 7)
How might we learn to accept our history and ourselves as

contradictions? Can we substitute cognitive dissonance for both the
national pride Rorty recommends and the Gothic self-disgust of the
cultural Left? If we are to understand ourselves as our contradictions,
how might we learn to do so? The capacity for cognitive dissonance
238 georgia warnke
is, I think, already embedded in humanistic forms of understanding

and, in particular, in our understanding of texts. Take our understand-
ing of characters in literature. If we must learn to understand Thomas
Jefferson as both a writer of the Declaration of Independence and a
ruthless owner of other human beings, we are already able to under-
stand the character Fanny Price of Mansfield Park in a number of
conflicting ways: as a symbol of Christian heroism (Trilling 1963,
128–9) and a model of constancy (MacIntyre 1984, 240), but also as
“a silent censorious pall” (Auerbach 1980) and proof that Jane
Austen’s very “judgment and . . . moral sense were corrupted” (Amis
1957, 440). Likewise, we can look to the website “Literary Hub” for a
catalogue of some of the different ways Holden Caulfield of The
Catcher in the Rye has been understood: as a “saintly Christian
person,” an “American rebel victim,” “an unregenerate whiner and
egotist,” and a “sad little screwed-up hero” (Temple 2018).
We also understand the texts in which these characters reside
in different ways. Edward Said presents Mansfield Park as a “pre-
imperialist” text, one that “sees the legitimacy of Sir Thomas
Bertram’s overseas properties as a natural extension of the calm, the
order, the beauties of Mansfield Park, one central estate validating the
economically supportive role of the peripheral other” (Said 1993, 79).
In contrast, David Bartine and Eileen Maguire see the same text as
“an extensively dissonant commentary on the false harmony of the
imperial/paternal model” (Bartine and Maguire 2009, 52). For its part,
The Catcher in the Rye has been seen as a coming-of-age story, a war
story, and a book about “the spiritual poverty of a conformist cul-
ture” (Menand 2001). We ask for evidence and justification for any
literary interpretation we are to take seriously. Yet we assume that
different readers can take up an identical text, argue for the import-
ance of different parts of it, and integrate these parts in different ways
to show how the text completes a different meaning.
To be sure, employing our hermeneutic practices of interpret-
ation as a basis for our capacity to live with cognitive dissonance
about the United States and its history confronts two problems. First,
these practices appear to fall short. Although Fanny Price can be

understood in different ways, the descriptions I have cited of her
belong to different interpreters, to Lionel Trilling, Alasdair
MacIntyre, Nina Auerbach, and Kingsley Amis. Likewise, the descrip-
tions of Holden Caulfield belong to Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph
L. Blotner, Ihab Hassan, Jonathan Yardley, and Maxwell Geismar,
respectively. In contrast, learning to live with cognitive dissonance
requires an ability on the part of one interpreter to understand the
same person, event, or series of events in different, sometimes con-
tradictory, ways. We must ourselves learn to understand Mansfield
Park as both pre- and anti-imperialist and Holden as both Christ-like
and screwed up. Yet what we learn in reading analyses of literary
texts by a range of others and discussing them with others is precisely
this ability. Literary critics may all argue for their particular inter-
pretations and point to the relevant textual evidence that supports
them, but none plausibly thinks that the analysis of who Fanny Price
or Holden Caulfield is ends with one contribution. Moreover, in
humanistic forms of study, critics and their readers learn to appreci-
ate and to subscribe to many different plausible interpretations.
Indeed, we take for granted that texts and the characters and parts
they contain are open to different compelling understandings.
Nevertheless, this interpretive pluralism raises a second poten-
tial problem with conceiving of our hermeneutic practices of interpret-
ation as a basis for our capacity to live with cognitive dissonance with
regard to American history. How far does the interpretive pluralism go?
If we can accept different, even opposed, understandings of Fanny Price
and Holden Caulfield as well as of Mansfield Park and The Catcher in
the Rye, and if we are to transfer this pluralism to our understandings
of historical actors and events so that we learn to accommodate differ-
ent, even opposed understandings of them, why should we not learn to
accommodate an understanding of Southern secession that sees it as an
attempt to stand up for the principle of states’ rights?
Respect for pluralism in textual interpretation does not extend
to interpretations that fail to make sense out of a text at all. Rather
240 georgia warnke
the general hermeneutic principle ties an adequate understanding of a

text to the ability to read the whole of the text in terms of its parts and
its parts in terms of the whole. An adequate understanding is thus one
that is able to present the text as an integrated totality where even
attempts to deconstruct that totality depend on understanding the
totality that is to be deconstructed. It is hard to see how we could
understand The Catcher in the Rye as the story of a happy, well-
adjusted prep school student given Holden’s words and actions. It is
equally hard to see how we could understand Southern secession as an
attempt to stand up for states’ rights given the words of the secession
articles themselves and the South’s opposition to states’ rights when it
came to Northern states’ lack of compliance with fugitive slave laws.
What makes cognitive dissonance appropriate to the history of the
United States is the juxtaposition of different trajectories: for example,
one that runs from slavery, the massacres of Native Americans, the
violations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Vietnam War
with one that runs from the petitions against slavery that the Society
of Friends made to the first US Congress, the efforts of Douglass
and abolitionists, the work of Thurgood Marshall and others, and
Obergefell v. Hodges. Yet if accepting cognitive dissonance asks us
to acknowledge the parts of our history that make us uneasy, it is not
an invitation to mythmaking or distortion.
With regard to the German historians’ debate, Habermas asks
whether one can “continue the traditions of German culture without
also assuming historical liability for the form of existence in which
Auschwitz was possible.” He also asks whether it is possible to
assume this liability “any way other than through the solidarity of
the memory of that which cannot be made good” (Habermas 1988,
47). If we transfer these questions to the American context, what
Habermas asks is that we take responsibility for the context of
American life that allowed for slavery as well as for broken treaties,
imperial aggression, and the oppression of marginalized groups in
general. Taking up this responsibility means remembering and being
committed to remembering “that which cannot be made good” or, in
Baldwin’s words, “that for which neither I nor time will ever forgive
them.” Memory is the minimum solidarity we owe victims, and a
national pride inconsistent with that memory is not a national pride
to be celebrated. Yet nor can this solidarity be found in the cultural
Left’s “ubiquitous specters” and “webs of power,” which ultimately
simply abstract from the agency of those it may mean to support. An
easy condemnation of the past does nothing to redeem the present.
Rather, we might replace both pride and condemnation with a will-
ingness to endure the cognitive dissonance that results from
accepting aspects of our history we would rather forget while not
forgetting aspects we can still respect.
notes
1 See for example Senior 2016.
2 “2017 Hate Crimes Statistics Released,” Criminal Justice Information
Services (November 27, 2018), www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/cjis-link/2017-
hate-crime-statistics-released (accessed May 23, 2019).
3 “Hate Crimes Rise in Major US Cities in 2017,” VOA (September 29,
2018), www.voanews.com/a/hate-crimes-rising-in-us/4034719.html
(accessed May 23, 2019.)
4 There is of course no reason why a progressive movement cannot work to
improve both the recognition of diverse identities and the redistribution
of material resources. Professions such as teaching and nursing are poorly
paid at least in part because they are largely composed of women and
because they are seen as caring professions that come naturally to women
without requiring a great deal of skill. Likewise, two-thirds of the
minimum-wage workers in the United States are women. Bettering their
material life conditions and prospects thus also works to decrease their
marginalization as women. Similarly, because African American and
Latinx populations are disproportionately working class, such measures
as raising the minimum wage, a decent health care system, and greater
taxes on corporations and the rich would also disproportionately benefit
them. Instead of allowing right-wing populists to pit poor and working-
class whites against poor and working-class people of color, could the Left
not have devoted its energies to illuminating their common interests?
242 georgia warnke
5 Rorty goes on to say, “Emotional involvement with one’s country –

feelings of intense shame or of glowing pride aroused by various parts of
its history, and by various present-day national policies – is necessary if
political deliberation is to be imaginative and productive. Such
deliberation will probably not occur unless pride outweighs shame”
(AOC, 3). Yet his account of the cultural Left does not suggest it feels
shame. Rather, it seems to glory in its disgust for the country and
its history.
6 According to a January 2018 poll, the number of Americans who have no
opinion on whether the US should have entered the war in Vietnam is
rising. Those under 50 “are less likely to think the US should have stayed
out, and more likely to not have an opinion.” See www.cbsnews.com/
news/cbs-news-poll-u-s-involvement-in-vietnam (accessed May 23, 2019).
7 “National Survey Finds Just 1 in 3 Americans Would Pass Citizenship
Test,” Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, https://
woodrow.org/news/national-survey-finds-just-1-in-3-americans-would-
pass-citizenship-test (accessed May 23, 2019).
8 Current leaders of the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD) think
much the same, calling the Nazi era a “speck of bird poop in more than
1,000 years of successful German history” and Germany’s Holocaust
Memorial “a monument of shame” (Eddy 2019).
11 Rorty on Religion
Stephen S. Bush
Richard Rorty’s most famous assessment of religion is that it is a

“conversation stopper.” People who refer to God in the midst of policy
debates do so as an appeal to a final, absolute court in order to settle a
debate definitively. Often they do so in order to deny the rights and
claims of others: gays and women, for example. Rorty, advertising
himself as an atheist, counsels that religious people should keep their
beliefs to themselves when they enter into public conversation.
If one knew only this much, one might class Rorty among those
cultured despisers of religion who regard religion as irrational, the
antithesis of reason and scientific knowledge. As it turns out, this is
not at all the case. Rorty does not think religion is as such irrational.
Indeed, Rorty himself evidences an unconventional sort of religiosity.
reason and religion

Rorty’s views on religion are in keeping with his broader philosophical
perspective; specifically, his commitments to a non-correspondence
theory of truth and mind and to anti-essentialism. Rorty spends a good
deal of his career challenging the idea that our minds are in some sense,
the “mirror of nature.” In the correspondence theory of mind, at least
of the sort that Rorty aims to displace, the ideas and concepts that
characterize our mental life of thought and perceptual experience
correspond to objects that exist outside of the mind and have their
existence and nature independently of human cognitive and social
activity. They are what they are regardless of whether or not humans
think about them or perceive them or even whether the human species
exists. Our idea of a dog corresponds to a class of mammals or any
member of it, and this classification is an aspect of the structure of the
world independently of any practical interests humans might have in
243
244 stephen s. bush
differentiating dogs from, say, cats or squirrels. Similarly, in a corres-

pondence theory of language, our words refer to objects and our sen-
tences refer to states of affairs. If the world is not as one of our
sentences says it is, then that sentence is false. If the sentence does
accurately depict how things are, then it is true. And here again, the
world has a particular structure and it has that structure independently
of human language.
Rorty rejects the correspondence theory of mind, language, and
truth. He does not think that the world has a specific structure or that
the things we think about, perceive, and talk about have a nature
independently of human cognitive and social activity. The way we
classify the objects that populate our surroundings has to do not with
accurately ascertaining the structure of the world but with our prac-
tical needs and desires: to acquire food and shelter for survival, to carry
out the various activities of our social lives, and to express ourselves
creatively. There is no single set of needs and desires that is hardwired
into human biology, no determinate and fixed human nature, but
rather our needs and desires develop historically, changing over time,
and exhibit diversity and plurality synchronically and diachronically.
Rorty refers to this perspective on things as pragmatism, a philosophy
that he inherited from John Dewey (1859–1952), William James
(1842–1910), and Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), and which he
did much to revive in the latter part of the twentieth century.
If truth and knowledge are not a matter of bringing our minds or
sentences into appropriate correspondence with a fixed and determin-
ately structured reality, what then are they? For Rorty, they are
matters of achieving intersubjective agreement. Historically, we have
posited something external to human social activity to secure our
quest for knowledge and to ground our attainment of truth: God,
Nature, Reality, or even Truth itself. Whether the domain is physics,
biology, morality, politics, or theology, we look to some nonhuman,
transhistorical, and transcultural arbiter of the claims we make in
order to ensure that an indisputable authority underwrites our
attempts to discriminate the factual from the fictitious. We are not,
rorty on religion 245
in Rorty’s view, responsible to any of these capital-letter ideals. Our

responsibility when it comes to knowledge and truth, rather, is solely
to one another. We have “a responsibility to ourselves to make our
beliefs cohere with one another, and to our fellow human beings to
make them cohere with theirs” (PSH, 149).
In principle, this is as true for gods and other religious entities
as it is for tables, dogs, and subatomic particles. However, when it
comes to divine things, there are not any “specific, observable phe-
nomena” that are publicly available the way that there are for tables,
dogs, and the experimental results from physics laboratories (Rorty
2005, 33). This is not to say that we should not believe in anything for
which there isn’t sufficient evidence. Theists and atheists are on
similar grounds: “Neither those who affirm nor those who deny the
existence of God can plausibly claim that they have evidence for their
views” (Rorty 2005, 33). For Rorty, most of our beliefs are part of the
shared, social endeavor of obtaining publicly accessible knowledge of
the world, but religion just isn’t like that. He asks, “Is evidence
something which floats free of human projects, or is the demand for
evidence simply a demand from other human beings for cooperation
on such projects?” (PSH, 150). It is, for him, clearly the latter. Our
scientific beliefs, our beliefs about tables and dogs, our beliefs about
train schedules, all of these have to do with our shared cooperative
projects of navigating the world we share, and all of these appeal to
the sort of evidence that we can share with each other, regardless of
our religious persuasion.
When it comes to religion, however, the evidence is lacking
and inconclusive. And this is so for the committed believer and
non-believer alike. When it comes to religion, at least in this day
and age and in pluralistic, diverse societies, we are not participating
in a shared, cooperative societal endeavor. Those who, with the
zeal of a missionary or apologist, think they have publicly ascer-
tainable reasons for their beliefs will find their arguments meet
annoyance or amusement from the larger public. Rorty suggests
that religion in our contemporary context is, or at least should be,
246 stephen s. bush
about something other than public argumentation. Whereas scien-

tists handle publicly accessible evidence in order to “predict and
control,” “religion offers us a larger hope, and thereby something to
live for” (PSH, 153).
What follows from this, for Rorty, is not that science is rational
and religion irrational, but rather that scientific knowledge (and most
of our commonsense knowledge) is public, whereas religion is private.
Religious attitudes are not susceptible to the public standards of
adjudication by reasoned argumentation and evidence because they
are not about the attempt to “cooperate with others on common
projects designed promote the general welfare.” Rather, they are
personal (PSH, 154). They are about the individual’s attempt to find
meaning and significance in their life, to connect with a sense of
something larger than themselves, to deal with despair and disap-
pointment, and to better themselves. Religion is not unique in this.
A person’s investment in poetry, novels, art, philosophy, or music is
also a matter of personal significance, and here too, the issue is not to
ensure that others agree with one’s preferences, but rather to find
sources of deep inspiration, delight, and emotional sustenance as one
makes one’s way through life. When religion is playing this sort of
role in people’s lives, we as a society should tolerate and even wel-
come it. These personal aspects of people’s lives are incredibly
important, and we should not insist that their religious, philosoph-
ical, or artistic viewpoints must have evidential support. This is the
same for the person whose personal life project includes religion and
for the one whose does not.
Obviously, however, many people do not view their religious
beliefs and practices as having this sort of insulation from the public
realm. For them, their religion is not merely about their own attempts
to find meaningfulness in their lives; it has a bearing on their under-
standing of the physical world that scientists describe and on their
engagement with the societal and political world that they share with
others. In these cases, when religion departs the personal for the
public, Rorty thinks it should be censured and contested.
So the issue is not whether one believes in God. In “Religious

Faith, Intellectual Responsibility and Romance” (PSH, 148–67), Rorty
allows that one can subscribe to his epistemological principles and be
a theist. Moreover, pragmatist theists need not regard their God as a
“mere posit,” to the contrary, they can hold that “God is as real as
sense impressions, quarks and human rights” (PSH, 156). Belief in
God is perfectly acceptable in its role of facilitating their personal and
emotional well-being. However, they do have a responsibility to
ensure that their belief in God does not interfere with the relevant
public discourses about sense impressions, quarks, and human rights.
A pragmatist theist, then, will have to reject such doctrines as immor-
tality, miracles, the Resurrection of Christ, and divine inspiration of
the Hebrew Bible, Christian Bible, and Quran, for example (PSH, 156).
Such beliefs, in Rorty’s account, impinge upon science’s domain as
the proper cultural authority when it comes to “predicting or control-
ling our environment” (PSH, 156).
It is a somewhat untenable view about theism, perhaps, to allow
that God could be an entity of the sort who is impressive enough to be
worthy of the appellation “God” but not have enough agency to affect
human life or material objects. Even humans, or for that matter nonhu-
man animals and objects, can do that much. Furthermore, it is not
apparent that belief in an occasional resurrection or miracle here or
there, or even widespread life after death, would throw a monkey
wrench in the entire scientific enterprise. That is, many believers
affirm the Resurrection or the divine inspiration of the Quran and still
think that science does quite a good job at figuring out the properties of
tables and quarks. Rorty does not convincingly consider the prospects
for the compatibility of scientific inquiry with a more traditional
theistic perspective.1 And it seems that this is not really his predomin-
ant concern. He is not trying to evaluate specific doctrines of God,
creation, and redemption to see how coherent or plausible they are on
their own terms; he is interested in their consequences, specifically
their consequences as to how they relate to the collective welfare of
the society. Will they make people, in the aggregate, now and in the
248 stephen s. bush
future, happier or not? What are the implications for public life for how
the theist understands God?
religion as a conversation stopper

The predominant concern Rorty has about religion’s incursion into the
domain of the public has to do with politics and ethics. He articulates
his views on this most directly in his best-known treatment of religion,
the brief but vivid “Religion as Conversation Stopper” (PSH, 168–74).
In that essay, which is largely a review of Stephen L. Carter’s The
Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize
Religious Devotion (1993), Rorty makes his case in provocative terms
that the only legitimate religion is a privatized religion.
In the essay, Rorty first contests the idea that to privatize
religion is to trivialize it. Private matters need not be trivial ones,
and especially when they concern the individual search for meaning
and personal perfection, they are not. “The search for private perfec-
tion, pursued by theists and atheists alike, is neither trivial nor, in a
pluralistic democracy, relevant to public policy” (PSH, 170). Someone
who writes poetry might find the undertaking to be of enormous
significance. But nevertheless, they should not, by Rorty’s lights, try
to influence public policy on the basis of their verse.
But some believers will retort that the God in which they
believe is not narrowly concerned strictly with their individual wel-
fare. A deity worthy of the name might have ideas not just about how
any one follower should lead their own life, but how people should
relate to each other, and how, as collectives, they should organize
their lives together. Why would God have ideas about what it is for
some one individual to flourish but not also have ideas about how a
society should flourish? Why would God have ideas about how this or
that follower should arrange their affairs, but not have opinions about
how to arrange economic institutions, political institutions, and
social institutions? And thus, why shouldn’t a follower of such a
god also have opinions, based on their understanding of their god,
about how best to organize economic, political, and social
institutions? And so why shouldn’t they advance proposals on such

matters on the basis of their understanding of their god?
In response to these sorts of ambitions on the part of religious
believers, Rorty suggests that they are better off if they accept Thomas
Jefferson’s compromise. The Jeffersonian compromise is that believers
can have freedom of religion, that is, the state will not enforce or
privilege a particular religious perspective at the expense of others.
All will be free to practice their religion as they see fit. In exchange,
however, the believers must practice a form of religiosity that does not
interfere with how others want to live their lives. This is, of course, not
to say that people in a society never interfere with one another. Social,
economic, and political arrangements are shared, and as such, people
disagree as to how they will operate. For matters that are regulated by
law, the coercive power of the state is involved, and refusal to comply
will be punished. When it comes to the sorts of matters in which
interference, and perhaps even coercive interference, is inevitable,
what legitimates policies and practices is that they are subjected to
conversation. That is, we can articulate our preferences for a particular
policy in terms that are accessible to other people, and if they disagree,
they need to state the basis for their disagreement in terms that we can
understand. If we propose that a specific tax credit will result in a
decrease in the child poverty rate, we can all study the economic
formulae together. Our favorite novel or our favorite religious text
cannot similarly motivate a policy proposal.
If the basis of legitimacy for social arrangements in a demo-
cratic society is their susceptibility to a conversation that involves
publicly accessible reasons and evidence, the problem with religion is
that it is a conversation stopper. If someone claims that abortion is
against the will of God, what is the non-believer supposed to say in
reply? Rorty thinks only something along the lines of, “Gee! I’m
impressed. You must have a really deep, sincere faith” (PSH, 171).
In order to keep the conversation going, the members of a democratic
society need to subscribe to the principle that “moral decisions that
are to be enforced by a pluralist and democratic state’s monopoly of
250 stephen s. bush
violence are best made by public discussion in which voices claiming

