From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 00:02:20 BST
Dear Shusterman,
You said, "Rorty rejects the very concept of experience as philosophically useless and
dangerous, as misleading us into the myth of the given." This is correct, but I don't think you catch his intention when you say, "But like the earlier pragmatists James and Dewey, I think the concept of experience is very important, so I have tried to defend it, paying particular care to rehabilitating the concept of aesthetic experience." Rorty is not trying to say that we shouldn't talk about our experiences, that would be ludicrous. However, if that's not what you are implying, I'm not sure what your point is. Experience is very important to Rorty, its just as a philosophical concept it has reaped more havok than it is worth. We can easily translate "experience" into a conversation metaphor so that we don't imply a reality "out there" that our experience corresponds to.
On contingency, I'm not sure that Rorty cannot make a distinction between contingencies that are capricious and those that are deeply imbedded in our social condition. Rorty accepts that radical nature of contingency, he just chooses not to develop it in those directions by ferreting out that which is capricious and that which is not. We have Foucault to do that. But I think the more important point is that in a very abstract way, Rorty blurs the distinction between that which is capricious and that which is socially embedded. This is to say that the two are on a continuum, and that you cannot pull off one from the other to reach naked social contingency or naked capriciousness. This is typically Foucault's point, also.
Your criticism of Rorty on his "liberal ironist" grabs Rorty by the wrong handle. First, Rorty is not so naive to think that our social structures, public sphere, and private sphere are in jumbled mess that all effect each other. But more importantly, like MacIntyre, you take the "liberal ironist" to be a reductio ad absurdum of the liberal position. Rorty is perfectly content to admit that the liberal ironist is an extension of a liberal, social democratic community. He says that's all we can expect. His creation of the liberal ironist was explicitly to be an extension, a better philosophically worded extension than its Kantian forefathers. However, it isn't a good critique until you can offer us alternative archetypes that you wish to see in the flesh. To place you roughshod amongst the communitarians, Rorty says, "Instead of suggesting that philosophical reflection, or a return to religion, might enable us to re-enchant the world, I think that communitarians should
stick to the question of whether disenchantment has, on balance, done us more harm than good, or created more dangers than it has evaded. For Dewey, communal and public disenchantment is the price we pay for individual and private spiritual liberation, the kind of liberation that Emerson thought charactistically American. Dewey was as well aware as Weber that there is a price to be paid, but he thought it well worth paying. He assumed that no good achieved by earlier societies would be worth recapturing if the price were a diminution in our ability to leave people alone, to let them try out their private visions of perfection in peace. He admired the American habit of giving democracy priority over philosophy by asking, about any vision of the meaning of life, 'Would not acting out this vision interfere with the ability of other to work out their own salvation?'" ("The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy") When you say, "Rorty's definition of autonomy as original, disti
nctly individualist self-creation seems a clear echo of neoliberalist self-seeking and selfishness," Rorty can only reply that of course some people are going to be self-seeking and selfish in a way that is of a detriment to society. What Rorty is banking on, however, is that the liberal ironist, liberal because she thinks cruelty the worst thing we can do, balances the public with the private, balances other-orientation with self-orientation. The only way to do this is through the way we've always passed on our moral intuitions: education.
On literature, again I think you grab Rorty by the wrong handle. To say that Rorty thinks that "interpretations must be novel" across the board, is to say that Rorty thinks that there is only one purpose in literture. This is not the case. Rorty is talking about one purpose, the purpose of saying something novel, and extolling the virtues of it. He is perfectly content with the Wittgensteinian idea that "more ordinary, traditional understandings of texts ... serve as a background or base for the more novel interpretations." That is in fact the very idea of a "strong misreading." Bloom's idea was that a poet, when he writes poetry, enters into a dialogue with the poets who have come before him and, in effect, rewrites those poems. Because those older poems are the background for the newer ones, the newer ones are effectively a misreading or a miswriting of those older poems. Rorty does not say that they have an "exclusive claim to value in literary experience." There
are other claims, such as the claim to sensitize us to the cruelty of others, which Rorty argues in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity that Orwell and Nabakov do extremely well from two very different angles.
I will accept that Rorty may be "too narrowly concerned with poetics as the generation of new texts and vocabularies to enhance moral reflection, while failing to give enough attention to the aesthetics of pleasure and beauty", but the only reason to say this would be because you are grabbing him by the wrong handle. You want to read Rorty say something about aesthetic pleasure and beauty, and when he doesn't you get mad. The point, though, is that Rorty has a different purpose in mind. Its not that Rorty thinks aesthetic pleasure and beauty unimportant, its that he either doesn't have anything new and interesting to say on the subject and/or he doesn't have the applicable knowledge and background to argue for his views. So Rorty contents himself with writing about things he does know and does have interesting things to say. And because he grew up with philosophy itch and has extensive training in it, he works in that corner of the market. To want him to branch out may
be good encouragement for a genius, but Rorty is too deflationary of his own skills to think it a good idea. I have never seen Rorty speak out against popular culture, but even if he had, that's one philosophy professor's opinion. Rorty's entire project is to clear space for other people's projects. To demand that he take part in yours goes against the liberal sensibilities that he, at least, holds dear. It is suffice to point out that he never makes pretenses at having written about everything under the sun and exhausted the realms of possibility. His philosophy in fact is the exact opposite: it is an extention of the belief that we will never exhaust the realms of possibility, we will always be too narrow in sombody's eyes, and it is this that keeps us progressing.
Matt
p.s. DMB said "I hope you see that these kinds of ideas can be expressed in a way that even I can understand," to which I reply that he is a better man than I to know what the "alterity that makes reading a dialogical hermeneutic project from which we can learn something new" means.
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