Hello John,
And thank you. Your post was very edifying and I appreciate it.
First, I need to apologize for the appearence of "Confessions." All of my
apostrophes and quotations marks disappeared after it got funneled through
the website. I originally typed it on a word processing program and then
tried to copy and paste it. That didn't work. I got a message back from
Horse saying it was bounced cuz' it had html in it. I'm like, "ht-what?"
I'm so bad with computers. I eventually figured it out, but apparently
apostrophes and quotation marks are stylized text, so they got filtered
out. Sigh. Anyways....
John: "But I haven't read Rorty - yet another task! Have you read Felipe
Fernandez-Armesto's 'Truth'? He critiques Rorty on pp 220-221 where he says
that Rorty "defines his position as 'the view that there is nothing to be
said about either truth or rationality apart from descriptions of the
familiar procedures of justification which a given society - ours - uses.'"
Felipe says that his problem is that he arbitrarily priveleges one point of
view, in his case the "western liberal intellectual" one. I don't know
enough to comment."
I'm still, myself, pushing my way through Rorty. If I had to recommend a
reading stratagey, it would be to read Consequences of Pragmatism, first.
A great selection of early essays which is what I first read. After that,
maybe to his opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. It is a beast of a
book, so maybe not. Rorty is at his best in essay form. What I found
extremely helpful was David L. Hall's book Richard Rorty: Prophet and Poet
of the New Pragmatism. It is a brilliant introduction to and critique of
Rorty that accepts his earlier material as a done deal (which you may not
be prepared to do) and then shows where it has been going in the past 20
years. Its actually what really got me into Rorty, or rather, it provided
me a map so I could tell where Rorty was going when reading his essays and
the like.
(One cautionary note about reading Rorty. Rorty is very secular. He talks
about religion and spirituality about as much as Pirsig talks about
consciousness. However, I believe this is more of personal bias, then a
great condemnation of spirituality (of course, with Rorty, this may be one
and the same thing ;-). I think much of Rorty's writings are commensurate
with spirituality. I only add this caution because I believe there is too
much to be gleaned from his writing to be caught off guard and turned off
by his secularity.)
As for Fernandez-Armesto's book, "Truth," I haven't read it, but I might
check it out if I get the chance. I seem to gobble up critiques of Rorty
as fast as I gobble up his actual writings. In particular you said that
Fernandez-Armesto says that Rorty arbitrarily privileges one point of view
over another. This elicits another strand of Rorty: his ethnocentrism.
Rorty is an avowed ethnocentrist because he believes it is the only thing
on which we can rest our back against. If we accept that truth and
language are historically contingent (which, again, you may not be ready to
do yet), then we must realize that their are no ahistorical,
true-for-all-time Truths. This means we are immediately biased and
predisposed to the truths that arise in one's own politically and
ethnically contingent language games. It is a contingent fact that we
learn our own language and not somebody elses. We then argue from that
base. That is the beginning of our final vocabulary. As Rorty says,
everyone has the right of "insisting that the beliefs and desires they hold
most dear should come first in the order of discussion. That is not
arbitrariness by sincerity." ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy")
John: "[Final vocabularies] seems a useful hypothesis. It links with
something I explored in an early essay of mine, where I pointed out that
the pursuit of quality in such areas as the arts actually leads us apart
into more and more circumscribed specialities. This creates the sad
situation that Pirsig refers to often in Lila, the intense loneliness of a
civilization where we have unprecedented opportunites to explore quality,
and all too often no one with whom to share the outcome of that
exploration. Our final vocabularies are similarly isolating."
Wow, I don't even remember that part in Pirsig. It is very true, though.
Rorty, in fact, sometimes borders on extreme solipsism. The topic is taken
up briefly by Hall, but it is certainly interesting to note that both
Pirsig and Rorty reflect isolation in their writings.
John: "The "centerless web of beliefs and desires" I find less attractive.
I tend
to agree with Wilber that there is a sense in which the self as agency is
centered. However I also am interested in Susan Blackmore's memetics, and
the self as a constellation of mutually reinforcing memes fits fairly well
with Rorty's view."
I'm not sure yet how I quite feel about the centerless self. I tend to
identify with it, but I think it is an area that Pirsig might have
something useful to add (even though Pirsig spends about zero pages talking
about "the self"). Without knowing more (and though memes leave a bad
taste in my mouth), the "constellation" metaphor does seem to work well.
John: "[Tempting people with your words] sounds like an invitation to
quality? You go on to describe the "Beasley/McWatt battle" [a bit of a
misnomer, as I don't recollect replying to the McWatt critique, though I
remember Struan's response]. As you say "Hellier solidified the
incommensurability and, ultimately, self-justifying nature of these
alternate paradigms". That seems a fair comment. I don't feel the personal
attacks helped at all."
"Invitation to quality." I like that. As for the "Beasley/McWatt battle",
it is a bit of a misnomer because you didn't (as far as I remember) reply
to McWatt's critique. I took a bit of license 'cuz I had to call it
something and McWatt did seem to be tussling with you ;-)
John: "But as you say, there is no way for the two forms of argument to
work together. 'Both methods are necessarily self-justifying.'"
This is more of a quibble, but I hesitate to call Rorty's "method" an
argument, based almost solely on the ad hoc definition I gave it earlier
("aligns our thoughts into a single thread"). Rorty's style and substance
(particularly with the isolation you underscored in final vocabularies)
aids more for the proliferation of threads then the bullying into unification.
I also don't know if I mean to say that logical argumentation doesn't work
with recontextualization. I'm sure people could equivocate and use both.
When "arguing" for one or the other, however, one only has recourse to the
final vocabulary supplied by the one you are in favor of. That, I believe,
is self-justification. But, once again, just quibbles. It does bring out
the difficulty, though, in finding words other than "argue" to describe
what's going on. I found myself taking a long time in writing those sections.
Matt: "Rorty ... recommends that we forego argumentation completely,
whether with the heretics or with each other. But ... this does not mean we
should abandon discourse or dialogue."
John: "Good point, but how is this achieved?"
I think this is a good time to bring out another strand. In dealing with
final vocabularies, Rorty describes two kinds of people: metaphysicians and
ironists. An ironist (1) "has radical and continuing doubts about the
final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by
other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has
encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present
vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as
she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her
vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a
power not herself." (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) The opposite of
irony is common sense and common sense is the watchword of metaphysicians.
Metaphysicians take terms in their final vocabulary as refering to
something real that has an essence. They see the word "truth" in their
final vocabulary and assume it must refer to something real and essential.
The ironist sees words in her final vocabulary as contingent to the
language games she learned as she grew up.
This distinction between ironists and metaphysicians goes hand in hand with
my belief that Rorty desires a proliferation of vocabularies. When a
metaphysician enters into conversation with a metaphysician, their final
vocabularies are pitted against each other so that each metaphysician
attempts to make the other accept her own final vocabulary as being real
and essential. Ideally, only one final vocabulary is left standing after
an engagement. When two ironists enter into conversation, the result is a
playful exchange in which vocabularies are thrown about so that both will
have hopefully learned something from the exchange. Its an exchange of
insights about your own vocabulary and about the vocabulary of others. If
you enjoy the insight of another, the ironist takes measures to see that
she can make such an insight and does so by changing her final vocabulary.
It is something that I hope you and I, John, are achieving here.
Matt
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