to be God’s, or reason’s, or science’s, are put on a par with everybody
else’s” (PSH, 172). And the way to put God’s voice on par with
everyone else’s is to make sure that the consequences of our moral
and political views, not their sources, are what is relevant. “The only
test of a political proposal is its ability to gain assent from people who
retain radically diverse ideas about the point and meaning of human
life” (PSH, 173). In pursuit of this aim, people should take the ideas
that they derive from their religious views and present them in non-
religious terms.2 Someone who thinks that abortion is against God’s
will needs to enter the public debate with an account of the conse-
quences of abortion that a non-religious person could entertain.
Nicholas Wolterstorff pointedly criticizes Rorty’s account of
religion, public morality, and public policy in his response to Rorty’s
conversation-stopper essay. Wolterstorff makes four points worthy of
mention here. First, whereas Rorty speaks as though religion is only
ever oppressive – denying same-sex relationships and women’s rights
to abortion, for example – Wolterstorff points out that religion has also
been a powerful motivator in struggles for freedom, for example in the
American civil rights movement, but also in democratic revolutions in
South Africa, Poland, Romania, and East Germany (Wolterstorff 2003,
133). Second, since everyone derives their moral principles from some-
where, why does Rorty get to derive his from John Stuart Mill and
Charles Darwin, and he gets to talk about that in public, but Christians
cannot reference the Bible? Wolterstorff writes,
Does Rorty himself come even close to living up to his own

demand? Consider that recent collection of his, Philosophy and
Social Hope. One would have to be obtuse indeed not to discern that
the arguments he gives for one and another social position in the
book are, in great measure, based on his Darwinian pragmatism.
They are not based on premises held in common. And the book is
addressed, as are all of Rorty’s books, to the public in general – not
just to his fellow Darwinian pragmatists. (Wolterstorff 2003, 134)
The specific vision of democracy that Rorty holds, which demands

the privatization of religion, is itself a particular, not universally
accepted, vision of public life. Rorty’s pragmatism is itself not based
in terms of accessible reasons or observable evidence (Wolterstorff
2003, 137–8). It is a vision for what is publicly shared that is not itself
publicly shared. Wolterstorff finds Rorty’s perspective somewhat sin-
ister and coercive in trying to impose his pragmatist principles for
what is and is not permissible in public discourse on everyone else.
Third, religion is not private like Rorty thinks. For someone
who made a career out of challenging dualisms, such as appearance/
reality, mind/object, language/world, it is somewhat strange to see
him endorsing the private/public distinction so wholeheartedly.
People’s religions give them principles about how humans should be
treated, and this is ultimately a political matter. Martin Luther King,
Jr.’s religion, for example, informed his view that segregation was
wrong (Wolterstorff 2003, 132). But more to the point, what is the
status of this division between the public and the private upon which
Rorty’s sequestering of religion rests? To Jeffrey Stout, the problem
with the way that Rorty divides up the public from the private – the
way Rorty requires rational justification for the views we advance in
public – is that we have so many publicly relevant beliefs that we are
unable to justify rationally. We acquired many of our political com-
mitments not through a process of reasoned deliberation, but accul-
turation, and we often do not have a clear, articulable grasp of why we
hold the belief. Following Kent Greenawalt, Stout argues that a whole
range of pressing contemporary issues are unresolvable by appeal to
reasons that can be publicly justified, including “welfare assistance,
punishment, military policy, abortion, euthanasia, and environmen-
tal policy” (Stout 2005, 101). This is the case whether we are talking
about religiously committed people or not.
Nancy Fraser also calls into question Rorty’s division between
the public and the private. Fraser discusses Rorty’s attempt to
embrace both the Romantic tradition, with its emphasis on individu-
ality, self-expression, and self-cultivation, and the pragmatist
252 stephen s. bush
tradition, with its concern for social consequences and public welfare.
Rorty initially sees these two impulses as existing in tension, but
resolves this by means of the public/private distinction, giving each
its own distinctive domain. Fraser’s first concern is that this distinc-
tion fails to depict accurately the complexities of human agency,
which do not fall neatly into publicly oriented motives and intentions
and privately oriented ones. We cannot distinguish “actions with
consequences for others” from those “with no consequences for
others” (Fraser 1989, 101–2). But the problem is not just describing
human action accurately, a private/public distinction is objectionable
from the standpoint of a left feminist politics. “Women’s movements,
as illuminated by feminist theory, have taught us that the domestic
and the personal are political . . . Rorty’s partition position requires us
to bury these insights, to turn our backs on the last hundred years of
social history” (Fraser 1989, 102). Rorty’s division wrongly gives the
impression that one’s personal habits, desires, and preferences do not
reflect and perpetuate structures of social power, even as his
emphasis on intersubjective agreement renders suspect discourses
that are oppositional to the dominant hegemony, such as leftist
feminism. (Incidentally, Fraser points out that when Rorty goes on
to treat feminism explicitly, he dismantles the private/public distinc-
tion in order to allow for the political significance of the creation of
novel and counterhegemonic discourses.)3
Finally, Wolterstorff addresses Rorty’s concerns about religion
as a conversation stopper. First, citing a religious authority does not
have to be a conversation stopper. If someone says that they oppose
abortion on the basis of their religious belief, one can try to “get
inside” their “way of thinking for a while, so as to see whether” one
cannot change their minds. Or one can say in response why one holds
the view that one does (Wolterstorff 2003, 136). The lesson to be
learned is that we should “let people say what they want to say on
political issues and let them argue for their positions as they think
best to argue for them, provided they conduct themselves with the
requisite virtues” (Wolterstorff 2003, 135). As Stout puts it, people
can “express their actual (religious) reasons for supporting the policy
they favor while also engaging in immanent criticism of their oppon-
ents’ views” (Stout 2005, 101). But what if people do come to an
impasse? The problem is that Rorty is too set on the goal of achieving
consensus. Sometimes the conversation has to stop, despite persisting
disagreement. In democracies, we vote. Once the conversation comes
to an end, whether because time runs out or our willingness to keep
talking to each other falters, we cast our ballots.
In his response to Wolterstorff and Stout (“Religion in the
Public Square: A Reconsideration”), Rorty issues a partial retrac-
tion. He acknowledges that his pragmatist principles have no better
claim to determine the nature of the public conversation than
Wolterstorff’s Christianity. He admits that religious people should
have the right to speak their religious convictions in public debates,
though he says that people who cite their religion to justify homo-
phobia should be publicly shamed for doing so. Ultimately, he states
that what he is really opposed to is not so much religion itself as
hierarchical religious institutions, and whereas he thinks people
should not be forbidden from appealing to religious authorities, they
should not merely do so:
I would not consider myself to be seriously discussing politics

with my fellow-citizens if I simply quoted passages from Mill at
them, as opposed to using those passages to help me articulate my
views. I cannot think of myself as engaged in such discussion if
my opponent simply quotes the Bible, or a papal encyclical, at
me . . . What should be discouraged is mere appeal to authority.
(Rorty 2003a, 147)
Rorty admits that religion does not necessarily serve to stop conver-
sations and says that the important thing is that “citizens of a dem-
ocracy should try to put off invoking conversation-stoppers as long as
possible . . . to do our best to keep the conversation going without
citing unarguable first principles, either philosophical or religious”
(Rorty 2003a, 147).
254 stephen s. bush
cultural politics and anticlericalism

In order to better understand Rorty’s “Religion As Conversation
Stopper” and his response to Wolterstorff and Stout, as well as to
understand what he means by “anticlericalism,” we need to under-
stand his notion of cultural politics. Rorty does not avail himself of
one common argumentative tactic when it comes to religion in
public discourse, which is to demand that religious people give
reasons for their belief in the existence of God. The idea is that if
they cannot satisfactorily do so, then there is no reason to take the
political implications of those beliefs as legitimate entries into the
public conversation. As we have seen, Rorty does not think that
theism or atheism can be justified by any appeal to reason or evi-
dence, so the issue for him is not a question of rationality. This is in
keeping with his views more generally on the limited scope of reason
and philosophy. Rationality, for Rorty, is the attempt to “make one’s
web of belief as coherent, and as perspicuously structured, as pos-
sible” (TP, 171). Philosophy, then, does not have the exalted task of
showing that various moral beliefs can be inferred or deduced from
some foundational basis of certitudes. Rather the most it “can hope to
do is summarize our culturally influenced intuitions about the right
thing to do in various situations” (TP, 171). That means that not just
for religion, but in respect to a variety of disputed moral, political, and
philosophical matters, reasoned argumentation has a minor role to
play in the pursuit of agreement. Moral philosophy of the sort that
Rorty proposes takes as its task not determining whether various
claims can be justified by transcultural foundational truths, but
rather “making our own culture – the human rights culture – more
self-conscious and more powerful” (TP, 171).
The extension of one’s culture is what Rorty means when he
talks about “cultural politics.” In respect to human rights, for
example, Rorty places no stock in the long-standing efforts by phil-
osophers, by means of rational argumentation, to convince others of
the existence of human rights. He thinks such attempts have all failed
and, insofar as they depend on some supposed transcultural facts

about human nature or human society, they are necessarily bound
to fail, since he doesn’t think any such transcultural facts exist.
Rather than argumentation, we should devote our efforts to socializ-
ing the emotional dispositions of our young people, especially
through literature, so that they empathetically identify with the
well-being and interests of people who are unlike them, in terms of
gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity. In addition, we should
support policies of wealth distribution so that people are not so
immersed in an overwhelming struggle for survival that they have
no time or motivation to expose themselves to literary accounts of
strangers (TP, 175–85). This is an example of cultural politics. In this
case, it is the attempt, through education, discourse, and policy, to
form people’s attitudes so that they support the sort of liberal democ-
racy that Rorty thinks will conduce to the overall best future for the
welfare of the human race. It is not that rational argumentation has
no role to play in these efforts, but it will be a matter of pointing out
coherences and incoherences, sorting out what is perspicuous from
what is not. It will not be a matter of ascertaining or applying time-
less, transcultural principles.
When we turn to religion, comparable considerations apply. We
should turn our collective attention away from the question, “Does
God exist?” and from all attempts to supply compelling rational
answers to that question, pro or con. “In recent centuries, instead of
asking whether God exists, people have started asking whether it is a
good idea for us to continue talking about Him, and which human
purposes might be served by doing so – asking in short, what use the
concept of God might be to human beings” (PCP, 16). For people, like
Rorty, who are committed to liberal democracy as the most promis-
ing political form for human flourishing, the task then is to
create a climate of opinion in which people have the same right

to idiosyncratic forms of religious devotion as they do to write
poems or paint pictures that no one can make any sense out of . . .
256 stephen s. bush
To leave as much free space as possible for individuals to develop

their own sense of who they are and what their lives are for, asking
only that they obey Mill’s precept and extend to others the
tolerance they themselves enjoy. (PCP, 25)
This is just the sort of project in which Rorty was engaged in his
1994 essay, “Religion as a Conversation Stopper.” In his 2003 response
to Wolterstorff and Stout and in his 2002 essay, “Atheism and
Anticlericalism,” he clarifies that religion is not so much the target
of his criticism as clericalism, that is hierarchical religious institutions
in which officials take themselves to have the authority to determine
how the faithful should think and act when it comes to moral and
political matters.4 Atheism is a religious or metaphysical position,
whereas anticlericalism is political. “It is the view that ecclesiastical
institutions, despite all the good they do – despite all the comfort they
provide to those in need or in despair – are dangerous to the health of
democratic societies” (Rorty 2005, 33). In Rorty’s view, religious insti-
tutions typically maintain their status and membership by differenti-
ating the faithful from the unfaithful and fostering ill will toward those
the institution deems immoral. What results are atrocities such as
pogroms, religious conflict, genocide, misogyny, and homophobia.
Rorty’s hope is that in present-day cultural-political struggles sur-
rounding religion, the anticlerical position will emerge victorious,
hierarchical religious institutions will wither and die, and religion will
flourish in people’s personal tasks of self-creation and in smaller, local
institutions characterized by pastoral care. We will all be better off in
such a world, he supposes.
a religion of democratic hope

In addition to his preference for the demise of hierarchical religious
institutions, Rorty also repeatedly expresses a hope for a future in
which the influence of liberal democratic politics expands, a signifi-
cant degree of economic equality is achieved, and a robust human
rights culture minimizes atrocities. His hope for these things, for a
future in which humans are better off than they are now, oftentimes
itself has an aura of religiosity. Rorty describes himself not only as an
atheist but as “religiously unmusical” and as lacking in “religious
feeling” (Rorty 2005, 33, 39).
And this is true in the sense that he lacks interest or curiosity in
God and the ways in which people worship. However, his work
frequently displays a marked religious sensibility. In fact, he often-
times uses explicitly religious language to speak about his commit-
ment to the “illimitable democratic vistas” that orient his political
vision (PSH, 4).
We see his religious sensibility in his autobiographical essay,
“Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” (PSH, 3–20). There he describes grow-
ing up in a socialist family with ties to prominent activists, and how
this instilled in him a deep commitment to economic justice. His
reading of socialist texts and his running of socialist errands, however,
still left time for him to hunt for wild orchids in the New Jersey
mountains. His encounters with orchids occasioned “Wordsworthian
moments” that left him “touched by something numinous, something
of ineffable importance” (PSH, 8). Rorty’s lifelong intellectual quest
became to figure out how to manage for himself and convey to others
both a commitment to justice and an experience of the numinous.
After he rejected religious and metaphysical visions that would hold
the public and the private in a single vision, he determined that these
were unreconcilable. They were different pursuits for different
domains, hence: the private/public distinction. It is easy to see how
characteristic emotions of religious devotion – self-transcendence,
awe, wonder, mystery, and delight – fit neatly into the Romantic vision
of interiority that defines his understanding of the private. But for him,
these emotions need not be elicited by supernatural entities, but rather
by literature, poetry, artworks, and compelling ideals. He can even
speak of his philosophy as a polytheism of sorts in his essay,
“Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism” (PCP, 27–41). Rorty does not
mean here a commitment to a host of powerful immortal beings, but
rather by polytheism he means “the substitution of poetry for religion
258 stephen s. bush
as a source of ideals, a movement that began with the Romantics . . .

Different poets will perfect different sides of human nature, by project-
ing different ideals . . . there are diverse, conflicting, but equally valu-
able forms of human life” (PCP, 29). The poets are the new priests of
this secularized religiosity.
Even for Rorty himself, though, the private and the public do
not remain neatly compartmentalized when it comes to religiosity.
For members of traditional religions, God relates not just to individ-
uals’ personal projects of self-perfection but also to the values by
which humans should organize their lives together in society. So also,
some of Rorty’s favorite poets speak not just of numinous moments of
natural wonder but of democracy. Walt Whitman’s poetic ideal,
which John Dewey endorses in A Common Faith (Dewey 1934) as a
proper object of religious attitudes, is the United States as “a symbol
of openness to the possibility of as yet undreamt of, ever more diverse,
forms of human happiness” (PCP, 41). Elsewhere Rorty writes, “My
sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that
someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a
global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such
a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste
would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary prag-
matic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the
free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate” (Rorty
2005, 39–40). Rorty is comfortable referring to this kind of hope as a
“spirituality” of sorts, an “exalted sense” of “new possibilities for
finite beings” (Rorty 2011, 14). In the closing pages of Achieving Our
Country, Rorty calls for a “religion of literature” that supplies hope
and inspiration for the task of building a “cooperative common-
wealth,” hope and inspiration that is fashioned by “romantic uto-
pians trying to imagine a better future” (AOC, 136, 140). Here we see
private individuals communing with their poets and novelists to
better their lives, and discovering ideals for human society that
press them out of their private preoccupations and into the public.
Rorty’s religion, his private sense of the holy, informs and motivates
his views on class, domination, education, and so on, and these are
views he put forward in public conversations about laws, policies, and
social arrangements.
The distinction between the private and the public, then, that
sits at the heart of Rorty’s understanding of religion and that has been
stringently criticized by Wolterstorff, Stout, and Fraser, finally col-
lapses. Ultimately, even for Rorty himself, religion seeps out of the
container he sets for it. This distinction then will probably not be his
legacy in relation to religious thought, and perhaps also not his sense
that we should publicly shame our opponents, an activity that would
severely hinder the sort of exchange of reasons with, and “immanent
criticism” of, our opponents that Stout and Wolterstorff recommend.5
What Rorty does offer, however, is a keen acknowledgment of the
significance of religion for finding meaning, pleasure, and consolation
in life and a compelling statement of the earlier pragmatists’ convic-
tion that democratic culture requires experiences of awe, ecstasy,
reverence, and wonder, that is, a religiosity of its own.
notes
1 In “Cultural Politics and the Question of the Existence of God,” Rorty
argues that believers can employ discourse about God, but that even so,
the existence of God is an irrelevant question. He does so using the
technical apparatus of Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit. He says, “We
shall dismiss natural theology if we see the undiscussability of God’s
existence not as a testimony to his superior status but as a consequence of
the attempt to give him that status – a side-effect of making him so
incomparably special as to be a being whose existence cannot be
discussed by reference to any antecedent list of canonical designators”
(PCP, 26). This presupposes, however, a conception of a God who does not
act within human history – to raise Jesus from the dead, for example, or
deliver the Torah to Moses. For that sort of God, canonical designators
could be supplied. For an example of a theistic Christian account of
religious speech that draws from Brandom, see Hector 2011.
2 This is a position for which John Rawls famously argued. See Rawls 1999
and 2005.
260 stephen s. bush
3 See Fraser 2010. Fraser is responding to Rorty’s “Feminism and

Pragmatism” (TP, 202–26).
4 The essay is reprinted as “Anticlericalism and Atheism” (Rorty 2005).
5 On the political reasons for objecting to public shaming, see Nussbaum
2006.
12 Rorty: Reading Continental
Philosophy
Paul Patton
Richard Rorty stands out among analytically trained English lan-

guage philosophers for the attention and respect he accords to phil-
osophers in the post-Nietzschean tradition of Continental
philosophy. He first read Heidegger in the 1950s and always regarded
him, along with Dewey and Wittgenstein, as one of “the richest and
most original philosophers of our time” (CP, 510). Later, he came to
regard Derrida, Foucault, and Habermas as among the leading
thinkers of the postwar generation. He also read and wrote about
the works of other Continental thinkers such as Castoriadis,
Gadamer, Lyotard, and the originators of Italian “weak thought”
Rovatti and Vattimo.1 Although he did not devote an entire essay
to Nietzsche, comments about his philosophy are scattered through-
out his writings.
This chapter focuses on his engagements with Heidegger,
Derrida, and Foucault, about whom he wrote the most. Rorty’s
essays on this trio serve to demonstrate the nature of all his engage-
ments with Continental thinkers, which is one of recontextualiza-
tion and criticism. In the Introduction to Essays on Heidegger and
Others, he suggests that the most that an original figure in philoso-
phy can hope to do “is to recontextualise his or her predecessors”
(EHO, 2). Not surprisingly, the context in which he places these
post-Nietzschean philosophers is Deweyan pragmatism. All of
them are judged to be partly consistent with this preferred frame-
work but also partly inconsistent and therefore subject to criticism.
All of Rorty’s encounters with Continental philosophers are a mix-
ture of assimilation and rejection. Although he clearly enjoyed
reading them, in the final analysis they did not add much to his
pragmatic philosophy.
261
262 paul patton
heidegger
Rorty’s first publication on Heidegger, “Overcoming the Tradition:
Heidegger and Dewey,” began as a conference paper in 1974 before
appearing in The Review of Metaphysics in 1976. The Introduction to
Consequences of Pragmatism mentions that he is writing a book on
Heidegger for the Cambridge Modern European Philosophy series.
The book never appeared, although he published a number of articles
on Heidegger in the years that followed. Four of these reprinted in
Essays on Heidegger and Others (1991) are described as “the fruits of
an abortive, abandoned attempt to write a book about him” (EHO, 1).
Rorty’s first piece on Heidegger sets out the pattern that is
followed in all subsequent discussions. Although he proposes an
evenhanded series of sketches of Heidegger as seen by Dewey and
vice versa, the comparison is heavily weighted in favor of Dewey. He
points out that they share a diagnosis of the origins of the Western
ontological tradition in Plato’s “spectatorial notion of knowledge and
its object” and a dismissive attitude toward the epistemological
problems of modern philosophy (CP, 44). Moreover, they share a
common project of attempting to describe the whole tradition of
Western metaphysics in order to set it aside, and offer “at least the
hope of something new. Further, they are almost alone in this century
in doing so. They are unique, unclassifiable, original philosophers,
and both are historicist to the core” (CP, 46). However, they differ in
their respective conceptions of what comes after the history of
Western metaphysics. For Dewey, the loss of a metaphysical view of
the world leaves us free to devote our attention to the concrete
problems of our time. For Heidegger, the end of metaphysics is a
clearing away that might allow for the emergence of a new way of
posing the question of Being. For him Dewey’s humanism is simply
“the modern consciousness incarnate” (CP, 50).
Rorty’s most extensive examination of Heidegger’s philosophy,
“Heidegger, Contingency, and Pragmatism,” sought to make sense of
Heidegger in Deweyan pragmatist terms. His aim was to see “how far
rorty: reading continental philosophy 263
a pragmatist can play along with Heidegger” and to locate the point at
which they must part company (EHO, 27). His answer, in brief, was
that there is much overlap in their respective views of the history of
philosophy and its culmination in pragmatism, but they part com-
pany in their attitudes toward pragmatism and the social and philo-
sophical present in which it takes center stage. Heidegger is critical of
the present and nostalgic for an earlier phase in the history of Being.
Rorty takes a more affirmative attitude toward the present, which he
sees in Deweyan terms as an epoch in which a social democratic
utopia is achievable and the separation between philosophy and the
rest of human culture no longer holds sway.
As in the earlier essay, Rorty argued that Dewey and Heidegger
share much the same reading of the history of Western philosophy
since Plato. Where Dewey argues that Plato and Aristotle built “the
quest for certainty” into our conception of the nature and purpose of
thinking, Heidegger argues that Plato introduced the idea that truth is
a matter of evidence, of deep and compelling arguments that “put you
in a commanding position vis-à-vis something or somebody” (EHO,
31). On this basis, Heidegger argues that, once the interpretation of
thinking proposed by Plato was adopted, pragmatism was the inevit-
able destiny of Western philosophy. Platonism leads inevitably to
Nietzsche’s idea that knowledge or truth is a function of the human
will to power and thereby to the pragmatist view that thinking is no
more than a means to satisfy human all too human needs and desires.
Drawing on interpretative work by Robert Brandom and Mark
Okrent, Rorty read Being and Time as proposing a “de-intellectuali-
zation” and historicization of thinking such that knowledge and truth
must be understood as grounded in human practice (Brandom 1983;
Okrent 1988). This implies criticism of the Platonic idea that Being is
eternal and outside of time. For Heidegger, the “ontotheological”
tradition derived from Plato has tended to identify the contingent
with the merely apparent and therefore inessential. By contrast,
Rorty suggested, Heidegger “would like to recapture a sense of con-
tingency, of the fragility and riskiness of any human project,”
264 paul patton
including the metaphysical project of attempting to think the nature

