Antifoundationalism

Nine. Metaphysics without Mirrors

Nine Metaphysics without Mirrors BETH J. SINGER In his well-known book Philosophyand theMirrorofNature Richard Rorty attacks the mentalistic and epistemological foundationalism and universalist, antihistoricist pretensions of "mainstream" Western philosophy from Rene Descartes to contemporary "analytic " philosophy, and proposes a new approach to philosophizing . Along with Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, W. V. O. Quine, and Wilfrid Sellars, he credits John Dewey with revealing the arbitrariness and confusion of the entrenched ways of doing and conceiving philosophy and with opening the way to a new and more appropriate approach. I-Ie nevertheless finds none of these philosophers to have articulated an adequate program, and in some ways he sees Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre as more nearly approximating the model of philosophy he takes to be desirable. Dewey, like Sellars and Paul Feyerabend, "point[s] the way toward ... a nonepistemological sort of philosophy" but only "partially exemplif[ies] it." 1 In general I accept Rorty's diagnosis of most modern and contemporary philosophy. I also accept his call for philosophy that is not epistemology-centered, that stands outside the mind-body problematic, and that comes to terms with the inevitable historicity and cultural conditioning of knowledge without succumbing to skepticism. But the model he proposes-philosophy that is "edifying " rather than systematic, hermeneutic rather than epistemological , reactive rather than constructive, eschewing all metaphysics and refraining from commitment to any position or conceptual frame-sacrifices too much and is not the only way to escape the 189 19° BETH J. SINGER pitfalls of foundationalism. I intend to show that there can be and in fact is "philosophy without mirrors" that is nonetheless systematic and does not extirpate metaphysics. I Dewey was not the only American philosopher to reject epistemological foundationalism and the traditional conception of "the mind." 2 William James paved the way, and there were others. Challenging the notion of subjectivity associated with the "mental mirror" concept and ingredient in both classical empiricism and idealism, George Herbert Mead presented a new model of mind and self. The human mind, he says, "is essentially a social phenomenon ." 3 In order to interact with others, the individual must learn to take their attitude toward himself. "When this occurs [he] becomes self-conscious and has a mind" (MSS, p. 134). Selfconsciousness is not introspection but an inner conversation, in which one alternately takes the attitudes of self and other. Mind or intelligence is the ability of the individual to reflexively modify and refine this process. Knowledge is no mirroring or remembering of percepts, but the exercise of intelligence.' Things known, like knowers, are social objects, located in social space as well as in physical space and in time. Rejecting the "identification of the object of knowledge with the so-called percept, whether a percept by virtue of the eye or of the imagination," Mead claims that "[this] rejection sweeps out a vast amount of philosophic riffraff known as epistemology, and relieves one of the hopeless task of bridgebuilding from a world of one's states of consciousness to an outside world that can never be reached" (PA, p. 94). In the United States it is not only pragmatists who have challenged the epistemological orientation of modern philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" obliterates the "mind" and "body" of the tradition and gives metaphysics priority over epistemology, rather than vice versa. Reacting primarily against the then prevalent versions of idealism, the "New Realists" repudiated the psychologism they saw to be also characteristic of classical empiricism. With it, they repudiated the effort to ground philosophy in epistemology." These writers represent a persistent trend in American philosophy, one that is still alive. For example, Metaphysicswithout Mirrors Sandra Rosenthal, in her book SpeculativePragmatism,develops an ontology for pragmatism." Rather than an attack on foundationalism , Rosenthal's approach to metaphysics is designed to undercut the conflict between foundationalism and antifoundationalism. It does so, not by eliminating epistemology, but by showing conventional epistemology to be too narrowly conceived? The dichotomy between foundationalism and nonfoundationalism "represents the alternatives of an absolutegrounding of knowledge or skepticism" (SP, p. 79; emphasis added). But for the pragmatists, knowing is a function within experience, and experience is interaction with an environment. The only "ground" of knowledge is its functional status in the relation between the knower and the environment, and any analysis of this grounding must be ontological as well as epistemic. III Rosenthal's version of pragmatism, the objects of awareness, potential objects of knowledge, are an "ontological presence" within the...