"Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind"

I finally finished Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty last night, and the last chapter, "Philosophy Without Mirrors," had some very interesting ideas. After providing a lengthy critique of metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, positivism, and particularly the notion of "mirroring¹," Rorty presented his vision of the task of philosophy after surrendering ill-fated attempts at securing its objectivity:

Our present notions of what it is to be a philosopher are so tied up with the Kantian attempt to render all knowledge-claims commensurable that it is difficult to imagine what philosophy without epistemology could be. More generally, it is difficult to imagine that any activity would be entitled to bear the name "philosophy" if it had nothing to do with knowledge—if it were not in some sense a theory of knowledge, or a method for getting knowledge, or at least a hint as to where some supremely important kind of knowledge might be found.

There is no way, as far as I can see, in which to argue the issue of whether to keep the Kantian "grid" in place or set it aside. There is no "normal" philosophical discourse which provides common commensurating ground for those who see science and edification as, respectively, "rational" and "irrational," and those who see the quest for objectivity as one possibility among others to be taken account of in wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein. If there is no such common ground, all we can do is to show how the other side looks from our own point of view. That is, all we can do is be hermeneutic about the opposition—trying to show how the odd or paradoxical or offensive things they say hang together with the rest of what they want to say, and how what they say looks when put in our own alternative idiom. This sort of hermeneutics with polemical intent is common to Heidegger's and Derrida's attempts to deconstruct the tradition.

The mainstream philosophers are the philosophers I shall call "systematic," and the peripheral ones are those I shall call "edifying²." These peripheral, pragmatic philosophers are skeptical primarily about systematic philosophy, about the whole project of universal commensuration.

Great systematic philosophers are constructive and offer arguments. Great edifying philosophers are reactive and offer satires, parodies, and aphorisms. Great systematic philosophers, like great scientists, build for eternity. Great edifying philosophers destroy for the sake of their own generation. Systematic philosophers want to put their subject on the secure path of science. Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause—wonder that there is something new under the sun, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) cannot be explained and can barely be described.

Edifying philosophers, unlike revolutionary systematic philosophers, are those who are abnormal at this meta-level. They refuse to present themselves as having found out any objective truth (about, say, what philosophy is). They present themselves as doing something different from, and more important than, offering accurate representations of how things are. It is more important because, they say, the notion of "accurate representation" itself is not the proper way to think about what philosophy does.

Whereas less pretentious revolutionaries can afford to have views on lots of things which their predecessors had views on, edifying philosophers have to decry the very notion of having a view, while avoiding a view about having views. This is an awkward, but not impossible, position. Wittgenstein and Heidegger manage it fairly well. One reason they manage it as well as they do is that they do not think that when we say something we must necessarily be expressing a view about a subject. We might just be saying something—participating in a conversation rather than contributing to an inquiry.

One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation from degenerating into inquiry, into a research program. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they can help prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science.

...to look for commensuration rather than simply continued conversation—to look for a way of making further redescription unnecessary by finding a way of reducing all possible descriptions to one—is to attempt escape from humanity.

Edifying philosophy is not only abnormal but reactive, having sense only as a protest against attempts to close of conversation by proposals for universal commensuration through the hypostatization of some privileged set of descriptions. [...] The resulting freezing-over of culture would be, in the eyes of edifying philosophers, the dehumanization of human beings. The edifying philosophers are thus agreeing with Lessing's choice of the infinite striving for truth over "all of Truth."

To see the aim of philosophy as truth—namely, the truth about the terms which provide ultimate commensuration for all human inquiries and activities—is to see human beings as objects rather than subjects, as existing en-soi rather than as both pour-soi and en-soi, as both described objects and describing subjects.

Whichever happens, however, there is no danger of philosophy's "coming to an end." Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism.

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¹

It is pictures, rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions. The picture which holds traditional philosophy captive is that of the mind as a great mirror, containing various representations—some accurate, some not—and capable of being studied by pure, nonempirical methods. Without the notion of the mind as a mirror, the notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation would not have suggested itself. Without this latter notion, the strategy common to Descartes and Kant—getting more accurate representations by inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror, so to speak—would not have made sense. Without this strategy in mind, recent claims that philosophy could consist of "conceptual analysis" or "phenomenological analysis" or "explication of meanings" or examination of "the logic of our language" or of "the structure of the constituting activity of consciousness" would not have made sense.

²

Gadamer (like Heidegger, to whom some of his work is indebted) makes no concessions either to Cartesian dualism or to the notion of "transcendental constitution" (in any sense which could be given an idealistic interpretation). He thus helps reconcile the "naturalistic" point I tried to make in the previous chapter—that the "irreducibility of the Geisteswissenschaften" is not a matter of metaphysical dualism—with our "existentialist" intuition that redescribing ourselves is the most important thing we can do. He does this by substituting the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation) for that of "knowledge" as the goal of thinking. [...] Since "education" sounds a bit too flat, and Bildung a bit too foreign, I shall use "edification to stand for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking.

6/21 update:

R.I.P. Richard Rorty... (10/4/1931 - 6/8/2007)