In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Left Conservatism, IV UCSC 1/31/98
  • Paul Bové (bio)

Seriously, I was pleased to know Chris thinks I invented this term — I didn’t — but I found myself in a tough spot because he said this obligated me to come.

I didn’t quite know what I wanted to talk about but I finally decided that since some of my own recent work has, in part, tried to develop a strong kind of critique of the authority of American pragmatism in the last fifteen or twenty years, I might be able to write out some of what I had been thinking about in that context, but around the work of Richard Rorty. I have to say that, since I first came to know Rorty’s work in the mid 1970s it has always dissatisfied me — that feeling dates from the very time I saw him give a paper at Columbia University in 1976 when he began what I take to be an important opening front in the now successful against theory or anti-theory movement.

But in our political and intellectual context it seems to me Rorty has become symptomatically interesting as a figure because he is both a self-avowed anti-foundationalist and writes for The Nation. He may be the only person who does that. In that way he seems to raise a conundrum for our flyer authors whose cartoon-like anti-theory attacks on “post-modernists” requires them to oppose all anti-foundationalists — oddly excepting Rorty. I want to claim that the adherence to anti-foundationalism in itself politically guarantees nothing at all, that Rorty’s anti-foundationalist position is in many ways congruent with the work of several other people whom The Nation and many of the rest of us would identify as being not only foundationalist but conservative. And in the longer version of this project, I have made an effort to explain some of that in terms of Rorty’s relation to E.O. Wilson, which relation was recently noticed in the New York Times.

Let me begin then, by giving you a few little remarks about Rorty, and a couple of quotations from Rorty to try to set up some sense of his own work, and then I want to read a few pages of my own, which I think will make a more consistent unit of comment.

The anti-foundationalist position, I think, is really most nicely put in a recent piece that Rorty has written, that is, the introduction to Wilfrid Sellars’ essay on empiricism. “The whole idea of foundations of knowledge basic to both empiricism and rationalism disappears once we become psychological nominalists.” Rorty claims that Quine and Sellars destroy the philosophical ambition to foundationalism by respectively, “attacking the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths and by attacking the distinction between what is given to the mind and what is added to the mind.” I think it would be interesting to go on and talk about Rorty as a kind of nominalist and as a kind of mis-reader of Sellars, but that is largely beside the point of what we are talking about at this conference. Yet, in context, Rorty makes an extremely revealing remark, revealing of his own position, in commenting on an important statement in which Sellars gives some definition to the notion of what he, Sellars, means by science. Rorty says that Sellars may have been the first philosopher to insist that we see mind as a sort of hypostatization of language. Rorty continues, “Sellars argued that the intentionality of beliefs is a reflection of the intentionality of sentences rather than conversely. This reversal makes it possible to understand mind as gradually entering the universe by and through the gradual development of language, as part of a naturalistically explicable evolutionary process, rather than seeing language as the outward manifestation of something inward and mysterious which humans have and animals lack.” I’m going to make the claim that that kind of statement gives Rorty the grounds for claiming himself to be — uncritically — a kind of general intellectual, a person who extends his reach into general areas of policy, culture, and politics.

Rorty concludes his commentary...

Share