of Being, which is an entirely human project formulated in a particu-
lar language at a particular time (EHO, 34). For Heidegger, the ques-
tion of Being is one that has received a series of answers since the
question was first raised in ancient Greece. It is not something about
which we can know any more than what is proposed by those meta-
physical answers. Rorty offers his own redescription of “Being” as
what the vocabularies proposed by successive philosophers are about
or, more precisely, as what final vocabularies are about. The mistake
of metaphysics is to suppose that there is a correct answer to the
question of being, as there is for empirical questions about the state of
the world. For Heidegger, this is to confuse philosophical truth with
correctness and Being with beings.
This leads to the question whether there are better and worse
ways of raising the question of Being. Rorty points out that some-
times Heidegger appears to embrace a straightforward historicism in
suggesting that each philosophical epoch has its own world-picture.
At other times he appears to have a preference for earlier, Greek ways
of raising the question. Rorty draws attention to Heidegger’s use of
the phrase “forgetfulness of Being” and his tendency to draw invidi-
ous comparisons between the ancient Greeks and the present:
The reader of Being and Time is led to believe that the Greeks
enjoyed a special relationship to being which the moderns have
lost, that they had less trouble being ontological than we do,
whereas we moderns have a terrible time keeping the difference
between the ontological and the ontic in mind. (EHO, 39)
The question at the heart of the relationship between Heidegger and

pragmatism is whether or not he has any right to such nostalgia for
ancient ways of posing the question of Being. Is he simply telling us a
story about the contingency of vocabularies, or is he proposing that
our age is somehow less able to appreciate this contingency? Rorty
points to passages in Being and Time and Basic Problems in
Phenomenology that seem to suggest an entirely historicist reading
of the project of an analytic of Dasein, such that the ontological

knowledge it proposes is no more than knowledge of a particular
historical configuration. Equally, he points to passages that seem to
suggest that philosophy can achieve a “distinctive primal form of
world-view” in which it can “define what in general constitutes the
structure of a world-view” (EHO, 42). In Rorty’s terms, this would
amount to a final vocabulary that would provide a basis for ahistorical
knowledge of our relation to Being. While this would go some way
toward justifying Heidegger’s nostalgia and his criticism of the pre-
sent for its forgetfulness of Being, it conflicts with the historicism
that was always present and that comes to the fore in later work
where he no longer refers to Dasein or ontology.
In order to be fully entitled to his nostalgia for the Greek age
and his criticism of pragmatism, Rorty argues, Heidegger would need
to give some normative sense to the claim that the early Greek
language of Being was somehow more “primordial” than that of the
present. Drawing on Heidegger’s essay “On the Essence of Truth” and
his “Letter on Humanism,” Rorty reconstructs a conception of prim-
ordiality that has to do with the capacity to appreciate the contin-
gency of one’s own final vocabulary. The Greeks were more
primordial in the sense that their understanding of Being, involving
notions like arche and physis, “was less self-certain, more hesitant,
more fragile than our own supreme confidence in our ability to
manipulate beings in order to satisfy our own desires” (EHO, 43). In
Heidegger’s terminology, the sense of contingency that he attributes
to the Greeks has to do with a kind of thinking that is at once both
using a particular language and also “letting beings be,” where this
latter phrase is associated with a kind of non-ontological thinking
that is “more rigorous” or higher than the kind of thinking practiced
in the sciences. One is “letting beings be” when one uses a language
in full awareness of its contingency, knowing that there are other
languages and other beings than those with which we are familiar.
Heidegger claims that the capacity to use language in this way dimin-
ishes as technical mastery over the material world increases, hence
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the loss of primordiality in the present. As Rorty summarizes

Heidegger’s view, “To be primordial is thus to know that when you
seize upon an understanding of Being, when you build a house for
Being by speaking a language, you are automatically giving up a lot of
other possible understandings of Being, and leaving a lot of differently
designed houses unbuilt” (EHO, 46).2
In reply, Rorty asks whether this is our situation in late mod-
ernity. Is it true that we moderns are less capable of appreciating the
contingency of our own final vocabulary and our own “common-
sense” understanding of the world? There are good reasons to think
not. We have become more aware of cultural diversity, of revolutions
in the forms of understanding provided by the arts, by the sciences
and by the political institutions that structure our social life. For
Heidegger, this “busyness” and diversity in the modern world are
precisely what make it more difficult to properly hear the elementary
words of our final vocabulary. Rorty remains unconvinced. He prefers
the view of modernity that he ascribes to Dewey according to which
it is entirely possible to reawaken the sense of the contingency of our
language and form of life, to feel gratitude for the words and social
practices that make us what we are, and for the beings that these
disclose. For Dewey no less than Heidegger, Rorty argues, it is import-
ant to recapture the sense of contingency that allows us to “let beings
be” (EHO, 49). The difference between them is that Heidegger
thought this impossible to achieve in the modern age as it is consti-
tuted. A decisive event in the history of Being is required in order to
overcome the forgetfulness of Being that prevails in our technological
society, one that Heidegger thought only his philosophy could pro-
vide. Dewey, by contrast, had no need and no place for the kind of
decisive event in thought that is the other side of Heideggerian nos-
talgia. According to Rorty, he never lost the sense of contingency, and
thus the sense of gratitude, which Heidegger thought only an
unimaginably new sort of Thinking might reintroduce (EHO, 49).
Rorty’s response amounts to suggesting that Heidegger should
have got out more and learned to see the modern world as open to a
host of new cultural, political and artistic practices. In “Heidegger,

Kundera, and Dickens” he urges us to remember that “the scope of
Heidegger’s imagination, great as it was, was largely restricted to
philosophy and lyric poetry” (EHO, 67). He remained blind to other
dimensions of Western culture, such as the novel or music, and
trapped in the idea of philosophy as somehow determinant in the
history of Western society. As a result, his view that philosophy had
exhausted its possibilities led him to suppose that the same applied to
Western society as a whole. Rorty is profoundly skeptical of such
views. He offers a highly derogatory image of Heidegger and other
philosophical diagnosticians of our time as representatives of a char-
acter type that he calls “the ascetic priest,” loosely adapted from
Nietzsche. These are individuals who build a world in their own
minds from which they can look down, or back, on their fellow flesh
and blood citizens. Those who embody this character type seek con-
tact with something outside or beyond ordinary language, something
attainable only in a more pure form of language, “a language entirely
disengaged from the business of the tribe, irrelevant to the mere
pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain” (EHO, 71). Only such
persons, Rorty suggests, might share in Heidegger’s and Nietzsche’s
contempt for those referred to in Thus Spoke Zarathustra as “the last
men.” These self-satisfied but blinkered individuals are convinced
that modern Western society is the best so far achieved. Nietzsche
describes them as those who blink and say, “We invented happiness”
(Nietzsche 2006, 10).
Rorty is somewhat ambivalent about ascetic priesthood, which
he admits is found in all of those attracted to philosophy, including
himself. He happily confesses the appeal that the writing of
Continental philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida,
and others has for him personally, but then seeks to reduce this to a
merely personal idiosyncrasy, an affectation of those who spend their
time reading philosophy books instead of novels. At the same time,
he notes the value of this ascetic priestliness for progress in human
culture. The result of trying to find a language different from that of
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the tribe, he argues, “is to enrich the language of later generations of

that tribe” (EHO, 72). Following Nietzsche’s evaluation of those he
called “free spirits,” he suggests that while ascetic priests are not
much fun to be around, and of no use for increasing happiness, “they
have been the traditional vehicles of linguistic novelty, the means by
which a culture is able to have a future interestingly different from its
past” (EHO, 72–3).
In the end, Rorty’s criticism of Heidegger is less a matter of
argument than of this cultural-political redescription of the type
of character that he represents. In these terms, Heidegger is not one
of those who speaks to and for his fellow citizens but one who aspires
to stand apart and to be in touch with a more profound reality than
the life they share. Rorty’s final judgment on Heidegger remains the
one put forward in his first essay where he suggested that, in stark
contrast to Dewey, Heidegger remained profoundly attached to the
Platonic idea “that there is something special called ‘philosophy’
which it is our duty to undertake” (CP, 54). Rorty’s Heidegger is thus
a figure already assimilated to his Deweyan critique of metaphysics
from whom he learns little that he did not already know: even the
importance of contingency was present in Dewey. As Caputo com-
ments, “There is no fusion of horizons here but rather an assimilation
into one’s own already established horizon” (Caputo 1983, 681).
derrida
Rorty began to write on Derrida during the late 1970s. “Derrida on
Language, Being and Abnormal Philosophy,” was published in The
Journal of Philosophy in 1977, while a companion piece, “Philosophy
as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” appeared in New Literary
History shortly after. Both are exercises in attempting to make sense
of Derrida for an American philosophical audience, remarkable as
much for how little they say about Derrida as for what they do.
A second phase of engagement began with “Deconstruction and
Circumvention,” published in 1984 and continued with “Two
Meanings of Logocentrism,” which appeared in 1989. The latter was
partly a response to Christopher Norris’s criticism of “Philosophy as a

Kind of Writing” (Norris 1989). It was followed by a further response
to Norris and to Rodolph Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror (Gasché
1986) in the Yale Journal of Criticism entitled “Is Derrida a
Transcendental Philosopher?” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
devoted a chapter to Derrida, “From Ironist Theory to Private
Allusions: Derrida,” in which Rorty elaborated on the differences that
he saw between Derrida’s early work written during the 1960s, such
as Of Grammatology and Margins of Philosophy, and later work from
the 1970s such as The Post-Card and Glas. A final phase of Rorty’s
writing on Derrida included three articles that appeared in 1995:
a review of Geoffrey Bennington’s Jacques Derrida, “Is Derrida a
Quasi-Transcendental Philosopher?” in Contemporary Literature, a
review of Specters of Marx in the European Journal of Philosophy, and
an article on “Habermas, Derrida and the Functions of Philosophy” in
the Revue Internationale de Philosophie. He also wrote a long essay
on “Deconstruction” for The Cambridge History of Literary
Criticism (Selden 1995) that summarized his response to Derrida’s
work up to this point. After this, apart from short contributions to a
volume called Deconstruction and Pragmatism (Mouffe 1996), he
wrote only two short memorial tributes for Derrida after his death
in 2004 (Rorty 2004a, 2004b).
Rorty’s contribution to the 1977 APA symposium canvasses
three alternative interpretations that, with some modification, pro-
vide the frame for his criticism of Derrida over the following
decades. He is presented firstly as a philosopher of language whose
work parallels that of the later Wittgenstein; secondly as “a disciple
of Heidegger striving to outdo his master”; and finally as “a writer
who is helping us to see philosophy as a kind of writing rather than a
domain of quasi-scientific inquiry” (Rorty 1977, 673). The first of
these characterizations presents him as a critic of foundational pro-
jects in philosophy in line with the skepticism of Donald Davidson
and the internal realism of Hilary Putnam. Rorty insists that his
“real target” is the idea of philosophy as an inquiry that will tell us
270 paul patton
“how meaning is possible” or “how language hooks up with the

world” (Rorty 1977, 674). In these terms, Derrida’s much-cited
remark that “There is nothing outside the text” is reduced to the
epistemological claim that we cannot get outside our representa-
tions “to a standpoint from which the legitimacy of those represen-
tations can be judged” (Rorty 1977, 676). While this is a way of
presenting Derrida that is arguably consistent with his conception
of language, and one that assimilates him into the mainstream of
Twentieth-Century Anglophone philosophy, it largely ignores
Derrida’s own understanding of text, writing and the play of
différance. I will say more about this below.
A second persistent thread of Rorty’s commentaries on Derrida
presents him as a dissident disciple of Heidegger, one who accepts his
account of the Western philosophical tradition but not his response to
the exhaustion of that tradition. His 1995 article on “Deconstruction”
opens with the claim that Derrida’s early work “was a continuation
and intensification of Heidegger’s attack on Platonism” (Rorty 1995b,
166). While Derrida called “the metaphysics of presence” or “logo-
centrism” what Heidegger called “Platonism” or “metaphysics,” he
accepted both Heidegger’s conviction that metaphysics was pervasive
in Western culture and the idea that the task of the philosophical
thinker was to “twist free” of the binary oppositions that define this
tradition of thought (Rorty 1995b, 169). On Rorty’s account,
Heidegger’s efforts to escape that tradition and return anew to the
question of Being failed, as indeed must any such attempt, for the
simple reason that “every statement of the attempt can only be in
the terms which the tradition created for us” (Rorty 1977, 677). His
later discussions of Derrida present him as “fully conscious” of the
dilemma faced by Heidegger’s attempt to break free of the metaphys-
ical tradition (EHO, 95). He acknowledges Derrida’s repudiation of
Heidegger’s nostalgic aspiration to return to an earlier and more prim-
ordial approach to Being, referring repeatedly to a passage from
‘Différance’ in which Derrida renounces the Heideggerian aspiration
to capture Being in a single word: “There will be no unique name, even
if it were the name of Being. And we must think this without nostalgia,
that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a
lost native country of thought” (Derrida 1982, 27).3
However, with equal persistence, Rorty refuses to allow that
Derrida offers another way out of this impasse. The third characteriza-
tion of Derrida in his 1977 essay presents him as representative of a
tradition in philosophy that he calls, by analogy with Thomas Kuhn’s
distinction between abnormal and normal science, “abnormal” philoso-
phy (Kuhn 1962). Whereas normal enquiry presupposes consensus about
problems and methods for solving them, abnormal enquiry is what
emerges in the absence of such consensus. For Rorty, the difference
between these two modes of enquiry corresponds to the split between
two ways of doing philosophy that occurred after Kant: Analytic and
Phenomenological normal enquiry as opposed to Continental abnormal
enquiry. For thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, or Derrida, it is as if
philosophy proceeded not by dealing with the statements and argu-
ments of predecessors, but by efforts to overcome one’s images of them.
From the standpoint of normal philosophy, “this looks like a confusion
of philosophy with literature” (Rorty 1977, 679). Rorty adopts this
standpoint in suggesting that Continental philosophy is not so much a
matter of argument as a kind of writing: “a genre defined by neither
subject nor method nor institutional affiliation, but only by an enumer-
ation of the mighty dead” (Rorty 1977, 679–80). Philosophers like Hegel
and Derrida are emblematic of this tradition in that not only do they
“not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses” (CP, 93).
Much of Rorty’s commentary on Derrida persists in refusing to
see Derrida’s practice of deconstructive reading as philosophical
argument. For example, in “Deconstruction and Circumvention”
he presents his own version of the dilemma that confronts
Heidegger and Derrida in their efforts to twist free of the metaphys-
ical tradition. He redescribes it in Kuhnian terms as the choice
between the normal operation of a particular cultural practice and
those “literary” or poetic moments that arise when things begin to
fall apart, anomalies accumulate, and dissatisfaction with the
272 paul patton
current way of proceeding becomes widespread. In these “literary”

moments of developing crisis, “people begin to toss around old
words in new senses, to throw in the occasional neologism, and thus
to hammer out a new idiom which initially attracts attention to
itself and only later gets put to work” (EHO, 88). Heidegger’s and
Derrida’s reading of the history of Western metaphysics point to the
emergence of such a “literary” moment as a result of the growing
awareness of the unsustainability of the philosophy of presence.
Rorty interprets the philosophy of presence as the idea that there
could be a vocabulary that was “intrinsically and self-evidently
final,” one that would be “adequate to ‘place’ all of history and all
of culture,” and that would be closed in the sense that it could place
itself in the same way that it speaks of everything else, without
contradiction (EHO, 89–92). In these terms, he suggests that
Derrida’s “great theme is the impossibility of closure . . . There is
always a supplement, a margin, a space within which the text of
philosophy is written” (EHO, 92). But his ambition goes beyond the
repetitive demonstration of this impossibility in relation to particu-
lar philosophical texts. He wants to produce a new kind of text that
would be “literature” in the sense that it is at once philosophical but
no longer beholden to the philosophical ideal of closure, a writing
“marked by self-conscious interminability, self-conscious openness.
Self-conscious lack of philosophical closure” (EHO, 93).4
Rorty acknowledges Derrida’s awareness of the dangers of either
falling back into the tradition from which he desires to escape or
practicing a kind of writing that bears no discernible relation to that
tradition. He notes that Derrida proposes not to embrace one or other
horn of the dilemma but to embrace both and to produce a form of
double writing that seeks both to analytically deconstruct philosophical
texts and to play with or across their contents. In response, Rorty shrugs
his shoulders and asks whether this is really necessary. It would only be
necessary if the philosophical canon remained firmly in the grip of the
metaphysics of presence and the conceptual distinctions it produced,
and if the distinction between philosophical and nonphilosophical
writing were as sharp as Derrida suggests. Rorty simply denies that this
is true of Western culture anymore: “things are just not that bad . . . The
discourse of physics, metaphysics, and politics is considerably more
pliant than this” (EHO, 100). Philosophers, like physicists and artists,
have always introduced new vocabularies to challenge old ones.
In Rorty’s view, efforts to deconstruct philosophical discourse
remain a way of taking it too seriously. He prefers the ironic response
of regarding metaphysics as a genre, like the epic, “which had a distin-
guished career and an important historical function but which now
survives largely in the form of self-parody” (EHO, 105). Accordingly, he
prefers works such as The Post-Card and Glas, in which Derrida is self-
consciously and unremittingly playful rather than attempting to be
argumentative or systematic. His Derrida chapter in Contingency,
Irony, Solidarity is a paean for The Post-Card, especially the first part,
‘Envois,’ which he takes to be Derrida at his best. Here, Derrida is
engaged in spinning out a series of private fantasies in response to the
postcard featuring Socrates and Plato that he came across at Oxford. He
runs together elements of the history of philosophy and contemporary
ideas such as the distinction between use and mention with sexual
fantasies, allusions to love affairs, and the desire for children, real or
imagined. Rorty devotes pages to untangling some of the richness and
complexity of Derrida’s prose, which he admires for its open-ended
recontextualization of the figures and the texts discussed. Above all, he
reads it as “privatized” philosophical thinking, free of any public moral
or political purpose. He takes this text to exemplify what is most
important in Derrida, namely “having the courage to give up the
attempt to unite the private and the public, to stop trying to bring
together a quest for private autonomy and an attempt at public reson-
ance and utility” (CIS, 125). Abandoning the quest to combine in a
single philosophical vision the private and the public is of course the
primary thesis of Contingency, Irony, Solidarity.
The other side of Rorty’s persistent characterization of Derrida
as practicing a kind of literary writing is his refusal to take seriously
the nature and function of argument in his deconstructive essays.
274 paul patton
One striking indicator of how much of Speech and Phenomena, Of

