Rorty and History

I. Introduction

The topic of "Rorty and history" is, at first sight, not a very promising one. Rorty never discussed any of the great historians from the past and the present, such as Gibbon, Ranke, Burckhardt, Huizinga, Meinecke, or Braudel.¹ He was even less interested in philosophy of history and considered this discipline to be devoid of interest and significance.² He never commented on the work of Hayden White—the most influential contemporary philosopher of history—though he must have been quite well aware of its existence³ and of how close it came to his own scholarly interests.⁴

Next, it is true that Rorty wrote quite a lot on political philosophy, philosophy of culture, and literary theory, all of them fields that are not too remote from the professional interests of historians and philosophers of history. But he never felt attracted to the typically historical aspects of politics, culture, and literary theory. It was Rawls whom he chose for his main guide in political philosophy—hence, the political philosopher who, with his notorious "veil of ignorance," had removed in one fell swoop all things historical from the political philosopher's agenda. Next, Derrida was Rorty's hero for the domains of culture and literary theory. And, again, Derrida's "fetishization of the text" left no room whatsoever for the historian's traditional concerns. In sum, history, historical awareness, historians, and historical thought never scored high on the list of Rorty's professional interests.⁵

However, there is one signal exception to Rorty's indifference towards "history." And this is Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature—his first book, and the one that made him famous. Upon publication he became an intellectual celebrity almost overnight and none of his later works ever had such a tremendous impact again.⁶

"History" is very prominently present in this book. Rorty attacked in it the core business of contemporary philosophy of language—epistemology. He argued that epistemology resulted from an improper demarcation of philosophy from science by seventeenth-century philosophers such as Descartes and Locke. So epistemology was the intellectual offspring of some (unfortunate) historical contingency and one that can only be accounted for historically. Had the historical facts about European intellectual history from Descartes to Kant been just a little bit different, philosophers would have ended up doing other and probably better things than presently is the case. Rorty's use of the weapon of historical contextualization was all the more effective since he proved himself to be an absolutely brilliant historian of philosophy. Moreover, throughout his book, Rorty took Thomas S. Kuhn's recommendation to heart, that when reading the work of an important thinker, we should preferably look for the apparent absurdities in the text and then ask ourselves how a sensible person could have written them.⁷ This is pure historicism, of course. Think of the old historicist demand that the historian must come to a "Verstehen" of what may, at first sight, seem strange and unfamiliar to us in the doings and saying of our ancestors.

But even more important is that a most powerful philosophy of history can be detected in the book. Rorty already implied as much himself by having the message of the book culminate in its last two chapters on Hans Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics. The suggestion clearly is that if one follows the history of Western thought since Descartes and extrapolates from there to the future (as Rorty tentatively did himself in these two last chapters), it will be hermeneutics, hence a philosophy of history, that we shall end up with. Moreover, the book offered already some tantalizing insights into what this new philosophy of history might look like: it would, minimally, apply the technical sophistication of analytical philosophy of language to the problems traditionally investigated in philosophy of history.

So philosophers of history (such as myself) eagerly awaited Rorty's next book in the expectation that this would fulfil the promises of the end of PMN. But, alas, when Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity finally came out in 1989, it was clear that Rorty had abandoned the project he had suggested...