Richard Rorty the Public Philosopher

by Michael Albert

All Rorty quotations are from his book, Truth and Progress, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

 

Truth

What is truth? How do we arrive at it? Richard Rorty denies that "the search for objective truth is a search for correspondence to reality and urge[s] that it be seen instead as a search for the widest possible intersubjective agreement." Bruno Latour is a famous French sociologist, highly admired by left academics in numerous countries, who takes Rorty seriously. As Sokal and Bricmont relate in their revealing new book Intellectual Impostures, Latour rejects a claim by French Scientists working on the mummy of the Paraoh Ramses II, that Ramses died in roughly 1213 due to tuberculosis. Latour asks, "How could he pass away [in 1213] due to a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch in 1882?" In other words, in tune with Rorty Latour forgets about there being or not being a bacillus and wonders only when people intersubjectively about one, concluding that "before Koch, the bacillus has no real existence." What would Rorty reply? For that matter, how would Rorty distinguish claims by biologists working for Marlboro from claims by biologists seeking objectivity? And if true beliefs do not "correspond to the intrinsic nature of reality," but arise only from "intersubjective agreement," how does Rorty counter when the entire U.S. media says the U.S. bombed Vietnam to benefit the Vietnamese?

Rorty says, "If I have concrete specific doubts about whether one of my beliefs is true, I can resolve those doubts only by asking whether it is adequately justified—by finding and assessing additional reasons pro and con. I cannot bypass justification and confine my attention to truth." Okay, but what counts as justification? Correspondence to reality doesn’t count and warranted intersubjective agreement does count. Okay, what kind of intersubjective agreement counts? If it isn’t tested against evidence is it fortified by wish fulfillment, myth making, or lying?

Rorty continues: "The difference between true beliefs considered as useful nonrepresentational mental states and as accurate…representations of reality, seemed [to] make no difference to practice." Suppose I consider claims that the U.S. invaded Vietnam, that cigarettes cause cancer or that markets inexorably produce anti-social behavior by checking to see if they accurately "represent reality." The U.S. Secretary of State, the Marlboro Man, and the head of the World Bank check the same claims for "usefulness." Does Rorty believe we will arrive at equally valid views?

Racism corrupts the human spirit. Is this claim true only because I can find people who nod yes, intersubjectively agreeing when I say it? If that’s Rorty’s position, would it be false if I couldn’t find people to nod yes? When Newton wrote his Principia were his claims about gravity false because there was no one to nod in agreement that they were true?

Rorty is very clear: "Philosophers on my side of the argument," he says, "answer that objectivity is not a matter of corresponding to objects but a matter of getting together with other subjects—that there is nothing to objectivity except intersubjectivity." Are we to infer that this statement itself is true only if enough folks say it is? Perhaps we should take a poll. In Dachau, two opposed belief systems were each intersubjectively agreed to by a large constituency. Are we to understand that there were two truths about Jews—the truth of the Jewish community and the truth of the Nazi community?

Rorty says about discussing matters of truth, "All there is to talk about are the procedures we use to bring about agreement among inquirers." Yet there is virtually nothing in Truth and Progress about such procedures. Having rejected correspondence, should we mesmerize, manipulate, lie, fabricate, bias by partial reporting, coerce, or submit to the authority of the Pope?

Rorty notes that "I believe that it is pointless to ask whether there really are mountains or whether it is merely convenient for us to talk about mountains." If so, what type "convenience" justifies existence? Is "convenience" regarding claims about a welfare budget larger than the defense budget that which gets us elected, or makes someone pay us a lot, or makes us happy? What has convenience got to do with truth, other than that truth might yield it or not, as the case may be?

Suppose Stalin, having just exiled some ex-aide and decided that this former aide must also be expunged from the historical record, tells us that the exile never held his prior office. Suppose also that the revisionist view Stalin proposes is convenient for us to ratify because the alternative is a firing squad. Does Stalin’s claim become true when we intersubjectively agree with it?