Grammatology, Margins of Philosophy, and other texts is thereby
overlooked is the fact that he nowhere comments on Derrida’s con-
cept of writing in general. Even when in “Philosophy as a Kind of
Writing” he cites the passage from Of Grammatology in which
Derrida argues that there is nothing outside (the) text, Rorty does
not comment on the equivalence in this passage between being out-
side or beyond text and being “outside of writing in general” (Derrida
1997, 158; cited at CP, 96). He says nothing about the concept of
writing in general, which informs the sense of “text” in this passage.
This term refers to any system of differentiated marks, thereby sub-
suming both phonetic and graphic signifiers, as well as any system of
signifieds. Rorty pays no attention to the arguments that Derrida lays
out in support of this concept in his extended discussion of philosoph-
ical conceptions of language, from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau,
Peirce, Saussure, Hjelmslev, and Jakobsen. Instead, he moves quickly
to “the most shocking thing” about Derrida’s work, namely his use of
puns, jokes, allusions, and phonic and typographic gimmicks (CP, 96).
For a long time, Rorty did not move beyond his initial response
of suggesting that Derrida resorted to such linguistic play in order to
help his readers see writing as writing and thereby “break the grip of
the notion of representation” (Rorty 1977, 679). He remained firmly
of the view that
The worst bits of Derrida are the ones where he begins to

instantiate the thing he hates and starts claiming to offer ‘rigorous
analyses.’ Arguments work only if a vocabulary in which to state
its premises is shared by speaker and audience. Philosophers as
original and important as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida are
forging new ways of speaking, not making surprising philosophical
discoveries about old ones. As a result, they are not likely to be
good at argumentation. (EHO, 93)
When pressed on his neglect of Derrida’s argument by Norris, he

proceeds to criticize a straw man version of deconstruction. Nothing
is gained, he says, by showing that the upper term of a given hierarch-

ical pair can be seen as a special case of the lower term: “Practically
anything can be seen, with a bit of imagination and contrivance, as a
special case of practically anything else” (EHO, 112). This misrepre-
sents Derrida’s argument to show that both terms of the hierarchical
speech–writing pair are species of writing in general (Derrida 1997, 52).
Equally evasive is a footnote in “Deconstruction and Circumvention,”
where Rorty comments that “all that the primacy of writing amounts
to is the claim that certain universal features of all discourse are more
clearly seen in the case of writing than in the case of speech” (EHO,
96). Rorty does not elaborate on the nature of this “discourse” whose
“universal features” appear more clearly in the case of writing in the
ordinary sense of the term.
There are several sources of Rorty’s refusal to take seriously the
role of argument in Derrida’s deconstructive essays. One is his reluc-
tance to take into account the context of Derrida’s deconstructive
arguments, namely the primary texts under consideration, and there-
fore the parasitic and performative dimension of these analyses.
Another is his inability to countenance any form of transcendental
argument seeking to establish noncausal conditions of possibility
(EHO, 112; TP, 331). A third is his a prioristic assertion that any
attempt to deconstruct the metaphysical tradition is doomed to fail
insofar as it is formulated in the terms of that tradition. In these
terms, Derrida’s arguments in favor of grammatology run the risk of
producing a new philosophical vocabulary involving terms such as
“trace,” “différance,” and “presence” (EHO, 93). Rorty’s initial
responses to Derrida suggested that he did sometimes fall into this
temptation and offer yet another philosophical theory of language or
textuality, at the cost of falling back into the metaphysical tradition
from which he aspired to escape (CP, 100). However, he also observed
that Derrida undermined this tendency within his own thought
when, for example, he presented Différance as an elusive and non-
identifiable something that lacks a unique name and that cannot be
an object of representation but only of affirmation (CP, 103). Rorty
276 paul patton
does not dwell on the paradoxical nature of this something that is not
a thing and is therefore unnameable, preferring to present Derrida in
his own image, playing with the texts of philosophy in order to show
us “how things might look if we did not have Kantian [normal]
philosophy built into the very bones of our intellectual life” (CP, 98).
Only in the final phase of his engagement with Derrida did Rorty
begin to question the manner in which he had hitherto quarantined
him as a literary figure engaged in essentially private pursuits. Despite
his skepticism regarding the usefulness of Marx to the contemporary
project of social democracy, his review of Specters of Marx led him to
soften his public–private distinction and allow that the later Derrida’s
alignment of deconstruction with justice, like some of Rorty’s own
efforts to strengthen the democratic ethos, “may eventually do some
social good, but only in the very long run, and in a very indirect way”
(PSH, 220). His review of Geoffrey Bennington’s Jacques Derrida
(Bennington 1993) led him to realize that perhaps his nominalism and
his “tough-minded hypostatization-bashing empiricism” may have
limited his understanding of Derrida and that perhaps he needed to
“put a leash on” both in order to fully appreciate the nature and force of
deconstruction. He still denies that Derrida was a transcendental phil-
osopher, in a sense that would commit him to a nonempirical world of
conditions of possibility, but allows that he might have been a quasi-
transcendental philosopher in the sense that he could only be who he
was by speaking as if there were such a world: “You cannot, after all,
deny someone his medium” (TP, 349). To allow Derrida his medium is
to grant him the license to invoke a certain spirit of a certain Marxism,
and to read him in the light of a philosophical tradition in which
transcendental argument is taken seriously. However, doing so
removes much of the justification for reading him as a literary figure
whose philosophy is an essentially private kind of writing.
foucault
Rorty’s engagement with Foucault began later and is less detailed
than his engagements with Heidegger and Derrida. His first
commentary, “Foucault and Epistemology,” was delivered at an APA

symposium in 1979 before being published unaltered in Foucault:
A Critical Reader (Hoy 1986). Foucault appears again in a 1980 essay
“Method, Social Science and Social Hope” that was presented at a
conference on Values and the Social Sciences before appearing in
revised form in The Canadian Journal of Philosophy in 1981. Rorty
discusses Foucault at more length in “Habermas and Lyotard on
Postmodernity,” first published in Praxis International in 1984, and
in “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy: The Case of Foucault,”
which was Rorty’s contribution to a memorial conference in Paris in
1988. Foucault is also discussed briefly in Chapter Three of
Contingency, Irony Solidarity.
Rorty’s initial responses to Foucault were largely critical. In
contrast to his reading of Heidegger and Derrida, there is little that
appeals to Rorty or that offers anything not already found in Dewey’s
pragmatism. “Foucault and Epistemology” offers reasons why
Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, which Rorty considers “his
least successful book,” cannot be taken to offer a successor subject to
epistemology (Hoy 1986, 43). Rather than discuss the theory of dis-
course and discursive formations laid out in Foucault’s Archaeology,
Rorty offers his own typology of possible attitudes toward the theory
of knowledge: the Cartesian view of knowledge as correspondence
with an external reality, the Hegelian historicist view of knowledge
as tending toward an ever more absolute and comprehensive descrip-
tion of the world, and the Nietzschean “abandonment” of the will to
truth that Rorty attributes to Foucault. Rorty’s rudimentary under-
standing of both Nietzsche and Foucault leads him to suppose that
the latter sees “the whole Western project of philosophical reflection
on the nature and prospects of human activity as part of a vast
organization of repression and injustice” (Hoy 1986, 47).
Although Rorty’s comments on Foucault in “Method, Social
Science, Social Hope” are somewhat more positive, his remark that
Foucault seems to him “one of the most interesting philosophers
alive” is less complimentary than it appears (CP, 208). Rorty’s
278 paul patton
assessment follows the pattern established in relation to Heidegger

and Derrida of determining the novelty of the Continental thinker by
comparison with Dewey. Foucault scores lower than either Heidegger
or Derrida, since his apparent innovations, which include the critique
of traditional notions of rationality, objectivity, method, and truth,
and the idea that power is not intrinsically repressive, had both
already been grasped by Dewey (CP, 208). Apart from the way in
which Foucault updates Dewey by showing us “the dark side of the
social sciences,” the only difference between them is that Dewey
offers a kind of social hope that is not grounded in any metaphysical
conception of the human subject, whereas Foucault offers no such
hope (CP, 204, 206). The basis for Rorty’s criticism on this point is not
spelt out in this essay, other than by reference to Ian Hacking’s
comment that, once having abandoned the appeal to a “transcenden-
tal or enduring subject,” Foucault offers “no surrogate for whatever it
is that springs eternal in the human breast” (CP, 206). However,
Rorty’s assessment of the relative merits of Foucault and Dewey is
clear: although both “are trying to do the same thing, Dewey seems to
me to have done it better, simply because his vocabulary allows room
for unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human
solidarity” (CP, 208).
The bases for Rorty’s negative assessment of Foucault are spelt
out in more detail in “Habermas and Lyotard on Postmodernity”
(1984), an essay that compares Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition
(Lyotard 1984) and Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity (Habermas 1985). Rorty sides with Lyotard and the so-
called postmodernists in this dispute, aligning them with the non-
transcendental and historicist outlook that he discerns in Dewey. The
problem with Foucault – Rorty refers primarily to Discipline and
Punish (Foucault 1977b) – is the “dryness” of his work, by which
Rorty means the absence of explicit connection with the concerns of
his fellow citizens. It is easy, he suggests, to read Foucault as “a
dispassionate observer of the present social order, rather than its
concerned critic” (EHO, 173). The “rhetoric of emancipation” is
absent from his work and there is “no ‘we’ to be found in Foucault’s
writings, nor in those of many of his French contemporaries” (EHO,
174). Rorty turns this absence of any rhetoric of emancipation in
Foucault’s work into a “disconnection” of philosophy from social
reform, as though the only possible way to connect philosophy and
social reform is by employing the “rhetoric of emancipation” or by
discussing public policy with one’s fellow citizens. He then assimi-
lates both Foucault and Lyotard to his earlier portrait of Heidegger as
one of those romantic intellectuals or “ascetic priests” contemptuous
of the concerns of fellow citizens and consumed by a desire for the
ineffable, the unthinkable, and a form of discourse “cut free from the
words of the tribe” (EHO, 176).
This parodic portrait of the avant-garde intellectual sets the
scene for Rorty’s distinction between the private, idiosyncratic
needs and ambitions of such figures and the public, social purposes
served by the Deweyan pragmatist thinker. In his 1988 contribution
to the memorial conference, “Moral Identity and Private Autonomy:
The Case of Foucault,” this portrait takes the form of a dichotomy
between an American Foucault, who is an “up-to-date version of
John Dewey,” and a French Foucault who is “fully Nietzschean” and
who, insofar as he has any politics is an anarchist rather than a
liberal reformer (EHO, 193). This historically inaccurate portrait is
the product of Rorty’s effort to read Foucault as exemplifying a
tension besetting any Romantic intellectual who is also a citizen
of a democratic society between a moral identity formed by the
relation to other citizens and describable in common terms and a
personal identity defined by the search for a form of autonomy that
is precisely not describable in terms shared with others. Rorty
thinks that it is possible to be both a Romantic intellectual and a
democratic citizen, so long as one does not confuse the two iden-
tities. Foucault’s problem is that he sometimes confuses the two,
refusing to be complicit with any form of power and lapsing into
“quasi-anarchism” (EHO, 196). Rorty sees Foucault’s supposed
anarchism as the result of “a misguided attempt to envisage a
280 paul patton
society as free of its historical past as the Romantic intellectual

hopes to be free of her private past” (EHO, 196).
The suggestion that Foucault, a leading theorist and practitioner
of genealogy, imagines a society free of its historical past should alert
us to the implausibility of this portrait of Foucault. The premise of
Foucault’s genealogical approach to criticism of the present is precisely
the opposite, namely that all societies are bound to their past unless
and until they become convinced of the need to think and act differ-
ently in particular ways. Rorty’s inaccurate portrait of Foucault is
further compounded by the suggestion that he opposed reform in favor
of all-out revolution. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, he claims
that Foucault “shares with Marx and Nietzsche the conviction that we
are too far gone for reform to work – that a convulsion is needed” (CIS,
64). He places particular weight on his “least favoured sentence in
Foucault,” from a 1971 interview with high school students: “I think
to imagine another system is to extend our participation in the present
system” (Foucault 1977a, 230).5 He wrongly takes this to express
opposition to piecemeal social reform rather than Foucault’s doubts
about the role of intellectuals in proposing ideal models of society. The
Prisoner’s Information Group that Foucault launched in collaboration
with other leftist intellectuals in the same year was a targeted initia-
tive specifically designed to provoke reforms in the penal system.
There is no doubt that Foucault participated in the revolutionary and
poetic language of that time in France, but he was also among the first
of the post-1968 leftist milieu to question the desirability of revolu-
tion.6 By contrast, Rorty’s insistence that only reform is needed to
address the cruelty and inequality that persists in and around
present-day liberal societies is only coherent if we accept his view that
“Western social and political thought may have had the last concep-
tual revolution it needs” (CIS, 63). At this point, he does indeed begin
to sound like one of the last men in Thus Spoke Zarathustra who blink
and say, “We have found happiness.” 7
Rorty does not mention the 1984 essay “What is Enlightenment?”
in which Foucault sets out the rationale and aims of his practice of
genealogy (Foucault 1997). Nor does he discuss the modalities and

varieties of practical political activity that accompanied and informed
Foucault’s writing about prisons. Information about these activities, and
about Foucault’s involvement with public policies around health and
preparations for the socialist-communist government that was antici-
pated in France in 1978, was available in 1988 when Rorty wrote his
memorial address. In apparent ignorance of the circumstances, methods,
and ambitions of Foucault’s work during the 1970s, he repeats the
parochial criticism first outlined in “Method, Social Science and Social
Hope” according to which Foucault’s writing lacks connection to the
political concerns of ordinary citizens. Like Michael Walzer, Charles
Taylor, and Jürgen Habermas, all of whom he cites, Rorty complained of
Foucault’s lack of attention to the liberal state as though he had never
delivered the lectures on liberal governmentality in 1978 and 1979
(Foucault 2007 and 2008).
Rorty’s bifocal conception of philosophy as divided into a pri-
vate realm of self-creation and a public realm of peaceful coexistence
with one’s fellow citizens is a blunt instrument with which to criti-
cize Continental thinkers. Foucault and Nietzsche in particular were
fully conscious of the complex interrelations between social and
political change on the one hand and personal, subjective change on
the other. Foucault, like Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and others,
recognizes the degree to which cultural and eventually political
changes such as those that have transformed the legal and political
status of women, people of color, homosexual, and other minority
social groups come about as a result of changes in individual beliefs
and attitudes. The creation of new vocabularies in which to describe
oppression, exploitation, and marginalization are an inescapable
element of the processes leading to such changes. Rorty’s dichotomy
makes it impossible to appreciate the force of intellectual activity
that aims to shift the limits of what it is possible to say, to think, or to
do, which is precisely how Foucault describes the purpose of his
genealogies of disciplinary punishment, sexuality, and government
in “What Is Enlightenment?” (Foucault 1997).
282 paul patton
Rorty admits that the boundary between these two realms is

porous, for example when he allows that the private projects of
purification pursued by ascetic priests can have “enormous social
utility” insofar as they have been “the means by which a culture is
able to have a future interestingly different from its past” (EHO,
72–3). In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he suggests that the sole
purpose of his ideal liberal society is “to make life easier for poets and
revolutionaries, while seeing to it that they make life harder for
others only by words, and not deeds” (CIS, 60–1). He acknowledges
that such a society is only possible and only speaks the language of its
liberalism “because certain poets and revolutionaries of the past
spoke as they did” (CIS, 61). But this is precisely to admit that the
work of those poets and revolutionaries has public political conse-
quences. Over the course of the 1970s Foucault was both less of a poet
and revolutionary and more engaged in public political activity than
Rorty allows.
conclusion
Rorty’s response to Foucault is perhaps the least charitable and most
unchanging of his assessments of Continental philosophers. There is
much more evolution in his responses to Derrida, from whom he
acknowledged that he had learnt a good deal about the way in which
Heidegger remained bound to the metaphysical tradition he so
wanted to leave behind. He evidently enjoyed reading Derrida, espe-
cially those texts that he described as later works, even though they
appeared well before the overtly political essays that countermanded
the characterization of him as a private thinker. While he admired
Heidegger’s characterization of the metaphysical tradition he found it
consistent with that found in Dewey, who also offered a way to
recapture a sense of the contingency of our language and form of life.
In the end, it does not appear that Rorty’s views were deeply affected
by his engagements with Continental philosophers. At best these
provided confirmation or elaboration of ideas he had already absorbed
from Dewey.
notes
1 In the Introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism, Rorty makes the
much-cited suggestion that “James and Dewey were not only waiting at
the end of the dialectical road which analytic philosophy traveled, but are
waiting at the end of the road which, for example, Deleuze and Foucault
are currently traveling” (CP, xviii). It is puzzling that he should mention
Deleuze in this context, given how few references there are to Deleuze in
his work. On Rorty and Deleuze, see Allen 2015 and Patton 2015.
2 John Caputo offers a different account of Heidegger’s “project of retrieval”
based on his suggestion that man already belongs to Being “in a more
primordial way” before the emergence of propositional thinking (Caputo
1983, 668). On Caputo’s account, retrieval is a matter of learning to
understand that we are already bound up with or borne by Being. Rorty
responds to Caputo in a long footnote in Contingency, Irony, and
Solidarity (122–3n4). See also Guignon 1986.
3 This passage from Margins of Philosophy is cited at Rorty 1977, 676; CP,
103; EHO, 95; CIS, 122; and Rorty 1995b, 170.
4 In “Wittgenstein, Heidegger and the Reification of Language,” Rorty
presents Derrida as standing in relation to Heidegger as Donald Davidson
does to Wittgenstein. Both deny the existence of language as some kind of
bounded whole that can be the object of philosophical study
(EHO, 59n21).
5 TP, 329. Also cited at EHO, 94 and CIS, 230.
6 See, for example, his comments on politics and revolution in a
1977 interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy: “What concerns us today, as
you know, is whether revolution is desirable” (Lévy 1995, 371).
7 “Rorty pipes, like a piper of Last Men from Zarathustra’s Prologue, calling
solitary philosophers to join the herd” (Allen 2015, 170).
13 Rorty’s Literary Culture:
Reading, Redemption, and
The Heart’s Invisible Furies
Áine Mahon and Elizabeth O’Brien
introduction
In Christian theology, “redemption” signifies salvation from sin or
deliverance from suffering. It implies a liberation from the baseness of
evil to a happier and a more exalted state of grace. In our more secular
understandings of the term, of course, “redemption” still implies this
trajectory from negative to positive. It signifies the recovery of a
person from loss, lack, or confusion, hinting at a rejuvenating or
transformative experience where, in our identities and relationships,
we develop from the fractured to the whole. To be redeemed, in other
words, means to achieve the solid sense that one has lived or is living
an authentic life. This is the existentialist ideal whereby one becomes
one’s own autonomous person and transcends what is given merely
by environment or education. One might say that redemption is the
achievement of a kind of peace. It is a state of mind where the story of
one’s life – in all its contingencies and inconsistencies – begins finally
to make sense.
For Richard Rorty, the intellectuals of the West have hoped for
redemption “first from God, then from philosophy, and now from
literature” (PCP, 91). If religion has offered the promise of redemptive
truth through a relationship with a divine being, and philosophy has
offered redemptive truth through a promised relationship with
reason, literature, finally, “offers redemption through making the
acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible”
(PCP, 91). This suggests a culture in which our experience of differ-
ence extends our own ethical potential – in which we develop in
284
rorty’s literary culture 285
immeasurable ways as we make ourselves open and vulnerable to

others. Those of us willing to turn to this literary culture no longer
attempt “to escape from the temporal to the eternal” or from the
fallible to the divine. We place our faith instead in the messiness of
human encounter. As Rorty expands on the idea:
For the Socratic idea of self-examination and self-knowledge, the

literary intellectual substitutes the idea of enlarging the self by
becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human. She
thinks that the more books you read, the more ways of being
human you have considered, the more human you become – the
less tempted by dreams of an escape from time and chance, the
more convinced that we humans have nothing to rely on save
one another. (PCP, 94–5)
Thus, Rorty’s central plea is not for God nor for Reason but for the
saving power of human relationships. On this epistemic model,
“redemptive truth” provides “maximal clarity and maximal coher-
ence,” redeeming its holder “by virtue of its explicit content, not
because of its non-cognitive relation to a particular audience”
(Voparil and Bernstein 2010, 391). Redemptive truth, then, gifts to
its holder a meaningful terminus or at the very least a meaningful
pause. It is a body of beliefs “which would end, once and for all, the
process of reflection on what to do with ourselves” (PCP, 90).
Taking as its starting point Rorty’s marked turn to the literary,
and situating this turn in the context of a broader development in
Anglo-American philosophy, our chapter focuses on the importance
of redemption in Rorty’s philosophical oeuvre. A fascinating yet
significantly undertheorized aspect of his late work, redemption
for Rorty carries spiritual as well as secular significance. It relates
to the power of the literary imagination as an ethical resource, and it
becomes increasingly important in his exploration of solidarity and
social justice. Crucially, Rortyan redemption is an individual or
private matter wholly independent of our projects of political
improvement. Understanding redemption as an individual affair
286 áine mahon and elizabeth o’brien
means acknowledging, in Rorty’s own words, “that private hopes for

authenticity and autonomy should be left at home when the citizens
of a democratic society foregather to deliberate about what is to be
done” (PCP, 102).
Seeking to unpack the significance of Rortyan redemption, we
explore the development of the concept not only with reference to
Rorty’s work but by bringing this writing into conversation with John
Boyne’s 2017 novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. Such an approach –
using a literary text to ventilate a philosophical concept – is inspired
by Rorty’s own conceptual turn from the logical to the literary, a turn
first heralded in his 1979 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In this
groundbreaking work, Rorty announces his signature move from
reason to imagination, from necessity to contingency, and from argu-
ment to “redescription.” This is a move, in his own parlance, from a
philosophical to a literary culture. In the decade following the publi-
cation of Mirror, Rorty continued to develop this central idea of
literary edification, where narrative might supplant argument in the
name of ethical and political progress.
We argue that Rorty and Boyne are united in their foreground-
ing of human relationships and in their plea for the redemptive power
of the novel. Both philosopher and novelist transcend a straightfor-
ward understanding of redemption (one conceived in purely religious
terms) yet both still hold to an underlying belief in the meaningful,
the purposive, or the transcendent. Both offer a distinctively secular
understanding of redemptive truth. We begin with a general consider-
ation of Rorty’s turn to literature and the literary. Both to illuminate
and to critique this conceptual work, we then turn to the particular-
ities of Boyne’s text.
imagination, solidarity, and the moral life

