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8. What Knowledge? What Hope? What New Pragmatism?
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145 8 BARRY ALLEN What Knowledge? What Hope? What New Pragmatism? “I sowed in them blind hopes.” Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound Philosophy and Social Hope offers a restatement of Richard Rorty’s themes since Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature twenty years earlier. Longstanding antiepistemological, antimetaphysical, polemically metaphilosophical themes are freshly formulated and combined with a social philosophy, which, like the very word “pragmatism,” was all but unspoken in the earlier work. 1. METAPHILOSOPHY “I enjoy metaphilosophy.”1 Indeed, Rorty seems never to miss an opportunity to make a polemical remark against the empty promises and fantastic dichotomies of classical and modern philosophy. This relentless attack on the respectability of philosophy may be one reason for the hostility Rorty’s work sometimes encounters from his professional colleagues. He asks rude questions about the point of the expensive things they do. It is not easy to say, especially not when you are an analytic philosopher trained in a specialization whose point cannot be explained to anyone without an advanced degree. At 146 Barry Allen least scientists, equally specialized, can say they are contributing their bit to the progress of science and technology. But what should David Lewis or Crispin Wright or John McDowell say? Looking for Rorty’s latest on this long-standing interest, I find that his arguments implicitly distinguish four activities that can be called “philosophy.” 1. Platonism, also known as Metaphysics. This is what Western philosophy has mostly been. It is the history of philosophy. John Searle proudly identifies it as the Western Rationalist Tradition. Rorty disparagingly calls it intellectual baggage inherited from Plato. It is a tradition of abstract absolutes (The Good, The True) and the inevitable dichotomies (appearance/reality, subject/object) they create. Metaphysical Truths, like wild orchids, are “numinous, hard to find, known only to a chosen few,” and proudly indifferent to use.2 2. Epistemology. The history of philosophy has not really been a history of Platonism, unless “Platonism” includes the discontent that inspires Kant’s critical philosophy. With Kant philosophy became conscious of itself as a special discipline standing in a special relation to natural knowledge as a whole. Philosophy as epistemology is philosophy as theory of representation, and as inspector of epistemic credentials, certifier of “objective validity.” 3. Therapy. This is what the later Wittgenstein called “philosophy” and where Rorty is most comfortable with his own identity as “philosopher.” In this point of view, the best philosophy undermines the feeling that there is something valuable for philosophy to do. The problem for philosophical work in this sense is simply the appearance of so-called philosophical problems. The best philosophy is one that overcomes the impulse to philosophy. As Wittgenstein said, “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions that bring itself in question.”3 4. Poetry, or Imaginative Redescription. In a use of the term that cannot be related to those I have discussed, Rorty says that “philosopher” is “the most appropriate description for somebody who remaps culture—who suggests a new and promising way for us to think about the relation among various large areas of human activity.” This is not Epistemology or Metaphysics , which strive for the eternal, for the deepest, for the most permanent truths. And it is not philosophical therapy, which is preoccupied not with the articulation of new alternatives but the debunking of exhausted, sclerotic, counterproductive ones. Philosophy as poetry is not what Plato did and not what Pragmatism is but, for instance, what Derrida does, and what links him in Rorty’s mind to what Davidson does. “Philosophy” in this sense is an honorific term, a term of praise, and not the name of an academic specialization . As imaginative redescription, philosophy is “an aid to creating ourselves rather than knowing ourselves,” and “not a field in which one achieves greatness by ratifying the community’s previous intuitions.”4 [54.221.159.188] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:13 GMT) What Knowledge? What Hope? What New Pragmatism? 147 Platonism and Epistemology are distinguished for polemical refutation, and Poetry is what Rorty celebrates in the “philosophers” he most admires, while Therapy seems to be his preferred self-consciousness qua philosopher. “I agree with Dewey,” he says, “that the function of philosophy is to mediate between old ways of speaking, developed to accomplish earlier tasks, with new ways of speaking, developed in response to...