Rorty’s response seems to be that: "When we say that good historians accurately represent what they find in the archives, we mean that they look hard for relevant documents, do not discard documents tending to discredit the historical thesis they are propounding, do not misleadingly quote passages out of context, tell the same historical story among themselves that they tell us, and so on. To assume that a historian accurately represents the facts as she knows them is to assume that she behaves in the way in which good historians behave." That is, when Rorty comes down to earth, usefulness turns into "what good historians do" and due to the historians Rorty chooses, this turns out to be what the rest of us call being objective. But how does Rorty decide that Stalin and Kissinger aren’t "good historians"? If the majority of historians in the U.S. academy 100 years ago intersubjectively agreed that indigenous people were sub human, was it therefore true? Are historians’ present-day intersubjectively agreed views on Vietnam true?

Rorty moves toward a larger comprehension: "In a wider sense of ‘social construction,’ everything, including giraffes and molecules, is socially constructed, for no vocabulary…cuts reality at the joints. Reality has no joints. It just has descriptions—some more socially useful than others." This is okay as long as we remember (unlike Latour) that it is the concepts "giraffe" and "molecule," that are socially constructed, not the entities. Yes, the world is an immensely interconnected and intertwined tapestry. We place boundaries when we put labels on parts of it and yes, every such choice involves abstraction from the true endless interconnectivity. What is our criteria for the names we use for the boundary lines we draw and concepts that we define? Whatever the list or criteria includes, it better not exclude "correspondence to reality."

 

Human Nature, Foundationalism, and Rights

Rorty says, admiringly, "There is a growing willingness to neglect the question ‘What is our Nature?’ and to substitute the question ‘What can we make of ourselves?’" Biologists are currently hell bent on detailing human nature and our genetic code and Rorty tells us "we are much less inclined than our ancestors were to take ‘theories of human nature’ seriously." Maybe Rorty really doesn’t care about "correspondence" between claims and reality.

Rorty says "since no useful work seems to be done by insisting on a purportedly ahistorical human nature, there probably is no such nature." Can this be how philosophers think? Do we say that if "no useful work seems to be done by insisting on the existence" of the moons of Jupiter, there are probably no such moons? Garbled thinking aside, human infants don’t grow up to be grasshoppers no matter what we feed them. Instead humans have a host of wired-in attributes that can be made to disappear only by violence to their natures. And while not required as an indicator of truth, this is certainly an insight that promotes a hell of a lot of "useful work," including a large part of biological science. If Rorty thinks there are no inherent differences between people and grasshoppers so that there is no grasshopper nature versus human nature but only an encompassing animal nature, one wonders why he never convenes an audience of grasshoppers. If Rorty thinks there is nothing innate to being human, why not buy a gerbil, mate it, and turn the offspring into a nice little human baby? If Rorty thinks no useful work arises from understanding DNA, why not eschew related medical treatments? If Rorty thinks human nature has no moral implications, why not opt for the morality appropriate to penguins, turtles, or flat worms instead of humans? Why do serious people, like Rorty, say there is no human nature, and why do others listen?

I have often wondered what precisely folks are uptight about when they say they are against "foundationalism." Rorty says foundationalism is trying to argue about aims based on "claims to knowledge about the nature of human beings." He says "to claim such knowledge is to claim to know something that, though not itself a moral intuition, can correct moral intuitions." In other words, if someone says that humans have a right to arsenic, another person might say, "hold on, I know that humans find arsenic toxic, so it is better to urge that people have a right to clean air or to sufficient calories or to control over their lives." Apparently, however, to base such claims on assertions about "human nature" is foundationalist and therefore verboten to Rorty and other anti-foundationalists.

Rorty tells us that, "It is essential to this idea of moral knowledge that a whole community might come to know that most of its most salient intuitions about the right thing to do were wrong." In other words, a foundationalist might expect that new insights about human nature could show old behaviors to be contrary to human fulfillment and development, and for some reason Rorty thinks that that can’t happen so foundationalism must therefore be invalid. Are we to understand that insights about the human nature of women or blacks played no role in changed conceptions of rights in the U.S.? Our society currently overwhelmingly thinks that to "truck and barter" on a competitive market or to hire out one’s labor for a wage are "human rights’? Couldn’t a deeper knowledge of human nature and institutional relations reveal that "trucking and bartering" and wage slavery aren’t rights but harmful impositions?