Beginning with Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and progressing
though Consequences of Pragmatism, Philosophy and Social Hope,
and the four volumes of his Philosophical Papers, Richard Rorty
undertakes a project of emancipation. First, in an effort to jolt
philosophical audiences out of a sole commitment to the scientific

method, Rorty urges that science should be considered as an optional
human endeavor, neither the paradigm nor the culmination of human
activity. Further, Rorty suggests that both philosophy and science
should view themselves on the model of literary criticism – as self-
consciously concerned not with facts but with interpretations. In this
way, both philosophy and science might come to develop a new self-
image, one based on the acceptance that there is no final truth, no end
point of argument, only a plurality of possible truths “redescribable”
more or less attractively. This closing of the gap between the logical
and the creative is one of the key moves in Rorty’s distinctive if
controversial brand of neopragmatism (PMN).
Beyond the suggestion that philosophy should redescribe itself
as literary criticism, Rorty makes a related set of arguments for the
importance of reading literature, and for the importance of reading
novels in particular. For Rorty, this literary genre is absolutely foun-
dational for a liberal and democratic society because it supplants
reason with imagination and rehabilitates abstract theory with the
detail of human lives. The novel can make us better persons than we
currently are by appealing to our innate sense of kindness and
solidarity and by broadening our understanding of other people from
“one of them” to “one of us.” It suggests possibilities of conversation
with individuals and communities fundamentally different to our-
selves. Thus, in the Rortyan picture, the novel substitutes doctrine
with hope. It replaces not only monotheism but “the kind of
metaphysics or science that purports to tell you what the world is
really like” (PCP, 30–1), validating instead ethical and political pro-
jects that foreground solidarity and what we as individuals ultimately
owe to each other.
Rorty further suggests that readers should turn to what he
calls “middlebrow” fiction for the inspirational and moral value it
holds. Reading these types of books “decrease[s] our self-
centeredness by reminding us that others are in pain – pain of a sort
which we may be likely to cause, or which we might be able to
relieve.” Reading “highbrow” books however “increases our self-

centeredness by reminding us of the possibility of self-making, the
possibility that we might make our own lives into works of art”
(Rorty 1996b, 60). The complex and highbrow is privately useful
where the sentimental and lowbrow is publicly useful.
“Highbrow” literature, then, has no place in the formation of a
liberal democracy; more popular media play a central role. What
finds emphasis here is the moral utility of the paraphrasable. As
Rorty elaborates: “One episode of a TV series about a white
Southern sheriff and his black deputy combating the lingering
racism of their neighbors is much like another, but this does not
detract from the considerable moral value of each. Paraphrasability
and replaceability is not a disadvantage when it is moral instruction
that is wanted” (Rorty 1996b, 60–1). Thus, in his turn to the literary
realm, Rorty privileges the straightforward over the complex, the
“paraphrasable” over the overtly literary. In his own somewhat
provocative terms:
To get whites to be nice to blacks, males to females, Serbs to

Muslims, or straights to gays . . . all you have to do is to convince
them that all the arguments on the other side appeal to ‘morally
irrelevant’ considerations. You do that by manipulating their
sentiments in such a way that they imagine themselves in the
shoes of the despised and oppressed. (TP, 178–9)
Rorty’s concern with philosophy as a mode of literary criti-

cism and, especially, with the novel as a philosophical/ethical
resource, can be linked to a broader turn toward the literary in
Anglo-American philosophy. On this point Rorty unites with a long
list of moral philosophers (among them D. Z. Phillips, Bernard
Williams, and Iris Murdoch) who have argued for literature’s pecu-
liar capacity to expand empathy and imagination. In encountering
fictional characters markedly different to ourselves, these philoso-
phers contend, we are far more likely to bring unknown others into
our sphere of direct moral concern. We are far less likely to think in
polarized terms of “one of us” and “one of them.” Such imaginative

expansion is facilitated primarily by our involvement in the details
of characters’ lives. In reading a novel or short story, the argument
goes, suspension of disbelief facilitates a gradual identification with
the difference of others – a difference which in other contexts might
seem insurmountable.
It is interesting that several of Martha Nussbaum’s key publi-
cations, from Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice to Cultivating
Humanity and Upheavals of Thought, similarly take as their central
theme the importance of the humanities – specifically, the import-
ance of narrative fiction – in educating a learner’s moral sensibility.1
Nussbaum agrees with Rorty that literature for the moral imagin-
ation widens, deepens, or expands. Her argument, in general terms
very similar to his, is that in the practice of reading we are gifted
greater moral sensitivity because of fiction’s expansionist role. We
become acquainted with a broader range of fictional persons and we
become familiar with a broader range of ethical scenarios. Certainly
there is a distinction to be drawn between Nussbaum’s cognitivist
picture (where the reading of fiction operates primarily on our under-
standing) and the sentimentalist picture of Rorty (where the reading
of fiction operates primarily on our emotions). Still, both visions rely
strongly on recurring metaphors of expansion or enlargement. In the
work of both philosophers, literature educates our moral capacities by
widening or deepening the moral or imaginative capacities already in
our possession.
Stanley Cavell, another of Rorty’s key contemporaries, simi-
larly explores the moral potential of literature. However, for Cavell,
the potential of literature as a moral resource is followed in very
different directions. Less interested in literature’s ability to widen or
to deepen our moral imagination, Cavell appeals instead to the kin-
ship between ordinary and literary speech. In attending to what fic-
tional characters say or avoid saying, Cavell writes, we become
attuned to the commitments and betrayals of our own lives in lan-
guage. On Cavell’s reading, literature doesn’t expand so much as
finely tune. By foregrounding or thickening language, it reminds us

that the meaning of everyday words and sentences must be won back
in every human encounter. And finally, to parse one final contempor-
ary of Rorty, for Cora Diamond poetry and short story illustrate that
the moral life is not easily captured by the discourse of analytic
philosophy. There is much more to moral understanding than the
interweaving of fact with general principle, and it is only in our
engagements with literature that the messiness of moral life is fully
brought to the fore (Diamond 2008).
In foregrounding literature in his philosophical work Rorty is
united, then, with a number of his philosophical contemporaries. But
what is distinctive about Rorty’s writing is the absolutely central place
that he claims for literature. Indeed, Rorty seeks to disband both
science and philosophy and to reestablish both as literary genres. By
“literary genres,” he means all forms of creative writing, and this
includes literary criticism as well as poetry, drama, fiction, and phil-
osophy. “Literature,” similarly, is expanded to all those areas of culture
which “forego agreement on an encompassing critical vocabulary, and
thus forego argumentation” (CIS, 142). What is in question is not the
truth of propositions but the usefulness of vocabularies.
In this context, Harold Bloom’s concept of “strong misreading”
comes strongly to the fore. Rorty adopts the “strong mis-reader” or
the “strong poet” as the archetype of his ideal literary culture. Once
again, in his conception of “poetry” and the “strong poet,” Rorty is
expanding liberally on the usual lexical definitions, viewing poetry
not as poesy (“metrical and/or imaginative discourse designed above
all to evoke an aesthetic response”) but as poiesis (“the creative
production of meaning”) (Verdicchio and Burch 2002, 3). The strong
poet is a pragmatist critic content to sideline authorial intention in
the imposition of his own discursive framework. He is “the maker of
new words, the shaper of new languages . . . the vanguard of the
species” (CIS, 20). As part of his poetic practice, indeed, invention is
prioritized over discovery, making over finding, autonomy and nov-
elty over truth. As Rorty writes in Consequences of Pragmatism:
“The model here is not the curious collector of clever gadgets taking
them apart to see what makes them work and carefully ignoring any
extrinsic end they may have, but the psychoanalyst blithely inter-
preting a dream or a joke as a symptom of homicidal mania” (CP,
151). This instrumentalist model involves a self-conscious blend of
neopragmatist and poststructuralist thought. It recommends the
downplaying of truth and knowledge and the valorization of creativ-
ity and utility. “Reading texts,” Rorty writes, “is a matter of reading
them in the light of other texts, people, obsessions, bits of informa-
tion, or what have you, and then seeing what happens” (PSH, 144). In
these interpretive contexts, what assumes priority is not the author’s
intention but the reader’s response. The novel might be central to the
important work of cultivating solidarity and rejuvenating liberal pol-
itics; nevertheless, taking on a literary work involves playfulness and
creativity, presupposing both a capacity for openness and a readiness
for surprise.
searching for self in john boyne’s the heart’s

invisible furies
With Rorty’s conception of literature and literary culture in mind,
we turn now to a particular novel, and to a particular cast of
characters patently in search of redemptive truth. Published in
2017, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies narrates the life
story of Cyril Avery, opening with the troubling circumstances of
his conception and birth in 1945 and closing in 2015 with a largely
happy end for Cyril and those closest to him. A substantial work,
standing at almost 600 pages, Furies adeptly balances depth and
breadth. The novel spans seventy years of Irish and international
histories, as the personal struggles of one small character come to
represent the growing pains of a larger society. Boyne tells Cyril’s
story in seven-year increments, with the first half of Cyril’s life in
Dublin (1945–80) juxtaposed with his later time in Amsterdam
(1980–7) and then New York (1987–94). Cyril returns to Ireland
for his final years (1994–2015).
Given up by his teenage mother, the infant Cyril is adopted by

Charles and Maude Avery. The Averys provide Cyril with a comfort-
able home and a privileged education, largely ignore his presence, and
on occasion openly forget that he exists:
From the start they never pretended to be anything other than my

adoptive parents and, in fact, schooled me in this detail from the
time I could first understand the meaning of the words . . . I was not
a real Avery and would not be looked after financially in adulthood
in the manner a real Avery would have been . . . “Think of this
more as a tenancy, Cyril,” [Charles] told me – they had named me
Cyril for a spaniel they’d once owned and loved – “an eighteen-year
tenancy.” (Boyne 2017, 61)
Cyril, for his part, is magnanimous toward his adoptive parents.

Knowing no other normal, he appreciates his material good fortune
and commits to continuously clarifying his non-Avery origins as a
sort of strange show of solidarity with Charles and Maude. At home,
at school, and in the workplace, however, he casts a lonely and
uncertain figure, never quite sure of his role or ambition. Similarly,
for Boyne’s reader, we are never on entirely solid ground with Cyril.
We are never entirely confident whether we are dealing with hero or
anti-hero. “Who is Cyril Avery?” asks the novel’s front cover, and this
pivotal question accounts to a large extent for the novel’s narrative
momentum and – at times – for its frantic, grasping, even uncomfort-
able pace. A settled self for Cyril Avery seems always out of reach.
Considering the self in philosophical terms, it is interesting that
in Rorty’s anti-foundationalist pragmatism the very idea of stable
personhood is negated. Indeed, Rorty draws an important distinction
between “self-knowledge” and “self-creation,” arguing that it is the
latter – encompassing “our accidental idiosyncrasies,” “our irrational
components,” “our incompatible sets of beliefs and desires” (EHO,
148) – that should be brought to the fore. This is a process of creation
rather than discovery, where any one person can include as part of
themselves “a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmonized
dispositions” (PSH, 78). Thus, the Rortyan ironist is a figure who

liberates herself entirely into redescription and re-creation. For her,
there is no essential self, no essential language or community, and the
freedom to improvise is nothing short of intoxicating.
Certainly, the dispositions of Cyril Avery appear far from har-
monious. Boyne’s protagonist cuts an evasive and chameleon-like
figure, a patchwork of contradictions and inconsistencies frustrat-
ingly difficult to pin down. As a young child he is captivated by the
confusing rush his friend Julian arouses in him; and over time his
need for intimacy with this freewheeling lothario becomes obsessive.
Julian throws himself at life’s every opportunity, fully embodying the
successful persona of the footloose and fancy-free bachelor. By Cyril
he is at times amused, frustrated, disinterested – but always generally
happy to have him in his company. Julian is oblivious to or simply
uncaring about the actual depth of Cyril’s feeling, and in these dizzy-
ing early chapters it seems that Cyril’s personality (or his morality) is
entirely up for grabs. Taking his lead from Julian, he consistently
avoids real intimacy or genuine relationship. He is downright dishon-
est with girlfriends in particular. As a result, his baseless hope that
Julian will return his desire is not without its victims, literally in the
case of Mary Margaret (who is killed, improbably, in the explosion of
Nelson’s pillar), and figuratively in the case of Alice (whom Cyril
abandons during the reception following their wedding).
Cyril’s single-minded pursuit of proximity to that which is
desired, regardless of the pain caused to others, illustrates the
Rortyan point that “we are not innocent souls corrupted by original
sin” (Rorty 2011, 13) but “are simply clever animals whose primary
need is to be made happier” (Llanera 2017, 106). In the Rortyan
schema, constant self-making is to be embraced as the mark of the
enlightened and autonomous postmodernist but if Cyril is a Rortyan
ironist – endlessly redescribing and endlessly self-fashioning – then
there are real human casualties to his behavior. Indeed his version of
self-creation seems less liberating than tragic as his reckless behavior
is the root cause of his own misery as well as that of others. The
destructive relationship with Alice is a case in point. Alice recognizes

in Cyril his best self and he achieves in her perceptive company a
measure of ease and understanding. Nevertheless, at one of the story’s
crucial moments, he fails to trust her with the honesty she deserves;
Cyril abandons Alice on their wedding day in an episode that, for all
its archness and play, is still devastatingly sad.
Although framed as comedy, a sort of youthful slapstick, the
early escapades of Cyril and Julian constitute in many ways the low
point of Boyne’s novel. There is a hysterical pitch to these encounters
that feels both risky and unnecessary and, in many ways, that sets their
reader on edge. Interestingly, when the duo meet in poignant circum-
stances much later in the novel, there is a notable calming and slowing
down. It seems that the endless possibilities for self-creation have
culminated in wretchedness rather than fulfillment as both reflect on
the questionable decisions that have brought them to this point. Cyril
visits Julian in a New York hospital where Cyril is volunteering and
Julian is dying of AIDS. For all the tragedy of this episode, there is
nonetheless a welcome shift – narratively speaking at least – from the
frantic to the introspective, and from the ironic to the sincere:
“That I wish I could go back in time, both of us, and do things

differently. We’ve both been fucked over by our natures, can’t you
see that? Seriously, Julian, sometimes I wished I was a fucking
eunuch. It would have made life a lot easier. And if you don’t want
me here, what about having someone you loved coming over?
Where’s your family? Why don’t you tell them?”
“Because I don’t want them to know.” (Boyne 2017, 411)
In its making obvious this later more subdued mood, perhaps, then,
the novel’s earlier hysteria had its own significance. “We were middle-
aged, both of us,” says Cyril, “but we had been cheerful teenagers once,
who had gone on to waste so much of our lives” (Boyne 2017, 403).
It is his abandonment of Alice and his subsequent loss of their
son, Liam, that constitute the greatest waste for Boyne’s protagonist.
In the wake of his betrayal, Cyril has no option but to leave Ireland
and significantly, during his subsequent exile (first in Amsterdam and

then New York), his character becomes decidedly more thoughtful –
more rounded – more sensitive to the vulnerabilities of others. In
Amsterdam, in particular, Cyril embarks on his first true period of
adult independence. No longer facing judgment as a gay man in a
repressively homophobic society, he is accepted for his authentic self
and develops a solid relationship with Bastiaan, his first real boy-
friend. It is during his years with Bastiaan that Cyril begins to make
sense, that he locates and develops his own beliefs and desires. He
begins to appreciate his complexity not as a depravity to be hidden or
a problem to be solved. Rather, he takes on this fractured plurality,
alive to the pragmatist appreciation that “any self is capable of
including within itself a number of inconsistent selves, of unharmo-
nized dispositions” (PSH, 78). Liberated from the restrictions of 1970s
Dublin, Cyril can finally live out loud. In a reversal of the Rortyan
trajectory, he moves from self-creation to self-knowledge.
Significantly, it is through his relationship with Bastiaan that
Cyril first experiences a Rortyan-style redemption. Bastiaan allows
Cyril to experience a genuinely caring and genuinely reciprocated
adult romance. More than this, however, it is in Bastiaan’s company
that Cyril is prompted to act on his best self; putting his concerns for
their safety aside, he agrees to take in the orphaned and abused Ignac
and becomes a sort of surrogate parent. Through joining in this act of
selflessness, crucially, a romantic relationship becomes a redemptive
one. It sets Cyril down a path of parenthood, perhaps a path he might
never have chosen, and through which he is both redefined and given
further opportunities to mature and to atone. Arguably, Cyril’s life is
made good by virtue of the family he creates with Bastiaan and Ignac,
who allow him to participate in an experience richer than he might
have constructed alone. This experience of care, of motivational
displacement and honest vulnerability, make possible his later recon-
ciliation with Julian, with Alice, and with Cyril’s biological son Liam;
last of all, it prepares Cyril emotionally for meeting with and under-
standing Catherine, his own biological mother.
The ambiguity of Cyril’s origins and his lifelong experience of

being “not-an-Avery” leaves the notion of family completely open
to interpretation; and ultimately, Cyril’s family is entirely of its
own definition. Including biological and adopted children, as well
as biological and adopted parents, this unorthodox family structure
speaks directly to the Rortyan idea that it is only through imagin-
ation that human relations are enriched, enlarged, and made mean-
ingful. The human relationships that sustain Boyne’s novel, and
those that come together in its final pages, make sense of Cyril’s
life by shaping accident into story. In Rortyan terms, this narrative
impulse toward sense-making captures the human need for
redemption. This is the need to reconcile the seemingly irreconcil-
able, to explain the plurality of our lives by a single context, “a
context that will somehow reveal itself as natural, destined, and
unique” (PCP, 90). More than this, this is the only context in which
our lives might appear in their essential version. “To believe in
redemptive truth,” Rorty expands, “is to believe that there is
something that stands to human life as elementary physical par-
ticles stand to the four elements – something that is the reality
behind the appearance, the one true description of what is going
on” (PCP, 90). It takes Cyril Avery the length of Boyne’s novel to
locate this “one true description.” By the end of his story, tellingly,
Cyril has regained Liam, Catherine has regained Cyril, and both
Cyril and Catherine are redeemed in the sense of recovering what
was once lost through a kind of parenthood-turned-mutuality. This
is the essence of Rortyan redemption – which at its heart holds
relationships that inspire growth:
I nodded and stepped forward, and slowly [Cyril and Catherine]

made our way down the aisle, passing the faces of our friends and
family, and I delivered her into the arms of a kind man who swore
to love her and take care of her for the rest of her life.
And at the end, when the entire congregation broke into applause,
I realized that I was finally happy. (Boyne 2017, 588)
And so, in the simplest possible terms, it is through his rela-

tionships with others that Cyril finds redemption – first with Bastiaan
and Ignac; then with Julian, Alice, and Liam; and finally with his
biological mother Catherine. In the rich tapestry of these relations,
Furies captures Rorty’s pragmatist insight that in our post-religious
culture we no longer need to look to a higher power for salvation. We
no longer need to worship possibilities beyond the horizon of our own
imagination. In his own terms:
[P]ragmatists transfer to the human future the sense of awe and

mystery which the Greeks attached to the non-human; it is
transformed into a sense that the humanity of the future will be,
although linked with us by a continuous narrative, superior to
present-day humanity in as yet barely imaginable ways. It
coalesces with the awe we feel before works of imagination, and
becomes a sense of awe before humanity’s ability to become
what it once merely imagined, before its capacity for self-
creation. (PSH, 52)
We no longer need, then, to outsource healing and forgiveness to a

superhuman authority. As a mature society, rather, we can place faith
in the reparatory potential of human fragility and human fallibility,
no longer projecting “beyond nature to the supernatural and beyond
life to an afterlife, but only beyond the human past to the human
future” (PSH, 162).
conclusion
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortal-
ity, where we must simply have something greater than our-
selves to hold onto – God or history or politics or literature or a
belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger . . .
A way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is
more to this life than we have ever imagined.
(Allison 1994, 166; quoted at PSH, 161)
In Rorty’s imaginative account, a gift of the literary culture is time. It

provides us with pause, with the opportunity to dwell in those mess-
ier or less obvious moments, where we can sit with others’ complex-
ity in all its ugliness and all its grace. Looking to Boyne’s novel,
Julian’s heartrending death illustrates an aspect of the AIDS crisis
which would not have been immediately apparent to a general audi-
ence. In late 1980s New York, as the living and dying cut each other
off, so a life stage emerged where affected individuals were not yet
dead but already gone. Julian waits for death, too ashamed to let his
family know. “His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes, and a dark
oval of purple-red sent a hideous bruise along his chin and down his
neckline. A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt
had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the
heart’s invisible furies on his face” (Boyne 2017, 401–2). With its
investment of time in ourselves as well as others, a literary culture
cultivates relationship with persons or scenarios that might other-
wise appear as alien. In this way, and in so many more, a literary
culture builds the solidarity that Rorty envisaged.
It is of central importance to Boyne that he capture his protag-
onist’s alien experiences as a gay man growing up in a predominantly
Catholic and highly repressive sociopolitical context. Up until 1993,
the year before Cyril’s return to Dublin, homosexuality remained a
criminalized act in Ireland. The country’s decriminalization of homo-
sexuality did not occur until the passage of the Criminal Law (Sexual
Offences) Bill and marked a watershed moment in the lives of gays
and lesbians in Ireland. Up until that point, and indeed for a long time
after it, gay people in Ireland were subject to thoroughgoing social,
political, and legal prejudice. Countless lives were shrouded in shame
and silence as being true to one’s identity or one’s relationships was
simply not an option. In Cyril’s words:
It was a difficult time to be Irish, a difficult time to be twenty-one

years of age and a difficult time to be a man who was attracted to
other men. To be all three simultaneously required a level of
subterfuge and guilt that felt contrary to my nature. . . . The belief

that I would spend the rest of my time on earth lying to people
weighed heavily on me and at such times I gave serious
consideration to taking my own life. . . . It was an option that was
always at the back of my mind. (Boyne 2017, 209)
Mapping Cyril’s private challenges against the significant social

and political upheavals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, then, Furies is at once a personal and a social history. Its
writing vacillates between tragedy and farce as a troop of real-life
historical personae (the writer Brendan Behan as well as the polit-
icians Éamon De Valera and Charles Haughey) play cameo roles in
Cyril’s story. The novel has further aspects of the picaresque, indeed,
not only in its episodic structure but in Cyril’s unlikely heroism as
well as his tendency to place himself on the margins. Here is a
character always alienated and often in exile (both literal and meta-
phorical), wandering between social and geographical groups but
never truly choosing to belong to any of them.
By the end of the novel, however, Cyril has charted his course
from orphan to patriarch. Reflecting the three named sections of
Boyne’s text – from “Shame” to “Exile” to “Peace” – we see Cyril
happy and settled in Boyne’s closing pages, surrounded by generations
of family and a “coherent web” (EHO, 147) of all who matter. There
is no longer a need to pose the question “Who is Cyril Avery?” as
Cyril is firmly placed by others around him – as son, as father, as
grandfather, and as friend. As the abstractions of Cyril are made flesh,
Boyne’s novel becomes progressively less arch and more sincere.
There is a marked movement from loss to plenitude, from farce to
sincerity, and from the frantic to the peaceful.
If the tone of Boyne’s text is playful and coy at the beginning
and gentler, more serious, as it progresses, we might identify in
Rorty’s work a similar move between irony and “deep humanism”
(to use Richard Bernstein’s 2008 phrase). These are the moments in
Rorty’s work where the awareness of postmodernism and the
demands of social justice compete. Focusing first on Rorty’s “ironic

temperament,” its “cool thin romanticism,” Russell Goodman draws
attention to those passages in Rorty “where something more direct
and passionate can be glimpsed not far below the surface.” Like
Bernstein in his defense of Rorty, Goodman cites “Trotsky and the
Wild Orchids,” finding particularly in this autobiographical essay
that Rorty’s romanticism warms up, that “ the irony recedes, and
we sense the anger, resolution, and natural piety that are also part of
Rorty’s life and thought” (Bernstein 2008; Goodman 2008, 95).
For Rorty, redemptive relationships draw something out of us,
something that overwhelms and enriches simultaneously. These
same relationships inspire “overpowering hope, or faith, or love (or
sometimes, rage)” (PSH, 161); they have the power to make our hearts
furious. Such fury would drive Cyril’s mother Catherine from her
insular community in West Cork to the busyness of Dublin, where
she would locate ordinary answers to her extraordinary situation.
Here, in time, she would provide solutions to others experiencing
trouble of their own. Arguably, it is the trajectory of Catherine that
best exemplifies Rorty’s secular view of redemption. Catherine
emerges – indeed, is literally pushed – from the established Catholic
Church into an entirely secular environment. In this way she
embodies the weak promise of Rorty’s post-religious culture. This is
a culture which places meaningful relationship front and center,
where human beings don’t yearn for connection with a supernatural
power but crave communion only with each other.
And so, Rorty and Boyne come together in their critique of
standard religious practice and their affirmation of the human as its
own source of salvation. Both are fully attuned to the salvific and
sense-making potential of the novel as literary genre. Where philoso-
pher and novelist part ways is on the many oppositions (“middle-
brow” versus “highbrow” fiction; a book’s “aesthetic” versus its
“moral” value; the “private” versus the “publicly” useful) developed
by Rorty over the course of his philosophical career. Indeed, it is
central to Rorty’s pragmatist practice of redescription to entrench
theoretical oppositions in this way. To take one particular example,

Rorty highlights in his essay “The Inspirational Value of Great Works
of Literature” a working distinction between a literature of “know-
ingness” (or protective cynicism) and a literature of “inspiration” (or
utopian romance). If the former is characterized by “aesthetic self-
making” and “psychological complexity,” the latter offers simpler
possibilities for moral and political improvement (AOC, 125–40).
Complicating Rorty’s straightforward dichotomies, Boyne’s
novel is at once aesthetically complex and morally transparent. In
its portrayal of twentieth and twenty-first century Ireland, it lam-
poons a wider social and political milieu (in addition to the many
hypocrisies of its fictionalized individuals); nonetheless, it is still
manifestly open to the possibility of personal as well as social
redemption. Furies traces the life story of one man and at the same
time maps the troubled progress of an entire nation. As its cinematic
sweep and layered language betrays a literary ambition well beyond
the “paraphrasability” or “replaceability” that Rorty seeks to cham-
pion, the novel complicates any easy distinction between “highbrow”
and “lowbrow” modes of writing. Troubling the philosopher’s neat
picture, then, Boyne’s text is at once sharply satirical and deeply
compassionate. Furies provides a rich backdrop against which we
might interrogate Rorty’s neopragmatist claims regarding literature,
the literary and the ideals of redemptive truth.
As Tracy Llanera has argued, it seems odd that Rorty – the
notoriously secular antifoundationalist – would set such store by
the seemingly religious idea of redemption. The concept of redemp-
tion, she argues, not only goes to the heart of many of Rorty’s late
essays but is there at crucial moments throughout the philosopher’s
oeuvre. Llanera reads this foregrounding of redemption as a key prag-
matist strategy, where Rorty “utilize[s] transcendent or sacred power
in the service of the secular” (Llanera 2017, 116). Rorty employs the
concept of redemption, Llanera writes, to capture religion’s “salvific
force,” and such power is redirected, in turn, “toward the protection
of secular, democratic hopes, which are demanding and fragile by
nature” (Llanera 2017, 105). In marshaling such a standardly religious

trope, then, Rorty claims for his liberal democratic ideals a central
and crucial importance.
What finds emphasis across Rorty’s extensive body of work is
the capacity of literature to illuminate the transformative power of
the everyday. Redemption through literature (and for Rorty this typ-
ically means redemption through reading novels) is dependent on our
ordinary encounters with ideas and persons that “might conceivably
have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is
possible and important” (CIS, 82). In a neopragmatist vein, Rorty
insists on the compensatory power of human relationship where the
rejection of metaphysical truth does not necessitate the death of
meaning but places our own fragilities front and center. These human
limitations, such as they are, are still the best we can hope for in our
ongoing projects of liberal democracy – in which an ethic of mutual
dependence becomes transformative for culture and civilization.
In summary, then, Rorty rehabilitates redemption from reli-
gious concept to secular ideal. This is an ideal not postponed to a life
after death but one fully realizable in our encounters with those
we love.
notes
1 See Nussbaum 1990, 1995, 1997, and 2001.
14 Wild Orchids
Robert Westbrook
The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the
suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.
I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and
I to them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836)
In his well-known autobiographical essay, “Trotsky and the Wild

Orchids,” Richard Rorty observed two contrasting dispositions that
he developed as a young boy. On the one hand, as the son of two
fellow-traveling Trotskyists, he absorbed a firm commitment to social
justice and democratic politics, if not to the radical left. At the same
time, as a solitary, even lonely child, living in rural isolation, he also
had “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests,” such as an
obsession with various species of wild orchids that grew near his home
in northwestern New Jersey. Generalizing from these examples, Rorty
wrote of the quest that has preoccupied so many philosophers and
others to, as Yeats put it, “hold reality and justice in a single vision,”
and of his own eventual conviction that the two – metaphysical reality
and politics, the wild orchids and Trotsky – could not, need not, and
often should not be fused. His insistence on this separation was, he
suggested, a key to understanding the work as a philosopher that made
him such a controversial figure and the target of cultural conservatives
and radicals alike (PSH, 6, 7).
Much has been written about Rorty’s politics, about his
“Trotsky” side. But relatively little has been said about his encoun-
ters with wild orchids, “Wordsworthian moments” in which he felt
“touched by something numinous, something of ineffable import-
ance” (PSH, 7–8). Rorty said “there is no reason to be ashamed of, or
303
304 robert westbrook
downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments” (PSH,

13). Yet no one said less about these moments than Rorty himself; he
seemed to slough them off. Why?
experience and nature

Readers of “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” could be forgiven if they
understood Rorty to have been saying that as a boy he had “had” an
“experience” of wild orchids. This, no doubt, is the way John Dewey
would have appreciatively read him. But Rorty’s own philosophy
provided little room for such a reading.
Rorty was a proud neopragmatist. But one significant thing that
separated him from some other neopragmatists was a conviction that
“experience” was a concept they could well do without.1 As Rorty saw
it, “experience” was a notion that, after the “linguistic turn,” pragma-
tists should give up in favor of attending strictly to language. He feared
that by hanging onto “experience” pragmatists were opening the door
to realist epistemic foundationalism by seeming to allow for access via
“experience” to a knowable world independent of human discursive
practices with which to adjudicate belief. This sort of world – a world as
it “really is,” one that correspondence theories of truth claim we must
accurately represent if we are to verify belief – constituted what Wilfrid
Sellars called the “Myth of the Given,” and was “a world well lost.”
Repudiation of the “Myth of the Given” is commonplace among
Rorty’s fellow naturalists, including neopragmatists. They have agreed
that a world known as it “really is” was a world well lost. Yet many of
them nonetheless worried that Rorty ran the risk of losing the nonhu-
man world altogether by denying any nondiscursive experience of it.
Rorty was, they feared, pressing pragmatism toward a “linguistic
idealism” that not only denied that language serves to represent the
world as it really is but also held that language entirely constructs the
world. That is, since Rorty contended that our knowledge of the world
is always under a description, always embedded in one or another
“language game,” he was said to be verging on the belief that such
descriptions wholly constitute the world.
wild orchids 305
Rorty parried such concerns. He readily acknowledged the pres-

ence of an independent, nonhuman world to which human beings
stand in a “causal” relationship, a world that can occasion us to have
beliefs about it even if not “in itself” justify beliefs that purport to
“represent” it. Leaning on Donald Davidson, he said:
We can never be more arbitrary than the world lets us be. So even if
there is no Way the World Is, even if there is no such thing as “the
intrinsic nature of reality,” there are still causal pressures. These
pressures will be described at different times and for different
purposes, but they are pressures none the less. (PSH, 33)
Pragmatists such as James and Dewey held
that you can’t compare your beliefs with something that isn’t a
belief to see if they correspond. But they sensibly pointed out that
that doesn’t mean that there is nothing out there to have beliefs
about. The causal independence of the gold or the text from the
inquiring chemist or critic does not mean that she either can or
should perform the impossible feat of stripping her chosen object
bare of human concerns, seeing it as it is in itself, and then seeing
how our beliefs measure up to it. (ORT, 83)
Pragmatists grant
a wholehearted acceptance of the brute, inhuman, causal

stubbornness of the gold or the text. But they think this should not
be confused with, so to speak, an intentional stubbornness, and an
insistence on being described in a certain way, its own way. The
object can, given a prior agreement on a language game, cause us to
hold beliefs, but it cannot suggest beliefs for us to hold. (ORT, 83)
A causal encounter with a mind-independent object can cause us to

believe “H20,” “water,” “trout stream,” or “reflection of the
greater glory of God,” but it cannot determine which of these
beliefs we hold. Beliefs rest not only on such encounters but on
our purposes (chemistry, drinking, fishing, worship) and the
vocabularies (scientific, everyday, sporting, religious) that we use in

their pursuit.2
What was at stake here was a disagreement about just how
arbitrary the world allows our beliefs and our knowledge claims to
be. Rorty wanted to avoid any characterization that would seem to
suggest that the world in any way speaks to us on its own behalf, that
it imposed any independent constraints on the arbitrariness of human
language games. Hence, he resisted the efforts of Richard Bernstein,
John McDowell, and others with “realist intuitions” to have him
admit to our “answerability” to the world or to go beyond acknow-
ledging its “causal constraints” to talking about its “rational con-
straints.” On the other hand, Bernstein and the others thought Rorty
was not giving experience of the “brute compulsiveness” of the
world, what Charles S. Peirce called “Secondness,” the role it
required if we are to make sense of “the self-corrective character of
inquiry and experimentation.” This Secondness checks our efforts to
know stuff. The one thing that noncognitive experience can say to us
is “No.” Yet while noncognitive experience constrains us, it cannot
tell us what it is that constrains us. When we ask that question, we
move into cognitive experience (what Peirce called “Thirdness”). And
in so doing, we cannot attain a “God’s-eye view” of things as they
really are in order to settle our beliefs. “One of the deepest and most
pervasive confusions that gives rise to the Myth of the Given,”
Bernstein observes, “is the confusion of brute constraint and epi-
stemic authority.” One can grant noncognitive experience the first,
without extending it the second (Bernstein 2010, 134).
This debate rages on, and powerful allies have joined Rorty’s
cause, most notably his onetime student Robert Brandom, the most
technically accomplished neopragmatist at work today.3 Critics con-
tinue to push back against them both.4
But I think a more relevant objection here to Rorty’s linguistic
turn away from “experience” than that it led him to deny the role of
noncognitive experience in the justification of belief is that it also led
him to turn a blind eye to other dimensions of noncognitive
wild orchids 307
experience in human life (those he seemed to corral under the not

particularly helpful term “causal pressures”). There is a great deal
more to human being-in-the-world than forming beliefs about it,
though anyone reading much academic philosophy, including
Rorty’s, can be forgiven for thinking otherwise. That is, for all his
condemnation of the domination of modern philosophy by epistemo-
logical concerns, Rorty himself remained very much a part of what
Dewey called an “epistemology industry” that was wedded to a
misleading conception of human experience in the world as ubiqui-
tously a knowledge affair (Shusterman 1997, 157–77). Rorty shared
Dewey’s complaint about the hegemony of epistemology among phil-
osophers. Sounding very much like Dewey, he told an interviewer
that “The idea that human beings are primarily knowers, that know-
ing and truth seeking are what makes them wonderfully different
from animals, is a bad one, even though it goes back to Plato and
Aristotle. It is high time we gave it up” (Mendieta 2006, 95). But
having made this point, Dewey moved on to try to reconstruct phil-
osophy, including metaphysics. Rorty seemed unwilling, perhaps
incapable, of moving on. By obsessively returning again and again to
an attack on the foundational claims of the epistemology industry
(and, as a philosopher, doing little else), he remained, in an important
sense, very much a part of it.5
Or to put it another way, and more broadly, Rorty was a leader
among those whom Richard Shusterman has called “textualists”
(Dewey would have called them “intellectualists”). One thing that
textualists share, whatever their differences, is a repression of the
nondiscursive. As Shusterman said:
This ideology, common to analytic and continental philosophy,

insists that language exhausts the scope of experience, since
whatever lies outside of language cannot be thought or given
content. Hence Sellars claims that “all awareness . . . is a linguistic
affair”; Gadamer stresses “the essential linguisticality of all human
experience of the world”; Rorty asserts that we humans are
“nothing more than sentential attitudes”; and Derrida declares

that there cannot be a “hors-texte,” “a reality . . . whose content
could take place, could have taken place outside of language.”
(Shusterman 1997, 173)
On the one hand, Shusterman observed, “textualist ideology has been

extremely helpful in dissuading philosophers from misguided quests
for absolute foundations outside our contingent linguistic and social
practices.” But when they insist on what Rorty termed “the ubiquity of
language” (CP, xix), they simply identify “human being-in-the-world
with linguistic activity” and in so doing “neglect or overly textualize
nondiscursive somatic experience” (Shusterman 1997, 173).
Dewey insisted that experience was not ubiquitously an affair
of language, but rather “an affair of the intercourse of a living being
with its physical and social environment.” Experience was infused
with qualities that were had before they were known or even put into
words. A human being was not simply, or even primarily, a knower
but rather an “agent-patient, doer, sufferer, and enjoyer.” Knowing
the world and encasing it in language was a secondary, mediating
affair that (as even Rorty said) was caused by primary, noncognitive
experience, serving if all went well subsequently to enhance the more
rewarding qualities of that primary experience. For Dewey, epistemic
authority was not something that noncognitive experience had on
offer.6 Primary, noncognitive experience, Dewey argued, was
ineffable and unknowable. Its qualities could not be known (and here
he anticipated Rorty) until “with language they are discriminated”
(Dewey 1925, 98). We have no immediate knowledge of anything.
Primary experience was not constituted by language, but it was
known only through language and the work of language-using human
communities. Yet knowing about it (including knowing that we have
it) and having it were two quite different things.
“An enriched pragmatism,” Bernstein advised Rorty, “can inte-
grate the linguistic turn with a subtle appreciation of the role and
varieties of experience” (Dewey 1905, 158–60; Bernstein 2010, 129).
wild orchids 309
By construing the human relationship to the world as almost strictly

one of thinking about it, talking about it, and having beliefs about it,
Rorty voluntarily took up philosophical residence in a prison house of
language, leaving little room for his ineffable encounter with wild
orchids outside the cell window.
anti-authoritarianism
How might an intellectual historian such as myself explain Rorty’s
neglect of the noncognitive, nondiscursive experience that he had with
the wild orchids? The answer, I would suggest, lay in his temperament.
Disagreements among philosophers, William James said, were
more often than not “a clash of human temperaments.” Whatever a
philosopher’s temperament, he said, “he tries, when philosophizing,
to sink the fact of this temperament . . . He trusts his temperament.
Wanting a universe that suits it, he believes in any representation of
the universe that does suit it” (James 1987, 488–9). Rorty shared this
sentiment, and left no doubt about the temperament that under-
pinned his philosophy.7 The animating impulse of much of his think-
ing was a deep-seated anti-authoritarianism that targeted, above all,
the quest for objective, ahistorical, transcendental constraints on
human knowledge and moral judgment. He described his inconclu-
sive debates with those who would continue this quest as “the recip-
rocal unintelligibility to one another of two very different types of
people . . . These two types of people are conveniently describable in
Freudian terms: they are the people who think subjection to an
authority-figure is necessary to lead a properly human life and those
who see such a life as requiring freedom from any such subjection.”
Rorty’s opponents, he said, were the partisans of the superego,
hawking a metaphysics that looked to him like “an attempt to
snuggle up to something so pure and good as to be not really human,
while still being enough like a loving parent so that it can be loved
with all of one’s heart and soul and strength.” Rorty’s pragmatism, on
the other hand, offered, as an ego ideal, a liberation from this deper-
sonalized primal father (Rorty 1999, 15, 17).
Given Rorty’s use of the language of the Freudian family

romance, it is worth sketching briefly the story of his own revolt
against the metaphysical father, a revolt that ironically resulted in a
return to the philosophical household of his parents.
Rorty was born into a family with a disposition for anti-
authoritarianism. His maternal grandfather was Walter Rauschenbusch,
the most significant and radical Social Gospel theologian and a leading
critic of industrial capitalism in the early twentieth century. His mother,
Winifred Rauschenbusch, while sharing her father’s social democratic
politics, proved a willful and rebellious daughter when it came to his
Victorian conception of familial responsibilities and sexual morality
(Blake 2000, 91–9). Rorty’s father, James Rorty, was an important
American radical and a stalwart of the anti-Stalinist left during Rorty’s
childhood. Under the tutelage of such parents, he learned that “the point
of being human was to spend one’s life fighting social injustice.” John
Dewey was “a hero to all the people among whom I had grown up,” and
pragmatism was their “unofficial philosophy.” The report of the Dewey
Commission exonerating Leon Trotsky of the charges made against him
in the Moscow Trials was their family bible, and as a young man, Rorty
recalled, “the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by Stalin were, for me,
what the Incarnation and its betrayal by the Catholics had been to preco-
cious little Lutherans 400 years before” (PSH, 6, 8, 5).
As the son of anti-authoritarian parents, Rorty’s youthful rebel-
lion against his upbringing naturally took the form of embracing the
sort of philosophical absolutism that they abhorred and he would
later indict. Initially, he found his way (at the age of fourteen) to the
neo-medieval certitudes proffered at Robert Hutchins’s University of
Chicago, where he was an undergraduate in the late 1940s. There he
learned contempt for the Deweyan pragmatism that had guided the
politics of his parents and their anti-Stalinist friends such as Sidney
Hook. He was taught that pragmatism offered no moral resources for
resistance to fascism, resources that only “something eternal, abso-
lute, and good” could provide (PSH, 8). “Since Dewey was a hero to all
the people among whom I had grown up,” he said, “scorning Dewey
wild orchids 311
was a convenient form of adolescent revolt” (PSH, 8–9). He became a