Rorty says, "The best and probably the only argument for putting foundationalism behind us is the one I have already suggested: It would be more efficient to do so, because it would let us concentrate our energies on manipulating sentiments, on sentimental education." If I ignore Rorty’s equation of sentimental education with manipulating sentiments, then of course I agree that to reveal emotions or values folks have not felt by communicating sentimentally via fiction or actual examples can be a fine undertaking. But how does believing in human nature impede doing that? I believe in human nature but urge reading novels or experiencing diverse situations to learn about complex behavior, not molecular biology textbooks, of course.

Rorty tells us that to reduce sadistic or oppressive behavior we ought to educate by manipulating sentiments. "That sort of education gets people of different kinds sufficiently well acquainted with one another that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human. The goal of this sort of manipulation of sentiment is to expand the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us.’" Again ignoring the problems of the word manipulation, let me try to get this straight. Rorty thinks Clinton and Gates, to use two archetypes, lack an education that manipulated their moral sensibilities so they would realize that folks who don’t have their power and wealth are humans like they are?

Rorty says that "Foundationalists think of [people who oppress others] as deprived of truth, or moral knowledge." Really? I think there is a human nature and that respect for it informs the best sensibilities, but I don’t think Gates and Clinton were deprived of such views. "But it would be better—more concrete, more specific, more suggestive of possible remedies" says Rorty, "to think of them as deprived of two more concrete things: security and sympathy." That’s interesting. I should think of Gates and Clinton, or perhaps the capitalist class of the U.S., as lacking security and sympathy? And this is what transcending "foundationalism" will free me to do? What’s the "possible remedies" I will then become more open to: sensitivity training?

Lest you think I am being unfair to Rorty, here we have some more on the same topic. "By ‘security’ I mean conditions of life sufficiently risk-free to make one’s difference from others inessential to one’s self-respect, one’s sense of worth. These conditions have been enjoyed by North Americans and Europeans—the people who dreamed up the human rights culture—much more than they have been enjoyed by anyone else." What if one’s conditions are so risk-free and materially exalted that out of guilt one has to rationalize them by seeing oneself as more deserving and superior? In Rorty’s view, North Americans and Europeans, particularly the especially rich and therefore especially secure ones, are ethically advanced. Is this another special insight that accrues to the anti-foundationalist method?

Rorty and I agree that sympathy is a good thing. And we agree that one who has more solidarity toward some community will on average be less disposed to stamp on that community. But Rorty also believes that "security and sympathy go together [because] the tougher things are, the more you have to be afraid of, the more dangerous your situation, the less you can afford the time or effort to think about what things might be like for people with whom you do not immediately identify." Rorty thinks good thoughts hard to come by make us solidaritous. I think solidarity comes naturally and vile social roles stamp it out of our personalities.

Rorty reports that "outside the circle of post-enlightenment European culture, the circle of relatively safe and secure people who have been manipulating one another’s sentiments for two hundred years, most people are simply unable to understand why membership in a biological species is supposed to suffice for membership in a moral community." This is either a large typo or utterly vile. Does Rorty really believe that outside advanced industrialized societies folks don’t know that other folks are in the same moral universe? For that matter, does Rorty not know that it is precisely the "most safe and secure people" who have most often defined the "human community" to be only their near neighbors? The archetype of advanced European culture was, of course, Germany in the 1920s. Was post WWI Germany, for Rorty, a cauldron of moral sentiment exploding into the superior sensitivity of Nazism?

Rorty explains why he thinks the poor and third world lack an understanding that unrelated humans deserve of moral respect: "This is not because they are insufficiently rational. It is, typically, because they live in a world in which it would be just too risky—indeed, would often be insanely dangerous—to let one’s sense of moral community stretch beyond one’s family, clan, or tribe." If danger and insecurity are the only things that wreak havoc with morality are we to expect that danger-free Wall Street, the Pentagon, and Yale Reunions must be full of folks with admirable moral sensibilities?