Platonist, since it “seemed clear that Platonism had the advantages of
religion, without requiring the humility that Christianity demanded,
and of which I was apparently incapable” (PSH, 9). Plato offered the
prospect of becoming “one with the One,” of ascent to a place “where
the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and
good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids” (PSH, 9). To
Rorty it then seemed obvious that “getting to such a place was what
everybody with any brains really wanted” (PSH, 9).
Embarking on a professional career in philosophy in the 1950s,
Rorty eventually recognized that professional advancement required a
turn – a linguistic turn – from Plato and Aristotle to the reigning
methods of Carnap and Quine. But he nonetheless held onto the hope,
common to all hard-nosed philosophers in the years following World
War II, that the analysis of language pioneered by émigré logical posi-
tivists would secure the place Plato had promised philosophers as the
arbiters of genuine knowledge. Landing a job at Princeton, rapidly
becoming a citadel of this hegemonic “analytical” view, Rorty seemed
destined in the sixties for a distinguished orthodox career. In the words
of his ex-wife, “as a young man, my husband was a person of high and
austere ideals, rather rigid, very reserved, a brilliant philosopher. He
was dedicated to the greater glory of God through philosophy, and to
developing his self-respect” (A. Rorty 1977, 40).
But doubts that analytical philosophy could deliver the goods it
promised grew over the course of Rorty’s early career, to the point
where he decided that philosophy as a discipline with a legitimate
claim to “be foundational with respect to the rest of culture” by virtue
of “knowing something about knowing which nobody else knows so
well” was dead. As Jonathan Rée has said, “Rorty found his distinctive
voice in the shock of a kind of bereavement,” the death of the Platonic
primal father (Rée 1998, 9). With the publication of Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature (1979), the proverbial ninety-five theses that he
nailed to the door of the analytic establishment announcing the end of
philosophy’s pretensions to underwrite knowledge, Rorty launched a
new career as a deflationary anti-philosopher, hitching his views to

those of therapeutic, “edifying” thinkers such as Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, and Dewey who had also broken with the discipline’s
foundational ambitions (PMN, 5). Beginning in the late 1970s, Rorty
attached a “pragmatist” label to his “reaction formation” against a
philosophical quest for underlying first principles, thereby returning
to the anti-authoritarian fold in which he was raised with a newfound
appreciation for the days when Sidney Hook bounced him on his knee
(Nystrom and Puckett 1998, 50).
Rorty was drawn to the classical pragmatists, and to Dewey in
particular, because he saw them as fellow anti-authoritarians.
Dewey’s philosophical stories – those he told in the books that
Rorty liked best, such as Reconstruction in Philosophy and The
Quest for Certainty – were “always stories of the progress from the
need of human communities to rely on non-human power to their
realization that all they need is faith in themselves” (Rorty 1999, 14).
As John McDowell has said, Rorty cast his own anti-authoritarianism
as a “Deweyan narrative of Western culture’s coming to maturity”
(McDowell 2000, 109).
Rorty’s project was not only to reannounce the death of God, but
to wipe out all God-surrogates. He urged the renunciation of every
“secular analogue to a religion of abasement,” including realist
epistemology, by making any and every appeal to the authority of
“things in themselves” look bad. He devoted the last quarter-century
of his career to the task of persuading his readers to “grow up” as he
had, drawing on resources from both within the “analytic” tradition in
which he was trained (especially the work of the later Wittgenstein,
Quine, Sellars, and Davidson) and the “continental” tradition he was
trained to despise (the sons of Nietzsche: Heidegger, Derrida, and
Foucault), to undermine the philosophical superego. There can be, he
claimed, no “way the world is in itself,” no “ahistorical human nature”
to which we can or should appeal in our quest for knowledge or virtue.
We have only the descriptions of particular, human, historically con-
tingent language games to work with; we cannot find any place outside
wild orchids 313
of such descriptions from which to know a reality standing apart from

all such descriptions and with which to compare them.
If in Rorty’s eyes we are to grow up, we must abandon the
epistemological and moral pretense to objectivity. As McDowell has
said, “as Rorty sees things, participating in the discourse of objectiv-
ity merely prolongs a cultural and intellectual infantilism, and per-
suading people to renounce the vocabulary of objectivity should
facilitate the achievement of full human maturity” (McDowell
2000, 110). Putting paid to any objective reality or moral law is the
last stage of the anti-authoritarian revolt. As Rorty himself put it, he
was urging us to “try to get to the point where we no longer worship
anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi-divinity, where we treat
everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a
product of time and chance” (CIS, 22).
By these lights, Rorty’s rejection of “experience” was critical to
his radical, anti-authoritarian project. For him, to lend much signifi-
cance philosophically to immediate, noncognitive, nondiscursive
experience was to yield too much authority to “things in themselves,”
and to depart on a slippery slope to epistemic foundationalism by
offering up such experience as evidence for particular knowledge
claims. Dewey was Rorty’s hero, but even he, Rorty thought, made
this mistake, which was why he consigned Dewey’s metaphysics and
Experience and Nature to the trash heap (CP, 72–89).8 Here again we
see how Rorty by insisting that any and all efforts at metaphysics were
bound to be epistemically foundational left himself with a truncated
vision of human being-in-the-world, one that could not account for his
encounters with the wild orchids.
And not incidentally, Rorty also betrayed his oft-proclaimed
commitment to Darwinism (TP, 290–306). To say that we have
experience of the world that we must take account of apart from
the experience of forging beliefs about it is not necessarily to
“abase” ourselves before its authority or even to grant it authority
at all, but rather to acknowledge that we are wholly one with it,
even as we attempt (always imperfectly and fallibly) to know it.
James made an important distinction between having an acquaint-

ance with reality and knowing about reality that might be helpful
here. Or to put it in terms that sound more like Rorty, there is a
difference between being in touch with the world and getting it right
by our lights. And there is a difference between the latter and some
notion of getting to the incorrigible truth about existence as it is in
its own right, which we cannot do. The nonhuman world will often
make our acquaintance and touch us of its own accord. A bolt of
lightning can strike us. Whether or not it was a bolt of lightning that
touched us is not something that the lightning will tell us. That is
for us to know (presuming we survive), and to know but fallibly
within the framework of wholly human practices of inquiry. It
may have been a bad dream.
Darwinians readily acknowledge that human beings are among
the most peculiar creatures to emerge from natural evolution. They
stand apart from the rest of the organisms that inhabit the natural
world by virtue of their unique and wonderful capacity for discursive
language and conceptual reasoning. Human beings, as Rorty was
always saying, are especially “clever animals” thrown up by time
and chance. But we remain animals, fully continuous with and entan-
gled in the rest of the world. My hound dogs, Billie Budd and Bartleby,
are different animals than I am, and I have obviously placed them
within a language game that they cannot play (they have not read
Melville). Yet my conceptual abilities and means of communication
were in the course of evolutionary change born of theirs – we stand to
one another in a relationship of “continuity with difference,” Dewey
might say.9 Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism and conception of human
autonomy was at times so extreme as to obscure this Darwinian
commonplace and to vault the human species outside of the rest of
nature, “causal pressures” to the contrary notwithstanding.
Even if we concede Rorty’s language and agree that “bouncing
off” the rest of the world in “causal interaction” is as “intimate a
connection” (Rorty 2000c, 127) with it as we can get outside the
confines of language, might we not incorporate this intimate,
wild orchids 315
noncognitive, nondiscursive experience into our understanding of

human being-in-the-world more fully than he did?10 As Dewey put
it, “experience is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of
standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the
literal sense of these words.” The realm of “causal interaction” with
the world is a much bigger deal than Rorty let on (Dewey 1917, 8,
emphasis added).
natural piety
What might Rorty have meant by describing his encounter with wild
orchids as a “Wordsworthian moment”? I think he was referring to
moments such as those invoked in Wordsworth’s perhaps most well-
known poem, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
(1798).11 The voice of this poem, suitably enough, is that of a young
man standing on the banks of the Wye River and thinking back to the
impact on him as a child of the landscape spread before him, and the
manner in which “these beauteous forms,” much like Rorty’s wild
orchids, have since enriched his life. Among these gifts is a “serene
and blessed mood” in which “the heavy and the weary weight / Of all
this unintelligible world, / Is lightened”:
In which the affections gently lead us on,

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
The poet readily admits that he cannot again look upon nature as he
did in “my boyish days.” Yet with age and an attunement to the “still,
sad music of humanity” has come “abundant recompense,” for now
he feels
A presence that disturbs me with the joy,

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
He is now “well pleased to recognize” in nature
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being. (Wordsworth 2001, 99–102)
Wordsworth here described what James would have called one

of the varieties of religious experience. Extraordinary poet that he
was, Wordsworth was able to put his primary, noncognitive experi-
ence into language of exceptional power. Moreover, he suggested the
beliefs of a pantheistic sort (in a spirit that “rolls through all things”)
that this experience caused him to have. He may even be said to say
in the foundationalist fashion that Rorty found objectionable that this
experience authorized these pantheist beliefs and somehow made
them true (“the anchor of my purest thoughts”).
Was Rorty revealing a religious experience in describing his
own Wordsworthian moment in the Jersey woods? Hard to say. His
use of descriptors such as “numinous” and “of ineffable importance”
is suggestive. But it is hard to imagine him saying so himself. Rorty,
ever the resolute anti-authoritarian opponent of a divinized world,
characterized religion in “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids” simply as
“a nonargumentative faith in a surrogate parent who, unlike any real
parent, embodied love, power, and justice in equal measure” (PSH,
wild orchids 317
12). Little wonder then that he did not there scrutinize his encounter
with the wild orchids more closely than he did, let alone term it a
religious “experience” (that word again). Indeed, given his view that a
belief in an omnipotent God was the fons et origo of the punishing,
authoritarian superego, the wonder is that he owned up at all to what
many readers could regard as a religious experience – and that he did
so far from dismissively and with more than a little of Wordsworth’s
conviction that it had provided “life and food / For future years.”
James and Dewey thought that noncognitive religious
experience had some distinctive and general qualities, despite its var-
iety. James, who remains the deepest American student of religious
experience, argued at the end of The Varieties of Religious Experience,
that the “essence” of religious experience was found in an individual’s
union with a “MORE . . . which is operative in the universe outside of
him, and which he can keep in working touch with.” This union with
the “MORE” was marked by solemn joy and a surrender of will,
something like Wordsworth’s “stilling of this corporeal frame” and a
joyous “sense sublime.” This was a state of mind, James observed, in
which “the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been dis-
placed by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the
floods and waterspouts of God” (James 1987, 454, 49–50).
Dewey described religious experience in similar terms, as the
highest form of “consummatory” experience. Experience had a reli-
gious quality, he said, when it takes shape as a profound “adjustment”
of self and world, “changes in ourselves that are much more inclusive
and deep-seated” than the ordinary adjustments we might make in our
lives. Such changes “relate not to this or that want in relation to this
and that condition of our surroundings, but pertain to our being in its
entirety.” There was a note of “ready and glad” submission in such
experience, as well as “a sense of security and peace.” Such an adjust-
ment was not the product of will but the possession of will, “a change
of will . . . rather than any special change in will”; it was, moreover, “an
influx from sources beyond conscious deliberation and purpose.” It
marked “a thoroughgoing and deep-seated harmonizing of the self with
the Universe (as a name for the totality of conditions with which the
self is connected)” (Dewey 1934, 12–14).
James and Dewey both understood religious experience as non-
discursive and noncognitive. But reflection on the meaning and impli-
cations of such experience in language, they were agreed, was as
irresistible as Wordsworth found it. Even for mystics who insisted
on its ineffability. Religious experience, James noted, “spontaneously
and inevitably engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and
metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by adher-
ents of another” (James 1987, 389). Neither philosopher, unlike
Wordsworth, made a foundationalist move – James because, try as
he might, he could not convincingly do so, and Dewey because he had
no interest in trying. They were agnostics, as their pragmatic concep-
tion of truth as warranted belief required. Dewey admitted that he
could not deny “the logical possibility of the existence of a personal
will which is causative and directive of the universe and which is
devoted to the promotion of moral ends,” but he doubted that prag-
matists would ever confront evidence sufficient to warrant belief in
such a God to them. Moreover, he said, “if the future of religion is
bound up with really finding such justificatory evidence, I fear for the
future of religion” (Dewey 1934, 227–8).12
Dewey was willing to provisionally venture one bare-bones
naturalist hypothesis that he thought might win widespread assent.
Human destiny, he averred, was so interwoven with forces beyond
human control that humility before and dependence upon those
forces should be essential aspects of religious belief. Religious belief,
he suggested, should contain a full measure of “natural piety.” He
merits extended quotation since it is wild orchids we are considering:
The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human

achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of
physical nature and our fellows. Our successes are dependent upon
the cooperation of nature. The sense of the dignity of human nature
is as religious as a sense of human nature as a cooperating part of a
wild orchids 319
larger whole. Natural piety is not of necessity either a fatalistic

acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of
the world. It may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of
which we are parts, while it also recognizes that we are parts that
are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to
strive by their aid to bring conditions into greater consonance with
what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an inherent constituent of
a just perspective in life. (Dewey 1934, 18)
Rorty wrote approvingly of Dewey’s conception of natural piety (TP,

196). He appreciated, of course, that Dewey had not made Wordsworth’s
pantheistic move, and instead naturalized the Wordsworthian moment.
But he also saluted Dewey for avoiding militant atheism. Rorty never
publicly worked out anything similar to Dewey’s natural piety, but it
might not be too much of a stretch to imagine that privately he shared
something much like it, which may account for the warmth with which
he told the story of his boyhood moment of spying the orchids in the
Jersey woods. I have to wonder as well whether if Rorty had lived to
confront the increasingly dire predictions of the consequences of
human-induced climate change that we face these days on a near-daily
basis, he might have more openly embraced the sort of natural piety that
Dewey proposed.13 What better way to think about climate change than
as the manifestation of colossal and suicidal impiety?
in search of lost time

Rorty said that when he left New Jersey for Chicago as a teenager he
replaced the wild orchids with Proust and À la recherche du temps
perdu. It is not exactly clear what he meant by this, perhaps only that
Proust replaced the orchids as his principal private, weird, snobbish
interest. Or perhaps he was using this displacement of the orchids by
the novel as a parable for the turn from experience to language, in
which case we might want to warn, as Proust himself did, that we
should not confuse the qualities of eating a madeleine with reading a
story about eating a madeleine (Proust, in de Botton 1997, 90).
Maybe, however, Rorty meant that in reading Proust’s novel he

was again “touched by something numinous, something of ineffable
importance,” even though this is not what he said in what little he
wrote about Proust (CIS, 96–121). But it is not inconceivable. It is not
only the nonhuman world that has occasioned religious experience.
Dewey saw consummatory experience generally as essentially aes-
thetic, and religious experience as a heightened, expansive mode of
aesthetic experience. Reading a text (like the Bible or Koran) can
certainly be an aesthetic experience and has been for some a consum-
matory religious experience. The same is true of looking at a painting,
or hearing the call to prayer, or making love.14
On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that Rorty did
not simply abandon the wild orchids for books, but rather continued
to revel in encounters with the nonhuman world alongside satisfying
a massive appetite for reading. In 1992, when he was seriously con-
sidering moving from the University of Virginia to Northwestern,
Rorty wrote to Arthur Fine: “Every time I walk into my office and
feel bored with the deadly sameness of it all, Northwestern looks
great. Every time I go (as Mary [his wife] and I did last weekend) for
three different hikes through different habitats, all within a quarter-
hour’s drive from our house, I feel that I’d be crazy to leave Virginia.”
Later, singling out for Jürgen Habermas the highlight of a long visit to
South Africa, Rorty wrote in 1998 that “We saw thirty-five kinds of
mammals, ranging from the tree squirrel to the leopard and the right
whale, as well as two hundred and twenty-three kinds of birds.”15
Here, Rorty – being Rorty – fell into a language game, taxonomy. But
I would bet he had some Wordsworthian moments in South Africa
before doing so.
For much of his life, that is, Richard Rorty nodded warmly not
only to the wild orchids but more generally to the flora and fauna of
the Skylands of New Jersey, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
the Coast Range of California, and elsewhere. And they nodded
back.16 Would that his philosophy had more fully given these nods
their due.
wild orchids 321
notes
1 I am here repeating some of the analysis I offered in Westbrook 2015, 8–9.
2 See Frankenberry 2006.
3 See especially Brandom 1994. Rorty deployed some of Brandom’s
apparatus in addressing the existence of God in PCP, 3–26.
4 See, for example, Levine 2019. Bernstein 2019 is a superb account of the
current debate among naturalists and of Dewey’s legacy for it.
5 Bernstein put the point nicely: “Over the years, I have been asked many
times, what is the difference that makes a difference between you and
Rorty? And the answer that I always give is that I began my philosophic
career convinced by Dewey’s critique of the quest for certainty and his
call for a reconstruction of philosophy. I never experienced the type of
disillusionment [with the quest for certainty] that Rorty experienced.
I never thought that one had to critique representationalist, traditional
epistemology and foundationalism over and over again. The task, as
Dewey had indicated, was to reconstruct philosophy . . . Rorty suffered
from the ‘God that failed’ syndrome” (Bernstein 2010, 214). The last
reference is to anticommunist disillusionment. Like the anticommunist,
Rorty defined himself pretty much entirely by his opponent. Or to switch
to an analogy he might use himself, Rorty was a therapist who defined
himself in terms of the neurosis of the patient he was trying to cure.
6 Shusterman persuasively finds one important instance, an article entitled
“Qualitative Thought” (1930) in which Dewey did make foundational
epistemological claims for noncognitive experience. But here Dewey was
at odds with himself and, Shusterman suggests, not at his best.
7 I am improving here on the analysis in Westbrook 2005, 142–7.
8 Asked by an interviewer what he thought of Dewey’s theory of
experience, Rorty responded, “I regard that as the worst part of Dewey. I’d
be glad if he had never written Experience and Nature” (Mendieta
2006, 20).
9 See Godfrey-Smith 2017.
10 I prefer Shusterman’s “on-the-pulse experienced quality and affect”
(Shusterman 1997, 166).
11 See TP, 196.
12 For a fuller account of the thinking of James and Dewey on religious
experience, religious belief, and institutional religion, see Westbrook 2003.
13 See at least, if you can bear to read it, Wallace-Wells 2019.

14 I would note that the last portion of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”
speaks of the added joy that his encounter with landscape brought him as
a consequence of sharing it with his sister. His return to that landscape
was consequently one of “warmer love – oh! With far deeper zeal/Of
holier love.” The “steep woods and lofty cliffs” were rendered “more
dear” by virtue of sharing the consummatory experience of them with
her. I am grateful to Jonathan Strassfeld for pointing this out to me.
15 Rorty to Arthur Fine, February 3, 1992; Rorty to Jürgen Habermas,
September 28, 1998, Richard Rorty Papers (Born Digital Collection),
University of California-Irvine. See also Rorty’s interview with James
Ryerson in the arboretum of the University of California-Santa Cruz,
which he conducted alongside bouts of bird-watching (Ryerson 2000/
2001).
16 When my family took possession in 1994 of our seven acres in rural
western New York, one of the first things we noticed was a wild orchid
growing on the edge of the woods along the western perimeter of the
property. I thought of Rorty.
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Index
More Information
Index
Achieving Our Country, xi, 171, 175, 198, Carnap, Rudolf, 75, 86, 92, 94, 99, 107, 128,
200, 215–18, 258, 323, 342 203, 205, 311, 328
Adorno, Theodor, 157, 159 Carter, Stephen L., 248, 328
Allen, Barry, 88, 109, 283, 326, 330, 332, 340 Cavell, Stanley, viii, 61, 289, 342
Amis, Kingsley, 238–9 Chin, Clayton, 22, 38, 85, 328
analytic philosophy, 2, 17, 31, 35, 70, 78, 86, Civil Rights, 172, 209, 216, 236
203, 205, 290 Civil War, 228–30, 235–6, 327, 332
anti-authoritarianism, 5, 8, 11, 31, 79, 83, climate change, 219, 319
130, 182–3, 189–92, 194, 199, 309, 312, Colapietro, Vincent, 76, 87, 328
314 communitarianism, 159
anticlericalism, 254, 256 consciousness, 9, 99, 111, 222, 262
anti-essentialism, 81, 102–3, 243 Consequences of Pragmatism, xi, 63, 78, 210,
Arendt, Hannah, 231, 298 262, 283, 286, 290, 323, 332
Aristotle, 15, 42, 88, 90–2, 99, 109, 202–3, continental philosophy, 31, 307
205, 263, 274, 307, 311, 332–3, 339 Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xi, 6, 9,
Austen, Jane, 140–1, 151, 153, 238, 327, 330, 11, 24, 84, 132, 148–9, 161, 163, 168–71,
338 180, 193, 210, 213, 269, 280, 282–3, 323,
autonomy, 15, 89, 131, 140, 162, 273, 279, 343
286, 290, 314 conversation, philosophy as, 33, 36, 38, 44,
68, 161, 168, 170, 172, 181, 208–9, 243,
Bacon, Michael, 65, 85, 87, 99, 155, 327, 331, 249–50, 252–4, 286–7
340 correspondence theory of truth, 2, 6, 24, 111,
Baldwin, James, 222, 227–8, 231, 234, 241, 113, 183, 243
327 Croly, Herbert, 175, 207, 223, 226
Bergmann, Gustav, 75 cruelty, 11–12, 149, 165–7, 169, 172–3, 175,
Bergson, Henri, 91, 93, 101, 109, 326 215, 280
Berlin, Isaiah, 83, 158, 163, 217, 339 cultural Left, 222–3, 225–6, 231–3, 237, 241–2
Bernstein, Richard, 30, 71, 85–6, 177, 180, cultural politics, 2, 13, 15–16, 64, 78, 81, 104,
211, 213, 220, 285, 299, 306, 308, 321, 200, 213, 254
324–7, 330, 339–40 Curtis, William, 85, 87, 183, 190, 197, 199,
Bickford, Susan, 179, 327 328
Blackburn, Simon, 110, 128, 327
Blake, William, 11, 15, 22, 220, 310, 327 Darwin, Charles, 1, 3–4, 19, 210, 250
Blight, David, 229–30, 237, 327 Darwinism. See Darwin, Charles
Bloom, Harold, 1, 177, 290 Davidson, Donald, 1, 18–19, 22, 34, 88, 93,
Boyne, John, 286, 291–4, 296, 298–301, 327 95–6, 98, 107–8, 110, 113, 116, 119, 128,
Bradley, Francis Herbert, 91 145, 162, 269, 283, 305, 312, 328, 342
Brandom, Robert, 18, 22, 44–6, 86, 88, 177, de Beauvoir, Simone, 231
259, 263, 306, 321, 325, 327–8, 333, 339, deflationism, 119
342 Deleuze, Gilles, ix, 93, 109, 281, 283, 326,
Brown v. Board of Education, 174 335
345

Index
More Information
346 index
democratic politics, 77, 197, 214, 256, 303, foundationalism, 32, 86, 201, 304, 313, 321
310 Frankfurt School, 231
Dennett, Daniel, 17 Fraser, Nancy, 144–5, 167, 169–70, 172–4,
Derrida, Jacques, 1, 19, 22, 110, 155, 206, 261, 180, 193, 199, 217, 221, 251–2, 259–60,
267–78, 282–3, 308, 312, 324–5, 327, 329, 326, 330
331, 334, 341 Freud, Sigmund, 1, 15, 84, 138, 144–6, 148–9,
Descartes, Rene, 90, 99, 110–11, 113, 203 153–4, 162–3, 331, 333, 336, 338
Dewey, John, viii–ix, 1–3, 5–6, 19, 28–9, 31–4, Frye, Marilyn, 171, 185, 199
36, 62, 67–71, 77–9, 81, 84, 86, 88, 93,
101, 104, 110, 117–19, 130, 132, 138–40, Gadamer, Hans Georg, ix, 206, 261, 307
142–3, 145, 153, 157–8, 163, 165, 175, Gascoigne, Neil, 42, 66, 87, 331
177, 184, 194, 196, 200, 202, 204, 206–8, gay liberation, 182, 193, 195
210–14, 220, 223, 226, 244, 258, 261–2, globalization, 224–5
266, 268, 277–9, 282, 304–5, 307–8, 310, Green, Thomas Hill, 98, 207, 331, 341
312–15, 317–21, 324, 326–7, 329, 331–2, Gross, Neil, 40, 69, 86, 202, 220, 331
336, 338–41
Diamond, Cora, 290, 329 Habermas, Jürgen, 18, 206–7, 209–10, 214,
Dickens, Charles, 19, 166, 267 234, 236, 240, 261, 269, 277–8, 281, 320,
Dieleman, Susan, 38, 179, 199–200, 329, 341 322, 331, 341
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 206, 208, 210 Hacking, Ian, 20, 278, 332
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 152 Hartshorne, Charles, 69, 203, 335
Douglass, Frederick, 230–1, 240 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 103, 136,
Du Bois, W. E. B, 231 140–2, 151, 177, 210, 271, 327
Durkheim, Émile, 144, 330 Heidegger, Martin, xi, 1–2, 10–11, 18–19,
Dworkin, Ronald, 159 28, 34, 39, 62, 65, 86, 110, 206, 261–71,
274, 276–9, 282, 312, 323, 328, 331, 335,
eliminative materialism, 44, 46, 69, 86 343
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 85, 303 hermeneutics, ix, 206
empiricism, 32, 78, 86, 88, 90–3, 96, 98–9, historicism, 24, 27–8, 31, 79, 103, 162, 209,
101, 104–5, 107–8, 203, 205, 276, 324–5, 264–5
337, 339 Hobbes, Thomas, 92–3, 109, 184, 335
Enlightenment, 77, 155–9, 180, 192, 280–1, Hollinger, David, 210, 213
330, 343 Honneth, Axel, 217, 221, 331–2
epistemological behaviorism, 68, 129–30, Hook, Sidney, 310, 312
132, 134, 136, 138 Horkheimer, Max, 157, 159
epistemology, 13, 17, 20, 43, 72, 75, 77, 87, Hoy, David, 277, 332
97, 99, 110, 132–4, 136, 155–6, 163, 208, human rights, 134, 247, 254, 256
210, 277, 307, 312, 321 Hume, David, 89–91, 98, 102, 108, 331
ethnocentrism, Rorty on, 179, 191
experience, vii, 53, 68, 79, 85–6, 90–2, 94–6, idealism, 32, 177, 304
98–101, 104, 106–8, 111, 140, 148, 150, individual freedom, 163
163, 179, 190, 201, 205, 208, 210–13, irony, 16, 144, 153, 164, 201, 215, 217, 299
215, 221, 229, 236, 243, 257, 284, 295–6,
304, 306–8, 313, 315–17, 319, 321 Jackson, Frank, 128, 332
James, William, vii–viii, xi, 6, 22, 31–2, 38–9,
feminism, 3, 172, 179, 193, 195–6, 200, 252 67–8, 70–3, 81–4, 87–8, 91, 93–4, 96, 101,
final vocabulary, 10–11, 37, 164, 167, 183, 104, 108–10, 207–8, 210–13, 221–2, 244,
265–6 283, 305, 309, 314, 316–17, 321, 323,
Foucault, Michel, viii, 98, 110, 155, 206, 225, 326, 328, 331–2, 335–6, 338, 340, 342
231, 261, 276–81, 283, 312, 330, 332, 342 Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 158, 237–8, 249

Index
More Information
index 347
Kant, Immanuel, 17, 61, 63, 90, 94, 99, metaphysics, 3, 17, 31, 43, 62–3, 72, 75, 77,
110–11, 113, 131, 133, 136, 138–9, 143, 79, 87, 127, 155, 157, 194, 211, 262, 264,
145, 155–7, 163, 176, 208, 271, 332 268, 270, 272–3, 287, 307, 309, 313
Kim, Jaegwon, 20, 332 Mill, John Stuart, 22, 162, 166, 168, 194, 196,
King, Martin Luther, 121, 172, 175, 216, 251 198, 208, 250, 253, 256
Kloppenberg, James, 201, 220–1, 332 Mills, Charles, 231–3, 334
knowledge, 5, 13, 17, 40, 68, 70, 72–3, 80, 82, Misak, Cheryl, 68, 163, 334–5, 337, 343
84, 89, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100, 102, 107, moral philosophy, 82, 137, 143, 208
124–5, 129–30, 132–3, 135–6, 145, 162, Murdoch, Iris, 288
166, 170, 200, 208, 218, 226, 228–9, 235, myth of the given, 94, 111
243–5, 262–3, 265, 277, 285, 291–2, 295,
304, 306–9, 311–13 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1, 22, 162, 166
Koopman, Colin, 19, 39, 41, 78, 85, 328, national pride, 195, 222, 226, 232, 234, 237,
331–2, 338, 342 241
Kuhn, Thomas, 38, 108, 271, 333 Nehamas, Alexander, 42–5, 62, 64–5, 325,
Kundera, Milan, 267 334
neopragmatism, 3, 31
Lacan, Jacques, 225, 231 New Deal, 202, 214, 216
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 47–8, 90–1, 93, New Left, 172–5, 223
203 Newton, Isaac, 15, 91, 99
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 283, 333 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1–3, 5, 11, 18, 22, 110,
liberalism, 3, 12, 18, 83, 131, 141–2, 150, 117, 138, 141, 150, 162–4, 210, 261, 263,
155–6, 158–60, 177, 179, 181–2, 190–2, 267, 271, 274, 277, 280–1, 312, 334, 340
194–7, 220, 282 nominalism, 73–4, 88–91, 93–6, 98–9, 101–5,
linguistic pragmatism, 68, 74, 304, 306–7 107–8, 119, 276
Lippmann, Walter, 207 Nussbaum, Martha, 260, 289, 302, 334
literature, viii, 1, 3, 7, 15, 44, 80, 92, 138, 140,
149, 153, 202, 213, 223, 232, 238, 255, Oakeshott, Michael, 92, 158, 335
257–8, 271–2, 284, 286–9, 291, 297, Ockham, William, 88–96, 98–103, 108,
301–2 326–7, 335
Llanera, Tracy, 38, 293, 301, 333, 342 Okrent, Mark, 263, 335
Locke, John, 90–1, 93, 98, 155–7, 176, 184, ontology, 13, 56, 59, 64, 88, 98, 101, 105, 265
331 ordinary language, 267
logical empiricism, 108 Orwell, George, 1, 22, 162
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 159, 164, 238–9, 333 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 54, 66–8, 70–1, 73–6,
MacKinnon, Catharine, 170–1, 181, 185–90, 83, 87–8, 90, 93, 108, 203, 213, 244, 274,
193, 196, 198–9, 329, 333 306, 324, 328, 334–5, 338–9, 341
Mansfield Park. See Austen, Jane Perry, Ralph Barton, 70
Marcuse, Herbert, 137, 333 philosophical justification, 159, 162
Margolis, Joseph, 67, 333, 342–3 Philosophy and Social Hope, xi, 78, 215, 250,
Marx, Karl, 22, 175–6, 178, 184, 226, 269, 286, 323
276, 280 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, xi, 7,
Marxism. See Marx, Karl 20, 27, 42, 57, 68, 70, 72, 77, 129–30,
materialism, 1, 49, 56–7, 62, 65, 324, 328, 336 133, 135, 143, 162, 204, 206–7, 286, 311,
McDowell, John, 5, 18, 306, 312–13, 325, 333 323
McKeon, Richard, 33–6, 40, 69, 331, 334, 337 Plato, 17, 91–2, 110–11, 113–14, 202–3, 205,
Mendieta, Eduardo, 6, 40, 307, 321, 334 262–3, 273–4, 307, 311
metaphilosophy, 20–1, 27–8, 31–5, 37–8, 40, pluralism, vii, 19, 21–3, 27–32, 35–7, 40, 56,
66, 71, 83 69, 72, 82–3, 85, 101, 196, 203, 239

Index
More Information
348 index
poetry, 2, 81, 149, 162, 246, 248, 257, 267, Rosenthal, David, 48, 328, 336–7
290 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 274
Posner, Richard, 174, 325 Royce, Josiah, 70, 86
postmodernism, 67, 155, 159, 299 Russell, Bertrand, vii, 75, 91, 331–2
pragmatism, vii, 3, 21, 29–34, 39–40, 43, 45,
55, 61, 65–73, 76, 80, 83, 85–6, 88, 93–4, Sandel, Michael, 158, 209
97–8, 100–1, 104, 107, 119, 125, 144, 158, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 206
170, 179, 189, 191–2, 199–201, 203–4, Schneewind, Jerome, 130, 208, 326, 336
206, 213, 215, 220, 244, 250–1, 261, self-creation, 10–12, 18, 148–50, 162–3, 168,
263–5, 277, 287, 292, 304, 308–10 226, 256, 281, 292–3, 295, 297
Price, Huw, 39, 119, 128, 335, 339, 343 Sellars, Wilfrid, 2, 18, 24, 34, 43, 53, 70, 88,
Princeton University, xi, 1, 87, 311, 323, 335, 91, 93–4, 97–9, 101, 108, 110, 116, 123,
337, 339, 341–3 127, 132–3, 136, 304, 307, 312, 325, 337
priority of democracy to philosophy, 77, 80 sex discrimination, 186–90, 199
progressivism, 201, 208, 216 Shapiro, Ian, 177, 337
Proust, Marcel, 162, 215, 319 Shklar, Judith, 11–12, 165, 337
psychological nominalism, 101 Shusterman, Richard, 212, 220–1, 307–8,
public and private, Rorty on the distinction 321, 337
between, 145, 179 Siegfried, Charlene Haddock, 179
Putnam, Hilary, 18, 211, 213, 269, 340, 343 skepticism, 41, 71, 100, 156, 173, 175, 269,
276
Quine, Willard Van Orman, 24, 34, 49–50, 55, social movements, 169, 174, 201, 215, 217
69–70, 92, 96, 107, 110, 119, 122–3, 132, Socrates, 4, 10, 273
136, 204, 311–12, 335, 339 solidarity, 9, 17, 112, 144, 161, 180, 191, 215,
240, 278, 285, 287, 291–2, 298
Ramberg, Bjørn, 87, 169–70, 325, 335, 343 Spinoza, Baruch, 203, 325
rationalism, 91–3, 96, 109, 158 Stout, Jeffrey, 65, 211, 220, 251–2, 254, 256,
rationality, 5, 17, 80–2, 92, 99, 129, 132–3, 259, 337, 343
136, 157, 159, 181, 190, 193, 200, 223, Strawson, Peter, 123, 337
254, 278
Rauschenbusch, Walter, 201, 207, 209, 214, Tarski, Alfred, 95, 122
310, 327 Taylor, Charles, 209, 281
Rawls, John, 155, 158–60, 166, 168, 171, 177, The Heart’s Invisible Furies. See Boyne, John
184, 209, 231, 259, 336 The Linguistic Turn, 39, 204, 206, 323–4
realism, 68–9, 71–4, 76, 87, 89, 117–18, 132, Trilling, Lionel, 140–2, 148–51, 153, 238–9,
150, 153, 161, 172, 269 333, 338
redemptive truth, 284–6, 291, 296, 301 Trotsky, Leon, 22, 61, 202, 211, 257, 300,
redescription, 16, 59, 64, 89, 100, 164, 182–4, 303, 310, 316
189–90, 195, 210–11, 264, 268 Trump, Donald, 57, 219, 224, 343
redistribution, 173, 217–19, 241
relativism, 18, 130–1, 135, 137, 153, 180 Unger, Roberto, 159, 209
religion, 3, 5, 12, 15, 84, 87, 140, 155, 209, University of Chicago, 30, 33, 35, 69, 202, 310,
212, 216, 219, 243, 245–6, 248–59, 284, 323–4, 326–7, 329, 331–4, 336–7, 341
301, 311–12, 316, 318, 321
representationalism, 2, 8, 16, 119, 126 Vietnam War, 223, 226, 240
Rieff, Phillip, 150, 153–4 vocabularies, 10–11, 15, 21–6, 28, 32–4, 37–8,
Romanticism, 144, 330–1, 336, 339, 342 71–2, 76, 84, 113, 128, 146, 148, 152, 165,
Rondel, David, 1, 9, 16–18, 38, 65, 326, 336, 167, 264, 273, 281, 290, 306
343 Voparil, Christopher, 38, 40, 66–7, 80, 85–7,
Rosenberg, Jay, 111, 128, 336 181, 198, 285, 338–9

Index
More Information
index 349
Walzer, Michael, 159, 209, 281 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 21, 23, 28, 34, 38, 42,
Weber, Max, 207, 210 60, 62–3, 66, 70, 86, 102, 110, 118–19,
Westbrook, Robert, 163, 213, 220, 303, 321, 125–8, 132, 138, 147, 204, 206, 261, 269,
339 283, 312, 327, 335, 339
Whitehead, Alfred North, 203, 205, 323 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 250, 252, 254, 256,
Whitman, Walt, 223, 226, 230, 235, 258 259, 339
wild orchids, 3, 201, 211, 215, 257, 303, 309, Wordsworth, William, 150, 316–19, 322, 339
313, 315, 317–20
Williams, Michael, 41, 124, 221, 325, 339, Yale University, 69, 323, 332
344 Young, Iris Marion, 181–2, 195–6, 198, 339

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Cambridge University Press

978-1-108-49657-5 — The Cambridge Companion to Rorty

the cambridge companion to

This Companion provides a systematic introductory over-

david rondel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the

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List of Contributors page vii

Introduction: The Unity of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy 1

1 Rorty’s Metaphilosophy: A Pluralistic Corridor 19

2 After Metaphysics: Eliminativism and the Protreptic

3 Rorty and Classical Pragmatism 67

4 A Pragmatism More Ironic Than Pragmatic 88

5 Rorty and Semantic Minimalism 110

6 Returning to the Particular: Morality and the Self

7 Rorty’s Political Philosophy 155

8 Tinkering with Truth, Tinkering with Difference:

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9 Rorty’s Insouciant Social Thought 201

10 Rorty and National Pride 222

11 Rorty on Religion 243

12 Rorty: Reading Continental Philosophy 261

13 Rorty’s Literary Culture: Reading, Redemption, and

14 Wild Orchids 303

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Barry Allen is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at

Michael Bacon is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at Royal Hollo-

Simon Blackburn retired from the Bertrand Russell Chair of philoso-

Stephen S. Bush is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Brown

Alexis Dianda is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Xavier Univer-

Susan Dieleman is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Southern

Neil Gascoigne is Reader in Philosophy at Royal Holloway, Univer-

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viii list of contributors

and the Ends of Philosophy (2008) and Rorty, Liberal Democracy,

James T. Kloppenberg is the Charles Warren Professor of American

Colin Koopman is Professor of Philosophy and Director of New Media

Áine Mahon is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Education at

Alan Malachowski is a research fellow in the Centre for Applied

Elizabeth O’Brien is a second- and third-level educator in Ireland. She

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org

Paul Patton is Hongyi Chair Professor of Philosophy at Wuhan Uni-

David Rondel is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University

Christopher Voparil teaches philosophy and political theory at Union

Georgia Warnke teaches in the Department of Political Science at the