More, why does the black work force of South Africa, still cleaning the houses and tending the children of rich whites, still living in black shacks compared to white palaces, not slit the throats of their white employers and take what they themselves produced by their labors and sacrifices? For me it is because they have human sentiments and values, like most poor in most places at most times. For Rorty, presumably it would be because the South African blacks have been highly educated and materially secure for a long time, thereby attaining a great moral sense, yet these blacks have in fact endured unsafe conditions and mistreatment and intentionally inferior education for decades upon decades. South African Blacks ought, according to Rorty, have no morals whatever, rather than a moral sensibility that dwarfs that of safe and secure Wall Street. What about white elites in South Africa? I expect them to display vile values due to advantages they have rationalized. And, in fact, they are hostile and bitter about losing even the smallest percentage of their advantages. For Rorty, this is inexplicable. These folks, with their decades of education and safety, should be moral paragons, not moral infants.

Rorty continues by addressing "possible remedies" for violations of human rights: "Producing generations of nice, tolerant, well-off, secure, other-respecting students in all parts of the world is just what is needed—indeed, all that is needed—to achieve an Enlightenment utopia." So Rorty’s only agenda is not to transform institutions so that the roles people fill don’t destroy solidarity, homogenize diversity, violate equity, and centralize power, but to teach the young to be nice while occupying elite roles. Rorty says "it would be better to teach our students that these bad people are no less rational, no less clear-headed, no more prejudiced than we good people who respect Otherness…. Instead of treating all those people out there who are trying to find and kill Salman Rushdie as irrational, we should treat them as deprived." Ignoring the inattention to institutional influences, Rorty’s comment makes clear, again, that he thinks folks like him and the intellectual high brows at the Ford Foundation or in the board rooms of Microsoft or the State Department are moral, due to being safe and secure and educated. On the other hand, peasants and the poor of the world are immoral, due to their insecurity and ignorance. Can someone perhaps tell me why some leftists are forming study groups about Rorty’s work?

Rorty counters what he thinks will be leftist resistance to his "remedies": "To rely on the suggestions of sentiment rather than on the commands of reason is to think of powerful people gradually ceasing to oppress others…out of mere niceness rather than out of obedience to the moral law." Yes, and how about as an alternative view thinking of elites doing less oppressing because changed institutions no longer offer them the opportunity to oppress? Nope, that isn’t the counter view Rorty wishes to ward off. Instead, he says leftists will feel "it is revolting to think that our only hope for a decent society consists in softening the self-satisfied hearts of a leisure class," He claims that "we want moral progress to burst up from below, rather than waiting patiently upon condescension from the top." Actually, I don’t know any leftist who wants to have to fight from below. Instead, we think we have to.

"So why does this preference to struggle endlessly against powerful foes at tremendous personal and social cost rather than have them just lay down their swords and join in redistribution and true renewal make us resist the thought that sentimentality may be the best weapon we have?" asks Rorty. Ignoring for a minute that no one in their right mind prefers to "Struggle endlessly against powerful foes" which means that isn’t why we would resist his "possible remedy," Rorty answers his fabricated critique: "…We resist out of resentment. We resent the idea that we shall have to wait for the strong to turn their piggy little eyes to the suffering of the weak, slowly open their dried-up little hearts. We desperately hope there is something stronger and more powerful that will hurt the strong if they do not do these things." Maybe this is true of someone Rorty knows but (a) most serious leftists know that the strong don’t have "piggy little eyes" or "dried up little hearts," but eyes and hearts just like you, me, and Rorty. (b) We know that what imposes and reproduces oppression and obstructs the finest social outcomes in tune with our natures is not mere malevolence, but powerful institutions and the associated patterns of behavior and belief they impose on new generations. (c) We doubt that elites, even in modest numbers, will truly renounce their hold on wealth and power because we know that their self image depends on maintaining their behavior and that they have long since convinced themselves it is moral and righteous. (d) We know that when a very few in elite positions do have profound changes of heart—Daniel Ellsberg and Ramsy Clark come to mind—other elite practitioners immediately occupy their prior slots. And finally, (e) we know that knowledge of human nature isn’t what will win change, but the power of the people united, something hard to achieve, but quite formidable once attained.